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Category: voter suppression

  • Leaked Tapes Reveal GOP’s Plan to Train Right-Wing Operatives to Be Poll Workers

    The Republican Party is hatching a plan to infiltrate polling places using GOP-trained operatives and to create an “army” of right-wing lawyers in order to make it easier for the party to challenge and overturn election results, newly leaked video recordings reveal.

    According to an outline of the plan by a Michigan-based Republican National Committee (RNC) staffer, the party is hoping to create an online database to help build a network of Republican-friendly lawyers and poll workers that can work in tandem to challenge election results at polling places in Democratic-majority locations, Politico reports. By installing trained GOP operatives as poll workers, the party can get more access to ballots and power to overturn elections, party members say.

    “Being a poll worker, you just have so many more rights and things you can do to stop something than [as] a poll challenger,” Michigan RNC election director Matthew Seifried said in a recorded meeting with GOP activists last November. Ensuring that GOP operatives take on roles as official poll workers is key to the plan, he said.

    The party has been crafting this plan for months, according to Politico, which obtained tapes recorded between the summer of 2021 and May of this year. An RNC spokesperson told the publication that the goal is to “even [the] playing field” in traditionally Democratic-leaning areas — all while the Republican Party works to erode voting rights and potentially overturn election results entirely.

    The plan is an extension of the party’s goal of biasing elections toward Republicans after Donald Trump lied about the 2020 presidential election being affected by widespread voter fraud — even as Republican voters move on from the 2020 election. If successful, it would operate at a less visible and less transparent level than moves like voter suppression bills, which state legislators have been passing en masse.

    In order to win those legal battles, party operatives say, Republicans will have to amass a huge number of sympathetic lawyers. “It’s going to be an army” of lawyers to back up the poll workers, Seifried said at a training session in October, appearing to acknowledge that the party will have to go through extralegal or otherwise legally intricate means to obtain the results Republicans want. “We’re going to have more lawyers than we’ve ever recruited, because let’s be honest, that’s where it’s going to be fought, right?”

    Most states have requirements for the partisan makeup of poll workers to be balanced in hopes of protecting elections from bias. But Republicans have been attacking elections at every level, working to pass legislation to bias election officials toward the right while waging loud and violent attacks on poll workers. This could have a chilling effect on Democratic poll workers’ ability to help run elections — indeed, in some places, it has already led to the ousting of Democratic election officials.

    If the party successfully recruits poll workers to contest votes, and those contests work, it could essentially lead to bottom-up local coups at a scale that may be difficult for Democrats to combat.

    Republicans have already reached their recruiting goal for the plan, with over 5,600 people having signed up to be poll workers since the winter. Sefried has submitted 850 of these people to Detroit election officials. Conservative activists have also been holding trainings in multiple states, meeting with activists in hopes of compiling a list of district attorneys who would be sympathetic to Republican election challenges.

    “Remember, guys, we’re trying to build out a nationwide district attorney network. Your local district attorney, as we always say, is more powerful than your congressman,” said Tim Griffin, legal counsel to the Amistad Project, which Trump’s former lawyer Rudy Giuliani once identified as a “partner” to Trump’s lawsuits over the 2020 election, in a training. “They’re the ones that can seat a grand jury. They’re the ones that can start an investigation, issue subpoenas, make sure that records are retained, etc.”

    Republicans have also been using other covert strategies to win votes. As the American Prospect reports, the RNC has been setting up local centers aimed at swaying poor and non-white voters — groups that the Democratic Party establishment often take for granted — toward Republicans, even as politicians in the party embrace violent white supremacist ideologies.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • States Have Passed 9 Bills Making It Easier for Elections to Be Tampered With

    As Democrats’ efforts to prevent voter suppression and election tampering bills have stalled in Congress, state lawmakers are still quietly passing bills to make it easier to intimidate and criminalize voters and election officials, a new report reveals.

    In a report released last week, the Brennan Center for Justice states that, in roughly the first four months of 2022, six states have passed nine election interference laws — laws that have opened the door for partisan actors to tamper with elections and election results. Such bills have been passed in Alabama, Arizona, Flor­ida, Geor­gia, Kentucky and Oklahoma; Georgia Republicans are responsible for four of the bills.

    Three Georgia bills have made it easier for partisan forces to be appointed to or control election boards in Miller, Montgomery and Dawson counties, all counties that heavily favored Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

    Georgia and Florida lawmakers have also passed a particularly extreme set of bills that grant new powers to police forces, ostensibly to enforce election laws — though, in reality, these laws will likely disproportionately target and disenfranchise already marginalized voters.

    The Georgia bill gives the Georgia Bureau of Investigation the ability to launch a criminal probe into supposed election fraud allegations without support from another agency. Florida’s law, first proposed by far right Gov. Ron DeSantis, creates a 25-person election crimes office, which experts say will serve only to suppress voters.

    Meanwhile, Alabama, Kentucky and Oklahoma have created laws that criminalize actions that an election official would normally take to run elections smoothly; typical moves like accepting private funding in order to help with logistics like ballot sorting or registering Native American people to vote are now outlawed.

    Arizona has also made it a felony offense for an election official to fail to comply with a new complex and racist law to verify a potential voters’ citizenship status.

    Overall in the 2022 legislative session, the report finds, lawmakers have introduced at least 148 election interference bills, even as federal lawmakers have largely moved on from efforts to prevent GOP lawmakers from passing bills to skew elections in their favor. Lawmakers in 39 states have also considered at least 393 voter suppression bills in this year’s legislative session.

    On the other hand, however, lawmakers in 44 states and Washington, D.C. have introduced hundreds of bills aimed at expanding voting access so far in 2022.

    States have also enacted voter suppression laws this year. Arizona and Mississippi have created new proof of citizenship laws that would restrict voting access, while lawmakers in at least five other states have passed restrictive bills that have either been vetoed or are waiting for action from the states’ governors.

  • Trump’s “Big Lie” Lost Big in Georgia on Tuesday

    Donald Trump lost big in Georgia on Tuesday as primary voters rejected three Republican candidates endorsed by Trump in favor of Republicans who refused to perpetuate the former president’s “Big Lie” about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

    Incumbents Gov. Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Attorney General Chris Carr won their primary elections decisively, with about 74 percent, 52 percent and 74 percent of the vote, respectively. All three candidates are rank-and-file Republicans — with the major distinguishing feature that none of them acquiesced to Trump’s demands to overturn President Joe Biden’s Georgia win in November 2020.

    The three politicians had drawn particular ire from Trump, who blamed them for his loss — though Georgia’s 16 electoral votes still wouldn’t have been enough to hand him the election. Still, Trump sought to exercise his influence in the state and, like members of his party have done, to oust politicians who wouldn’t stand by him as he attempted to overthrow the government over his 2020 election loss.

    Georgia Republican voters’ decision to send the incumbent politicians to the general election is a sign that Trump’s influence may be waning among his base. While his endorsees have been triumphing in some elections, the Georgia losses are a major blow to his grip on his followers — or at least a blow to his strategy of directing all of the party’s attention toward the 2020 election.

    Raffensperger’s win over Rep. Jody Hice (R-Texas) was a particularly surprising result. Raffensperger was on the receiving end of Trump’s infamous call demanding that Georgia election officials find him more votes to win the election. The secretary of state rejected Trump’s demands, and an internal GOP poll found that he would lose handily because of it. Hice, on the other hand, was hand-picked by the former president to oust Raffensperger.

    “The people of Georgia must replace the [Republicans In Name Only] and weak Republicans who made it all possible,” Trump said at a Georgia rally last year, speaking about Raffensperger. “In particular, your incompetent and strange — eh, there’s something wrong with this guy — your Secretary of State Raffensperger.”

    Congressional Republicans’ and other GOP members’ continued obsession with so-called RINOs over the past year makes Trump’s loss even more of a blow; experts say that the loss shows that messaging about the 2020 election just isn’t energizing Republican voters anymore, and that attacks from Trump aren’t enough to sink a candidate.

    To be clear, Raffensperger is far from a friend to voting rights. He has taken moves that would impede upon voting rights in the past, including forming a group to root out and criminalize absentee ballot-related voting fraud and allying with conservative voter suppression group True the Vote. Kemp, who signed Georgia Republicans’ sweeping voter suppression bill after the election, and Carr, who supported the law, aren’t civil rights heroes either.

    Wins for Carr, who faced Trump’s pick John Gordon, and Kemp, who beat Trump-recruited David Perdue, are less surprising to election experts, but still a show of voters’ priorities. Even as they sought to make it easier for their party to openly bias or even overturn election results in the future, both politicians had rejected Trump’s coup attempts.

    “[E]verybody and their dog down in Georgia knows exactly what this means: total, abject humiliation for the former president,” wrote Truthout’s William Rivers Pitt on Monday, before the primary. “If it happens like it seems it will, this one will leave a big, broad mark.”

    Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Stacey Abrams won her uncontested primary election for governor. Abrams, a longtime voting rights advocate, stands in sharp contrast to the Republican candidates. Though she lost to Kemp in her 2018 gubernatorial campaign, the run launched her to Democratic fame, granting her national name recognition — and, perhaps, a better chance at breaking Republicans’ nearly decade-long grip on the governor’s office.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Texas Voter Suppression Is Keeping Climate Action by the State Off the Table

    For Alán de León, natural disasters are a way of life. Growing up in Houston, de León knew that late summer meant hurricane season, a time when his family took special care to save money and stock up on extra food.

    In recent years, those storms have gotten worse because of the climate crisis. When Hurricane Harvey hit in August 2017, flood waters swallowed de León’s father’s house up to its roof. In February 2021, when Winter Storm Uri knocked out power across the state, de León’s family huddled in the dark, with candles as their only source of light and warmth; it was so cold de León found it unbearable simply to move.

    In more ways than one, Texas is ground zero for the climate emergency. The state is home to many of the biggest names in fossil fuels, corporations that have helped power the nation and world for decades — but have also knowingly lied about the dangers of burning those fossil fuels. Now, along with supercharged hurricanes, the climate crisis threatens Texans with extreme heat, drought, wildfires and sea-level rise on the Gulf coast. The non-profit Trust for America’s Health rates Texas among the states that are simultaneously most vulnerable to climate effects and the least prepared.

    In 2021 polling by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 65% of Texans said they are worried about global warming — on par with the nationwide average — and clear majorities said they want politicians to do more about it. But Texas is also the site of broadscale voter suppression efforts, which contribute to leaders being unresponsive to voters’ concerns, experts and advocates say.

    “If the attitudes of our communities were proportionally represented, I think we would see more climate action,” said de León, who serves as policy and advocacy manager for MOVE Texas, a nonpartisan grassroots group that specializes in voter mobilization. “We’re not seeing that, though, and the reason, in part, is we have this democracy problem.”

    Harvey was responsible for 103 deaths in Texas, and Uri killed 246, according to official figures, though for Uri the actual toll was probably higher. Today, de León said, the psychological impact of those storms is unmistakable. When it rains, many in his community are afraid to go outside. This past winter, a forecasted cold front prompted anxiety and panic buying in stores. The weather passed without incident, but to de León it was a grim sign of the times. “If there’s a natural disaster now, the mindset is you’re on your own,” he said. “Help isn’t going to come. That’s how little faith we have that our public officials will keep us safe.”

    An anti-climate tack might not surprise in a state where Republicans boast the governorship, both US senate seats, and significant majorities in the state house and senate — not to mention the fossil fuel ties that permeate the halls of power in Austin. “There are politicians in Texas who would consider climate action an explicit threat to the industry they’re in government to promote,” said Adrian Shelley, who directs the Texas office of Public Citizen, a non-profit consumer advocacy group.

    But party control and fossil fuels’ influence alone don’t explain the Lone Star state’s slow roll on climate. Due to partisan gerrymandering, political representation at both the state and federal level is skewed away from Democrats, who more often favor climate action. In the 2020 general election, Republican congressional candidates received 53% of the popular vote — yet they were awarded 64% of seats, accounting for 23 of Texas’s 36-member congressional delegation in Washington.

    That said, many Republican voters in Texas also favor climate action. In detailed polling by Climate Nexus, 71% of Texans this February said a complete transition to clean, renewable energy should be a “top” or “important” priority for the state. Lawmakers, meanwhile, routinely pass measures to stymie efforts by cities and other municipalities wanting to make their own climate progress; one 2021 law effectively banned local governments from favoring clean energy use to lower emissions.

    Gerrymandering “reduces competition in elections and basically removes incentives for legislators to be responsive to the public”, said Samuel Wang, who directs the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, a nonpartisan research group. The project’s “Redistricting Report Cards” give Texas’s congressional and state senate maps “F” grades, indicating the maps are among the least fair nationwide.

    Gerrymandering also means the “decisive election,” Wang said, is often not the general election but the party primary. Although many Republican voters might favor climate action, it’s typically not their top voting issue. Amid America’s polarized political landscape, voters tend to back their preferred party, regardless of the candidate, so even primary winners hostile to climate action can count on voters who would otherwise favor it. “Non-competitive primaries have a strong tendency to remove climate from the conversation,” Wang said.

    Due to population growth, Texas enters the 2022 election cycle with two new congressional seats (making for a total of 38). People of color, especially Latinos, accounted for 95% of growth – yet the new congressional map includes fewer districts where non-white voters “can realistically sway election outcomes”, according to The Texas Tribune.

    Republican lawmakers who drew the state’s maps insist race wasn’t a factor. But Miguel Rivera, voting rights coordinator at the Texas Civil Rights Project, says the maps’ lines tell a different story. He says they elaborately contort to “crack” up or “pack” in communities of color. “The Texas lawmakers who voted in favor of [these maps] are giving Texans a very clear message that they’re willing to put their own agendas ahead of the will of the people,” Rivera said.

    An iron-clad rule of the climate crisis is that it weighs disproportionately on communities of color, who in the US are more likely to reside in disaster-prone areas and often, because the same communities are disproportionately poor, last in line for help when disaster does strike.

    De León, the MOVE Texas activist, lives in Texas’s 29th congressional district, whose lines cut a jagged, reverse-C around Houston’s east side — and, in doing so, pack in much of the area’s Latino population. Five years on, Hurricane Harvey damage remains plain to see in parts of the district, de León said, with some families and businesses still awaiting promised aid that was never delivered. The district is also home to a legion of petrochemical facilities and the Port of Houston, where fossil fuels are exported from Texas. This means area residents must also contend with the public health consequences of fossil fuels: cancer, respiratory illness, cardiovascular disease, and more.

    Texas has also pushed through other voting policies that critics say are clearly intended to limit the franchise for minority voters. Last year, citing widely debunked claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election, Texas Republicans passed an expansive elections bill that bans drive-thru voting, curtails early voting in diverse communities (while expanding it in smaller, Republican-leaning areas), empowers partisan “poll watchers”, and criminalizes various forms of voter assistance that can be critical in helping some voters to the polls, among other measures. Many of the law’s provisions roll back policies meant to make voting safe and accessible amid the coronavirus pandemic, which were implemented in 2020 with particular effectiveness in Houston’s diverse Harris county.

    Partisan attacks on voting and other democratic norms stand in the way of needed climate action all over the country, not just in Texas. “We often differentiate our ideas about democracy and climate, but they’re not separate issues,” said Diana Faraj, voting rights program manager at the League for Conservation Voters. “The overwhelming majority of Americans want free and fair elections that represent their interests. They also want [a safe climate]. So, the suppression of votes both undercuts their power and perpetuates environmental harm.”

    In the absence of federal legislation to take on gerrymandering and other voter suppression tactics, some states have instituted independent redistricting commissions to help quell overly partisan election outcomes. In Texas, though, electoral maps remain firmly in the grip of the legislature. Numerous groups, including the Texas Civil Rights Project and the US Department of Justice, have filed legal challenges to allegedly discriminatory aspects of the state’s voting laws. Another spate of lawsuits, including from Public Citizen, target the state’s climate and energy policies. Whether these suits will be successful, and how quickly, is unclear. In the meantime, groups are mobilizing to educate and organize around these issues.

    De León’s MOVE Texas is among them. On a given day, MOVE Texas activists are registering voters across the state and engaging with local leaders to build out climate plans, despite difficulties imposed from Austin. But de León worries: “It gets to the point where you can’t fully out-organize this,” he said.

    “We can keep coming up with new ways to fight this battle, but the challenge is getting steeper and steeper every time.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Florida’s Gerrymandered Map Is Now Law — Practically Guaranteeing GOP Victories

    Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed into law a gerrymandered voting map that virtually guarantees Republicans four more seats in Congress while likely cutting the number of Black Democrats elected. The measure passed along party lines Thursday but was delayed when Black Florida lawmakers staged an impromptu sit-in protest. “Republicans cannot continue to disenfranchise Black voters,” says state Senator Shevrin Jones, a Democratic member of Florida’s Legislative Black Caucus who took part in the protest and who calls the gerrymandering part of a larger suite of “racist tactics” enacted by Republicans across the country.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

    In Florida, the Republican governor and possible presidential contender, Ron DeSantis, has signed into law a gerrymandered congressional voting map that virtually guarantees Republicans four more seats in Congress while likely cutting the number of Black Democrats elected. The measure passed along party lines Thursday during a special session called by the governor. But it was delayed when Black Florida lawmakers staged an impromptu sit-in.

    BLACK FLORIDA LAWMAKERS: Whose house? The people’s house! Whose house? The people’s house! Whose house? The people’s house!

    Show me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like! Show me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!

    We are the people! We are the people! The mighty, mighty people! The mighty, mighty people! Fighting for justice!

    AMY GOODMAN: That was Florida state Representative Dianne Hart, a Democrat from Tampa, live-streaming video from the floor of the Florida House chamber as she joined the protest. She said DeSantis’s map is meant to disenfranchise Black voters.

    REP. DIANNE HART: We know that what the governor is doing with these maps is not fair. He is taking us from four representatives to two. That’s not fair. He should have allowed us, the Legislature, to draw maps. His job is to either accept them or veto them. But he’s not doing that. Instead, he’s sending his own map, and he’s saying, “If you don’t vote on my map the way I want my map to be, then guess what: You won’t get a map.”

    AMY GOODMAN: The governor signed the bill into law on Friday. The controversial plan immediately drew a legal challenge.

    Also last week, Governor DeSantis signed into law a measure approved by Republican state lawmakers to rescind Disney World’s self-governing status, after he and his allies blasted Disney for opposing Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law. We’ll talk more about that in a minute.

    But right now we go to Florida, where we’re joined in Miami Gardens by Democratic Florida state Senator Shevrin Jones, member of Florida’s Legislative Black Caucus. He is a Bahamian American, also Florida’s first openly gay state senator.

    Welcome to Democracy Now!, Senator Shevrin Jones. It’s great to have you with us.

    SEN. SHEVRIN JONES: Thank you, Amy.

    AMY GOODMAN: Why don’t you start off by talking about the walkout by the Black Caucus and why you walked out?

    SEN. SHEVRIN JONES: Yeah, well, the House Democrats, they did exactly what was on the heels and what was going to happen eventually, because in Florida we have been dealing with, for the past four years, this constant attack on the Black community and on marginalized communities at large. And so, the House Democrats, they did what was warranted. That was they shut the House down.

    Now, I will say that the House Democrats and how they — and what they’ve done, they made clear that if they are going to make laws like 1960, they will protest like it’s 1960. The Republicans cannot continue to disenfranchise Black voters, disenfranchise and take our voices away from us, and expect nothing to bring attention to what’s happening in Florida. If we can’t win inside the chambers, we have to bring attention one way or another. And so, the House Democrats, Black Caucus members felt that this was the best way to bring attention nationally to what Florida is doing.

    AMY GOODMAN: It so much reminded me of John Lewis sitting literally on the floor of the House with other congressmembers in that national protest that took place, what you all did in the Florida Legislature. And yet Governor DeSantis signed on Friday. Explain more what this means, not only for Florida, because it sure looks like, from this to “Don’t Say Gay,” we’re talking about as goes Florida, so goes, well, a number of other states in the nation.

    SEN. SHEVRIN JONES: Yeah, Amy. What we’re seeing right now, we’re seeing Florida is pushing our judicial system. They want to see how far they can take it, because the Republicans in Florida know good and well that what they did is unconstitutional. Since Reconstruction, we’ve only had 11 Black congressional members. Now we only have five Black congressional members, four which are actually access seats. Now with this new map that just went into place, we will only have two Black access seats.

    And what we are saying right now is that if other states are watching, that if Florida can do this, if Florida can go in this direction and they can get away with going totally against the people — which in 2010 we voted for the Fair District Act — if they can go along with this, that means other states can do the same.

    And so, this is exactly what’s happening. The governor is an attorney. He has very smart people around him. So they know exactly what they’re doing. This is to push the judicial system to the limit, all the way to the Supreme Court, which I believe is not only dangerous for the state but is dangerous for our democracy.

    AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to a clip of you on the floor of the state Senate, not sitting on the floor but when you addressed the governor last week.

    SEN. SHEVRIN JONES: And so, Governor DeSantis, I’m not going to call what you’re doing a culture war anymore. I’m going to call it just what it is: It’s a racist tactic that you’re doing, and you know what you’re doing.

    AMY GOODMAN: Actually, that was at a news conference that you held. How did he respond?

    SEN. SHEVRIN JONES: They didn’t respond at all, actually. And I think a lot of this, what we’re seeing, Amy, is all of this is just a distraction. Whether it’s Disney, whether it’s CRT, all of these things that’s happening is a distraction. But what we can’t allow to happen, we cannot allow the Black community to continue to be run over. Yesterday we had a call with over 300 people from across the state, that was put on by the NAACP. The Republicans have just awakened a sleeping giant.

    You know, we already — right now within the South Florida, particularly in Miami, Miami has become the most expensive place to live. A lot of these areas that we’re speaking about are Black communities. And so, the fact that we are going to go to Tallahassee, waste our time, waste taxpayers’ money to hold a special session to take a special district away from Disney, all because you want to punish them, while ignoring the fact that we have bigger issues that we need to deal with, this is lackluster leadership at its best.

    And I’ll end with this, that as we continue to move forward, that what we’re seeing right now in Florida, it is not just a culture war. It is racist tactics that is happening all across this country, that Republicans, they see that they are in distress, and they are going to great lengths to take power away from marginalized people, to pick on marginalized people. Why is that? It’s because they see their power slipping away from them. But what they’re doing is dangerous and can have long-lasting effect on the state and in this country.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Democrats Introduce Bill Guaranteeing Workers Paid Time Off to Vote

    On Monday, a group of House Democrats introduced a bill guaranteeing that workers get paid time off to vote in federal elections as other voting rights initiatives have fallen flat.

    The Time Off to Vote Act, introduced by Representatives Nikema Williams (D-Georgia), Matt Cartwright (D-Pennsylvania), Cheri Bustos (D-Illinois) and Andy Levin (D-Michigan), would require employers to give their employees at least two hours off of work to vote, either on election day or on a day with early voting.

    Many states have no regulations requiring that workers get time off to vote; even in states that do guarantee that right, many only require that workers get unpaid time off, meaning that workers may not be able to take advantage of the benefit without suffering financially.

    The bill would help to normalize regulations for paid time off across the country, a critical step toward expanding voting access. It requires that the paid time off be separate from workers’ existing benefits.

    “No one should be forced to choose between earning their full paycheck or participating in our democracy,” Williams said in a statement. “In the last two elections, countless Georgians waited in line for hours to vote. Many waited all day. The Time off to Vote Act will make it easier for working people to exercise their sacred right to vote.”

    For months, Democrats have tried — and failed — to pass legislation to protect voting rights. President Joe Biden emphasized the issue during his first year in office, but Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) killed Democrats’ hope of being able to pass sweeping anti-corruption election bills like the For the People Act, which voting rights advocates have said are crucial to protecting democracy.

    The Time Off to Vote Act has been introduced in previous years, but has never been taken to a vote. Proposals like making Election Day a federal holiday also aim to ensure that work isn’t a barrier to being able to vote, but about a quarter of workers don’t receive days off on federal holidays, according to a 2018 federal survey.

    Not being able to get time off to vote is a major barrier to voting, making it hard or impossible for people to cast their ballots. According to a FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll conducted after the 2020 election, waiting in long voting lines and not having time off are two of the top barriers to voting. With Republicans creating stricter guidelines for mail-in ballot access, some people may be blocked from voting at all.

    These barriers affect Black and Latinx voters disproportionately. Racist voter suppression policies have led to fewer polling stations in predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods, meaning that people in these communities often have to wait in line for hours to vote; data has shown that Black and Latinx voters wait about 45 percent longer on average than white voters.

    Voters in poorer neighborhoods are also more likely to face long lines while waiting to vote — and for many low-income people, this is an impassable hurdle. Some workers aren’t allowed to take time off to vote, and those that have the option of taking unpaid time off often can’t afford to do so, especially when they may have to wait hours in line.

    While the Time Off to Vote Act could help expand voting access, two hours may still not be enough in places like Georgia, where some workers waited 10 hours or more to vote in the 2020 presidential election.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Federal Judge Blocks Parts of Florida GOP’s Election Law, Citing Racism

    Civil rights defenders on Thursday welcomed a ruling by a federal judge who struck down parts of a Florida voter suppression law, calling racism “a motivating factor” in the GOP-backed legislation’s passage.

    In a 288-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker blocked provisions of Florida’s Senate Bill 90, a massive attack on voting rights signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2020. The law empowers partisan poll watchers, imposes strict voter ID requirements, criminalizes so-called “ballot harvesting,” limits ballot drop boxes, and bans advocacy groups from handing out food or water to voters waiting in long lines.

    “At some point, when the Florida Legislature passes law after law disproportionately burdening Black voters, this court can no longer accept that the effect is incidental,” Walker wrote. “Based on the indisputable pattern set out above, this court finds that, in the past 20 years, Florida has repeatedly sought to make voting tougher for Black voters because of their propensity to favor Democratic candidates.”

    Cecile Scoon, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida — the lead plaintiff in the case — said in a statement that “for democracy to work, it must include all voices. A federal judge has ruled that the Florida Legislature has engaged in decades of intentional discrimination against Black voters with a series of voting laws” like S.B. 90.

    “Senate Bill 90 was clearly an anti-voter measure that raised barriers to voting for marginalized groups with specific impacts on elderly voters, voters with disabilities, students, and communities of color,” Scoon added. “The league is gratified that once again the constitutional rights of all of Florida’s voters have superseded partisan politics and that the targeted attack on Black voters will be stopped.”

    NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) senior counsel Amia Trigg said that “today’s decision is a huge win for Florida voters. This decision recognized that S.B. 90 is the latest stain in a long history of voting laws which restrict Black political participation.”

    Walker’s ruling also placed Florida in Voting Rights Act preclearance status — meaning the state must receive federal approval before passing new voting laws — for the next decade, because its Republican officials have “repeatedly, recently, and persistently acted to deny Black Floridians access to the franchise.”

    “Without preclearance, Florida could continue to enact such laws, replacing them every legislative session if courts view them with skepticism,” the judge wrote. “Such a scheme makes a mockery of the rule of law.”

    Walker also took aim at the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder ruling, accusing the justices of “gutting” the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance regime.

    “As Judge Walker acknowledged, this is part of a larger assault on voting rights that continues across the country,” Trigg said. “We’re seeing the right to vote being targeted at every level of government. Therefore, it is crucial that we continue this fight.”

    “Every voice deserves to be heard in our democracy, and state officials must ensure that by making elections fair and accessible — not by creating unnecessary obstacles to the ballot box,” she added. “This ruling is extremely encouraging for those of us on the frontlines.”

    Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at the advocacy group Common Cause, said that “our ‘government by the people’ is stronger and more representative when all of us can participate in it.”

    “But as the court found today, for the past 20 years, ‘Florida has repeatedly sought to make voting tougher for Black voters’ as the Legislature worked to pick and choose the voters they want to participate in our government — and the voters they want to exclude,” she added. “This is completely antithetical to our ideals of what a government ‘by the people’ ought to look like. We particularly appreciate that Judge Walker is insisting on 10 years of preclearance through his court.”

    According to Edward Hailes, the then-general counsel for the United States Commission on Civil Rights, the intentional disenfranchisement by GOP-led Florida officials of thousands of Black voters “was outcome-determinative” in the state’s — and therefore the nation’s, given the decisive role played by Florida — 2000 presidential election results.

    Some observers noted the unlikelihood of Walker’s ruling surviving an appeal to the 11th Circuit or the U.S. Supreme Court, with its 6-3 right-wing supermajority.

    “We’ve seen other district courts do aggressive things in election law cases, and we’ve seen a lot of those decisions get reversed by appellate courts or the Supreme Court,” Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard Law School professor and election law expert, told The New York Times.” I wouldn’t be shocked if this litigation falls into that pattern.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • This Little-Known Foundation Is Pushing “The Big Lie” and Voter Suppression Laws

    The Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, a major funder of rightwing groups promoting the Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election, is also pushing voter suppression policies in states across the country, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has learned.

    Based in Maryland, the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation (“the Foundation”) is led by its namesake, the daughter of Shelby Cullom Davis, who made a fortune on investments and insurance and once chaired the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. The Foundation disclosed net assets totaling $1.5 billion on its 2020 IRS filing obtained by CMD.

    In analyzing the Foundation’s latest IRS filings between 2018 and 2020, CMD found that it gave $3.7 million to 13 voter suppression groups. Many of the grants are designated for “election integrity” — rightwing code words for restricting voting rights.

    In addition, the Foundation’s IRS filings for those three years detail $24 million in contributions to DonorsTrust, the preferred donor conduit of the Koch political network. DonorsTrust pumped over $137 million into rightwing groups in 2020 alone — including millions to the same voter suppression groups funded by the Foundation — according to a CMD analysis of its last IRS filing.

    Here are the voter suppression groups the Foundation supported between 2018 and 2020, presented in descending order of funding granted:

    Lawyers Democracy Fund — $625,000

    Over the three-year period (2018–20), the Lawyers Democracy Fund (LDF) received a total of $625,000 in Foundation grants for its “election integrity project.” LDF’s IRS filings show that the Foundation’s $200,000 grants in both 2018 and 2019 accounted for its entire revenue those years.

    The Foundation’s 2019 IRS filing states that the $200,000 is for “educational initiatives, policy research activities and public interest litigation efforts with respect to the vital issues of electoral system integrity throughout the United States.” Its 2020 grant of $225,000 is similarly worded.

    LDF President Harvey Tettlebaum was the former president of the Republican National Lawyers Association (2003–06) and LDF Secretary Elliot Berke currently serves as Georgia’s special assistant attorney general and on the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

    LDF advocates for strict voter ID laws and opposes all mail-in ballots and mandatory voter registration — policies that make it more difficult for people to exercise their right to vote.

    Much of LDF’s public-facing work is in the courts. In January it helped overturn Pennsylvania’s no-excuse absentee voting law in Commonwealth Court and filed an amicus brief with Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) in the Supreme Court case Berger v. North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, arguing in favor of giving the state legislature the power to intervene to defend the constitutionality of North Carolina’s voter ID law.

    LDF and two other grant recipients, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Honest Elections Project, also filed briefs in the case, which was argued on March 21. The groups are trying to get the Supreme Court to embrace the “independent state legislature doctrine,” a fringe theory that resurfaced during attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, by arguing that only state legislatures can control federal elections — without any limitations from state courts or constitutions.

    As the ranking member on the U.S. House Administration Committee, Davis leads Republicans in their Faith in Elections Project to combat efforts by Democrats to safeguard elections and expand access to the ballot box.

    American Civil Rights Union — $550,000

    The American Civil Rights Union (ACRU), rebranded as the American Constitutional Rights Union in 2019, received $550,000 in grants from the Foundation for its voter suppression efforts. ACRU had $810,000 in revenue as of its last IRS filing and is led by Lori Roman, ALEC’s former executive director.

    ACRU received grants of $125,000 in 2018 and $150,000 in 2019 for “election integrity” and $300,000 in 2020 for a project to “protect elderly and military votes” and “voter educational initiatives.” The longtime voter suppression group launched its Protect Elderly Votes Project in April 2020 “to protect seniors from those who may wish to defraud them of their vote.”

    ACRU’s Project “applauded” the Racine Sheriff in Wisconsin for identifying what he claimed were eight cases of voter fraud at a nursing home in the area. The sheriff recommended criminal charges against five election commissioners, but prosecutors have not acted due to a lack of evidence.

    Two national leaders of misinformation about widespread voter fraud serve on ACRU’s policy board: Ken Blackwell, chairman of the MAGA Voter Suppression Center, and Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative.

    Judicial Education Project / The 85 Fund — $450,000

    The Foundation granted the Judicial Education Project — now rebranded as The 85 Fund — $450,000 in 2020 for “election integrity initiatives in various states.” The large grant likely went to the fund’s Honest Elections Project (HEP).

    HEP is a dark money voter suppression group formed in February 2020 by Leonard Leo‘s network. Known as Trump’s “judge whisperer,” Leo worked behind the scenes during the Trump administration to organize a rightwing takeover of the U.S. Supreme Court.

    In addition to pushing misinformation about voter fraud, HEP has placed ads opposing mail-in balloting and advocated for purging voter rolls. It is also developing model voter suppression policies for ALEC, and organized at least two multi-day voter suppression summits for ALEC members preceding its Annual Meeting, along with last year’s States and Nation Policy Summit.

    CMD obtained memos that HEP distributed to ALEC members at the summit, loaded with rightwing spin on Congress’s Freedom to Vote Act, state election laws, and polling from HEP Action claiming that West Virginia voters oppose the Freedom to Vote Act and ending the Senate filibuster.

    Blackwell and HEP’s Executive Director Jason Snead, a former senior policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation (where he developed the Heritage Election Fraud Database with Spakovsky), were among the speakers at the first voter suppression summit.

    American Legislative Exchange Council — $440,000

    The Foundation granted ALEC a total of $550,000 in 2020, with $440,000 of that designated exclusively for “accurate and verifiable voter rolls: an American public awareness campaign.” ALEC’s revenue for 2020 was just under $8 million.

    In the past year, CMD has repeatedly blown the whistle on ALEC for falsely claiming that it does not work on voting issues. In September 2021, CMD obtained and published a video of CEO Lisa Nelson enumerating the states where ALEC was working on voting issues and stating that it would outsource actual model policy development.

    “We don’t have model policy,” Nelson told the Council of National Policy audience. “We will be developing that at the Honest Elections Project [seminar] — through them.” ALEC held voter suppression summits with HEP at both of its national conferences in 2021.

    In April 2021, The New York Times published details of a $24-million Heritage Action for America voter suppression plan (obtained by Documented) that described its efforts to work closely with ALEC to move legislation in “crucial states.”

    Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also said at the time that he had spoken with state legislators through ALEC about passing state bills that restrict voting rights and impose greater legislative control over how elections are run. CMD research found that more than 100 Republican politicians connected to ALEC in just six battleground states were lead sponsors or co-sponsors of those bills.

    When a broad coalition of more than 300 civil rights and democracy reform groups called for ALEC’s corporate members to leave the organization in June 2021 because of its voter suppression efforts, ALEC’s response was swift and righteous.

    “ALEC doesn’t have ‘template legislation’ on voting because ALEC doesn’t work on voting issues,” its CEO Lisa Nelson wrote in a Real Clear Politics opinion piece. “The allegation is a literal fabrication.”

    And, in a letter obtained and published by CMD, Nelson told ALEC members that “the assertions included in the coalition letter are categorically false…. ALEC does not create or promote policy models on election reform/security.”

    The Foundation grant to ALEC — specifically earmarked for voting work — provides the latest evidence that ALEC is lying to both the public and its corporate members.

    Public Interest Legal Foundation — $300,000

    The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) received a total of $300,000 in 2019 and 2020 for “public interest litigation activities in connection with preserving the constitutional framework of the American elections project” and “election integrity.”

    PILF is led by J. Christian Adams, who has moved the group to focus on the threat of “voter fraud,” despite lack of evidence that this is a widespread problem. PILF has filed numerous lawsuits across the country with the goal of purging state voter rolls, and saw its revenue climb to $3.8 million in 2020.

    Its Board Chair Cleta Mitchell is a senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute, where she chairs its Election Integrity Network. She participated in the infamous call in which Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory in the state.

    Blackwell, Spakovsky, and insurrectionist John Eastman are also PILF board members.

    Texas Public Policy Foundation — $300,000

    In 2019 and 2020, the Foundation distributed grants totaling $300,000 to the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) for “election integrity.”

    With revenues of $17.7 million in 2020, TPPF launched an Election Integrity Project in March 2020 that spread the myth of widespread voter fraud and helped Texas Republicans put the right spin on the voter suppression bills passed there in 2021.

    TPPF also spread misinformation about the For the People Act, the federal voter protection legislation that has stalled out in Congress.

    Thomas More Society — $250,000

    The Thomas More Society (TMS) received $250,000 in 2020 for its “election integrity initiatives.” The rightwing litigation outfit’s 2019 and 2020 IRS filings show its revenues almost doubled in that one year — from $9.6 million to $17.4 million.

    TMS’s Amistad Project has played a key role in challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election alongside rightwing allies in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

    TMS is a proponent of the election subversion strategy of giving state legislatures (such as in Michigan) the ability to certify electors.

    Earlier this month TMS also released a report on its review of the 2020 election in Wisconsin, where it claimed it found evidence of voter fraud. The organization shared an office with former Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge Michael Gableman, who was hired by State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) to conduct an election review.

    Eagle Forum Educational and Legal Defense Fund — $200,000

    The Foundation distributed $200,000 in 2020 to the Eagle Forum Educational and Legal Defense Fund (EFELDF) for an “election integrity project.” EFELDF’s 2020 IRS filing is not publicly available but it brought in $1.3 million in funds in 2019.

    EFELDF’s activities around elections and voting appear to center on filing amicus briefs such as the one in support of U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly in Kelly v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which asked the U.S. Supreme Court to forbid Pennsylvania from certifying its 2020 election results because the legislature allowed for no-excuse absentee voting.

    Virginia Institute for Public Policy — $160,000

    The Virginia Institute for Public Policy (VIPP) received $60,000 in 2019 for “election integrity programs” and $100,000 in 2020 for “the Tuesday Morning Group coalition impact and election integrity program.”

    The organization’s latest publicly available IRS filing (2019) details the smallest total revenue — $141,501 — among all of the Foundation’s grant recipients.

    On its website, Virginia Institute claims its Tuesday Morning Group “has over 1,000 participants representing more than 260 organizations.” It’s unclear whether the Virginia Institute-led Virginia Fair Elections Coalition is an offshoot of this group or the same one but with a different name.

    Virginia Institute published The Virginia Model on “election integrity” earlier this month, detailing an approach that Lynn Taylor, president of VIPP and chair of Virginia Fair Elections, credits with helping the GOP realize massive gains in the 2021 elections.

    In listing the “experts” it consulted with, the Virginia Fair Elections Coalition cites J. Christian Adams from PILF, Cleta Mitchell from Conservative Partnership Institute, Hans von Spakovsky from the Heritage Foundation, Ken Cuccinelli from Election Transparency Initiative, and Chris Marston, general counsel for the Republican Party of Virginia. The Thomas More Society’s Amistad Project is also listed as a “partner.”

    As a guest on Mitchell’s Who’s Counting podcast, Taylor and her host recently touted the efficacy of the Virginia model in achieving voter suppression goals.

    Abby Spencer Moffat, the Foundation’s CEO, sits on VIPP’s board of directors.

    Judicial Watch — $150,000

    The Foundation gave Judicial Watch $150,000 in 2020 for “election integrity initiatives.” Tom Fitton leads the group, which reported $110 million (2020) in revenue and, like PILF, has focused its voter suppression efforts on purging voter rolls in the states.

    The same year it received the grant, Judicial Watch published a “study” making dubious claims “that 353 U.S. counties had 1.8 million more registered voters than eligible voting-age citizens.”

    While not directly addressing the study, the Brennan Center calls large-scale purges “risky because of the sheer numbers of records involved,” and cautions against using “third-party information” to remove voters because it does “not come directly from a voter” and “will inev­it­ably include errors.”

    Judicial Watch has also litigated to purge state voter rolls and filed amicus briefs supporting voting rights restrictions.

    Americans of Faith — $100,000

    The Foundation gave Americans of Faith (AOF) $100,000 in 2020 for an “election integrity project.” AOF has no web presence beyond a Facebook page that hasn’t been active since May 2020.

    Its latest publicly available IRS filing (2019) shows that it brought in $1.1 million for the mission of “voter education.”

    AOF is led by Ralph Reed, founder and president of the dark money group Faith & Freedom Coalition and a GOP operative. Faith & Freedom is a Christian right electioneering outfit that works to turn out Republican voters.

    FreedomWorks Foundation — $100,000

    FreedomWorks Foundation received $100,000 in 2020 “to be allocated exclusively toward the election integrity program.” Despite bringing in $8.3 million in revenue that year, FreedomWorks Foundation does not have a web presence.

    Its larger sister organization, FreedomWorks, is a major rightwing group that launched the National Election Protection Initiative in March 2021. Led by Mitchell, it has focused on opposing federal voting rights bills, backing voter suppression legislation, and building state “election integrity” infrastructure in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

    In 2020, the year its Foundation received the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation grant, FreedomWorks held “Election Protection” trainings for activists to counter “mail-in ballot fraud.”

    Ballotpedia — $50,000

    The Foundation granted Ballotpedia $50,000 in 2019 for “general support and the Election Integrity Content Project.” Officially registered with the IRS as the Lucy Burns Institute, Ballotpedia brings in over $8 million in revenue, and is run by rightwing operative Leslie Graves.

    The group publishes pages on “election integrity” and “voter suppression” that may be part of the Foundation-funded content project.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • New Texas Law Has Already Resulted in More Black Voters’ Ballots Being Tossed

    Workers drop ballots into a secure box at a ballot drop-off location in Austin, Texas, on October 13, 2020.

    The rate of rejected mail ballots soared in the March primary elections in Texas — and those rejections disproportionately affected Democrats, especially Black voters in the state’s biggest county.

    Nearly 23,000 ballots, or about 13% of all returned mail ballots, were thrown out across 187 Texas counties in the March primaries, according to an analysis by the Associated Press. In past election years, the rejection rate was around 1% to 2%, according to the Texas Tribune.

    The rejection rate hit more liberal areas of the state with more than 15% of mail ballots thrown out in Democratic-leaning counties, compared to 9.1% in Republican-leaning counties. In Tarrant County, election officials rejected 813 ballots in the Democratic primary under the new voter ID rules, but just three ballots in the Republican primary, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

    One of the highest rates of rejections was in Harris County, which includes Houston and is the state’s largest population center (and the third most populous county in the nation). Election officials were forced to discard nearly 7,000 ballots there, about 19% of all returned mail ballots. They threw out just 0.3% of returned mail ballots in the 2018 primaries.

    The March election data also shows a stark racial disparity, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Voters in areas of Harris County with large Black populations were 44% more likely to have their mail ballots tossed than voters in areas with large white populations.

    Texas already limits mail voting to voters over 65 or those who have a verified excuse to vote absentee. The startling increase in mail ballot rejections could foreshadow an even larger wave of thrown-out ballots in the general election, which is likely to see much higher turnout. That could potentially be echoed in the 18 other states that have imposed harsh new voting restrictions after former President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.

    Most of the rejected ballots were flagged under a provision in the new voting law that requires voters to provide their driver’s license number or a partial Social Security number. Some voters left the field blank or entered an ID number different than the one election officials had on file. The state provides a limited period of time for voters to correct problems on their ballots, but the vast majority of ballots flagged for rejection were not fixed before the deadline.

    The reason for the disparities in rejection rates between Texas counties is unclear. While Harris County, which has 2.5 million registered voters, rejected about 19% of mail ballots, Dallas County, which has 1.4 million registered voters, rejected only about 9.5% of mail ballots.

    Geographic and demographic differences between those counties could well play a role. Harris County spans more than 1,700 square miles, nearly twice as much as Dallas County, which made it challenging to “reach every voter with very limited resources,” Harris County Elections spokeswoman Nadia Hakim said in an email to Salon.

    Hakim also said that Harris County officials “did not receive any guidance or materials from the Texas Secretary of State, nor did we receive a budget to run campaigns or advertisements to educate voters on the changes.” She added that county election officials spent three months educating voters before the election and allocating staff to focus on outreach to voters whose ballots were marked for rejection.

    Hakim said that her office “is deeply troubled by the number of mail ballot rejections” during the March primary, especially considering the much lower number of rejections in 2018. “The new voting laws brought on by Senate Bill 1 are leading to the disenfranchisement of Harris County’s most vulnerable populations, including communities of color, the elderly, and voters with disabilities.”

    Sam Taylor, a spokesman for the Texas secretary of state’s office, told Salon that state officials have heard from county officials that the vast majority of rejected mail ballots “were due to voters who did not provide any ID information on their carrier envelope,” even though they had successfully applied for a mail-in ballot using the same ID information.

    Taylor said the office is now devoting “a significant portion of our voter education campaign to enhancing awareness of the new mail-in ballot ID requirements.” He continued, “We are confident we will have all the information we need to apply any lessons learned during the primary to an even more robust voter education campaign” directed at the general election in November.

    Voting rights groups are skeptical that Texas officials will do enough, and say the stark increase in ballot rejections demonstrates the need for federal intervention.

    “Texas was already the hardest state to vote in before Republicans passed these laws that made it even harder,” said Anthony Gutierrez, executive director of Common Cause Texas, in a statement to Salon. “What we’re seeing today is a small preview of what we can expect to see at a far wider scale in November unless the federal government finally takes real action to intervene.”

    Gutierrez said the Texas secretary of state’s office was repeatedly told about the potential for these problems when the voting-restriction bill was going through committee. He suggested that state officials had “ample opportunity” to address these issues but “instead chose to focus on playing politics [as] implementation was left to local officials who received little to no guidance or communication from our state’s chief election officer.” He predicted “far bigger problems in November when we have exponentially more people showing up to the polls.”

    Last November, the Justice Department sued Texas over the new voting law, alleging that restrictive measures in the bill violate both the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. The complaint specifically notes that the provision requiring the rejection of mail ballots due to “certain paperwork errors or omissions that are not material to establishing a voter’s eligibility to cast a ballot” violates the Civil Rights Act.

    The bill’s restrictions on “which absentee ballots cast by eligible voters can be accepted by election officials are unlawful and indefensible,” DOJ Civil Rights Division chief Kristen Clarke said last year.

    More than a dozen Texas Democrats sent a letter to Clarke earlier this month asking the federal government to expedite its lawsuit against the state due to an “unprecedented” increase in rejected mail ballots.

    “Unfortunately, this wrongdoing is a direct — and intended — result of Texas Senate Bill 1 … with the sole purpose of making it more difficult for Texans to vote and, thereby, undermining the democratic process,” the letter said, calling on the Justice Department to “deploy the necessary resources to combat this injustice.”

    Rep. Mark Veasey, the lead author of the letter, said in a statement that the “destructive” Republican voting law “disproportionately undermines the voice — and vote — of minority and low-income communities.”

    It’s by no means clear that the federal lawsuit will succeed, especially since it is likely at some point to come before the current Supreme Court, whose conservative supermajority has already let other legally dubious election laws stand. Attorney General Merrick Garland warned last year that the DOJ’s power to protect voting rights was limited after the Supreme Court gutted part of the Voting Rights Act that required states with a history of discrimination to pre-clear any electoral changes with the department.

    Democrats have repeatedly attempted to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore the pre-clearance requirement (among other voting reforms) but it has been repeatedly filibustered by Republicans. Two “moderate” Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have rejected their own party’s efforts to repeal the filibuster, effectively dooming the legislation (which both claim to support).

    Voting rights groups say the Senate needs to renew its effort to pass the voting rights legislation ahead of the upcoming elections. The Texas law “caused heart-breaking confusion” in the March primaries that “hit older voters and voters with disabilities particularly hard,” Grace Chimene, president of the League of Women Voters of Texas, said in a statement to Salon.

    “In Harris County, older Black voters were especially impacted by this anti-voter legislation,” Chimene said. “This law is a throwback to the poll taxes of the Jim Crow era. … The federal Voting Rights Act must be restored to ensure that every voter in Texas — regardless of where they live, what they look like, how old they are, if they have disabilities, or what language they speak — has equal access to the ballot box.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pro-Trump Group Sent Armed Members to Colorado Voters’ Doors, Lawsuit Alleges

    A Trump supporter waves a Trump 2020 flag during a rally at the Colorado State Capitol on January 6, 2021.

    Voting rights groups have filed a lawsuit seeking to stop a pro-Trump group from going door-to-door in Colorado in search of evidence to support voter fraud allegations that have already been debunked and rejected by courts.

    The lawsuit alleges that the U.S. Election Integrity Plan — led by Shawn Smith, an ally of former Trump strategist Steve Bannon and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell — is sending armed members door-to-door in areas with large numbers of voters of color, questioning people about how they voted and taking photographs of their homes.

    The lawsuit, which is backed by the state chapter of the NAACP, the League of Women Voters and Mi Familia Vota, alleges that the “voter intimidation” campaign violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, a post-Civil War law aimed at preventing white vigilantes from terrorizing Black people to stop them from voting.

    The lawsuit cites the “County & Local Organizing Playbook” used by the group, which instructs members to “undertake citizen audit activities to either refute or confirm serious allegations of election malfeasance” in order to “support future legal action.” The group, some of whose members are armed, has been going door-to-door in El Paso, Mesa and Weld counties in Colorado, using public voter lists to identify areas where they believe ballots were fraudulently cast, the Colorado Times Recorder reported last year. The report prompted an alert from Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who warned voters of unofficial canvassing efforts and urged residents to report harassment and threats to local law enforcement or the Justice Department.

    “Defendants’ objectives are clear. By planning to, threatening to, and actually deploying armed agents to knock on doors throughout the state of Colorado, USEIP is engaged in voter intimidation,” the lawsuit states. “USEIP’s public-facing actions are a clear signal to Colorado voters — especially voters of color — that to vote in an upcoming election means facing interrogation by potentially armed and threatening USEIP agents at their doorstep thereafter.”

    The lawsuit claims that some members have worn “badges” and falsely accused voters of fraud.

    “Sometimes armed and donning badges to present an appearance of government officiality, USEIP agents interrogate voters about their addresses, whether they participated in the 2020 election, and — if so — how they cast their vote,” the complaint says. “It is reported that multiple agents have claimed to be from ‘the county,’ and have, without any evidence, falsely accused the residents of casting fraudulent ballots.”

    The voting rights groups say the group’s efforts to seek out areas where they believe voter fraud occurred has largely focused on high-density housing areas and communities experiencing a growth in the number of minority voters.

    “No one should have to be afraid to go to the polls or fear that doing so will mean being threatened in their own homes,” Courtney Hostetler, senior counsel for Free Speech for People and one of the lawyers leading the lawsuit, said in a statement. “Free and fair elections can only occur when people know that they are able to safely vote without reprisal or intimidation.”

    The group’s “playbook” thanks Lindell, a leading election conspiracy theorist. Smith, the group’s founder, attended Lindell’s election conspiracy-laden “symposium” last year in South Dakota along with former Colorado election clerk Tina Peters, who was indicted earlier this month for her role in leaking sensitive voting system data that was published by QAnon conspiracy theorists and right-wing websites. Griswold’s office said earlier this year that Smith had also convinced another election official, Elbert County Clerk and Recorder Dallas Schroeder, to make copies of his office’s hard drives that he later gave to “unauthorized people in violation of Election Rules.”

    Shawn Smith, the head of USEIP last month led a “lock her up” chant while discussing Griswold at a rally and said that “if you’re involved in election fraud, you deserve to hang.”

    He can also seen in a video among a group of violent Trump supporters who clashed with police outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He was accompanied by Colorado state Rep. Ron Hanks, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate who has also pushed false election claims.

    Smith is also the president of another “election integrity” group called Cause of America, also funded by Lindell, which Smith announced on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast.

    USEIP appears to have fully embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory. Its website and the first page of its “playbook” include the slogan “We Are the Plan,” frequently associated with QAnon believers. During a presentation organized by Sherronna Bishop, the former campaign manager for Rep. Lauren Boebert, USEIP leader Cory Anderson (who is also a member of the anti-government Three Percenter militia) described the briefing as “being red-pilled,” according to the Times Recorder. (That expression, originally drawn from The Matrix, is popular among QAnon followers and other far-right conspiracy theorists.)

    The lawsuit names Smith, as well as co-founders Holly Kasun and Ashe Epp, who was also at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

    It alleges that their attempted canvassing for election fraud evidence had the “purpose and effect of intimidating Coloradans from voting, trying to vote, helping others to vote, supporting or advocating for certain political beliefs, or exercising the right to speak, peaceably assemble, or petition the government for redress of grievances, in violation of Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act.” The suit also accuses the group of violating a section of the Ku Klux Klan Act that bans “conspiracy to interfere with civil rights.”

    “Sadly, efforts to intimidate voters are nothing new,” NAACP general counsel Janette McCarthy Wallace said in a statement. “The NAACP has a long and proud history of opposing those who would seek to thwart democracy. We could not sit idly by and allow voters to potentially be bullied out of exercising their rights.”

    The lawsuit does not offer specific examples of voters being intimidated or harassed by armed canvassers, but last year USEIP leader Charity McPike urged armed members to provide “security” for the group.

    “We are attempting to line up security. However, anyone who carries protection might want to let us know so we can offer your cell phone numbers to those who are concerned,” McPike said, according to Colorado Pols.

    “No voter should ever feel threatened in the safety of their own homes,” Celina Stewart, League of Women Voters chief counsel, said in a statement. “The nefarious actions of the USEIP are a blatant form of voter intimidation used to target and with the intent to silence Colorado voters of color, which is in clear violation of the Voting Rights Act.”

    The USEIP is also working with the Colorado Republican Party on its “Election Integrity Operations,” according to the Times Recorder. A USEIP member is in charge of the GOP’s program and has given joint presentations with Epp, the group’s co-founder. Heidi Ganahl, the leading Republican candidate for Colorado governor, promoted the group during a recent event, declaring that they are “doing great things.”

    USEIP did not respond to a request for comment. The group’s website says it plans to expand to other states, including Arizona, Georgia and New Hampshire. Its training materials are already being used by conspiracy theorists in Utah who call themselves the Utah Voter Verification Project, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

    Residents in Hurricane, Utah, alerted Washington County officials in December that members of the group, who refused to identify themselves, showed up at their doors with personal voter information, according to the report. The members also recorded voters without their consent.

    “We can record anyone without telling them. We don’t need permission,” one unidentified trainer told the outlet. The group’s training manual also stressed that “you do not have to identify yourself at all.”

    The goal of the Utah group appears to be to collect affidavits from voters who claim to have evidence of illegal votes. In the wake of Trump’s 2020 defeat, his legal team attempted to submit voter affidavits to prove their debunked allegations, but those efforts were almost entirely rejected by judges and discredited by election officials.

    There has been no credible evidence of voter fraud in Utah, which Trump won by more than 20 points. Republican Gov. Spencer Cox and Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson condemned those who are spreading “misinformation” about the election and dismissed claims of fraud as “absolute falsehoods.”

    Other Trump supporters have tried similar door-to-door audits. Cyber Ninjas, the bankrupt company that led Arizona’s failed “forensic audit,” sought to send canvassers door-to-door in Maricopa County but ultimately relented after the Justice Department warned that such an effort would violate federal laws against voter intimidation.

    Another group called the New Mexico Audit Force also sent its members door-to-door in heavily Republican Otero County, which had already spent $50,000 on an “audit” confirming that Trump had won the county by more than 25 points. The House Oversight Committee last Thursday announced a probe of the effort, warning that the audit “illegally interferes with Americans’ right to vote by spreading disinformation about elections and intimidating voters.”

    USEIP also appears to have had trouble vetting its volunteers. The group’s training manual says that the group intends to check volunteers’ social media and called on them for a “gut check,” saying leaders had “learned (roundaboutly) that there were a couple of people in our group, who were volunteering for our events, who had a criminal history of sexual misconduct,” and adding, “it’s unfortunate that we must check volunteers for pedophilic leanings.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ohio Supreme Court Strikes Down Gerrymandered GOP Maps For the Third Time

    The Thomas J. Moyer Ohio Judicial Center, headquarters of the Ohio Supreme Court, is pictured at night.

    The Ohio Supreme Court has rejected Republican-drawn district maps in the state for the third time, sending the majority-Republican Ohio Redistricting Commission back to the drawing board yet again.

    In a 4-3 decision, the judges found that the maps were unconstitutional and didn’t reflect the will of voters in the state. “Substantial and compelling evidence shows beyond a reasonable doubt that the main goal of the individuals who drafted the second revised plan was to favor the Republican Party and disfavor the Democratic Party,” the majority wrote.

    The majority, including one conservative justice, said that Republicans have inflicted “chaos” on themselves in the map-drawing process. They directed the commission to turn in new maps by March 28. At least part of the primary election set to take place on May 3 will almost certainly have to be delayed.

    “Resolving this self-created chaos thus depends not on the number of hands on the computer mouse but, rather, on the political will to honor the people’s call to end partisan gerrymandering,” the ruling reads. Republicans have already had their maps rejected by the court twice for gerrymandering, and the commission has missed numerous deadlines to pass maps.

    Democratic state lawmakers criticized Republicans for trying to pass gerrymandered maps yet again.

    “For a third time, the Supreme Court has ruled that the majority party is not above the law and cannot blatantly disregard the will of Ohio voters and the Ohio Constitution,” said Ohio House Minority Leader and Democratic redistricting commission member Allison Russo in a statement. “Democrats have a state legislative map proposal ready to go that is fair, constitutional, and closely reflects the statewide voting preferences of Ohioans. Now, it is up to the Republican Commissioners to work with us to adopt the fair maps Ohioans deserve.”

    The most recent maps were adopted by the redistricting commission 4 to 3, with only Republicans voting for the map and one Republican joining the two Democrats in the group to vote against them. Because they weren’t passed with a bipartisan majority, they would only have been in place for four years.

    When the commission redrew the maps after they were rejected for the second time in February, the justices ruled that the maps gave unfair favor to Republicans, giving them 58 percent of seats when previous election data has shown that about 54 percent of Ohio voters preferred Republicans. The maps then would have created a 42 percent seat ceiling for Democrats, the justices found.

    Under the newly rejected maps, Republicans would have gotten 54 percent of seats in the state, matching voter preferences on a surface level. But voting rights advocates said that the maps would have put a hard cap on the number of districts that Democrats could win, regardless of voter preferences in that election.

    Democrats weren’t given a chance to contribute to the map-drawing or even review the maps when they were presented in February, justices said in their decision. “The evidence shows that the individuals who controlled the map-drawing process exercised that control with the overriding intent to maintain as much of an advantage as possible for members of their political party,” the justices wrote.

    On Thursday, GOP Gov. Mike DeWine suggested that Republican and Democratic mapmakers “work together” on the fourth draft, which is theoretically the entire purpose of the redistricting commission. The group was created in 2015 in a constitutional amendment approved by voters, in order to stamp out partisan bias in the map-drawing process, but Republicans have been able to commandeer the commission and create gerrymandered maps anyway.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The 2020 Census Undercounted Native Americans, Black and Latinx People

    A census employee holds a sign reading I count at the unveiling of the U.S. Census Bureau's campaign for the 2020 United States Census at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., on January 14, 2020.

    According to new estimates that the Census Bureau released on Thursday, the 2020 census undercounted Black people, Latinx people and Native Americans, which advocates have warned could potentially lead to voter disenfranchisement.

    All three groups were undercounted at higher rates than they were a decade ago. Latinx people were undercounted by about 5 percent, or over three times the rate from 2010. Black people were undercounted by about 3.3 percent, while Native Americans on reservations were undercounted by over 5.6 percent.

    Meanwhile, non-Hispanic white people were overcounted by 1.64 percent, the bureau found. The miscounts, which have already been used for redistricting, could give disproportionate power to white populations while further disenfranchising populations that already face voter suppression. The more accurate population counts from Thursday’s report won’t affect redistricting, according to the New York Times.

    Experts say that the high miscounts may be the result of difficulties due to COVID and attempts to suppress the census by former President Donald Trump. Meddling from the Trump administration “wreaked havoc” at the Census Bureau, NPR reported earlier this year, and pressured the agency to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count.

    Trump ultimately succeeded in getting the count cut short by a month. Experts say that his efforts were a transparent campaign to expand GOP power while also potentially sabotaging local governments, who receive funding based on census counts.

    Population counts from the census can be used by redistricting officials to determine the number of districts in a state that should be majority non-white. The government also uses census data to guide decisions on where to direct about $1.5 trillion a year to state and local governments for things like health care. The bureau has long undercounted marginalized populations and overcounted white people.

    Groups representing Black, Indigenous and Latinx people were outraged over Thursday’s report.

    “A year ago when the first results of the 2020 Census were released, we said we smelled smoke. The [Census Bureau’s] estimates released today confirm that this census was a five-alarm fire,” Arturo Vargas, the CEO of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, said in a statement. Vargas said in a press call that he had never seen such a large undercount of Latinx people in over three decades of following the census.

    “These results confirm our worst fears,” Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians, said in a statement. “Every undercounted household and individual in our communities means lost funding and resources that are desperately needed to address the significant disparities we face.”

    Groups like the National Urban League say they may file litigation over the results, but there may be limited legal options to remedy the issue. “We’ve talked about voter suppression. Now we see population suppression,” National Urban League president Marc Morial said.

    Advocates have previously sued over Trump’s obstruction of the count, alleging that the bureau violated its duty, as set by the Constitution, to accurately count the population.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Billionaire-Backed Group Enlists Trump Supporters to Hunt for Voter Fraud

    Voters stand at ballot boxes and cast their votes at Fairdale High School on November 3, 2020, in Louisville, Kentucky.

    At a wedding hall in rural northwest Wisconsin, an evangelist hollered a question to an eager crowd of conferencegoers: “Who thinks Wisconsin can be saved?”

    He was answered with enthusiastic whistles and cheers. The truth, he said, would be revealed. “We need transparency!”

    The subject: the nation’s election systems. The preacher was among a group of conservative speakers, including politicians, data gurus and former military officers, who theorized on the mechanics of voter fraud in general — and specifically distrust in the voter rolls, the official lists of eligible voters.

    “Voter rolls are very, very important to the process,” Florida software and database engineer Jeff O’Donnell told the gathering of 300 in late January in Chippewa Falls, deeming the rolls “the ground zero” of what he called Democratic plots to steal elections. The only way former President Donald Trump could have lost his reelection campaign in 2020, O’Donnell said in an interview, was if voter rolls had been inflated with people who shouldn’t have been able to cast ballots.

    Ever since Trump failed to convince the world that he lost the 2020 election because of fraud, like-minded people across the country have been taking up the same rallying cry, revisiting that vote with an eye toward what will happen in 2022.

    Now, a new group is stepping into a more conspicuous role in that world by providing easily accessible tools for people in Wisconsin, other Midwest battleground states and, eventually, the entire country to forge ahead with a quest to prove election irregularities.

    Calling its work unprecedented, the Voter Reference Foundation is analyzing state voter rolls in search of discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters credited by the rolls as having participated in the Nov. 3, 2020 election.

    The foundation, led by a former Trump campaign official and founded less than a year ago, has dismissed objections from election officials that its methodology is flawed and its actions may be illegal, ProPublica found. But with its inquiries and insinuations, VoteRef, as it is known, has added to the volume in the echo chamber.

    Its instrument is the voter rolls, released line by line, for all to see.

    In early August, the foundation published on its website the names, birthdates, addresses and voting histories for 2 million Nevada voters, information that is normally public but only available on request, for a fee. It claimed to have found a significant discrepancy between the number of voters and the number of ballots cast, despite being warned by state election officials that its findings were “fundamentally incorrect.”

    In the months since, VoteRef has reported similar discrepancies in rolls posted for 18 other states, including the 2020 election battlegrounds of Michigan, Georgia, Ohio and Wisconsin. Most recently, it added Texas. It intends to post the rolls of all 50 states by year’s end.

    “Voter File Transparency site adds Michigan; large discrepancy found,” read a headline on a Dec. 6 press release put out by the organization, which is led by Gina Swoboda, a high-ranking officer in the Republican Party of Arizona.

    The project is still in its early stages, and the people at the Chippewa Falls conference did not mention VoteRef specifically.

    Still, the VoteRef initiative is an important indication of how some influential and well-funded Republicans across the country plan to encourage crowdsourcing of voter rolls to find what they consider errors and anomalies, then dispute voter registrations of specific individuals. Visitors to the VoteRef site are able to scroll through data on more than 106 million people in a free, easy-to-use format. The VoteRef data includes personal identifying information of every voter and the years they voted, but not how they voted.

    VoteRef’s methods have already led to pushback from state officials. The New Mexico Secretary of State believes posting data about individual voters online is not a permissible use under state law and has referred the matter to the state attorney general for criminal investigation.

    And an attorney for the Pennsylvania Department of State notified VoteRef in January that state law prohibits publishing the voter rolls on the internet and asked that the data be removed. VoteRef complied.

    ProPublica contacted election officials in a dozen of the states where VoteRef has examined voter rolls, and in every case the officials said that the methodology used to identify the discrepancies was flawed, the data incomplete or the math wrong. The officials, a mix of Democrats and Republicans, were in Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

    “The accuracy and integrity of Michigan’s election has been confirmed by hundreds of audits, numerous courts and a GOP-led Oversight Committee analysis,” said Tracy Wimmer, director of media relations for Michigan’s secretary of state.

    “This is simply another meritless example of election misinformation being disseminated to undermine well-founded faith in Michigan’s election system, and from an organization led by at least one former member of the Trump campaign,” Wimmer said.

    VoteRef, records show, is an initiative of the conservative nonprofit group Restoration Action and its related political action committee, both led by Doug Truax, an Illinois insurance broker and podcaster who ran unsuccessfully in the state’s GOP primary for the U.S. Senate in 2014.

    A ProPublica review found that VoteRef’s origins and funders are closely linked to a super PAC predominantly funded by billionaire Richard Uihlein, founder of the mammoth Wisconsin-based packaging supply company Uline. A descendant of one of the founders of the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, Uihlein is a major Trump supporter and a key player in Wisconsin and Illinois politics. Among his political donations: $800,000 in September 2020 to the Tea Party Patriots political action committee, a group that helped organize the Jan. 6 rally that led to the Capitol insurrection.

    Uihlein and his wife, Elizabeth Uihlein, have contributed in excess of $30 million combined over two decades to mainly Republican candidates on the state and local level, particularly in Illinois and Wisconsin, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan organization that tracks campaign donor information. The total includes money given to groups that advocate on behalf of candidates as well as direct contributions.

    Voter rolls are public information, typically used by campaigns to identify potential supporters, target messages or persuade people to go to the polls. Journalists and some businesses also at times use the rolls for newsgathering or commercial purposes.

    VoteRef has said its aim is to increase transparency in the elections process, echoing the language used to justify door-to-door address checks, painstaking ballot audits and other efforts that Trump supporters are continuing to employ to parse the 2020 election. To publicize the results of its analysis of ballot inconsistencies, it crafted press releases that then were parroted on sites that purport to be legitimate news outlets and were connected to a media network that received large sums of money from VoteRef.

    “VoteRef is the beginning of a new era of American election transparency,” Swoboda, VoteRef’s executive director, said in its Nevada press release. “We have an absolute right to see everything behind the curtain.”

    Until a few months before the 2020 election, Swoboda, a resident of Scottsdale, a Phoenix suburb, was a professional in Arizona’s election system, working as the campaign finance and lobbying supervisor in the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office.

    Swoboda then served as Election Day operations director for the Trump campaign in Arizona, according to a sworn court affidavit she gave in Arizona in November 2020 as part of Trump’s legal challenge to election results there. She described how she took complaints from people who thought poll workers allowed defective ballots to be submitted, in what later became known as “SharpieGate.” (Votes made with a Sharpie do count, the state said.)

    She and others associated with VoteRef declined to be interviewed for this story. But Swoboda did respond via email.

    “In each of the states we’ve researched to date, the election data math simply doesn’t add up,” she wrote. “That requires reform. We seek to spur this reform through the sustained spotlighting of inaccuracies or wrongdoing.”

    Flawed Methodology

    As of late February, VoteRef showed 431,173 more ballots cast overall than people credited by voter rolls with having participated in the 2020 election.

    To those unschooled in the mechanics of elections, VoteRef’s approach could seem reasonable: Compare the total number of ballots cast in the Nov. 3, 2020 election with the number of current voters on the rolls who have recorded histories of having participated in the vote.

    For example, the VoteRef table for Nevada shows 8,952 more ballots cast than individuals credited with voting, based on histories obtained in February 2021.

    “Theoretically, these numbers should match,” VoteRef claimed in an August press release.

    But there are valid reasons the numbers do not match.

    Nevada election officials explained it this way in a press release: “If ‘John Doe’ votes and has his ballot counted in Lander County, then moves to Mineral County, once he is registered in Mineral County, he will show no vote history because he has no vote history in Mineral County. The farther away from the election the data is acquired, the more it will have changed.”

    In Connecticut, there were 1,839,714 ballots cast in 2020, according to VoteRef, but the group’s examination of voter histories in October, 2021, showed 1,802,458 people voting. VoteRef’s conclusion is that there was a discrepancy of 37,256 ballots.

    But state election officials said that the registration database is “live,” and voting histories of those who moved out of state or died in the months after the election would have been removed from the rolls, accounting for the discrepancy.

    “The list is not a static list,” said Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill. “It changes all the time.”

    In Michigan, where VoteRef found a difference of more than 74,000 votes, an elections official said that state’s qualified voter file also constantly changes as it’s updated, making the data the foundation relied on in late May 2021 — more than six months after the election — out of date.

    In a recent email to ProPublica, Swoboda conceded as much.

    “It’s up to election officials who run election offices to reconcile their data, not the Voter Reference Foundation, which merely publishes their information in a consumer-friendly format,” she said. “Of course, our election experts are well aware of the time lag between certification and data pulls — we posted the documents online for all to see!”

    Federal law requires that election supervisors make reasonable efforts to update voter lists, but provides leeway in how states carry out the task. The law prohibits administrators from removing people for simply not voting in repeated elections, unless notices go unanswered and officials wait for two federal election cycles before putting the voters on an inactive list.

    Counties haven’t always done a good job, however, in maintaining the voter rolls, leading some people to distrust the system. One of VoteRef’s key aims is to task ordinary people with the chore of finding anomalies.

    Scrutinizing Voter Rolls and Neighbors

    In announcing the launch of its website, the Voter Reference Foundation touted it as a “first of its kind” searchable tool for all 50 states “that will finally give American citizens a way to examine crucial voting records.”

    “Citizens will be able to check their voting status, voting history, and those of their neighbors, friends and others. They will be able to ‘crowd-source’ any errors,” the press release stated.

    The group’s backers have encouraged scrutiny outside of one’s own household.

    “With VoteRef.com you can find out who voted and who didn’t. Did your aunt who died 10 years ago ‘vote’ after she died? Did your ‘neighbor’ who moved to another state vote? Did 55 votes emerge from a five-unit apartment complex?” Jeffrey Carter, a partner in a venture capital group who earlier had appeared on Truax’s podcast, wrote on the newsletter site Substack in December.

    Matt Batzel, whose organization American Majority recently highlighted VoteRef’s efforts in Wisconsin, said in an interview with ProPublica that VoteRef’s vision is for citizens to detect and then report potential problems with the voter rolls, such as people who are registered to vote at vacant lots or unusually high numbers of votes coming from nursing homes.

    Election experts say the type of work being done by VoteRef risks leading to further misinformation or being weaponized by people trying to undermine the legitimacy of the past election or give the sense that voter fraud is a more encompassing problem than it’s proven to be. Or it could be used to harass or intimidate valid voters under the guise of challenging their legitimacy.

    Even without any clear evidence of fraud during the 2020 election, the vast, decentralized election system still is drawing scrutiny from those who believe that the system can be easily manipulated. At the daylong voter integrity conference in Chippewa Falls, speakers invoked war imagery, spoke of coverups, and urged people to “expose the tactics” of the political left. The group — saluted via video by Trump acolyte and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — is seeking to put like-minded individuals in vote-certifying secretary of state offices nationwide.

    The voter rolls have been targeted, too, by others in Wisconsin, including special counsel Michael J. Gableman, a former state Supreme Court justice and Trump supporter who the state’s Republican Assembly speaker appointed in June to conduct a review of Wisconsin’s administration of the 2020 election. On March 1, Gableman released a report blasting what he called “opaque, confusing, and often botched election processes.”

    Gableman urged the Legislature to consider legal methods to enable citizens or civil rights groups to help maintain election databases.

    “As it stands, there is no clear method for individuals with facial evidence of inaccurate voter rolls to enter state court and seek to fix that problem,” he wrote. He envisioned a system that “could even provide nominal rewards for successful voter roll challenges.”

    While information about voters is available in most states, it comes at a cost and with limits on how it can be distributed to avoid having some private information be easily accessible.

    In January, an official with the Pennsylvania Department of State wrote to Truax warning that it appeared that the Voter Reference Foundation had “unlawfully posted Pennsylvania-voter information on its website” and demanding that the organization “take immediate action” to remove the information.

    Soon, Pennsylvania data disappeared from the website. Swoboda declined to answer questions about the matter. Attempts to reach Truax were unsuccessful.

    In New Mexico, Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver also said the undertaking is not an allowable use of voter data. By state law, she said, the rolls can only be used for governmental or campaign purposes.

    “Having voter registration data ‘blasted out across the internet’ violates state law limiting use of the voter rolls solely for campaign or government activities,” she said. In December, Toulouse Oliver’s office referred the matter to the state attorney general for investigation and possible prosecution.

    Associates of the Voter Reference Foundation dismiss these privacy concerns.

    “You are joking, right?” said Bill Wilson, chairman of the conservative-leaning Market Research Foundation of Fairfax, Virginia, which paid more than $11,000 to the state of Virginia in March 2021 for the voter roll data and shared it with the Voter Reference Foundation.

    “Big tech, both political parties and big media have no interest or concern for privacy and have mountains of data on individuals that is shared and sold on an hourly basis. You called me at my home, after all.’’

    Support in GOP Circles

    Restoration Action/PAC describes itself on its website as an “effective dynamo against those trying to destroy our country.” It produces ads on behalf of state and national candidates, castigates Planned Parenthood, “biased liberal media” and “Big Tech” and advocates for fair elections.

    Truax, the group’s head, frequently assumes the role of news anchor to host the First Right video podcast, interviewing far-right conservatives. In early June last year, he introduced his audience to VoteRef, telling them: “We helped create the organization, and we’ll have much more to say about it in the coming weeks.”

    Richard Uihlein’s quiet role was essential. He’s been the primary funder of Restoration PAC since its inception in 2015, contributing at least $44 million, according to the data from OpenSecrets. In May 2021, Federal Election Commission records show, Uihlein donated $1.5 million to Restoration PAC. That same month, the Voter Reference Foundation was incorporated in Ohio.

    Two weeks after the Uihlein donation, money started flowing from Restoration PAC to a media network that did some data procurement and analysis for VoteRef, with payments totalling more than $955,000 as of the end of 2021, the FEC records show.

    The network, which includes Pipeline Media, is operated by Bradley Cameron, a Texas business strategist, state corporation records show. Brian Timpone is listed as a manager at Pipeline Media. He made headlines a decade ago after his firm, then called Journatic, came under fire for outsourcing hyperlocal news offshore using phony bylines.

    In recent months, VoteRef has released press releases about its activities that have been turned into stories on sites owned by Metric Media, which Cameron leads, according to his online profile. The sites mimic legitimate news outlets but print press releases, shun bylines, do little to no original reporting and rely on automated data. “New website to publish which Arlington residents voted, did not vote in gubernatorial election,” read an Oct. 28 headline in the Central Nova News of Virginia, a Metric Media site.

    Uihlein did not respond to calls or emails from ProPublica seeking comment. Cameron and Timpone also did not reply to messages seeking an interview.

    Political figures with ties to Trump have been touting the efforts of VoteRef.

    Among them: former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, an immigration hard-liner appointed by Trump to serve as acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

    Cuccinelli now heads the Election Transparency Initiative, a Virginia organization opposed to expanding early voting or easing registration requirements. The initiative, a project of the conservative group Susan B. Anthony List, says it partners with The Heritage Foundation’s political arm.

    Cuccinelli spoke in September to about 100 party loyalists at a gathering at a suburban Milwaukee hotel about how they could use the VoteRef tools and become involved in securing the elections process.

    Similarly, J. Hogan Gidley, former national press secretary for the 2020 Trump campaign, promoted the work of VoteRef on Philadelphia conservative talk radio before Christmas.

    “We’re doing some work with them, too. We know the folks over there really well,” said Gidley, who is now with the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit packed with Trump administration alums.

    Truax, meanwhile, brought in Swoboda for his podcast last summer. They talked about the Arizona ballot audit and briefly referenced her work with the Voter Reference Foundation.

    “It always feels like to me that the states, in general, have gotten a little sloppy in different areas and just you know nobody’s really paying a lot of attention to it,” Truax said.

    He added: “Now I think as conservatives we’re in a place we really got to pay a lot more attention. There’s a lot of energy now on this.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In Blatantly Fascist Move, Florida GOP Passes Bill to Form Election Police Force

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis arrives for a press conference at the Miami Dade College’s North Campus on January 26, 2022, in Miami, Florida.

    The Republican-controlled Florida legislature passed a bill on Wednesday that would create a special elections police force meant to monitor elections at the behest of far right Gov. Ron DeSantis, who says that he will sign it into law.

    The bill would establish an Office of Election Crimes and Security within the Department of State, which is overseen by DeSantis. The 25-person office would allow DeSantis to appoint 10 police officers to investigate supposed election crimes — despite the fact that experts have repeatedly proven that election fraud doesn’t exist at a scale that would even begin to approach affecting election results.

    Appointing police officers to monitor elections to probe for non-existent voter fraud is nakedly fascist. This move is indicative of the fact that the U.S. is in fascism’s “legal phase,” as fascism scholar Jason Stanley noted in The Guardian late last year.

    The bill is the most extreme yet in Republicans’ push to suppress voters en masse, and voting rights advocates say that it will disproportionately affect Black voters.

    “The governor’s personal goon force will exist to do only one thing: intimidate Black voters,” Walter Shaub, senior ethics fellow for the Project on Government Oversight, said on Twitter.

    “It’s also gonna be a felony to take your sick grandma’s ballot to a drop box for her, unless you strap her in a cart and wheel her down there with you,” Shaub continued, referencing the fact that the bill makes it a felony for a voter to bring other people’s ballots to a dropoff location, which would disproportionately affect disabled or elderly people. The punishment for that is a hefty fine of up to $50,000 and five years in prison.

    Even before Republicans began passing exceedingly punitive voter suppression laws, Black voters were already punished harshly and disproportionately for supposed election fraud, often in cases where they had just made a simple mistake. Black people are also disproportionately the target of police violence and surveillance.

    Republicans claim — as they have for over a year as they pass dozens of voter suppression bills across the country — that the new bill is about election integrity. But the laws are actually an extreme reaction to former President Donald Trump’s loss in 2020, and an attempt to give Republican lawmakers more control over election results in the future.

    Republicans haven’t provided any evidence that widespread voter fraud is a legitimate issue. Though increased voter suppression laws from Republicans have already alarmed voting rights advocates, the current bill is one of the starkest signs yet that the GOP is openly embracing authoritarianism.

    “Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis is taking Orwell’s 1984 and running with it into a despotic dystopia of his own feverish imagining with his hoped-for, first-in-the-nation creation of an Office of Election Crimes and Security to ensure ‘elections are conducted in accordance with the rule of law,’ though, in fact, they already are,” wrote Abby Zimet for Common Dreams.

    The blatant voter suppression is just one example of the right’s increasing embrace of facism; as Henry Giroux noted for Truthout in November, DeSantis and the GOP’s attacks on education, and their efforts to punish educators for teaching about race, LGBTQ issues, and diversity, are also a sign of rising fascism on the right.

    Republicans’ attacks on public and higher education are “closely aligned to a fascist politics that despises anyone who holds power accountable and sees as an enemy anyone who fosters liberating forms of social change or attempts to resist the right wing’s politics of falsehoods and erasure,” Giroux wrote.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Redistricting Tactics Threaten to Suppress Black Representation in Louisiana

    Black voters at polling place

    The Louisiana Senate recently continued the state’s long history of racial oppression by voting down Sen. Cleo Fields’s congressional redistricting map. What’s more, the Louisiana House voted down Rep. Randal Gaines’s congressional redistricting map. Gaines is a veteran and civil rights attorney who represents one of the areas hardest hit by Hurricane Ida (river parishes), and Fields is an attorney and former congressman. Gaines’s and Fields’s proposals included two majority-minority districts (electoral districts where the majority of the constituents are people of color) giving them an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice — something Black voters in the state advocated for. Since the Black population has grown in Louisiana, an additional seat representing this shift is warranted, just and fair.

    But in Louisiana, as in other parts of the country, map drawers are refusing to create new electoral opportunities for communities of color. What’s more, they are actively dismantling Black voting power by carving up Black communities in some states or packing Black communities into fewer districts in other states. These manipulative tactics make it harder for Black voters to elect candidates of choice, regardless of turnout or Black population growth.

    We’ve seen this play out time and again in Louisiana, where Black voters have not always been treated equitably. My organization, the Power Coalition for Equity & Justice, understood this history and participated in a statewide roadshow allowing legislators and voters to directly engage around redistricting. Throughout the roadshow, which ran from October 20, 2021, through January 20, 2022, voters shared extensive testimony on the importance of representation.

    Across the state, countless voters expressed the need for legislators to add an additional majority-minority district given that 33 percent of the state’s population is Black. Louisiana has six congressional districts; one-third of six is two. Rather than surrendering to the will of the people or the logic of population growth, legislators continue machinations that will silence voters.

    State Sen. Sharon Hewitt suggested she was actually protecting Black voters by not creating a second majority-minority district because she didn’t think a 51 or 52 percent majority-Black district would turn out to vote, meaning they wouldn’t be able to elect a candidate of choice. But many Black voters would take 51 or 52 percent any day over not having a committed and representative voice. No legislator should be able to unilaterally decide what voters need; voters should have more influence.

    In the absence of a process that levels the playing field by allowing voters to select who represents them, legislators have outsized influence. For instance, our current congressional House delegation sits on several powerful committees. As the second-poorest state in the country, Louisianians are not benefiting or growing from this representation. In fact, our delegation recently voted against the president’s infrastructure bill, with the exception of Congressman Troy Carter, who currently holds the only majority-Black seat. Their resistance could have blocked a wonderful opportunity to invest in crumbling infrastructure. This is a risk we cannot continue to take.

    It is clear that any maps with an additional district will never make it out of committee. State leaders will certainly try to amend on the floor, much like they did on the Senate side, when State Senator Fields made a powerful and compelling plea for his colleagues to do the right thing.

    The next step is for a map with only one majority-minority district to go before Gov. John Bel Edwards, who can and should veto the map. Edwards should unite with the people of color in his state, particularly since Black voters helped propel him into office. For his part, Governor Edwards said he would veto unfair maps.

    He would be in good company. Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas vetoed the racially discriminatory maps put forth by legislatures in their states. Their vetoes were overturned, but their willingness to support the people of their state will be reflected in the history books. Moreover, several residents from three Kansas counties sued to block the state’s newly passed congressional maps, which conservatives in the state passed in early February.

    Louisiana has the second-largest Black population in the country, second only to Mississippi. If the governors of Kansas and Kentucky, who have much smaller Black populations, can stand for equity and fairness, Governor Edwards can certainly do the same.

    There can be no protection without representation.

    Much of what has happened during our redistricting process seems to be heading toward litigation. I hope Louisiana’s leaders remember that we experienced a 4.8 percent drop in the white population, and demographic trends show that it will continue to decrease. My question is: When our population shifts to a white minority, will legislators think it is fair, given the decisions they have made to continue to racially gerrymander and silence the voices of voters of color? I hope Louisiana’s leaders consider that people of color represent more than 40 percent of the population, and with the current maps being considered, only receive less than 25 percent of the representation. In what scenario would anyone take less than they deserve?

    The truth is that immigration is driving population shifts in the United States. And most of the people immigrating to this country are people of color, including Black immigrants. Legislators cannot hold communities of color hostage by continually drawing district lines that ignore population growth.

    As we think about redistricting, we should ground it in the broader fight for freedom. As Davante Lewis, director of public affairs and outreach for the Louisiana Budget Project, noted in his testimony before the House Governmental Affairs Committee, Black people have endured decades of trauma. Legislators can help ensure progress by drawing fair maps and allowing voters of color to elect candidates of their choice. To gaslight voters by downplaying their population growth is a continuation of their traumatic history.

    All people deserve elected officials who will advocate for them. Legislators should not be able to cherry-pick their voters. But unless and until we have an equitable process, legislators will continue to thwart the will of the people, especially when the people are Black, people of color, or persons living in poverty.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In a Victory for Activists, Lawsuit Against Arizona’s ALEC Lawmakers Can Proceed

    A protester carries a poster reading "I am Trayvon Martin"

    An appeals court in Arizona ruled this week that a coalition of racial justice groups can pursue a lawsuit against 26 Republican state lawmakers accused of breaking Arizona’s open meetings law at a 2019 policy summit of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

    ALEC is the powerful pay-to-play forum that brings hundreds of conservative lawmakers together with far-right activists and corporate lobbyists to craft conservative policies for state legislatures, many of which are actually passed into law. The Arizona ruling is a preliminary legal victory for racial justice activists who have long fought ALEC-sponsored legislation that they say disproportionately harms communities of color while safeguarding corporate power and white supremacy.

    A unique state open meetings law in Arizona provided an opening for the activists to challenge the 26 lawmakers who attended the 2019 national ALEC summit held in central Arizona — and test ALEC’s controversial policymaking process in court. The lawsuit argues that enough lawmakers from five committees in the Arizona state legislature attended the ALEC summit to represent a quorum, or the minimum number of committee members necessary to conduct official business and make decisions.

    Deliberating and drafting “model bills” at the ALEC summit — a process designed to “imitate” the actual legislative process — is essentially the first step toward introducing legislation in the legislative committees, the groups argue, and the fact that it happens behind closed doors violated a broad state law requiring that meetings of governing bodies be open to the public. The lawmakers’ move to dismiss the lawsuit was rejected by the appeals court this week, and the case was sent back to a state trial court, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights.

    Natally Cruz, interim Director of Puente Human Rights Movement, another plaintiff in the case, said the ruling “marks the turning of the tide.”

    “For decades, ALEC and the captured lawmakers it associates with have corrupted the lawmaking process to advance a capitalist white supremacist agenda that has attacked Latinx, Black, Brown, Queer, and many other communities all across the U.S. without facing any form of accountability,” Cruz said in a statement.

    The lawsuit also asks the court to make all notes and materials from the 2019 summit public and enjoin lawmakers from attending ALEC meetings behind closed doors in the future. Jacinta Gonzalez, senior organizer at Mijente, a Latinx rights organization that is a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said the ruling confirms what communities have been saying for years: Corporate lawmakers must follow the law and let people enter the rooms where decisions are made “about the future of our lives.”

    “ALEC is really the place where the far-right and corporations can come together to create policy that is against human rights on multiple levels,” Gonzalez said in an interview.

    Activists in Arizona and beyond have clashed with ALEC since 2009, when a state senator with ties to white supremacists introduced model legislation at ALEC that would later become SB 1070, Arizona’s infamous “show me your papers” law. Protests erupted as the model bill became state law, and legal challenges largely defanged provisions that invited police to racially profile Latinx people as undocumented immigrants. However, Gonzalez said, “copycat” legislation popped up across the country and passed in several other states, bringing activists into the street and civil rights attorneys into the courtroom.

    ALEC has opposed efforts to strengthen labor unions and protections for workers, fought environmental and climate regulations, and worked with state lawmakers to punish Palestinian rights activists who support boycotts and divestment from Israel. While the group is more focused on economic issues than the culture wars, ALEC members in affiliated Christian groups have also launched legislative attacks on abortion rights and transgender kids in schools, according to the Center for Media and Democracy.

    More recently investigative journalists have linked ALEC members to right-wing efforts to undermine public confidence in elections and mail-in voting, support former President Trump’s conspiracy theories and attempt at overthrowing the 2020 election, and pass voting restrictions in red states across the country. Civil rights groups say restrictions on voting pushed by Republicans — most famously the voter ID laws ALEC promoted in the past — disproportionately disenfranchise low-income people, students, people with disabilities and voters of color.

    Watchdogs say ALEC distanced itself from voter ID laws and disbanded its Public Safety and Elections Task Force after losing corporate members to controversy over voter ID and “stand your ground” laws that became infamous after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012. After 300 progressive groups urged corporations cut ties with ALEC for promoting a wave of GOP voter suppression bills last year, ALEC leadership has said the group “doesn’t work on voting issues.”

    However, critics on the left say this is a lie, and ALEC has worked with right-wing operatives and partner organizations to promote partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. In fact, secretive ALEC working group on redistricting and election law was meeting at least a year before the 2020 elections. The group was reportedly led by Cleta Mitchell, a controversial attorney who served as a legal advisor for Trump as the former president pushed officials to overturn election results in Georgia and spread disinformation about the 2020 election, according to the League of Women Voters.

    ALEC did not respond to a request for comment by the time this article was published.

    Gonzales said the chance to fight ALEC’s secretive process for crafting model policies in court is a victory for all the communities targeted by right-wing legislation.

    “It’s a fight that is connecting a lot of movements in different places and pushing back on far-right extremists and corporations that are trying to push a policy agenda,” Gonzalez said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Just 13 of 143 Texas GOP Candidates Will Admit Trump’s Loss Was “Legitimate”

    Former President Donald speaks to a crowd a rally at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds on January 29, 2022, in Conroe, Texas.

    Just 13 of the 143 Texas Republicans running for Congress acknowledge that the results of the 2020 election are “legitimate,” according to a survey.

    Hearst Newspapers sent questions about the election to all 143 candidates and only a baker’s dozen accepted the results of the election despite repeated recounts, audits and court cases that have found no evidence of any fraud or election-rigging that could have impacted the results, according to the Houston Chronicle.

    At least 42 of the candidates claimed that the election was stolen outright, called the results illegitimate or said they would have voted not to certify the results after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Another 11 candidates falsely claimed that there was enough fraud or irregularities to raise doubts about the election results. Another 19 have listed election fraud and irregularities as a key issue, without taking a stance on whether the 2020 results were legitimate.

    “We’ve seen across the board, the Democrats have always cheated,” Jonathan Hullihan, a former Navy lawyer running for the seat of retiring Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, said at a recent candidate forum without any evidence. “Eighty-one million votes for Joe Biden? I just don’t believe it.”

    Two of the candidates participated in the storming of the Capitol. Alma Arredondo-Lynch, who is challenging freshman Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, bragged that she had an “exciting and unforgettable” time at the protest outside the Capitol, blaming the pro-Trump violence on antifa and Black Lives Matter with no evidence. Sam Montoya, a former staffer at Alex Jones’ Infowars running in the state’s 35th congressional district, was arrested after filming himself and others invading the Capitol and has pleaded not guilty.

    Even some Republicans who have acknowledged that President Joe Biden’s win was legitimate raised questions about the election.

    “There are a lot of questions and issues regarding the 2020 election that need to be resolved and that are still being looked into, but there is not enough evidence to suggest that the election was stolen or that he is illegitimate,” Greg Thorne, who said he would have certified the election, unlike incumbent opponent Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, told the Chronicle.

    The 2020 election has become a key litmus test in Republican primaries as voters continue to be bombarded with false claims of fraud stemming from Donald Trump’s unending propaganda campaign to deny his loss. Trump’s Justice Department and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s “Election Fraud Unit” all found no evidence to support any of the widespread fraud claims.

    Two-thirds of Texas Republican voters believe Biden’s win was illegitimate, according to a recent poll from the University of Texas at Austin, compared to just 22% who accept the election results. Nationwide, just 21% of Republicans believe Biden’s win was legitimate, according to a December poll from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

    “The belief in widespread voter fraud is becoming the article of faith among Republicans,” Joshua Blank, research director for the Texas Politics Project at UT Austin, told the Chronicle.

    Blank said candidates’ position on this question is a signal to voters of their fealty to Trump.

    “Is there any daylight between you and the former president?” he said. “It’s not necessarily about voting per se, but the extent to which these candidates can present themselves as on the president’s team.”

    Though political candidates are notorious for playing fast and loose with the facts, candidates echoing repeatedly debunked lies about the election is a fairly new phenomenon. The Trump administration’s top cybersecurity officials called the 2020 race “the most secure in American history.” Republican Texas Secretary of State Ruth Hughs said the election in the state was “smooth and secure,” which appeared to have led Republican state lawmakers to block her confirmation.

    It’s not just Texas: Hundreds of Republicans who deny or cast doubt on the election results are running for Congress nationwide. Perhaps more alarmingly, more than 80 election deniers are running to run, oversee or protect elections in their states and even more are seeking to take over local election jobs.

    Many Republican state lawmakers have also gone all-in on Trump’s Big Lie with legislation aimed at restricting ballot access in the wake of record turnout in the 2020 race. Republicans last year enacted 34 new voting laws in 19 states, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, and have already introduced at least 250 new voting bills this year.

    Texas’ sweeping new voting law, which restricts numerous forms of voting, has already become a nightmare for election administrators with primary voting underway. The state’s new voter ID requirements have caused some counties to reject nearly half of mail-in ballot applications and mail ballots.

    In Harris County, which includes Houston, election officials have been forced to reject about 40% of applications and ballots, said Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo. “We have the receipts,” she tweeted.

    In Travis County, which includes Austin, officials have also had to deal with a big increase in rejections.

    “Voters are being mistreated,” County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir said last month. “My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Suppression of Mail-In Voting Looms Over Texas Primary

    Voters line up at a polling station to cast their ballots during the presidential primary in Houston, Texas on Super Tuesday, March 3, 2020.

    Early voting for a March 1 primary election opened yesterday in Texas, where civil rights groups are warning the Republican Secretary of State John B. Scott of a “crisis of confidence” among voters as election officials scramble to implement the state’s punitive new election law.

    According to a letter to Scott signed by 30 civil rights groups this week, he squandered precious time “chasing down” former President Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election results when state officials should have prioritized helping voters and election officials navigate Senate Bill 1, the new restrictions on voting and mail-in ballots that Republicans rammed through the state legislature last year.

    “Altogether, the issues stemming from the passage of anti-voter Senate Bill 1 create multiple deliberate barriers to voting with far-reaching consequences,” said Charlie Bonner, communications director for MOVE Texas Action Fund, in a statement. “These failures have led to mass confusion surrounding our voting processes that continue to undermine trust in our elections.”

    Scott briefly signed onto one Trump’s ill-fated lawsuits that attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential vote in Pennsylvania before Republican Gov. Greg Abbott appointed him to Texas secretary of state last year. For Republicans, Scott is a champion of “election integrity,” a buzzword describing the idea that restrictions on voting are needed to prevent fraud. Despite Trump’s claims, there is no evidence of widespread fraud in 2020 or any other recent election, and critics say Texas Republicans are continuing a longstanding tradition of diluting the voting power of people of color, workers and people with disabilities.

    The uncertainty and confusion hanging over the Texas primaries was underscored late last Friday when a federal judge in San Antonio issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of a portion of the voter restriction law that made it crime for public officials to encourage or “solicit” applications to vote by mail. Plaintiff election officials said the restrictions violated their First Amendment rights and made it difficult to help elderly and disabled people apply for mail-in ballots without potentially committing a criminal offense.

    Scott’s office did not respond to Truthout’s request for comment, but a spokesman told Politico that some county officials have “almost been overly restrictive on themselves.” But the incentive to be “restrictive” is clear: “Unlawfully soliciting” mail-in ballots is now a felony punishable by 180 days in jail and a fine of up to $10,000, according to the Texas Tribune.

    Across the state, officials have complained about rejecting large numbers of mail-in ballot applications due to confusion over the law’s cumbersome new ID requirements. Senate Bill 1 also enhanced criminal penalties and paperwork for people who assist voters, creating hurdles for elderly and disabled voters and the people who care for them.

    Officials have rushed to update forms to alert voters to new rules and penalties ahead of the midterms, and Scott’s office was initially forced to ration voter registration forms after running out of paper due to problems in the supply chain.

    “This was a seismic blunder that threatened many thousands of eligible voters, and which you worked to fix only after a massive public outcry,” the groups wrote in the letter.

    Scott’s office has responded to lawsuits and public outcry by issuing guidance on a rolling basis, but advocates say Scott still has not done enough to educate voters about new rules and procedures for mail-in voting. For example, Scott’s office rolled out a new website for tracking mail-in ballots, but most voters don’t know about it, according to the letter.

    “Unlike Secretary Scott, we have been working directly with voters to provide the support and guidance that they deserve in the wake of the confusion of Senate Bill 1,” said Stephanie Gómez, associate director for Common Cause Texas, in a statement.

    The groups said public confidence in Texas elections was already eroding before Abbott appointed Scott last year. In 2019 and again in 2022, attempts at purging non-citizens from voter rolls have wrongly targeted naturalized citizens and intimidated immigrant voters.

    In 2020, Scott’s predecessor forced election officials in Harris County, which includes most of Houston, to abandon a plan to send mail-in ballot applications to every registered voter due the pandemic, according to civil rights groups. Republican election officials also worked with Abbott to severely limit the number of mail-in ballot drop boxes available to voters shortly before the 2020 election.

    Texas Republicans went on to pass Senate Bill 1, which the Justice Department has challenged in court in defense of elderly and disabled voters. Republicans passed the new penalties for encouraging or “unlawful soliciting” of mail-in votes after a series of legal fights with Democratic election officials in Harris Country and other populous areas over the issue. Mail-in ballots are highly controversial in Republican-led Texas, where high voter turnout in 2020 left Trump with a narrower margin of victory over President Joe Biden than the former president may have expected in a traditionally red state.

    In September, Trump demanded that Abbott pass legislation authorizing a “forensic audit” of ballots in Texas long after state officials declared the 2020 election “smooth and secure.” Within hours of Trump’s request, Scott’s predecessor ordered an audit of the results in the state’s four largest and most diverse counties, including Harris County. Abbott appointed Scott to take over as secretary of state soon after.

    Initial results of the review released last month found few discrepancies, confirming what many observers in Texas already knew: There was no widespread voter fraud in 2020. Voting rights advocate chalk it up to a thinly veiled and hyper-partisan attempt to bolster Republican conspiracy theories about a stolen election that fueled a wave of voter suppression efforts in Texas and other states.

    The civil rights groups say Scott has been vocal about making the election audit his “first and foremost” priority while his office should have been preparing for a primary election with new voting restrictions in place. They say Scott must use the time remaining before the March 1 vote to expand efforts to educate voters about the changes, issue clearer guidance to local officials, and protect voters from intimidation by partisan poll watchers who are empowered to intervene at polling locations under Senate Bill 1.

    “The longer these issues go unaddressed, the more voters [are] impacted, and the more extreme the impacts on our democracy become,” Bonner said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Georgia Republicans Are Trying to Undo Democracy in Local Elections

    Demonstrators stand outside of the Georgia Capitol building, to oppose a bill that will add voting restrictions to the state's upcoming elections on March 3, 2021, in Atlanta, Georgia.

    A new wave of power grabs by Georgia’s Republican legislators is threatening to wrest control of key local government bodies where Democrats, often people of color, have recently been elected and currently hold governing majorities.

    The Republican moves are an effort to consolidate political control after passing sweeping legislation in 2021 that limited popular early voting options, and allowed state officials to oust county election officials and possibly overturn results.

    The latest power grabs are occurring under the umbrella of reconfiguring political districts after the 2020 census, and they target county commissions, school boards and prosecutors in the metro-Atlanta region and other areas where recent elections have left Republicans as political minorities.

    “They are not waiting for the [next] election,” said Richard Rose, Atlanta NAACP president. “That’s not quick enough for the powers that run Georgia.”

    “They used to believe in local control,” said Helen Butler, a civil rights activist who was purged from Morgan County’s Board of Elections by GOP legislation passed in 2021. “The legislature is now coming in and saying, ‘we don’t like the maps that local people put together,’ and they’re drawing their own maps… They want total control.”

    Legislation that is now progressing includes Republican-drawn maps for county commissions in several metro-Atlanta counties, where numerous elected Democrats, who are Black, say they are being targeted for replacement by Republicans, who are white. In one of those counties, Gwinnett, home to the state’s largest school district and most diverse demographics, a bill would make its school board elections nonpartisan — masking a candidate’s party — and reschedule the election months before November, when voter turnout is lower.

    The school board’s new chair, Tarece Johnson, speaking at a statehouse press conference on January 27, said the Senate-passed legislation was “targeting people of color and attempting to suppress the vote, erase their historical truths and censor diverse perspectives.” Republicans pressing for the change have attacked the board’s leadership, which only recently changed to control by elected Democrats, as incompetent.

    That same charge, of managerial incompetence, has been used to justify legislation that passed in 2021 to remove local election officials, such as in Spalding County on Atlanta’s outskirts. It is also the rationale of another bill that would allow a newly created state panel to fire elected prosecutors, which is the latest development in a GOP effort to unseat Deborah Gonzalez, the state’s first Latina district attorney, who won after pledging to ignore low-level drug offenses.

    “It was a very progressive platform, and I was very vocal about wanting to run to address systemic racism,” Gonzalez told the Marshall Project, a media outlet covering the justice system.

    County-level partisan targeting often escapes coverage by national media. In Georgia, however, a national battleground state where demographic changes have evenly divided its electorate, the Republican takeover attempts follow 2021 legislation that rolled back early in-person and mail-based voting options, and empowered a GOP-run state board to purge election officials in eight counties. Voting rights advocates fear 2021’s legislation could set the stage for overturning election results. The latest power grabs worry but do not surprise advocates.

    “We are hearing more and more that the worst abuses, the worst discriminatory redistricting and gerrymandering is playing out at the local level,” said Yurij Rudensky, a redistricting counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. “This is becoming an increasing concern in states that were formerly covered by [preclearance in] Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. This is the first redistricting cycle to occur without those protections.”

    “In decades past, all of these sorts of changes, whether it is where district lines fall or the size of local governing bodies, county school boards, city councils, etc., would be assessed [by federal officials in Washington] for their tendency to diminish the influence of communities of color,” he said. “And there was certainly a deterrent effect because a legislature like Georgia’s legislature would know that what they were doing would have to pass muster.”

    But outside of the Atlanta-based policy and activist circles that are tracking the power grabs, many Georgia voters are not yet aware of the Republicans’ latest moves, said Julius Johnson, who runs a democracy center in rural Hawkinsville — in mid-Georgia — that includes a food bank, meeting space, Black history museum and library, and hosts voter drives.

    “Typically, locally, people don’t realize the importance of the local elections,” said Johnson, a Democrat who lost a 2020 bid for the state Senate. “We have to articulate very clearly what’s happening here — ‘Here is the Republican strategy to get these people in at the local levels’ — so that we can get people to step up their game with participation and keep people voting.”

    Deepening Structural Racism?

    Many Democrats have described the latest GOP moves as the latest structural racism in Georgia politics. The bills to redraw local districts, change who serves on local boards, alter the timing of local elections, and expand ways to unseat locally elected officials are seen by these officials as imposing rules that will steepen the path for people of color to hold majority power. The latest bills come after Republicans in 2021 reversed policies that made early voting easier.

    “They’re leveraging their power wherever they happen to have it,” said Ray McClendon, Atlanta NAACP political action chair. “If you look at all of these [voting] changes, it is not to take us back to Jim Crow where you have to count jellybeans in a jar to vote. All they need to do is just take off three, four or five percent of voter turnout and they will accomplish what they want.”

    McClendon said that the GOP’s 2021 election reforms were designed to discourage voting and disqualify votes cast early — which is when many working-class Georgians prefer to vote. Unlike the aftermath of the 2020 election when Donald Trump pressured top state officials to “find” enough votes for him to win, McClendon said the GOP’s strategy is for local officials to winnow votes.

    “The combination of all of these [rule] changes on the mail-in ballot, no longer being able to have Sunday voting in certain cases because they stacked local election boards, the narrowing of the dates for early voting, the cutting back on the number of voting locations and drop boxes — they don’t sound like they are onerous provisions individually,” McClendon explained. “But when you take them collectively, and you take the fact that every one of these is in a state that is purple, these are steps that are intended to ensure minority rule.”

    Data suggests McClendon’s analysis is correct. In November 2021’s municipal elections, the number of rejected absentee ballots increased 45-fold when compared to the percentage that were rejected in November 2020’s presidential election. The GOP’s 2021 law required that all ballot applications and returned ballots be accompanied by a photocopy of a voter’s ID.

    Republicans, notably, have rejected the accusations of racism surrounding their voting reforms and county gerrymanders as “ugly” and “baseless.” They have defended their bills as efforts to make local government more representative, especially in parts of Atlanta where whites may now be in the political minority. (GOP sections of the city have repeatedly tried to secede.)

    “I do believe that all of the communities in our county matter,” Rep. Bonnie Rich, R-Suwanee, whose map redrawing county commissioner districts in Gwinnett County passed her chamber, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “That is why I drew lines that represent those distinct communities.”

    Rep. Houston Gaines, a Republican who represents a portion of Athens, a city about 70 miles east of Atlanta, told the newspaper that the legislature-imposed maps “protect the voice of every Athenian… [thus] ensuring greater opportunities for minority communities.”

    Critics like the NAACP’s Rose say that rhetoric — portraying white Republicans as victims of discrimination after losing to people of color — is offensive. It also masks what is unfolding.

    “It is a complete overhaul of the system that we know of,” Rose said. “They have to make sure that they control the elections, that they control the counting, that they control how absentee ballots are processed… And, in some counties, like Gwinnett, for example, where the county commission is all Democratic, they now want to change that. They want to change the school board… They feel they must change it if it does not allow them to maintain power.”

    Georgia’s 2022 Primaries

    There are many signs that Georgia’s upcoming primaries on May 24 will be chaotic for election officials, candidates, campaigns, and groups urging voters to turn out. The ballot will feature each party’s nominees for federal, state, and local office, including local judgeships. In short, the legislature’s election law and voting rule changes (and federal redistricting litigation) have left many issues unresolved, which makes it harder to inform voters about what will affect them.

    In August 2021, the Georgia Association of Voter Registrars and Election Officials (GAVREO) passed a resolution in which they “implore[d]” the legislature to postpone 2022’s primary from May to June, because the officials needed time to make “complicated redistricting changes,” such as finalizing maps, allocating resources and related planning before candidates could file to run for office.

    GAVREO’s plea was ignored, just as, several months before, a handful of counties with Black election officials (administrators and policymakers) were “blind-sided” when their lobbyists discovered that GOP legislators were drafting bills to fire them (by requiring they live in the county) or to purge election board members (who were Democrats), according to emails obtained by American Oversight, a progressive law group that has used public document requests to expose numerous anti-democratic effort by pro-Trump Republicans.

    All of Georgia’s 159 counties are affected by the post-2020 legislation. But the counties that have been additionally targeted in specific legislation have notable populations of color. As a result, organizers like the NAACP’s McClendon or Helen Butler, who is executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, a civil rights group, have been scrambling to track the changes to help voters chart a path through what she says is intentional chaos.

    “They’re throwing so much stuff at us that we just have to put things in place,” Butler said. “Our ‘Democracy Squads’ monitor boards of elections to see what they’re planning on doing with regards to the vote… We send people to meetings. We get their minutes. We basically try to get people to report to us in real time so that we know what’s going on.”

    “The chaos is real,” McClendon said. “It builds on what they are already doing to marginalize a percentage of voters. They are creating so many whack-a-mole situations that all we are doing as activists is trying to beat down one thing after another and then another thing pops us.”

    In the meantime, the NAACP and its allies from the 2020 campaign — which include professional associations in communities of color and data-driven grassroots campaign experts — are looking to revive those networks and stand up “democracy centers” across the state, so that ordinary Georgians have trusted sources for addressing local needs, including voting.

    “We have talked about the issues to raise, and one has to be true patriotism,” Rose said. “You cannot support the insurrection of January 6, and if you’re a veteran you cannot support the Confederacy… We’re also going to talk about bread-and-butter issues like Medicaid expansion, because rural hospitals are closing. And education, because the GOP is losing its mind over critical race theory, which has never been taught in public schools.”

    But while Rose is looking to reactivate the grassroots networks that led Georgia to elect a Democratic presidential candidate and two Democratic U.S. senators in 2020, the Republican-run state legislature is seeking to reconfigure state and county election districts and boards in Georgia’s blue epicenters — by finding ways to oust popularly elected representatives.

    “It’s untethering policymaking from public will and from voter preference in response to changing demographics and the political changes and policy preferences changes that go along with that,” said the Brennan Center’s Rudensky. “It’s very concerning because it really cuts to the heart of what our system is supposed to be about.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Ohio Supreme Court Rejects Republican-Drawn Congressional Maps — Again

    The Ohio Statehouse, located in Columbus, Ohio.

    On Monday night, the Ohio Supreme Court threw out Republican-drawn congressional maps after justices ruled GOP maps unconstitutionally gerrymandered for the second time.

    The justices ruled that the Ohio Redistricting Commission’s latest attempt to draw constitutional maps that accurately represent the electorate were too skewed toward Republicans. It was a 4 to 3 ruling, with one moderate Republican joining the court’s Democrats in rejecting the redrawn map.

    According to the ruling, Republicans in the legislature had proposed nixing one Republican-leaning House district and one Republican-leaning Senate district in central Ohio. But the Democratic-leaning districts that would replace them were only Democratic by “very slim margins,” the justices wrote.

    Although prior elections have shown that roughly 54 percent of Ohio voters prefer Republicans while 46 percent prefer Democrats, the new maps skewed even more favor to the GOP, giving them 58 percent of seats. According to the Ohio Constitution, the maps must be representative of the electorate’s preferences.

    “[T]he revised plan’s structure guarantees that the 58 percent seat share for Republicans is a floor whereas the 42 percent seat share for Democrats is a ceiling,” the ruling reads. New maps are due back by February 17.

    Though the new maps are closer to a representative partisan split than the first ones Republicans submitted, the ruling said that adjustments to the maps were a facade.

    The first maps gave Republicans about 62 percent of House seats and nearly 70 percent of Senate seats. Justices wrote that Republicans had not started the new maps from scratch, but rather tweaked the old, unconstitutional maps. GOP lawmakers “started with the same plan that we invalidated and then merely adjusted certain districts just enough so that they could nominally be reclassified as ‘Democratic-leaning,’” the ruling reads.

    Voting rights advocates praised the court decision. “Now that the Ohio Redistricting Commission is back to square one, we ask that they finally stop and listen to the voters’ demands for a fair redistricting process,” Common Cause Ohio said in a statement, lamenting the fact that the commissions’ map drawing process is done behind closed doors. “After today’s ruling, these partisan games must come to an end. It’s time for the Ohio Redistricting Commission to do its job.”

    The bipartisan Ohio Redistricting Commission is made up of five Republicans and two Democrats and was created in the hopes of stamping out partisanship in map drawing. But the panel has failed to reach a bipartisan consensus on its maps twice so far.

    Republican lawmakers have been able to sidestep the commission in the map drawing process, though Republican House Speaker Bob Cupp told reporters that the new maps will be drawn solely by the commission.

    In response to the maps being rejected for a second time, Democrats released their own version of the maps, which they say adheres to the Ohio Constitution’s guidelines for a partisan split.

    “Our congressional map proposal keeps communities together, reflects the preferences of Ohio voters, and follows the Constitution. Most importantly, it does not unduly favor or disfavor a political party, in compliance with the Court’s ruling,” House Minority Leader Allison Russo, a Democrat, said in a statement.

    “There are multiple pathways to achieve the fair, constitutional map that Ohioans deserve, and our updated map is yet another example demonstrating this legislature can deliver a fair map that complies with the court order and the Ohio Constitution,” Russo continued.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • At Least 80 Pro-Trump “Big Lie” Believers Are Running for State Offices

    Georgia Secretary of State candidate Rep. Jody Hice speaks to the crowd during a rally as former President Donald Trump watches on September 25, 2021, in Perry, Georgia.

    More than 80 candidates who have made false claims about the 2020 election or supported Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” are running for state offices that run, oversee or protect elections, according to a new report.

    Trump has targeted numerous state-level races after Republicans like Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey refused to help him try to overturn his loss and election officials like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (a Republican) and Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (a Democrat) repeatedly discredited his baseless claims of fraud. But the trend is not limited to the handful of battleground states that decided the 2020 election.

    At least 51 Republican candidates who have falsely claimed that Trump won the election, spread lies about the election’s legitimacy, backed “forensic” audits, promoted conspiracy theories or took other actions to undermine election integrity are running for governor in 24 states, according to States United Action, a nonpartisan group tracking election deniers running for office. In some states, multiple election deniers are running in the same primary.

    At least 21 election deniers are running for secretary of state in 18 states, an office that would put them in power to oversee voting in their states. Another 11 election deniers are running for attorney general, which would position them to get involved in election litigation and law enforcement matters.

    “We are seeing Democrat and Republican statewide officials who defended the will of the people in 2020 being challenged or primaried by Election Deniers in red and blue states alike,” former Republican New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, the co-chair of States United Action, said in a statement. “Elections are national events run by the states, so these positions are critical to a government of, by, and for the people. It’s important that we pay attention, and early, to the rhetoric about our election system happening in these down-ballot races.”

    Secretaries of state in particular proved to be key in undermining Trump’s post-election crusade. Secretaries of state from both parties certified election results and fended off lawsuits from Trump and his allies. Raffensperger, for example, also resisted a barrage of calls from Trump asking him to “find” enough votes to overturn the election. He and many other top election officials endured months of death threats for their efforts.

    Trump has thrown his endorsement behind Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., who is mounting a primary challenge to Raffensperger. After the 2020 election, Hice backed multiple lawsuits seeking to overturn the results of the election in Georgia, saying he was “not convinced at all” that President Biden won the state even after three recounts confirmed the results. Hice has also spread conspiracy theories that voting machines flipped votes from Trump to Biden. Hice objected to the certification of Biden’s victory in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, which he called “our 1776 moment,” even after hundreds of Trump supporters assaulted Capitol Police officers and hunted lawmakers through the halls of Congress.

    Trump is also backing state Rep. Mark Finchem in his campaign against Hobbs as secretary of state in Arizona, which Trump lost to Biden by fewer than 11,000 votes. Finchem attended the “Stop the Steal” rally ahead of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and has acknowledged his ties to the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia whose leader and other members have been charged with seditious conspiracy in the riot. Finchem has repeatedly insisted that Trump won the 2020 race, was a key supporter of the failed Maricopa County “audit” and has since introduced legislation that would require all voters’ ballots to be published online and require all ballots to be counted by hand — a nod to the numerous conspiracy theories around Arizona’s so-called audit. Finchem is also co-sponsoring a bill that would allow the state legislature to “accept or reject” the results of a presidential election, without establishing clear criteria for such a rejection.

    Trump is also targeting Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who fended off multiple legal challenges to the state’s election. Trump has endorsed Kristina Karamo, a community college professor who gained a following in conservative circles after claiming she had seen fraudulent ballots counted in Detroit while acting as a poll challenger, assertions that have been rejected in court and by local election officials. Karamo later pushed conspiracy theories that voting machines had switched votes from Trump to Biden and that antifa, not Trump supporters, were behind the Capitol riot.

    More than a dozen other election deniers are running in many other states, according to States United Action, including such swing states like Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico and Ohio. (Biden won the first four and Trump carried Ohio, all by relatively narrow margins.)

    Benson warned that these election deniers are vying for positions that could potentially allow them to “change election results.”

    Misinformation spread by Trump supporters and threats against election officials are all part of a “multi-tier effort designed to, in some ways, create a ripe environment that could accept the results of an election being overturned because there’s been so much confusion and chaos and instances of illegitimacy suggested through various means,” Benson told reporters on Wednesday. “This misinformation campaign is also a critical component of enabling these individuals … to be poised to block or overturn election results that they don’t support.”

    The nearly two dozen election deniers running for secretary of state represent only a small number of the election conspiracists seeking power over elections at multiple levels. Trump allies are also working to place supporters in key local election positions at the county and municipal levels.

    “Sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate,” Trump said earlier this month.

    “There are local efforts to place individuals on local canvassing boards who also play a role in certifying our elections,” Benson said. “You have a clear line for election subversion in the future if these individuals are elected with his support.”

    Trump is also recruiting candidates to challenge governors that opposed his post-election efforts. He recently convinced former Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., to challenge Kemp in this year’s GOP primary, much to the chagrin of many Georgia Republicans who are still reeling from losing both U.S. Senate seats in a January 2021 runoff election after Trump stoked conspiracies about the November election.

    Perdue has said he would not have certified the 2020 election and filed a baseless lawsuit in December, nearly a year after his loss to Democrat Jon Ossoff, claiming that election officials in Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, had “circumvented the majority vote” and echoing other debunked conspiracy theories about the results. He recently proposed the idea of an election police force, an idea also pushed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

    Trump is also aiming to replace Ducey, the Arizona governor — who is leaving office due to term limits — with former TV news anchor Kari Lake, who has called for “decertification” of the 2020 election, which is not legally possible. Lake was a key supporter of the Maricopa County audit and has repeatedly claimed that the election was “stolen.” Last fall called for Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state who is herself also running for governor, to be imprisoned for unspecified crimes, and similarly suggested that journalists should be “locked up” for failing to support pro-Trump election lies.

    Election deniers are running for governor in about two-thirds of the states with gubernatorial elections this year, including in such swing states as Florida, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada and Pennsylvania. (In 2020, Biden carried all those states except Florida.)

    “All of these people are running in the very same election system that they’re criticizing,” Republican Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said on a press call. “The irony is, there’s no greater sign of approval that you’re willing to spend a year of your life, some of your money, some of your friends’ money running for the system. Nobody runs against Vladimir Putin. You know what the outcome’s going to be in a truly rigged election. So why would you waste your time and money? The reality is, these people are revealing their true opinion that they don’t think that the system is wholly corrupt, that they have so much confidence in the system that they’re willing to invest their political future and professional future in that very system. … I think that’s truly revealing.”

    The effort to install election deniers in key state offices comes as Republican-led legislatures across the country impose new voting restrictions that opponents worry will suppress voter turnout, especially in urban areas and communities of color that tend to vote Democratic. State legislatures last year introduced more than 260 bills that would “interfere with the nonpartisan administration of elections,” according to States United Action, and 32 were signed into law in 17 states. Republicans have already kicked off this year’s legislative sessions with a flurry of new proposed voting restrictions, even in states that already passed sweeping new laws in response to Trump’s conspiracy theories last year.

    “The anti-democracy playbook is simple: change the rules and change the referees, in order to change the results,” Joanna Lydgate, CEO of States United Action, said in a statement. “With extreme candidates running on election lies as a campaign issue up and down the ballot, it’s never been more important to elect leaders from both sides of the aisle who respect the rule of law and the will of the voters.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Georgia Mail Ballot Restrictions Disenfranchised 45 Times More Voters Last Year

    An election worker validates ballots at the Gwinnete County Elections Office on November 6, 2020, in Lawrenceville, Georgia.

    Due to a voter suppression law that was passed by Republicans in Georgia last year, the rate of voters in the state who didn’t vote after having mail-in ballot applications rejected increased 45-fold, according to a new analysis by Mother Jones.

    During Georgia’s municipal elections in 2021, mail-in ballot applications were rejected at a rate that was four times higher than during the 2020 election. Officials rejected a record rate of 4 percent of absentee ballot.

    Mother Jones analyzed how many voters didn’t go on to cast a ballot in person due to their mail-in applications being denied, a rate that also increased dramatically last year. Of the 1,038 people who had their applications rejected in 2021, only about a quarter ultimately cast a ballot in person. That’s about 2.19 percent of total mail-in voters – a huge increase over the 0.05 percent of voters who didn’t end up voting after an application rejection in 2020.

    As Mother Jones’s Ryan Little and Ari Berman wrote, the figure is “an example of how a seemingly minor change to voter access can lead to a big increase in disenfranchisement.”

    The voter suppression law that Republicans rushed to pass through the legislature last spring contains a number of restrictions on absentee voting. The new law implemented stricter ID requirements for mail-in ballots, cut the period in which voters can submit their mail-in ballot requests by more than half and reduced the number of drop boxes. The law also made it illegal for election officials to mail unsolicited mail-in ballot requests.

    Voter disenfranchisement has directly resulted from these changes, reporting has found. About 1 in 6 mail-in ballots were thrown out because voters had filled out their identification information incorrectly after the new ID requirements.

    If the rate of rejections from last year was applied to the 2020 election, over 38,000 people would not have voted in the presidential election. This is over three times the margin of President Joe Biden’s win in Georgia; Biden won the state by only 11,000 votes.

    The mail-in ballot restrictions are more likely to affect Democrats. Last year, of the people who voted in the 2020 primaries, 404 Democrats had their applications rejected, while only 145 Republicans received a rejection. Further, 351 Democrats had their mail-in ballots rejected, while only 102 Republicans experienced the same.

    It’s unclear why there is a disparity between how Democrats and Republicans are affected by the new changes.

    However, election experts warned last year that the Republicans’ voter suppression laws were racist. One reason for the disproportionate effects of the law, then, could be that the restrictions disproportionately affect Black voters; 58 percent of registered voters who don’t have an ID on file with the state are Black, Little and Berman pointed out. According to exit polls, Black voters in the state overwhelmingly chose Biden in the 2020 election. Black voters also participated in mail-in voting at a higher rate than other demographics in the state.

    Another reason could be that Democrats generally voted by mail at a higher proportion than Republicans in the 2020 election. In some states, mail-in ballots went overwhelmingly for Biden, even in states that ultimately went for Donald Trump, like North Carolina. However, Republicans ended up having a slim margin over Democrats when it came to mail ballots in Georgia.

    Republicans in other states are also cracking down on mail-in votes, leading to similar consequences. In Texas, Republicans’ voter suppression law led to a 700 percent increase of rejected mail-in ballot applications in Houston’s Harris County, which went for Biden in 2020.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Tax Cuts and Voter Suppression Laws Are Working Together to Lock in Plutocracy

    Hands of person in business suit sign paperwork in shadowy light

    America’s national media typically pay little attention to the moves the nation’s state lawmakers make. Not this year. State legislative battles have emerged over recent months as a top-tier national story. And deservedly so. The battling at the state level — on a tidal wave of proposed new voter-suppression laws — could well determine the course of American democracy.

    But state lawmakers are threatening democracy with more than schemes for voter suppression. In one state after another, legislators have been advancing and enacting tax cuts that pump more dollars into rich people’s pockets — and fix in place more plutocratic power over the political process.

    In Arizona, for instance, the tax cuts enacted last year figure to deliver 55.5 percent of their benefits to the state’s top 1 percent. Arizonans making over half a million dollars will save an average $30,000 off their tax bills. Taxpayers making between $21,000 and $40,000 will average $13 in savings.

    In Arkansas, among other tax changes, lawmakers chopped the highest state income rate — on income over $37,200 — from 5.9 to 4.9 percent. The state’s overall tax changes will save the poorest 20 percent of Arkansas taxpayers an average $17 each. Households in the state’s top 1 percent will average $10,400 in tax savings.

    In Kansas, a state that should know better, a similar story. A decade ago, the state’s right-wing governor gave taxpayers of means a massive tax break that cratered state revenues and, relates Wesley Sharpe of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “forced schools to shift more costs on to parents and teachers” and “left millions of people without health insurance.” The Kansas economy, meanwhile, would see no sign of the “shot of adrenaline” the governor had promised the tax cut would deliver.

    Now the Kansas legislature, news reports indicate, is revving up for more tax cutting. Lawmakers appear “likely to consider a bill that would take Kansas from three income tax brackets to a single rate,” a move that would destroy what remains of progressivity — the notion that higher incomes should face higher tax rates — in the state’s tax code.

    Last year 14 states cut their taxes, either by enacting new rates that heap big benefits on the rich or having the cuts triggered by legislation passed in previous years. Some 20 states, the Institute for Tax and Economic Policy calculates, “are already discussing tax cuts for 2022.”

    This rash of tax cutting has received precious little national attention, and — given our turbulent times — that shouldn’t surprise us. The ongoing tax cuts, after all, seem to involve mere dollars, not our national future as a democracy. But tax cuts for the rich and attacks on the integrity of our democracy go hand in hand. The same state legislatures that are pushing voter suppression are pushing “tax relief” for their state’s most affluent.

    “Many of the same states — Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, and Kansas, to name a few — considering tax cuts are also making it harder for people to vote,” explains analyst Wesley Sharpe, “such as by criminalizing efforts to assist voters with disabilities.”

    Statehouse cheerleaders for grand private fortune have also shown little respect for the niceties of democracy as they rush to lavish tax breaks on the already well-endowed. Arizona may be the most outrageous example. State GOP lawmakers there have been bending over backwards to undo the tax-the-rich will of the voters.

    Those voters in 2020 approved a referendum that significantly raised taxes on Arizona’s rich to pay for increased funding for the state’s public schools. The voter-backed tax hike, details the Tax Foundation, “created a 3.5 percent high earners tax atop of the state’s existing 4.5 percent top marginal income tax rate, functionally yielding a new top rate of 8 percent.”

    State lawmakers in Arizona would not accept the referendum result. In their 2021 session, they proceeded to rewrite the state’s basic tax-rate structure. They slashed the already existing 4.5 percent rate “to ensure” that the combined top rate Arizona’s richest face never exceeds 4.5 percent, essentially erasing the tax hike on the rich the referendum had put in place.

    A “small group of politicians is helping their rich friends avoid paying their fair share to public schools,” responded Rebecca Gau, the executive director of Stand for Children Arizona. “Worst of all, they are trying to silence voters.”

    Gau and other angry Arizona education advocates subsequently collected enough signatures to put onto the November 2022 ballot a referendum that would repeal the 2021 legislative session’s exceedingly rich people-friendly rate-rigging.

    But Arizona’s conservative lawmakers have still another wildcard to play. They sense that state education advocates will prevail at the polls in this November’s referendum and kill the tax cut for the rich the legislature passed last year. The lawmakers’ new strategy? They’re planning to repeal the 2021 tax cut themselves in the 2022 legislative session and, as local news reports explain, “replace it with a new version, a move that would end a voter referendum that has stopped the tax cut law from taking effect.”

    In the meantime, the Tax Foundation observes, no wealthy Arizonans will be facing the top 8 percent rate that voters adopted in 2020.

    Rich people-friendly state lawmakers are moving on other fronts as well. Kentucky friends of grand private fortune want to replace more of the state’s income tax revenue with regressive hikes in the state sales tax. Iowa has begun a phased-in repeal of its inheritance tax. In Mississippi, the governor is calling for the total elimination of the personal income tax.

    How are these pals of plutocrats justifying their magnanimity toward mega-millionaire households? They’re pointing to the sizeable budget surpluses many states are currently experiencing.

    But those surpluses, points out Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy analyst Neva Butkus, reflect a set of special circumstances that range from billions in federal Covid aid to changes in tax-filing deadlines during the pandemic that have left many 2020 and 2021 tax payments getting collected in the same fiscal year. Using the surpluses these special conditions have created as an excuse for permanently cutting the taxes rich people pay makes no fiscal sense.

    The same legislators who were touting tax cuts for the rich as the perfect solution to our problems before the pandemic, adds ITEP’s Butkus, are now calling tax cuts for the rich the solution to our problems during the pandemic.

    “Tax cuts,” she notes, “cannot be a solution to everything.”

    Tac cuts carefully targeted to families struggling to get by, to be sure, can make solid policy sense. But tax cuts for wealthy households that have become wealthier during the pandemic have no redeeming social value. We shouldn’t be cutting the taxes these rich people pay. We should be raising them. And if we did that raising, the resulting revenue — and opportunities for real social progress — would be stunning.

    Just how stunning? Oxfam, the Institute for Policy Studies, Patriotic Millionaires, and the Fight Inequality Alliance have just issued a new report that does the math, nation by nation and for the world as a whole.

    In the United States, a nation whose billionaires now hold more wealth than the population’s poorest 60 percent, even a modest annual wealth tax — say one that started with a 2 percent levy on wealth over $5 million and topped off with a 5 percent bite on wealth over $1 billion — would raise close to $1 trillion a year, $928.4 billion to be more exact.

    Oxfam is also proposing a one-time 99 percent tax on all the wealth the world’s ten richest men — a group that includes nine Americans — have gained since Covid hit. If these 10 richest men lost 99.999 percent of their combined fortunes, Oxfam goes on to note, each of them would still be richer than 99 percent of humanity.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Court Rejects Alabama GOP’s Congressional Map That Marginalized Black Voters

    State capitol building in Alabama during sunny day with old historic architecture of government and many row of flags by dome

    On Monday, federal judges rejected a redistricted congressional map in Alabama, saying that the Republican-drawn map likely violated the Voting Rights Act, which protects voting rights for non-white groups.

    The judges ruled that the Republican-led legislature in the state must redraw new maps that give Black voters two districts with a majority-Black population or “in which Black voters otherwise have an opportunity to elect a representative of their choice,” the panel of three judges wrote.

    “Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress,” the ruling reads. “We find that the plaintiffs will suffer an irreparable harm if they must vote in the 2022 congressional elections based on a redistricting plan that violates federal law.”

    The ruling was the result of a lawsuit filed by Greater Birmingham Ministries, Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, and plaintiffs represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and others.

    The legislature must now draw a new map, which is due in two weeks. If lawmakers fail to pass a new map in that time, the court will appoint a third party expert to draw a new map for them.

    The court found that the plaintiffs would be “substantially likely” to successfully demonstrate that the map violates the Voting Rights Act.

    “The congressional map our Legislature enacted fails Alabama’s voters of color,” plaintiff Evan Milligan said in a statement. “We deserve to be heard in our electoral process, rather than have our votes diluted using a map that purposefully cracks and packs Black communities.”

    The rejected map, which the legislature approved last year, has only one majority-Black district, which represents only about 14 percent of the state’s districts. But Black people make up about 27 percent of the state’s total population, meaning that the state’s remaining majority white districts would get disproportionate representation. Two majority-Black districts of the state’s seven total regions would give the state’s Black population more equal representation.

    The state’s Republican attorney general, Steve Marshall, has already said that his office plans to appeal the ruling “in the coming days,” according to a spokesperson.

    Chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee Eric H. Holder Jr. told The New York Times that the court’s decision is “a win for Alabama’s Black voters, who have been denied equal representation for far too long.”

    “The map’s dilution of the voting power of Alabama’s Black community — through the creation of just one majority-Black district while splitting other Black voters apart — was as evident as it was reprehensible,” Holder said.

    This is the second time that Republicans have had their congressional maps thrown out by the courts. Earlier this month, the Ohio Supreme Court struck down the state’s Republican-drawn district map for being unconstitutionally gerrymandered. Voting rights advocates said that the map would have given disproportionate favor to the GOP and violated the Voting Rights Act by marginalizing Black voters.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Sanders Says Arizona Democrats’ Decision to Censure Sinema Was “Exactly Right”

    Senators Bernie Sanders and Kyrsten Sinema

    Over the weekend, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) praised the Arizona Democratic Party for censuring Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) over her obstruction of federal voting rights.

    In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Sanders called Sinema’s vote in the Senate last week against filibuster changes to allow the passage of voting rights legislation “terrible.”

    Certain Republican states “are moving in a very, very anti-democratic way,” he said. “It was absolutely imperative that we change the rules so we could pass strong voting rights legislation. All Republicans voted against us, two Democrats voted against us – that was a terrible, terrible vote.”

    “I think what the Arizona Democratic Party did was exactly right,” Sanders concluded.

    Last week, Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) voted against a proposal to enact a talking filibuster for Democrats’ voting rights bill, which would allow the Senate to pass the measure with a simple majority vote. It was a last-ditch effort to protect voting rights as Republicans shred them to pieces.

    The Arizona Democratic Party announced that it had voted to censure Sinema on Saturday after months of frustration with the senator’s obstinate defense of the filibuster.

    “[T]he Arizona Democratic Party is a diverse coalition with plenty of room for policy disagreements,” party chair Raquel Terán said in a statement. “[H]owever on the matter of the filibuster and the urgency to protect voting rights, we have been crystal clear.” Terán said that, while the party supports Democratic candidates, the consequences of Sinema’s “failure” to protect voting rights are too dire to ignore.

    The state party has expressed frustration over the senator’s obstruction before. Last year, it threatened to hold a vote of “no confidence” for Sinema’s filibuster defense, which has caused a near-absolute deadlock in the Senate over Democratic priorities.

    A censure is largely a symbolic ruling that does not carry formal consequences in this instance. However, it is a strong rebuke to Sinema, as her own party essentially rules to stand against her, and will likely fuel a primary campaign to unseat her when she’s up for reelection in 2024.

    In October, a poll found that, if the election were held soon, Sinema would easily be defeated by Democratic challengers. In a head-to-head race against Ruben Gallego, an early favorite to primary the senator, Sinema loses 62 to 23 percent, according to the poll.

    Sanders told reporters last week that he would be open to supporting a candidate who ran against her. In a video posted to his Twitter, he said that it was “pathetic” that Sinema and Manchin would vote to obstruct voting rights during such a crucial time for the country.

    However, with Sinema and Manchin not up for reelection for another four years, Sanders is saying that it’s crucial for their stances to be made clear now. In interviews and an op-ed in CNN last week, Sanders has made it clear that he thinks more Democratic agenda items should be put to a vote so that voters can clearly see what the conservative Democrats oppose.

    “Funny things happen when a bill gets to the floor,” Sanders said on “Meet the Press.” “Let’s put a strong bill on the floor. And if Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema want to vote against it whatever, Republicans want to vote against it – we can go from there. But what we cannot continue to do, in my view, is these endless backroom negotiations. The American people have got to see where we are.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • United States: The battle against Trumpism can’t be left to the Democrats

    Donald Trump is aiming to take back the majority in the Senate and the House in November, aided by voter suppression, as stage one of his 2024 presidential re-election campaign, write Barry Sheppard and Malik Miah.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Trump Considered Using Military To Seize Voting Machines, New Documents Show

    Former President Donald Trump Holds Rally In Florence, Arizona

    One of the pieces of evidence that Donald Trump unsuccessfully fought to keep out of the hands of the congressional committee investigating the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol shows that the former Republican president considered ordering soldiers to seize voting machines across the nation following his 2020 election loss, a document published Friday by Politico revealed.

    The document — a draft executive order that Trump ultimately did not sign — “credulously cites conspiracy theories about election fraud in Georgia and Michigan, as well as debunked notions about Dominion voting machines,” explains Politico’s Betsy Woodruff Swan.

    Woodruff Swan reports it is not clear who authored the draft order. However, its contents are consistent with proposals made by Sidney Powell, a former Trump attorney and purveyor of the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen.

    “This draft order represents not only an abuse of emergency powers, but a total misunderstanding of them,” Liza Goitein, co-director of the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Politico. “The order doesn’t even make the basic finding of an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat’ that would be necessary to trigger any action… It’s the legal equivalent of a kid scrawling on the wall with crayons.”

    Woodruff Swan writes:

    The order empowers the defense secretary to “seize, collect, retain, and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information, and material records required for retention under” a U.S. law that relates to the preservation of election records. It also cites a lawsuit filed in 2017 against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

    Additionally, the draft order would have given the defense secretary 60 days to write an assessment of the 2020 election. That suggests it could have been a gambit to keep Trump in power until at least mid-February of 2021.

    The government accountability watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) notes that the draft order “was part of the records that Trump was fighting to keep from the January 6th committee,” a reference to the bipartisan House select panel investigating the attack.

    Trump had sought to prevent the January 6 committee from obtaining more than 700 documents, which were held by the National Archives. However, the U.S. Supreme Court by a vote of 8-1 on Thursday sided with the committee, which wants to know what was happening in the Trump White House during the deadly assault on the Capitol by supporters of the defeated president as Congress was meeting to certify President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.

    In response to the revelations Friday, U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) tweeted that “every single Trump seditionist must be prosecuted.”

    In a Washington Post analysis of the draft order, national correspondent Philip Bump writes that “the main predicate President Donald Trump cited as his rationale for having federal officials seize every voting machine in the nation as part of his doomed effort to prove that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him was that Sheryl Guy had forgotten to update something on her computer.”

    Guy, the clerk of Antrim County, Michigan, was alerted by staffers to an error that occurred when she added a candidate to the county ballot at the last minute on Election Day. During the process of adding the candidate for village trustee to the ballot, Guy failed to properly update the counting machines with new parameters. Slightly over 2,000 Trump votes were subsequently—and erroneously—shifted to Biden. While rushing to correct this mistake, employees double-counted some more votes.

    Trump won Antrim County by nearly 3,800 votes. Biden won Michigan by more than 300,000 votes.

    However, Bump writes:

    A right-wing media ecosystem primed by Trump to look for evidence of ‘fraud’ decided that fraud was precisely what had happened in Antrim County. Despite the fact that the results didn’t effect the state outcome. Despite the fact that the error was explained. Despite the fact that it was a Republican county that Trump had won. Antrim County became a shorthand for ‘fraud committed via electronic voting machines.’

    In June 2021 a Republican-run state legislative committee published a report on Michigan’s 2020 elections process. It found no evidence of wrongdoing. Addressing Antrim County in particular, the committee declared that “all compelling theories that sprang forth from the rumors surrounding Antrim County are diminished so significantly as for it to be a complete waste of time to consider them further.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Increased Voting Restrictions Put LGBTQ People of Color at Risk, Advocates Say

    Voting Rights Demonstration

    As Senate Democrats on Wednesday failed to pass voting rights legislation in the face of Republican opposition, LGBTQ+ advocates grew worried about how rising voter restrictions being passed in states will disproportionately harm LGBTQ+ Americans — especially people of color and people with disabilities, who face multiple intersecting barriers.

    While the House had previously passed legislation that would reverse some of those rules, a merged version of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act was unable to pass in the Senate without needed support from moderate Democrats on changing the filibuster, leaving the future of federal voting rights legislation unclear.

    Other major advocacy groups, including two that support abortion rights, had also raised their voices to encourage a filibuster carve-out for voting rights ahead of the Senate vote on Wednesday.

    The Human Rights Campaign, National LGBTQ+ Task Force, and National Black Justice Coalition — which advocates for Black LGBTQ+ people — are among the groups that called on LGBTQ+ people to pressure their senators into supporting the federal protections.

    Nineteen states passed 34 laws last year restricting voting access — the most tracked by the Brennan Center for Justice since it began counting in 2011. Seven of those states have among the highest proportion of LGBT people in the country, per Gallup data tracked by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law — including Georgia and Florida, which enacted far-reaching voting restrictions. At least four states prefiled restrictive bills in December, per the Brennan Center.

    Throughout this, voting rights advocates have expressed concern that without stronger federal protections, the state-level restrictions may effectively disenfranchise citizens who do not have the resources to meet new voting requirements — primarily people of color, who are often unable to vote due to strict voter ID laws and are disproportionately subjected to longer Election Day voting lines that could be offset by expanded early voting hours.

    LGBTQ+ advocates, already attuned to statehouse maneuvers after a record year for anti-transgender legislation, are paying attention. Estimates from older data analyzed by the Movement Advancement Project (MAP) show that 1 in 3 LGBTQ+ people live in the South, where eight states passed restrictive voting laws last year. That same MAP analysis, citing 2014 Williams Institute data, found that 1 in 5 LGBTQ+ Southerners are Black.

    “That’s a significant percentage of LGBTQ folks, who also happen to be Black, that are going to be experiencing a return of Jim Crow-era tactics,” said Victoria Kirby York, deputy executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition.

    Recently enacted laws that require photo identification to vote, with little to no ID alternatives, would prevent many transgender and nonbinary people from casting their ballot, since many in the community face financial and legal roadblocks to updating documents as they transition. Ahead of the 2020 election, the Williams Institute estimated that roughly 42 percent of eligible trans voters would be unable to vote due to not having identification that reflects their gender and meets state requirements.

      Diego Sanchez, director of advocacy and policy at PFLAG National, which advocates for LGBTQ+ families and allied parents, said it can be emotionally fraught for a trans person to be challenged over their identification while trying to vote.

      Prior to legally changing his name to Diego around 1994, and when some of his legal documents still bore his deadname — his name pre-transition — he feared being challenged over his identity at the polls.

      “At any point at a voting place, someone if they knew me could say ‘I know that’s not that’s not your name.’ They could yell up my deadname, if they knew that. I would rather die,” he said. “It’s hard … because where you vote is where you live, so those people would see me the rest of my life.”

      There are also more physical barriers to consider.

      Legislation passed in states including Alabama and Texas last year to restrict curbside or drive-through voting, as well as separate efforts to make signature requirements for mail-in voting more strict, can make casting a ballot more difficult for voters with disabilities, said Bobby Hoffman, deputy director of the ACLU’s democracy division. And research from the Kaiser Family Foundation — as well as data from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey — shows that LGBTQ+ people in the United States dispropriately report living with a disability than the rest of the population.

      “All polling places are not as accessible as they should be,” Kirby York said.

      The reduction of curbside or drive-through voting also can restrict ballot access for people working low-wage jobs that don’t allow for time off to vote.

      “LGBTQ workers are more likely to be in jobs with lower pay, and without paid time off, meaning if there is a really long line at your polling station, your boss may not be forgiving or understanding to let you be able to cast your ballot because you’re standing in line for three, four or five, six hours,” said Ross Murray, senior director of GLAAD’s media institute.

      Without federal protections, advocates and experts fear that LGBTQ+ people — and all voters — will be further impacted by state voting restrictions.

      “Access to the ballot box is a fundamental right in this country – a right that is currently under threat,” HRC interim president Joni Madison said in a statement following Wednesday night’s vote. “The voting rights legislation that was before the Senate aimed to protect marginalized populations such as LGBTQ+ people, Black and Brown people, the elderly, low-income people and people with disabilities.”

      “My fear is that we’re going to see a continuation of the wave of voter suppression laws that were passed by state legislatures in 2021,” Hoffman said.

      A number of state laws are being challenged in court. The ACLU is suing over two voter restriction laws in Montana denounced by Native American advocacy groups as well as Texas’ omnibus bill to implement voting restrictions and Georgia’s far-reaching voting law, which is also being challenged by the Justice Department.

      GLAAD and HeadCount, a voter registration nonprofit also supported by the National Black Justice Coalition, encourage LGBTQ+ voters to check their state identification laws if they are trying to figure out how to vote while homeless or if their name doesn’t match what’s on their ID.

      LGBTQ+ advocacy groups need to rally around voting rights ahead of the midterms, pressure lawmakers to pass federal protections and actively protest against state restrictions, Kirby York said — or risk losing credibility.

      “If we’re not seen doing it, we lose all forms of legitimacy as a movement when it comes to wanting other communities to show up for us,” she said.

      This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

    • GOP Suppression Efforts Escalate as Voting Rights Bill Fails in Senate

      Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at a press conference at Buc-ee's travel center on November 22, 2021.

      Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis did not wait for fellow Republicans in the Senate to finish blockading federal voting rights legislation to start ramping up racist suppression efforts in his home state.

      In an unusual move on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, DeSantis proposed an alternative political map for Florida that experts said would dilute the power of Latino voters and effectively eliminate two majority-Black voting districts out of only four in the state. DeSantis then asked Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature for nearly $6 million to fund a new police agency to enforce election laws, including sweeping new voting restrictions he signed into law last year.

      DeSantis’s proposed poll patrols would ultimately answer to the governor, raising fears of voter intimidation in a state where Republicans gutted a constitutional amendment meant to restore voting rights for hundreds of thousands of formerly incarcerated people. Ash-Lee Henderson, the first Black woman to serve as co-executive director of the Highlander Research and Education Center, the legendary incubator for the southern civil rights movement where King and Rosa Parks trained, said DeSantis’s call for an Office of Election Crimes and Security targeting voters “wasn’t even a dog whistle, it was overtly racist.”

      “I’m disgusted, because literally residents across the state — and Florida is a huge state — said that formerly incarcerated people deserve the right to vote, said they wanted drive-through voting and mail-in ballots, and his response is, ‘all this is voter fraud,’” Henderson said. “But there is no scientific evidence to show there is this intentional voter fraud happening.”

      DeSantis is hungry for right-wing media attention, and the proposals were a broad swipe at Democrats and civil rights groups, who spent the past year accusing Republican-controlled states of reviving Jim Crow with a wave of voter suppression laws. The laws passed in the wake of former President Trump’s mendacious attempts at overthrowing the 2020 election with false claims of voter fraud.

      DeSantis is signaling that the GOP will take up every inch of ground abandoned by Democrats in the fight over ballot access, which has once again ignited mass civil rights protests. While it’s unclear whether DeSantis will ultimately implement new election police in Florida, he knew the federal legislation that could block such a proposal was likely to fail on Wednesday. And it did.

      After an intense day of debate over race and democracy in the U.S., the Senate rejected by a razor-thin margin the Democratic push to pass their landmark voting rights bill, the Freedom to Vote: John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which was championed by Black leaders as an important step toward addressing racist suppression. The Senate’s 50 Republicans united against the bill, which they deride as a federal takeover of elections — a revival of segregationist arguments against the original Voting Rights Act of 1965, according to voting rights groups.

      Henderson and other observers say DeSantis’s timing is obvious as Republicans continue to push back on any progress made by Black people since the 2020 uprisings for racial justice. The governor rails against anti-racist education, and is pushing a bill designed to shield white people from feeling “discomfort” from discussion about the nation’s racist past at work and in public schools this week.

      “DeSantis is using his bully pulpit to wave a flag of white supremacy and fascism and anti-democracy in the face of what has been amazing multi-racial, Back-led movement for voting rights and racial justice,” Henderson said.

      Two Democrats, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who say they support the voting rights bill, sided with Republicans and refused to tweak filibuster rules so the bill could pass with a simple majority. Both senators refused to budge on the filibuster despite intense pressure from civil rights activists and warnings from colleagues and President Joe Biden that a “no” vote would land them on the wrong side of history.

      “When exceptions to the filibuster are made to raise the debt limit and to push through Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, we refuse to believe that you can’t make the exception so that Black and Brown folks, folks with disabilities, folks with criminal records, and so many more of us can have our right to vote protected,” said Rep. Cori Bush, a Black Democrat from Missouri, in a statement after the vote.

      The Senate prepared to vote, election officials and disabilities advocates continued raising alarms about voter suppression in Texas, where voting rights groups and the Justice Department are challenging new statewide voting restrictions and alleged attempts at brazen racial gerrymandering that aggressively dilute Black and Brown voting power.

      Thousands of Texans are receiving letters from the state informing them that they are flagged as potential non-citizens and could be purged from voter rolls, forcing long-time U.S. citizens to hand over paperwork, according to the Associated Press. Dana DeBeauvoir, the clerk of Travis Country, which includes Austin, said hundreds of mail-in ballot applications were rejected due to confusion over strict new ID requirements passed by the Republican lawmakers last year.

      “My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like,” DeBeauvoir said in a press conference on Tuesday.

      While DeBeauvoir tussled with Republican state officials over who’s to blame for the confusion over the ID rules, voting rights groups warned a number of other changes to Texas law are designed to intimidate voters and purge them from the rolls. The Texas law, known as SB1, enhanced criminal penalties and paperwork for people who assist voters, creating hurdles for elderly and disabled voters and the people who care for them.

      “Different needs require different forms of assistance,” said Molly Broadway, a voting support specialist with Disability Rights Texas, told KXAN Austin. “They can misinterpret a proper form of assistance as illegal assistance.”

      About 200 new measures passed in at least 19 states last year that make it harder to vote, and more are expected to come now that the Senate failed to pass the voting rights legislation. Along with other measures, the voting rights bill would make Election Day a federal holiday, mandate two weeks of early voting and restore federal oversight of states that erected barriers for Black and Brown voters in the past.

      Henderson said the gears of voter suppression are now grinding beyond Texas and Florida, including in Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee. Henderson, who is a leader of the Movement for Black Lives coalition, said it’s clear why voters are increasingly threatened with criminal penalties, polling police, empowered partisan poll watchers and immigration enforcement in the wake of intense protests against police violence. After all, Black and Brown are disproportionately criminalized and targeted by police.

      “It’s not hyperbolic to understand this as a racist intervention; the highest concentration of Black people in the country is in the South,” Henderson said. “The timing of it is very clearly and overtly a response to Black, Brown, Indigenous and Asian-descended and white folks coming out to say we have a different vision, a vision for Build Back Better and defunding the police.”

      Republicans flatly reject that their “election integrity” efforts have a racial dimension and say Jim Crow ended years ago, but Henderson said the fight for voting rights did not end in the 1960s. Voters in majority-Black districts still wait in long lines all over the country. Attempts at racial gerrymandering in states such as Texas and Florida follow a long tradition splitting up Black, Brown and Indigenous voter strongholds to dilute their power.

      “It’s a tactical intervention in order to consolidate their wealth and power because they are losing it,” Henderson said.

      Democrats exploit their structural advantages as well, including through gerrymandering, allowing Republican to paint the voting rights legislation as a partisan power grab. However, Republicans have controlled a majority of state legislatures for the past decade, giving their party disproportionate control over political maps that shape elections. Before losing the Senate majority, the GOP stacked federal courts with conservatives as voting rights cases wound their way through the judiciary.

      In 2020, unprecedented voter turnout gave Democrats their own an advantage by handing the party control of Congress and the White House — and, activists say, a mandate to deliver on voting rights. Yet Manchin and Sinema ensured that the Democrats could not use this advantage, and the voting rights fight would continue as it has for decades.

      “We are not starting a conversation yesterday,” Henderson said. “We are talking about a centuries-old conversation in this country — if Black people are able to patriciate in this democracy.”

      This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

    • Under New TX Law, Number of Rejected Mail-In Ballot Applications Is Skyrocketing

      Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks during the Houston Region Business Coalition's monthly meeting on October 27, 2021, in Houston, Texas.

      The number of rejected mail-in ballot applications is skyrocketing in Texas counties under new Republican-authored voting restrictions recently signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott.

      The Texas crackdown on mail-in voting appears to be hitting hardest in the state’s most densely populated counties, which also tend to have more voters of color and predominantly vote Democratic. In Travis County, which includes Austin, about half of all mail-in ballot applications have been rejected ahead of the state’s March primaries, up from a rate of about 11% in the 2020 election cycle, according to the county clerk’s office. About half of applications were rejected in Hidalgo County as well, according to elections administrator Yvonne Ramon.

      Dallas County has rejected 43% of the applications it received, according to elections administrator Frank Phillips. In Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, more than half of the applications received on Monday were rejected under the “ridiculous” new law, said county elections administrator Jacque Callanen. Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said the county is rejecting applications at a rate 700% higher than previous cycles because of the new “voter suppression laws that create a maze of technicalities.” Harris County includes the city of Houston, and with 4.7 million residents has a higher population than 24 U.S. states.

      “Voters are being mistreated in this circumstance,” Travis County election clerk Dana DeBeauvoir told reporters on Tuesday. “My friends, this is what voter suppression looks like.”

      Many of the applications have been rejected because of the new identification requirements under Texas’ new voting law, SB 1. Texas law already restricted mail-in voting by people under age 65 but the new law requires voters to include their driver’s license or state ID number in their application, or the last four digits of their Social Security number. Counties must match those numbers against the information in each individual’s voter file to approve their application.

      Counties have struggled to match ID information because they lack certain data, particularly because voters are not required to provide both their state ID and Social Security numbers when they register to vote. The Texas secretary of state’s office last year said more than 2 million of the state’s 17 million registered voters did not have one of the two ID numbers on file and more than 250,000 did not have either number on file. The numbers have declined since then, but more than 700,000 voters still do not have both numbers on file and more than 100,000 don’t have either, according to the secretary of state’s office.

      Nearly 500,000 Texas voters do not have a driver’s license on file, which is the first number voters have to provide on their applications.

      “The voter is playing a guessing game with this,” DeBeauvoir said at a press conference. “The voter is trying to remember the number they signed up with at the voter registration office 10, 20, 30 years ago. ‘What number did I use for the voter registration database? Was it my driver’s license number? Did I use my Social Security number?’ Do you remember what you signed up with? I didn’t. I had to go back and look it up. Voters are going to have to play the same guessing game.”

      DeBeauvoir said some voters’ applications were rejected because they used an older form that did not include the new voter ID requirement.

      “A lot of people are still trying to use the old form because we’ve had a paper shortage, and printing of these new forms means they’re scarce,” she explained. “They’re hard to come by. Nevertheless, you have to use the new form. If somebody sends in an old form, their ballot will be rejected.”

      Election officials have sought to help voters avoid mistakes that lead to rejections but the new law also bars election officials from sending unsolicited mail-in voting applications, which would include the updated form and instructions on how to properly fill it out.

      “So far, we have not received instructions from the secretary of state’s office to tell voters how to look up this information, and therein is the beginning of the problem for voters,” DeBeauvoir said.

      Republicans are pushing back on the concerns raised by election clerks. Republican Secretary of State John Scott said the rejection rate in Travis County was “surprising” and demanded a review of the applications.

      “We call on Travis County to immediately review and re-examine the mail ballot applications in question to determine whether they were processed in accordance with state law, with the goal of reinstating and minimizing any disruption to eligible voters who have properly submitted their application for ballot by mail. We anxiously await the results of their re-processing of these mail ballot applications,” he said in a statement.

      Voting rights advocates say the new law was largely aimed at restricting voting expansions in areas like Harris County, which sent mail-In ballot applications to every voter in 2020.

      “They sent vote-by-mail applications to every registered voter in the county, and it caused state leadership to go berserk,” James Slattery, the senior staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, told Texas Public Radio.

      Isabel Longoria, the Harris County elections administrator, filed a federal lawsuit last month challenging the law’s ban on sending out unsolicited mail ballot applications.

      “SB 1 makes it a crime for me to do a critical part of my job, and it hurts the most vulnerable voters,” Longoria said in a statement. “SB 1 subjects me to criminal prosecution for encouraging eligible voters to vote by mail so they may participate in our democracy — an option they have under Texas law.”

      While county officials are banned from sending out unsolicited mail ballot applications, candidates and political parties are not. The Texas Democratic Party said Monday it will send out hundreds of thousands of mail ballot applications to voters 65 and older.

      “We can’t rely on our Republican-run state government to do this for us,” Rose Clouston, the party’s voter protection director, said in a statement. “Texas Republicans have made it very clear that they only think Republicans should have the right to vote and it is therefore incumbent on us to help voters navigate the maze of voting laws Republicans have erected — too much is at stake if we don’t.”

      Texas is one of 19 states that passed new voting restrictions last year that Democrats worry will suppress voter turnout, particularly among voters of color, especially after the U.S. Senate failed multiple times to pass new voting rights legislation in the face of a Republican filibuster.

      Georgia, which also passed a sweeping new voting law last year, saw absentee ballot applications increase by 400% in November’s municipal elections, with more than half of those rejected because they were submitted past the deadline set under the new law.

      The laws were prompted by a campaign of false claims of voter fraud pushed by former President Donald Trump after his election defeat. Trump’s ire was particularly directed at cities with large Black populations like Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee. President Joe Biden last week highlighted the importance of protecting Black voters from “new laws designed to suppress your vote” as he called on the Senate to change filibuster rules to pass voting rights legislation after Republicans repeatedly blocked debate on the bills. The renewed voting rights push died this week, at least for now, when Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., joined all 50 Republicans to block the filibuster changes.

      “Across the United States, dozens of voter suppression laws have been introduced in state legislatures, with 34 laws enacted in 19 states,” Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., said in a statement. “These laws are clearly aimed at restricting access to the ballot box, disproportionately impacting Black, Indigenous, Latino and other communities that have borne the historical weight of voting restrictions. The failure of the U.S. Senate to restore the Voting Rights Act and protect our communities from these restrictions is a failure of our nation’s moral compass.”

      This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.