The Wisconsin state Supreme Court ruled on Friday that absentee ballot drop boxes are illegal under the provisions of the state constitution.
The court’s controversial ruling, which will likely benefit Republicans in the state, ran along partisan lines, with all four conservatives finding that the drop boxes were illegal and all three liberals dissenting. The ruling means that voters can no longer use drop boxes to vote early — absentee ballots must be turned in directly to election officials’ offices or sent by mail, the court said.
The ruling will take effect immediately, which means that drop boxes that are currently installed will not be usable in next month’s primary election races.
Absentee ballot drop boxes have been used in the state for years, but came into prominence during the 2020 election season due to the coronavirus pandemic. Around 500 drop boxes have been placed in front of public buildings in many communities in Wisconsin.
Conservatives in the state, particularly those loyal to former President Donald Trump, alleged, without evidence, that the use of drop boxes amounted to election fraud in the 2020 presidential race. The state Supreme Court’s majority ruling, authored by conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley, seemed to suggest an endorsement of that idea, unduly comparing Wisconsin’s elections to rigged elections in countries like North Korea and Syria.
Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, one of the liberal bloc justices, wrote the dissent in the case, noting that the majority opinion “has the practical effect of making it more difficult to exercise” the right to vote in the state.
Walsh Bradley also took note of the conservative Bradley’s assertions of fraud, writing that the ruling from the majority “without justification fans the flames of electoral doubt that threaten our democracy.”
“The majority/lead opinion’s sky-is-falling rhetoric not only defies the facts, but also is downright dangerous to our democracy,” Walsh Bradley added. “Absent evidence that supports its statements, the majority/lead opinion still lends its imprimatur to efforts to destabilize and delegitimize recent elections.”
Indeed, as a fact check from CNN points out, there is no proof to any claims (in Wisconsin or elsewhere) that drop boxes create a greater possibility of election fraud.
Absentee ballot drop boxes “are designed with anti-tampering measures, affixed to the ground, made with durable materials, and often monitored by video surveillance — and there is no evidence that the boxes were used for fraudulent purposes in the 2020 presidential election,” that fact check said.
Gov. Tony Evers (D), who is up for reelection this fall, decried the ruling.
“Today’s decision is another in a long line of Wisconsin Republicans’ successes to make it harder for Wisconsinites to exercise their right to vote, to undermine our free, fair, and secure elections, and to threaten our democracy,” Evers said in a press release.
Papua New Guineans, your future is in your hands, vote wisely.
As the campaign trail wound up its last hours at the weekend, voters were being urged to keep their future in mind when choosing and voting this election starting tomorrow.
Alvin Gia Huk, an independent candidate, and runner up in the 2017 National General Elections for the Mendi-Munihu Open seat in Southern Highlands Province is encouraging voters to not repeat the mistakes made in the past when electing people who didn’t have their interest at heart.
He said voters needed to make wiser decisions for long term benefits for their children, the district and the province as a whole.
“Don’t follow money and materials today and spend the next five years being neglected of your basic right to services. You have the power to change your course in the next week, to receive what is rightfully yours and have a better quality of life,” he said.
Among other policies, he said a change in voters’ attitudes was what he had been promoting and encouraging throughout the campaign period.
“I have been educating voters since last elections to not vote with a cargo cult mentality or based on family lines, tribal ties and vote for quality”.
He admits it has been a challenge breaking the cargo cult mentality but he sees some progress from the previous elections.
Voters have become more educated and aware of what they deserve and what qualities they want in their leaders.
Asia Pacific Report’s coverage of the PNG general election is being boosted by partnerships with media groups such as the independent Inside PNG, The National, PNG Post-Courier and RNZ Pacific.
A review of thousands of pages of documents paints the picture of True the Vote as an organization that enriches insiders rather than rooting out voter fraud.
Over the last two presidential election cycles, True the Vote has raised millions in donations with claims that it discovered tide-turning voter fraud. It’s promised to release its evidence. It never has.
Instead, the Texas-based nonprofit organization has engaged in a series of questionable transactions that sent more than $1 million combined to its founder, a longtime board member romantically linked to the founder and the group’s general counsel, an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.
A former PTA mom-turned-Tea Party activist, True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht has played a pivotal role in helping drive the voter fraud movement from the political fringes to a central pillar in the Republican Party’s ideology. Casting herself as a God-fearing, small-town Texan, she’s spread the voter-fraud gospel by commanding airtime on cable television, space on the pages of Breitbart News and even theater seats, as a new feature film dramatizing her organization’s exploits, “2000 Mules,” plays in cinemas across the country.
Along the way, she’s gained key allies across the conservative movement. Former President Donald Trump, who shouts her out by name during rallies and held a private screening for the film at his Mar-a-Lago resort, exploited the group’s declarations to proclaim that he won the popular vote in 2016. Provocateur Dinesh D’Souza partnered with Engelbrecht on the film. And she’s represented by the legal heavyweight James Bopp Jr., who helped dismantle abortion rights, crafted many of the arguments in the Citizens United case that revolutionized campaign finance law and was part of the legal team that prevailed in Bush v. Gore.
James Bopp Jr. (from left), Gregg Phillips and Catherine Engelbrecht make a presentation to the Wisconsin Assembly’s elections committee in March. Credit: Courtesy of WKOW
A review of thousands of pages of documents from state filings, tax returns and court records, however, paints the picture of an organization that enriches Engelbrecht and partner Gregg Phillips rather than actually rooting out any fraud. According to the documents, True the Vote has given questionable loans to Engelbrecht and has a history of awarding contracts to companies run by Engelbrecht and Phillips. Within days of receiving $2.5 million from a donor to stop the certification of the 2020 election, True the Vote distributed much of the money to a company owned by Phillips, Bopp’s law firm and Engelbrecht directly for a campaign that quickly fizzled out.
Legal and nonprofit accounting experts who reviewed Reveal’s findings said the Texas attorney general and Internal Revenue Service should investigate.
“This certainly looks really bad,” said Laurie Styron, executive director of CharityWatch.
And while the claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election have been dismissed out of hand by courts and debunked by audits, even those led by Republicans, the story of True the Vote highlights how exploiting the Big Lie has become a lucrative enterprise, growing from a cottage industry to a thriving economy.
The records show:
True the Vote regularly reported loans to Engelbrecht, including more than $113,000 in 2019, according to a tax filing. Texas law bans nonprofits from loaning money to directors; Engelbrecht is both a director and an employee.
Companies connected to Engelbrecht and Phillips collected nearly $890,000 from True the Vote from 2014 to 2020. The largest payment – at least $750,000 – went to a new company created by Phillips, OPSEC Group LLC, to do voter analysis in 2020. It’s unclear whether OPSEC has any other clients; it has no website and no digital footprint that Reveal could trace beyond its incorporation records. The contract, which one expert called “eye-popping” for its largess, did not appear to be disclosed in the 2020 tax return the organization provided to Reveal.
True the Vote provided Bopp’s law firm a retainer of at least $500,000 to lead a legal charge against the results of the 2020 election, but he filed only four of the seven lawsuits promised to a $2.5 million donor, all of which were voluntarily dismissed less than a week after being filed. The donor later called the amount billed by Bopp’s firm “unconscionable” and “impossible.”
The organization’s tax returns are riddled with inconsistencies and have regularly been amended. Experts who reviewed the filings said it makes it difficult to understand how True the Vote is truly spending its donations.
The IRS version showed Phillips as a board member. Englebrecht’s version did not. The IRS return showed Engelbrecht had a loan balance of $113,396. Engelbrecht’s version indicated the loan’s balance was gone. In response to questions from Reveal, Engelbrecht said she was going to submit an amended version of the group’s 2019 tax return – the one she’d provided to Reveal – to the IRS.
Engelbrecht declined to be interviewed for this story, routing specific inquiries through Bopp and her accountant. Bopp wouldn’t answer questions about the loan and who approved the contracts, saying that was confidential financial information. He said there was “nothing inherently wrong or improper with contracting with board members to do services for the corporation.”
“I’ve represented not-for-profits for 45 years,” Bopp said, “and it is common.”
However, experts questioned whether True the Vote had the proper structure and policies to safeguard against self-dealing the way other nonprofits would.
As True the Vote has gained prominence, Engelbrecht has maintained an oversized control of the charity as its only employee in recent years and a member of a small board of directors that’s been packed with potential conflicts of interests. “That’s a real problem,” said Styron, of CharityWatch.
The federal government grants nonprofit organizations a special status, allowing them to operate tax-free in recognition of their public benefit. In exchange, they are subject to greater scrutiny and transparency to ensure that donor funds are being used properly.
Experts said an organization with more than $1 million in revenue typically would have more employees and a larger board. “These are public dollars, and the board members and officers of a charity have a fiduciary duty to … spend all of the resources of the charity carrying out the mission of the organization to the best of their ability in ways that benefit the nonprofit,” Styron said. “Not in ways that benefit them personally.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has appeared on Engelbrecht’s podcast and been an active supporter of attempts to overthrow the 2020 election. In court filings in a donor lawsuit against True the Vote, his office said it would review the case to see if any action is warranted. Reveal sought his office’s communications about True the Vote through Texas public records law, but he refused to disclose them, citing attorney-client privilege.
Meanwhile, True the Vote’s work continues to get airtime in Trump’s speeches. At a rally earlier this year in Southeast Texas, the former president celebrated Engelbrecht as a champion.
“What a job she’s done, thank you, thank you, Catherine,” Trump said. “If you have any information about ballot harvesting in your state, call Catherine Engelbrecht.”
True the Vote’s Tea Party Roots
In the late 2000s, Engelbrecht was a small-business owner in Southeast Texas who was not deeply involved in politics. But Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008 concerned her enough that she got active in local Tea Party efforts, attending rallies and meetings.
Along with her then-husband, Bryan Engelbrecht, she created a nonprofit called King Street Patriots, which trained volunteers who ended up poll watching in mostly Black and Latino neighborhoods in Harris County. It ran into problems for violating the law that prohibits nonprofits from being overtly political, and the Engelbrechts spun off True the Vote.
Catherine Engelbrecht speaks at the Tea Party Patriots American Policy Summit in Phoenix in 2011. Credit: Gage Skidmore
Catherine Engelbrecht earned regular appearances on Fox News, where she once offered a $1 million bounty for testimony. She advocated for Texas’ strict voter ID law in 2013. A year later, Engelbrecht and her husband filed for divorce and Bryan Engelbrecht left True the Vote’s board. Gregg Phillips, a longtime conservative operative, took his seat.
Phillips had been dogged by allegations of financial impropriety, accused of leveraging his government positions in Mississippi and Texas to make himself money. The same year Phillips joined True the Vote’s board, the nonprofit began to pay entities he controlled.
In 2014, True the Vote paid $25,000 to American Solutions for Winning the Future for a “donor list rental.” Phillips was the director, records show. The next year, True the Vote gave $30,000 to a company called Define Idea Inc. for “IT support services.” Phillips was a director of the company, according to its formation documents.
That year, Engelbrecht began receiving questionable payments from True the Vote as well.
According to its 2015 tax filings, it issued Engelbrecht a $40,607 loan. Under Texas law, nonprofit directors can’t receive loans, though employees can. Engelbrecht is both a director and an employee. True the Vote wouldn’t answer questions about who approved the loan, its conditions and whether Engelbrecht voted on it as a board member.
“I’m not going to respond to you on this,” Bopp said. “If you want free legal research, go pay a lawyer to do it.”
But that wasn’t the only way Engelbrecht got access to her nonprofit’s coffers. ARC Network LLC and Ao2 LLC were paid a total of $82,500 in 2015 and 2016 for “database license fees” and “software license fees,” respectively, according to the tax filings, which disclose that the companies are tied to Engelbrecht. Court filings indicate that she owned 100% of ARC Network; she is listed as the owner of Ao2 in registration documents in Wyoming.
ARC Network and Define Idea were barred by Texas in 2015 from doing business, state records show.
A business can be forfeited when a company doesn’t file a mandatory annual report showing its owner, directors and registered address – or when it does not pay taxes. Reveal couldn’t find other clients or a footprint for the two companies Engelbrecht owned.
Brian Mittendorf, an Ohio State University accounting professor who specializes in nonprofit accounting, said the records raise a series of red flags.
“We always have concerns from a governance standpoint about organizations engaging in such transactions with insiders, and the organization’s behavior, in terms of its accounting and inconsistencies, only inflame those concerns,” he said.
Engelbrecht and Phillips’ ties go beyond True the Vote. Their companies have shared the same mailing address, and Engelbrecht in 2016 was named the CFO of one of Phillips’ companies. In court filings, a donor later alleged that the two were “lovers,” something they haven’t denied.
When Reveal asked Bopp about their relationship, he said: “I do not know the facts because it’s none of my business, whether they’re in a romantic relationship or not.”
True the Vote Fuels Trump’s Conspiracies
In 2016, just weeks after pulling off his stunning presidential victory, Trump made an unprecedented claim: Millions of people had voted illegally in the election. And, he said, that’s why he’d lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton – by what would ultimately be about 2.9 million votes.
He didn’t offer up any evidence. But weeks later, Phillips appeared on CNN claiming he had the data analysis to show that more than 3 million voted illegally in the 2016 election. But when asked to show proof, Phillips said he needed time to verify the data.
“(We) believe that it will probably take another few months,” Phillips said. Trump tweeted shortly after the interview: “Gregg Phillips and crew say at least 3,000,000 votes were illegal. We must do better!”
Gregg Phillips appeared on CNN in January 2017, claiming he had the data analysis to show that more than 3 million people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election. Credit: CNN.com screenshot
True the Vote quickly used the opportunity to push a $1 million fundraising campaign to audit its data.
“Our audit team will include world-class technologists, researchers, data miners, statisticians, scholars, analysts, and subject matter experts. This isn’t B team stuff,” Engelbrecht wrote in a fundraising email. “The integrity of our election is too important.”
But Engelbrecht and Phillips never completed the audit or released the evidence behind their claims. In a video posted on YouTube in June 2017, Engelbrecht said they dropped the effort because donor promises didn’t materialize.
In 2017, the organization was in the red by more than $139,000. It reported having one employee, Engelbrecht, down from 11 employees in 2012. The $40,607 loan to Engelbrecht remained on the books in 2017, accounting for more than 66% of the nonprofit’s total assets.
The next year, True the Vote reported it had $4,754 in cash.
But that didn’t stop True the Vote from giving ever-growing loans to Engelbrecht. In 2018, it disclosed an outstanding $61,896 loan to Engelbrecht. It’s unclear whether Engelbrecht took one loan that grew over the years or multiple loans.
The nonprofit’s tax returns make it difficult to follow.
Lloyd Mayer, a nonprofit law professor at the University of Notre Dame, said there’s “a lot of sloppiness” in the financial statements. Documentation around Engelbrecht’s loan at times contradicted itself, saying in one section she paid it off but then still had a balance in another.
“The changes over time and the fact that in 2017, it doesn’t say which way the money’s flowing, would make me ask if I was in the attorney general’s office, at least ask: Could you clarify?” Mayer said.
In a number of years, True the Vote doesn’t answer important governance questions in its tax filings, such as whether it has policies around conflicts of interest, whistleblowers, document retention and how it determines Engelbrecht’s pay. “Importantly, it fails to answer questions about family or business relationships between officers and board members,” said Styron, the leader of CharityWatch. She called True the Vote “a governance black hole.”
It’s also unclear when Phillips left the board. In court documents, he says he left the board in 2017. However, the 2018 tax return listed him as a board member, as did the original 2019 filing. Phillips didn’t respond to multiple attempts to reach him for comment; he has previously denied wrongdoing in the Mississippi and Texas cases.
“To me, that makes no sense,” said Philip Hackney, a former IRS official who teaches tax law at the University of Pittsburgh.
True the Vote’s Plan to Challenge the 2020 Election
As the November 2020 election approached, Engelbrecht and attorney James Bopp Jr. warned on the nonprofit’s podcast that Democrats planned to use the courts to expand mail-in voting and said the organization had a plan to challenge it.
“We’re going all in on this,” Engelbrecht said on her show in May 2020. “If you would have asked me two months ago, I would have not told you that litigation was any part of what we plan to do at True the Vote in 2020, but now it’s the most important thing we can do.”
Yet as Election Day neared, conservative leaders were sounding the alarm about True the Vote. During a private meeting of the Council for National Policy in August 2020, a group of panelists was asked what they thought about True the Vote. Conservative journalist John Fund said he was the one who’d given Engelbrecht her first national publicity.
“I like Catherine, but she has gone astray. She has hooked up with the wrong associates. And I have to say this with the greatest of sadness, because I have to be honest with you, because you’re the people who actually have to make decisions on your own about who to support. As much as I like Catherine personally, I would not give her a penny,” he said, according to a recently leaked video obtained by Documented. “She’s a good person who’s been led astray. Don’t do it.”
Then Election Day came, and Trump demanded that states stop counting votes as it appeared Biden would win.
He claimed victory, saying – without proof – that he’d been the victim of massive fraud. Trump’s campaign promised action: a legal campaign challenging the outcome in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia. Rumors and conspiracy theories about illegal voting – often in Democratic areas home to Black and Brown voters – ramped up in earnest.
Fred Eshelman watched in angst. A pharmaceutical entrepreneur from North Carolina, Eshelman was concerned that the election had been riddled with fraud.
A political consultant emailed some of those conspiracies to Eshelman the morning of Nov. 5, according to records filed as part of a lawsuit in rural Austin County, Texas.
Eshelman responded eight minutes later. “This stuff really needs to be verified, quantified, and a massive information campaign launched at American people,” he wrote. “You want a revolt from the Silent Majority, you got it.”
He told the consultant, Tom Crawford, that they needed the best and most powerful public relations firm “cranked up now,” and they had to “figure out how to get it out in spite of the media.”
At 6:36 a.m. that same morning, Bopp emailed Engelbrecht with the urgent plea to call him. The email’s subject line: “voter fraud and a legal challenge.”
“I have been contacted by a friend with access to substantial funding regarding an idea about lawsuits re voter fraud,” Bopp wrote. “You might be central to that. I would like to discuss.”
Within hours, Engelbrecht prepared a donor pitch for what she called Validate the Vote, a litigation plan to challenge the election using data and whistleblower testimony.
The two teams had a brief call, and Eshelman decided he was in. He wired True the Vote $2 million, records show.
Attorney James Bopp Jr. represents U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (left) of Georgia during a hearing in April in Atlanta. Bopp also serves as general counsel for True the Vote. Credit: John Bazemore/Getty Images
True the Votes’ plan laid out the details: Bopp, touted as the lead attorney in Citizens United and Bush v. Gore, would file lawsuits in seven states across the country to “nullify the results of the state’s election, so that the Presidential Electors can be selected in a special election or by the state legislature.” OPSEC would “aggregate and analyze data to identify patterns of election subversion.” True the Vote would build public momentum and “galvanize Republican legislative support in key states.” The total cost of the campaign: $7.3 million.
“Thank you for this opportunity. We will not let you down,” Engelbrecht wrote in a Nov. 5 email.
But days later, the plan started to show strains. On Nov. 7, the Associated Press called the election for Biden. By then, many lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign started to get dismissed in multiple states. The day after, Engelbrecht sent a text message saying Eshelman wanted to talk about their game plan moving forward.
“He’s getting skittish that we can’t do this because the Trump camp is falling apart and people are jumping ship,” she said.
Still, they pushed ahead and began spending Eshelman’s donation. On Nov. 9, Phillips’ OPSEC submitted a bill to True the Vote for $350,000, according to court records. The invoice for the services is sparse; it bills for “Validate the Vote.” The quantity: one. It includes a litany of items ranging from “data” to “analysis,” “whistleblower” and “security,” all lumped in the six-figure bill.
The next day, True the Vote paid Bopp a $500,000 retainer, according to court records. It also paid Engelbrecht a total of $30,000, the records indicate.
By Nov. 11, Eshelman was getting impatient, according to the communications. He wanted to know what the team was uncovering through its state-of-the-art computer programs and whistleblower tip line.
“I know you’re running very hard, and I don’t want to pile on. However, I do want to know what money is accomplishing, where this is headed and the odds of winning,” he wrote to Engelbrecht.
But Eshelman began to question the team as he failed to get the concrete follow-ups he expected from Engelbrecht.
“I cannot continue to spend millions if this is quixotic,” he wrote to Engelbrecht and the consultant, Crawford, the morning of Nov. 11.
He saw an analogy in his own work that could be applied to his new calling. It was similar to a drug development process: Get the technology and then get the hard data to support the claims. This wasn’t “rocket science,” he wrote to Crawford. True the Vote said it had both handled.
By the end of that week, Engelbrecht said she needed more money for the project, according to court records. The $2 million hadn’t been enough. The consultant told Eshelman that they may need “additional short term money for Bopp.” Eshelman wired another $500,000 on Nov. 13.
The next day, Engelbrecht touted knowledge of four whistleblowers but never identified who they were. When the consultant followed up with Engelbrecht later to get details on the whistleblowers, it led to tension.
“I just had a difficult call with Catherine,” Crawford wrote to Eshelman on Nov. 15. “She is resistant to sharing ANY details with us about whistleblowers or the data work and took an ‘I run this’ tone with me.”
That day, Eshelman implored Engelbrecht again to share whatever information she had on data and whistleblowers for the lawsuits so he could send it to South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and Crawford, who’d said earlier that he had Fox News’ Sean Hannity waiting to break the news.
The consultant updated Eshelman that Graham’s team was “growing more skeptical every hour that passes with nothing from Catherine.” And he shared what he said Cleta Mitchell, an attorney aiding Trump’s attempts to overturn the election, thought of Engelbrecht.
“Again, I am sorry for this headache. Cleta Mitchell, a well known election attorney called to cheer us on for helping Bopp and told me Catherine ‘is crazy as a shithouse rat,’ ” Crawford wrote to Eshelman.
(Mitchell, who had once represented True the Vote, denied ever making that comment. “I’ve never used that term in my life,” she said in an email to Reveal. “I’ve got lots of colloquialisms. That isn’t one of them.”)
On Nov. 16, True the Vote convened a conference call with Eshelman and his consultant. The big donor learned that the group had voluntarily dismissed the four lawsuits. Emails show Eshelman was furious about the decision.
“I cannot believe they did this without giving us a chance to get to Trump or be in on the decision,” Eshelman wrote later that dayto his consultant, according to records.
“Very frankly I was physically sick after our call,” Eshelman wrote to Engelbrecht. “I have to tell you this is a total disaster from a coordination, communication, and representation perspective.”
By that point, True the Vote had spent one-third of Eshelman’s gift in 11 days and failed to produce anything meaningful in evidence, the records show.
In an email to Eshelman and Bopp following the meeting, Engelbrecht indicated they fell short of funding goals. She told them that “our not having full funding was well known and often discussed.” She mentioned that she assumed the Trump campaign would be pitching in.
“I’d written in my 11/14 email to you that it appeared our legal fees would have been covered by the Trump campaign, which I described in a statement of our cash position, described as best possible given the tight timeline with so many moving parts,” Engelbrecht wrote in a Nov. 16 email.
Later that night, Crawford began to express regrets about going with True the Vote. He told Eshelman he had been told that Bopp “was the guy” they needed for the legal efforts.
“To get him I had to go through True the Vote. Given timing, I ran with that and am just kicking myself as it is clear from many friends and insiders that Catherine is a disaster,” Crawford wrote to Eshelman. “Her story is utter Bullshit.”
Eshelman ultimately sued the nonprofit in federal and state court, accusing True the Vote of using his donation to enrich Engelbrecht, Phillips and Bopp. In court filings, True the Vote argues that Eshelman wasn’t entitled to his money back because there were no strings attached to the donation and that the relationship became strained after True the Vote didn’t want to pay a $1 million invoice connected to one of Eshelman’s consultants for communications. (The federal suit was withdrawn. In the state suit, True the Vote argued that the court didn’t have jurisdiction to handle the dispute, saying it was the purview of the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton. A judge agreed and threw out the case. Eshelman has appealed the decision.)
In a recent deposition in a separate lawsuit, Engelbrecht admitted that True the Vote had not identified widespread voter fraud at the time she pitched the Validate the Vote plan to Eshelman, despite proclaiming there was “significant evidence” in the one-page proposal she emailed to him on the project.
“This was a promotional piece,” Engelbrecht said of the document during the deposition, according to court records.
Bopp never served on True the Vote’s board and doesn’t face the same potential conflicts of interest as Engelbrecht and Phillips do for some of their transactions, but he has come under scrutiny for the amount he billed for the aborted legal campaign.
In the court records, Eshelman’s team said Bopp’s firm billed for more than $183,000 over a five- to seven-day period, in addition to more than $97,000 to supervise those attorneys.
“After spending in excess of $280,000 to draft and file the nearly-identical complaints in those cases, Mr. Bopp and his law firm then dismissed them all just days later,” the lawsuit reads. “Not only is the amount charged for these cookie-cutter complaints unconscionable – and likely impossible given the size of his firm (only five attorneys) and the number of hours available – but the goal was actually unachievable.” Eshelman said he later learned that the voter data Bopp sought in the suits would not even have been available before the election results would’ve been certified.
Bopp said there were no cookie-cutter lawsuits – each state had different laws and procedures, requiring lawsuits to be tailored for each. “These people are so ignorant,” he said of Eshelman’s group. “This was ignorance.”
He said he dropped the lawsuits because courts didn’t act on them fast enough for him to acquire voter data.
Bopp said his work was efficient – “remarkably cheap” – and dropping the lawsuits was the financially responsible thing to do. “Why the hell am I being criticized for trying to save my clients money rather than just go forward?” he said. “Knowing that it’s highly unlikely that any of the legal work that I do will bear any fruit whatsoever? I mean, I should be praised for saving the client’s money.”
Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, called the lawsuits “bogus” to begin with. “Jim probably withdrew the lawsuit so that he wouldn’t have to perpetuate a fraud on the court,” he said.
As for the $30,000 payment to Engelbrecht from Eshelman’s donation, Bopp said it was to oversee the project. True the Vote said it was part of her $197,000 annual pay.
And Phillips’ OPSEC continued to bill True the Vote after Eshelman had broken ties, according to court records. On Dec. 7, OPSEC billed the nonprofit for $400,000 for a project called Eyes on Georgia.
At the same time, Phillips and Engelbrecht had another business going. While she reported working full time for True the Vote, Engelbrecht also was the president, according to records, of another software company Phillips owned that had a nearly $800,000 contract with Mississippi’s Department of Information Technology Services.
At the end of 2020, Engelbrecht and Phillips received an extension to the contract. They renamed their company, which promises to detect fraud and abuse in government programs, from AutoGov to CoverMe Services Inc. It is a health care software company.
Trump and True the Vote have moved past the failed election lawsuit strategy and are on to the next conspiracy theory: illegal ballot harvesting.
That’s when a third party – like a household member, activist group or nursing home – collects and submits absentee ballots on behalf of others, which is legal in a majority of states. It may be a new angle for Engelbrecht and Phillips, but they already have a similar refrain.
In an interview with conservative talk show host Charlie Kirk, Engelbrecht and Phillips said they planned to show their evidence following the May 7 launch of the film “2000 Mules.”
A photo collage shows part of the poster for the film “2000 Mules” and a still from its trailer, featuring Catherine Engelbrecht. Credit: Photo collage by Reveal with images from “2000 Mules”
“At some point, shortly after the video runs, we are going to pull the ripcord, we are going to release all of this,” Phillips said.
In a scene that mimics a spy thriller, the film’s trailer depicts two characters, who appear to be Phillips and Engelbrecht, making a tension-filled decision to release earth-shattering information.
The film touts part of True the Vote’s new strategy: using anonymized cellphone data sold by vendors to show when a person was near a ballot dropbox multiple times – ostensibly hinting at “ballot harvesting” activity.
Engelbrecht and Phillips still haven’t released the evidence. At one point in the film, they claim to have used the cellphone data to help solve the murder of a young Atlanta girl; that, too, has been debunked.
So far, True the Vote’s cellphone data analysis is not convincing state officials in Wisconsin that illegal votes were cast.
In a hearing in Madison earlier this year, Engelbrecht and Phillips said their analysis suggested people were delivering ballots that weren’t their own.
But again, when asked to show the evidence, they declined.
Reporter Ese Olumhense contributed to this story. It was edited by Andrew Donohue, Sumi Aggarwal and Kate Howard and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
True the Vote has been a key player in giving rise to the myth that widespread voter fraud is undermining U.S. elections.
Yet the Texas nonprofit hasn’t proven its big claims – or even produced the evidence it promises.
Our new investigation shows what True the Vote has been doing with its donations: It has engaged in a series of questionable transactions that has directed more than $1 million combined to its founder, a longtime board member and its general counsel. Based on thousands of pages of tax filings and court documents, the story highlights how promoting former President Donald Trump’s Big Lie has become a thriving economy.
Here are six takeaways from our investigation:
1. True the Vote has loaned founder Catherine Engelbrecht significant amounts of money. Under Texas law, it is illegal for nonprofits to give loans to their directors.
According to its tax filings, True the Vote issued Engelbrecht a $40,607 loan in 2015. It was still on the books in 2017. And in 2018, True the Vote disclosed an outstanding $61,896 loan to Engelbrecht. In its original 2019 tax return, the nonprofit reported giving her a $113,396 loan.
It’s unclear whether Engelbrecht took one loan that grew over the years or multiple loans.
The loans raise some potential legal issues for True the Vote. Under Texas law, it is legal to lend employees money under certain conditions. And while Engelbrecht is an employee of True the Vote, she’s much more than that. She’s also a member of the board of directors.
We asked True the Vote a number of questions about the loan: Was it approved by the board of directors? Did Engelbrecht vote on it? What are the terms of the loan? Did Engelbrecht’s business associate and alleged romantic partner, Gregg Phillips, vote for it while he was on the organization’s board?
True the Vote wouldn’t answer questions about who approved the loan, its conditions and whether Engelbrecht voted on it as a board member.
“I’m not going to respond to you on this,” said general counsel James Bopp Jr. “If you want free legal research, go pay a lawyer to do it.”
True the Vote originally reported the $113,396 loan to the IRS in its 2019 tax filing, yet it provided us with a return that shows no loan balance. An accountant for True the Vote said there “are no outstanding advances” but didn’t explain the differences between the two documents.
2. The year that Gregg Phillips joined the True the Vote board, the nonprofit began regularly paying money to entities connected to him.
Phillips replaced Engelbrecht’s ex-husband, Bryan, on the True the Vote board in 2014. In the years since, Phillips and Catherine Engelbrecht have become closely linked. Engelbrecht has served in key roles in Phillips’ private companies. In a court filing, a disgruntled donor said Phillips and Engelbrecht are lovers.
They haven’t acknowledged the relationship, but they haven’t exactly denied it either. Here’s what Engelbrecht told The New York Times: “You know, Gregg and I have actually talked about this and how we would answer this question. And the best answer that I think either of us are going to give is, it is totally unrelated and unimportant.”
Before he joined the board, Phillips had been dogged by allegations of financial impropriety, accused of leveraging his government positions in Mississippi and Texas to make himself money. Phillips in previous news stories has denied wrongdoing. He did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
In 2014, True the Vote paid $25,000 to American Solutions for Winning the Future for a “donor list rental.” Phillips was the director, records show. The next year, True the Vote gave $30,000 to a company called Define Idea Inc. for “IT support services.” Phillips was a director of the company, according to its formation documents.
Those payments all dwarf Phillips’ 2020 payments, however. That year, he created a new company, OPSEC Group LLC, to do voter analysis in 2020, and it received at least $750,000 from True the Vote. It’s unclear whether OPSEC has any other clients. One expert called the contract “eye-popping” for its largess.
True the Vote didn’t respond to questions about whether it was appropriate to contract with Phillips.
It’s unclear when Phillips left the nonprofit’s board. In court documents, he says he left in 2017. However, the organization’s 2018 tax return listed him as a board member, as did the original 2019 filing. True the Vote’s amended 2019 filing removes him as a board member.
Engelbrecht and Phillips’ ties go beyond True the Vote. Their companies have shared the same mailing address.
While she reported working full time for True the Vote, Engelbrecht also was the president of a health care software company owned by Phillips that promises to detect fraud and abuse in government programs, according to records.The state of Mississippi awarded the company a nearly $1.7 million contract for work through 2023.
3. Engelbrecht’s own companies also have received contracts from True the Vote.
In 2015 and 2016, True the Vote paid ARC Network LLC and Ao2 LLC a total of $82,500 for “database license fees” and “software license fees,” respectively, according to its tax returns, which disclose that the companies are tied to Engelbrecht.
Court filings indicate that Engelbrecht owned 100% of ARC Network; she is listed as the owner of Ao2 in registration documents in Wyoming.
We couldn’t find other clients or a footprint for the two companies. But ARC Network was barred by Texas in 2015 from doing business, state records show. A business can be forfeited when a company doesn’t file a mandatory annual report showing its owner, directors and registered address – or when it does not pay taxes.
Bopp wouldn’t answer questions about who approved the contracts, saying that was confidential financial information. He said there was “nothing inherently wrong or improper with contracting with board members to do services for the corporation.”
“I’ve represented not-for-profits for 45 years,” Bopp said, “and it is common.”
However, a number of nonprofit legal and accounting experts who reviewed the documents said the transactions with Engelbrecht and Phillips raise a series of red flags.
“We always have concerns from a governance standpoint about organizations engaging in such transactions with insiders, and the organization’s behavior, in terms of its accounting and inconsistencies, only inflame those concerns,” said Brian Mittendorf, an Ohio State University accounting professor who specializes in nonprofit accounting.
Laurie Styron, executive director of CharityWatch, put it more bluntly: “This certainly looks really bad.”
4. The organization’s tax returns are riddled with inconsistencies and have regularly been amended, making it difficult to understand how True the Vote is truly spending its donations.
In one case, Engelbrecht provided us a copy of a 2019 tax return that was vastly different from the one available on the IRS website. The differences strike at the heart of our findings.
The IRS version showed Phillips as a board member. Englebrecht’s version did not. The IRS return showed Engelbrecht had a loan balance of $113,396. Engelbrecht’s version indicated the loan’s balance was gone. In response to questions from Reveal, Engelbrecht said she was going to submit an amended version of the group’s 2019 tax return – the one she’d provided to us – to the IRS.
What’s more, in the original IRS filing, True the Vote didn’t answer questions about whether it has policies around conflicts of interest, whistleblowers, document retention and how it determines Engelbrecht’s pay. “Importantly, it fails to answer questions about family or business relationships between officers and board members,” said Styron, of CharityWatch.
Because of that, she said True the Vote is “really a governance black hole.”
True the Vote says it did answer those questions in the amended return, but these kinds of omissions are common throughout its years of tax filings.
And as True the Vote has gained prominence, Engelbrecht has maintained an oversized control of the charity as its only employee in recent years and a member of a small board of directors that’s been packed with potential conflicts of interests. “That’s a real problem,” Styron said.
The federal government grants nonprofit organizations a special status, allowing them to operate tax-free in recognition of their public benefit. In exchange, they are subject to greater scrutiny and transparency to ensure that donor funds are being used properly.
Experts said an organization with more than $1 million in revenue typically would have more employees and a larger board. “These are public dollars, and the board members and officers of a charity have a fiduciary duty to … spend all of the resources of the charity carrying out the mission of the organization to the best of their ability in ways that benefit the nonprofit,” Styron said. “Not in ways that benefit them personally.”
5. One of the two agencies that would hold True the Vote accountable, the Texas attorney general’s office, is led by an ally of Engelbrecht’s, Ken Paxton.
Experts called on the IRS and Paxton to investigate whether insiders were improperly benefiting from donor money.
And Paxton’s office has already played a key role in a lawsuit filed by a True the Vote donor who said his $2.5 million donation to stop the certification of the 2020 election was essentially pocketed by Engelbrecht, Phillips and Bopp.
In court filings in that lawsuit, Paxton’s office said it would review the case to see if any action is warranted. The suit eventually was dismissed by a judge, who sided with True the Vote when it argued that it was up to Paxton – not the courts – to resolve. It’s unclear what, if any, action the attorney general has taken.
Reveal sought his office’s communications about True the Vote through Texas public records law, but he refused to disclose them, citing attorney-client privilege.
Paxton has appeared on Engelbrecht’s podcast and been an active supporter of attempts to overthrow the 2020 election.
6. True the Vote’s questionable financial transactions have also ensnared one of the legal architects of the modern conservative movement, James Bopp Jr.
Bopp has helped dismantle abortion rights, crafted many of the arguments in the Citizens United case that revolutionized campaign finance law and was part of the legal team that prevailed in Bush v. Gore. He’s also True the Vote’s general counsel.
He never served on the organization’s board and doesn’t face the same potential conflicts of interest as Engelbrecht and Phillips do for some of their transactions, but he has come under scrutiny for the amount he billed for a failed challenge to the 2020 election.
True the Vote provided Bopp’s law firm a retainer of at least $500,000 to lead a legal charge against the results of the election, but he filed only four of the seven lawsuits promised to a $2.5 million donor, all of which were voluntarily dismissed less than a week after being filed.
In court records, the donor said Bopp’s firm billed for more than $183,000 over a five- to seven-day period, in addition to more than $97,000 to supervise those attorneys. The donor called the amount billed by Bopp’s firm “unconscionable” and “impossible.”
Bopp said he dropped the lawsuits because courts didn’t act on them fast enough for him to acquire voter data.
He said his work was efficient – “remarkably cheap” – and dropping the lawsuits was the financially responsible thing to do. “Why the hell am I being criticized for trying to save my clients money rather than just go forward?” he said. “Knowing that it’s highly unlikely that any of the legal work that I do will bear any fruit whatsoever? I mean, I should be praised for saving the client’s money.”
Reporter Ese Olumhense contributed to this story. It was edited by Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Sadly, the Philippines has sold its soul. Thirty six years ago a People Power revolution ousted the dictator Ferdinand Marcos after two decades of harsh authoritarian rule.
Yesterday, in spite of a rousing and inspiring Pink Power would-be revolution, the dictator’s only son and namesake “Bongbong” Marcos Jr was elected 17th president of the Philippines.
On the eve of the republic’s most “consequential election” in decades, Filipina journalism professor Sheila Coronel, director of practice at the Columbia University’s Toni Stabile School of Investigative Journalism in New York, said the choice was really simple.
Significantly more than half of the 67.5 million voters have apparently chosen to forget – including a generation that never experienced the brutal crackdowns under martial law in 1972-1981, and doesn’t want to know about it. Yet 70,000 people were jailed, 35,000 were tortured, 4000 were killed and free speech was gagged.
Duterte’s erosion of democracy
After six years of steady erosion of democracy under Duterte, is the country now about to face a fatal blow to accountability and transparency with a kleptomaniac family at the helm?
Dictator Marcos is believed to have accumulated $10 billion while in power and while Philippine authorities have only been able to recover about a third of this though ongoing lawsuits, the family refuses to pay a tax bill totalling $3.9 billion, including penalties.
In many countries the tax violations w
President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines in 1972 … killing democracy and retaining power for 14 years. Image: Getrealphilippines.com
ould have disqualified Marcos Jr from even standing for the presidency.
“A handful of other autocrats were also busy stealing from their people in that era – in Haiti, Nicaragua, Iran – but Marcos stole more and he stole better,” according to The Guardian’s Nick Davies.
“Ultimately, he emerges as a laboratory specimen from the early stages of a contemporary epidemic: the global contagion of corruption that has since spread through Africa and South America, the Middle East and parts of Asia. Marcos was a model of the politician as thief.”
Tensions were running high outside the main office of the Commission on Elections (Comelec) in Intramuros, Manila, today as protests erupted over alleged voting irregularities and the expected return of the Marcoses to the Malacañang Palace.
The Comelec today affirmed its dismissal of two sets of cases – or a total four appeals – seeking to bar Marcos Jr. from the elections due to his tax conviction in the 1990s.
Ruling after the elections
The ruling was released a day after the elections, when the partial, unofficial tally showed that the former senator was on the brink of winning the presidency.
It wasn’t entirely surprising, as five of the seven-member Comelec bench had earlier voted in favour of the former senator in at least one of the four anti-Marcos petitions that had already been dismissed
Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr … commanding lead in the Philippine presidential elections. Image: Rappler
One further appeal can be made before the Supreme Court.
As mounting allegations of election fraud and cheating greeted the ballot result, groups began filing formal complaints.
One watchdog, Bakla Bantay Boto, said it had received “numerous reports of illegal campaigning, militarised polling precincts, and an absurd [number] of broken vote counting machines (VCMs)” throughout the Philippines.
STATEMENT ON THE MAY 9, 2022 PHILIPPINE ELECTIONS – Fraud, violence, electioneering, and unreliable voting machines have stained the 2022 Philippine national elections#BaklaBantayBoto2022pic.twitter.com/vWqhmVgwii
— Bakla Bantay Boto (@baklabantayboto) May 9, 2022
“Intensified violence has also marked today’s election. Poll watchers have been tragically killed in Buluan, Maguindanao and Binidayan, Lanao del Sur, while an explosive was detonated in a voting centre in Kobacan, Cotabato.
“The violent red-tagging of several candidates and party lists [was] also in full force, with text blasts to constituents and posters posted within polling precincts, insinuating that they are linked to the CPP-NPA-NDFP [Communist Party of the Philippines and allies].”
Social media disinformation
Explaining the polling in the face of a massive social media disinformation campaign by Marcos supporters, Rappler’s livestream anchor Bea Cupin noted how the Duterte administration had denied a renewal of a franchise for ABS-CBN, the largest and most influential free-to-air television station two years ago.
This act denied millions of Filipinos access to accurate and unbiased news coverage. Rappler itself and its Nobel Peace laureate chief executive Maria Ressa, were also under constant legal attack and the target of social media trolls.
A BBC report interviewed a typical professional troll who managed hundreds of Facebook pages and fake profiles for his clients, saying his customers for fake stories “included governors, congressmen and mayors.”
Presidential candidate Leni Robredo … only woman candidate and the target of Filipino trolls. Image: DR/APR
Meta — owners of Facebook — reported that its Philippines subsidiary had removed many networks that were attempting to manipulate people and media. They were believed to have included a cluster of more than 400 accounts, pages, and groups that were violated the platform’s codes of conduct.
Pink Power candidate human rights lawyer Leni Robredo, who defeated Marcos for the vice-presidency in the last election in 2016, and who was a target for many of the troll attacks, said: “Lies repeated again and again become the truth.”
Academics have warned the risks that the country is taking in not heeding warnings of the past about the Marcos family. Dr Aries Arugay, an associate professor of the University of Philippines, reflects: “We just don’t jail our politicians or make them accountable … we don’t punish them, unlike South Korean presidents.”
As Winston Churchill famously said in 1948: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
An elections bill that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed into law this week restricts municipalities from being able to determine how to organize their elections, and bans the use of ranked-choice voting.
Senate Bill 524 creates a new police force that is tasked with aggressively investigating claims of voter fraud throughout the state — a move that experts have warned is blatantly fascist, as such fraud doesn’t happen on a scale that would warrant expanding surveillance.
The ranked-choice voting process is a simple one: voters rank all candidates on the ballot in order of whom they most prefer. If no single candidate receives a majority of votes in the first round, the lowest-ranked candidate is eliminated. If you ranked the eliminated candidate as your first choice, your vote still counts — it’s simply redistributed to your second-choice candidate. The process is repeated until a single candidate receives a majority.
Ranked-choice voting is frequently praised for allowing voters to pick whichever candidates they most prefer without worrying that doing so will be “throwing away” their ballots, a problem that arises under the “first past the post” system of voting. In both conservative and progressive areas of the country where ranked-choice voting is used, voters have reported being overwhelmingly satisfied with its implementation.
But despite the popularity of ranked-choice voting, DeSantis and Republicans in Florida have now forbidden its use throughout the state.
The bill prohibits the use of ranked-choice voting “to determine election or nomination to elective office,” and voids any “existing or future local ordinances authorizing the use of ranked-choice voting.” That means that no village, town, city or county can utilize the voting process from now on, and that any city that has already approved of ranked-choice voting can no longer employ such a system.
One city in the state had previously passed an ordinance to implement ranked-choice voting, while another was exploring doing so. In 2007, the Sarasota city council voted to use ranked-choice in its elections, but the state never certified the software that would be needed to implement the process. In 2021, the city council of Clearwater moved to put the idea up for a vote among its residents in this year’s elections.
Unless the new law is repealed, however, neither of those communities will be able to use ranked-choice voting going forward.
Prime Minister James Marape has called on Papua New Guineans not to vote for “money, relatives or cargo” in the country’s 2022 general election that kicks off later this month.
He made the call yesterday on the third anniversary of his resignation from the O’Neill-led government on 11 April 2019 due to “sheer frustration” at the way the country was being run.
Marape on that day in 2019 had resigned in protest at the way he said at the time Peter O’Neill was running down the country.
Reflecting on that occasion, Marape urged the people “to exercise your right to vote wisely in the 2022 elections”.
“Don’t vote for money, don’t vote for relatives, and don’t vote for people or parties who have sold your birthright,” he said.
“If I have not done well for this country, if I am not the leader of your choice, then vote in someone else who can do better.
“Pangu Pati, and the coalition that I have worked with over the last three years –– including National Alliance, United Resources Party, United Labour Party, People’s Party, Liberal Party, National Party, People’s Movement for Change, Allegiance Party, Triumph Heritage Empowerment Party, One Nation Party, People’s Labour Party, Social Democratic Party and others –– have tried our best to stabilise our economy and restore credibility for this country.”
‘Steadied the ship’
He said so much had happened since that fateful day on 11 April 2019.
“I never knew I was going to be Prime Minister. I resigned [as] one man because I was fed up with the way Peter O’Neill was running down our country.
“Yes, he was doing some good, but the greater part of him was for personal gratification and gain and I could not knowingly remain in his government.”
Marape said the country had been through a lot of political turbulence since he took office, the most-infamous being the failed no-confidence vote of November 2020, spearheaded by O’Neill.
“There were political challenges right up until the 18-month grace period of my election as prime minister was up in November 2020,” he said.
“There were economic challenges, there were covid-19 challenges, but we have prevailed through the Grace of God.
“We have steadied the ship.”
The writs are issued on April 28, and voting is due June 11-24.
In April 2021, Monica Palmer walked into The Token Lounge, a rock-and-roll bar outside Detroit, for a meeting of Michigan’s 13th Congressional District Republican Committee. About 75 people gathered around tables on a black-and-white checkerboard dance floor.
For three years, Palmer had filled an obscure position deep within the gears of the U.S. election system. She was a member of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, appointed by party leaders to certify election results.
But that anonymity vanished after Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election became apparent and then-President Donald Trump began casting about for ways to reverse it.
The campaign to block Biden’s election was particularly intense in Wayne County, and three months after Biden had taken office, the intensity hadn’t waned for Palmer. She’d been invited to The Token Lounge by David Dudenhoefer, the committee’s leader and one of the people who had put her on the board. He wanted her to explain why she had certified the election and effectively delivered Biden the votes he needed to carry the state.
Dudenhoefer spoke first.
“Hey, if we don’t focus on what happened in 2020 and straighten that out, you can forget 2022, 2024, 2028, 2030,” he said, according to a video recording of the event. “Because right now, tens of millions of Americans feel like these elections are rigged. And I’m one of them.”
When it was Palmer’s turn to speak, she stood in front of a dark stage in a green summer dress and flip-flops and was at once defiant and contrite.
“Now I will take the heat,” she said, adding that she was “off-focus” during the highly contentious public Zoom meeting in which the certification took place. She told the group that she didn’t want to certify the election but that, legally, she had no choice.
“The only thing that the Board of Canvassers has the authority to do is to compare the statement of voters, the number of ballots that were received versus the number of ballots that were tallied and to make any mathematical corrections,” she said.
In fact, Palmer and her Republican colleague on the board, William Hartmann, had first voted not to certify the election, citing differences between the number of votes cast and the number of votes tallied in some precincts. The board was deadlocked 2-2. But the Republicans changed their votes to yes after a Democrat on the board promised that state officials would audit results down the road.
Dudenhoefer wasn’t impressed with that explanation. “You were willing to compromise your beliefs, your principles and your standards for a promise of something down the road,” Dudenhoefer told Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
When it came time to renominate Palmer for the board, he and his colleagues declined. To replace her, they nominated three candidates who all have said they didn’t trust the results of the 2020 election. Two of them were active in efforts to overturn the 2020 election before they were nominated for the canvassing board.
This isn’t just happening in Wayne County. Since the 2020 election, Republican leaders in Michigan have purged GOP canvassers in eight of the largest counties, including Macomb, Washtenaw, Ingham, Kalamazoo, Livingston, Saginaw and Genesee, according to a report by The Detroit News last year. At least half of them have been replaced with people who have publicly cast doubt on the 2020 election results.
Jeff Timmer, who ran the Republican Party in Michigan from 2005 to 2009, says he’s alarmed by what’s happening to his party.
“They’ve been able to infiltrate the Republican Party right down to the precinct level in a way that I’ve been astounded by,” he said. “They have paid attention to those very obscure, small party positions, precinct delegates, getting their people in place to chair county Republican parties all across the country – not just to Michigan.”
Indeed, Republicans have mobilized against GOP officials who didn’t go along with Trump’s plan to stop the certification across the country. They’ve worked to unseat many of those officials and place election deniers in key positions, from county clerks to canvassers and up to the secretary of state, attorney general and even governor.
Altogether, the movement raises the specter that a campaign to overturn the 2024 election could be much more coordinated than 2020 and face much less resistance.
Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University law school said the GOP shake-up of election officials in swing states is dangerous and unpredictable.
“I would say in some ways, we are in an unchartered territory, certainly in modern history when it comes to election administration,” he said.
A county canvassing board can’t reverse the results of a national election by itself. But Norden said disputes over county election results could create enough chaos and confusion that the election is taken out of the hands of voters and given to a partisan state legislature to decide the outcome.
“It provides an opportunity to muddy the waters on what really happened in an election, provides the opportunity for more time for litigation to try to encourage state legislatures to step in to try to prevent a certification of results that that side doesn’t like,” he said.
This idea – that a legislature can step in and override the vote of the public – is known as the independent state legislature doctrine, and it has caught fire in conservative legal circles lately.
Michigan: Test Lab of the Anti-Democratic Movement
In the weeks after the 2020 election, Wayne County was one of the most politically contentious places in America.
Droves of Republicans went to Detroit’s TCF Center the day after Election Day, where poll workers were counting absentee ballots. Amped up by Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud and false rumors that poll watchers were illegally being turned away, they banged on glass walls and chanted, “Stop the count!”
Michigan, a swing state, is mostly Republican and White, except for its main metropolitan area. Wayne County is predominantly Democratic. Its largest city, Detroit, is nearly 80% Black. And, if you take away Wayne County from the vote, Michigan goes from a clear Biden victory to a clear Trump victory.
But there was no fraud in Michigan, or Wayne County, that would have changed the outcome of the 2020 election. A bipartisan state Senate Oversight Committee investigation led by Republican Ed McBroom spent months scrutinizing and found no evidence of widespread or systematic election fraud.
The Michigan secretary of state’s office completed 250 election audits and found no evidence of fraud or discrepancies that would have changed the results. In the end, of the 174,000 absentee ballots cast in Detroit, only 17 were found to be questionable.
Demonstrators gather at the Michigan statehouse in Lansing in October 2021, claiming they don’t believe Donald Trump lost the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Credit: Photo by Nic Antaya/Getty Images
Still, across the country, the GOP platform rests more and more on the baseless assertions that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol was harmless. A handful of swing states have become testing grounds for this movement. Much of the playbook has been written in Michigan, and it stretches back far before the election.
In April 2020, hundreds of protesters, some armed with rifles, descended on the Michigan statehouse in a failed attempt to force an end to COVID-19 restrictions.
In October 2020, 13 men were arrested on suspicion of plotting to kidnap Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and overthrow the state government.
On Dec. 14, 2020, the day Democratic electors were meeting at the statehouse to certify the election for Biden, Michigan GOP leaders showed up in person to try to stop them. Sixteen of them signed and sent documents to the National Archives falsely claiming to be the legitimate Michigan electors and casting phony votes for Trump.
On Jan. 5, 2021, Meshawn Maddock, co-chair of Michigan’s state Republican committee, helped organize a rally in Washington, D.C., for Trump supporters in advance of his Stop the Steal rally the next day. She organized buses to transport Michigan Republicans to the Capitol.
Conducting a county election canvass is usually a mundane bureaucratic process. Each of Michigan’s 83 counties has a canvassing board made up of two Republicans and two Democrats. Their job is to make sure the number of voters in each precinct matches the number of votes cast and sign off on the results.
But now those positions are being packed with 2020 election deniers, potentially setting the stage for even more election chaos in 2024.
In Macomb County, which borders Detroit to the north and is the third most-populous county in the state, the newest Republican canvasser is Nancy Tiseo, who in 2020 suggested that Trump should suspend the Electoral College so military tribunals could investigate voter fraud.
In tiny Antrim County, there’s Victoria Bishop, wife of far-right talk show host “Trucker” Randy Bishop. She moderated an event last year with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, where he said the Supreme Court should remove Biden from office and reinstall Trump.
New Republican canvasser Marvin Rubingh, who sits on the Antrim County board with Bishop, said Trump’s lie that the election was stolen was a “credible allegation.”
Kalamazoo County appointed Tony Lorentz, who said he wasn’t sure Biden won the election or whether he would certify elections in the future.
Monica Palmer, the Wayne County canvasser who was ousted, declined to go on the record for this story. In the weeks after the election, she’d received death threats and text messages with photos of dead naked women. Some of the threats mentioned her daughter. She even found herself on the phone with Trump after the certification as his campaign was still fighting in courts in Michigan to overturn the election.
As a result, she gave a handful of interviews and then tried to lay low, hoping the harassment would blow over. But after she was kicked off the board, she went on “The Paul W. Smith Show,” a Detroit radio program, and described the ongoing purge as part of a new GOP election strategy.
“There are people within the state party who are getting rid of any canvasser that isn’t pulling the line of, ‘We need to stop everything,’ ” she said.
“To find out they’re doing this across the state,” she said, “what other motive would it be?”
The Guys Who Picked Palmer’s Replacement
When it was time to name who would replace Palmer, the decision came down to David Dudenhoefer and two other Republican committee leaders in and around Wayne County.
Until recently, Dudenhoefer – known to friends and colleagues as “The Dude” – was the chair of Michigan’s 13th Congressional District Republican Committee. In 2020, he ran for Congress against Democrat Rashida Tlaib and lost with 18% of the vote. His head is shaved clean and his goatee is showing gray around the chin. When he’s not running for office in a suit and tie, he can be spotted around southeast Michigan in a T-shirt that reads: TYRANNY RESPONSE TEAM. He says he can’t prove it, but he believes the 2020 election was rigged.
Joining Dudenhoefer was a young activist named Shane Trejo, head of Michigan’s 11th Congressional District Republican Committee. The day after Palmer voted to certify the election, he sent her a text message. It read: “You should quit all your GOP posts and never show your face at an event ever again.” Since then, Trejo has pushed for suppressive changes to state voting laws, such as outlawing outdoor ballot drop boxes. He writes for the far-right blog site Big League Politics and used to co-host a podcast called “Blood Soil and Liberty” with a member of the White nationalist group Identity Evropa. (“Blood and Soil” was a Nazi slogan during the Third Reich.)
Shane Trejo (left) and David Dudenhoefer Credit: YouTube screen shots
Dudenhoefer and Trejo were joined by William Rauwerdink, an investment manager and the kind of behind-the-scenes political player that most voters never hear about. He’s held positions on state and local GOP committees and was indicted in 2003 on 16 felony counts related to one of the largest financial fraud schemes in Michigan’s history. He pleaded guilty to charges of fraud, conspiracy and making false statements to investigators. He served three years and nine months in prison and was ordered to pay $285 million in restitution to lenders and shareholders.
Trejo didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview, and Rauwerdink declined to speak on the record. But Dudenhoefer wanted to talk, mostly about what he sees as a quick and steady slide into authoritarianism since Trump left office. He says mask mandates, vaccine requirements and COVID-19 lockdowns imposed by Michigan’s Democratic governor have eroded his freedom and damaged the livelihoods of his family and friends.
“They’ve seen a government shut their business down,” he said. “They’ve seen a government force them to put a cotton mask around their face. They’ve seen things that they never thought they would see government do.”
He said he and his wife spent the last several months in Florida so she could work as a nurse without being vaccinated against COVID-19.
He scoffed at the idea that Republicans are threatening democracy by refusing to accept the results of the election. Or that democracy is even what the country should strive for.
“Well, the type of democracy I’m interested in is where the individual’s liberties are protected always,” he said, “and under a straight democracy that would come into question.”
That being the case, he says majority rule is not what he’s looking for in a government.
“Let’s do this then, OK? So if we got 300 million Americans and the majority of them decided to make cannibalization legal, and now we can just start eating each other,” he said. “I mean, does that make it right?”
One of the people Dudenhoefer and his colleagues nominated to replace Monica Palmer was Robert Boyd, who said publicly last year that, had he been on the board of canvassers in 2020, he would not have certified Biden’s win. Asked why he thought the results were illegitimate, he said he didn’t know because he “wasn’t there.”
Boyd declined to speak to Reveal.
He wouldn’t say whether he would certify the elections in 2022 and 2024, which will both take place during his term on the board.
“Well, Rob is somebody that’s just level-headed,” Dudenhoefer said. “I mean, he puts a lot of thought into things. And I don’t know the man well, you know, just so you understand that.”
Who Can Stop the Election Deniers?
Dudenhoefer and his colleagues can’t just install the next canvasser directly, though.
Once party leaders decide on three nominees, they submit them to their county commission. The commissioners then vote on which one to appoint to the board. But that’s not what happened in Wayne County.
In September, the Wayne County Commission met to appoint Palmer’s replacement. Fourteen of the 15 commissioners are Democrats. The lone Republican commissioner, Terry Marecki, made a motion to vote on appointing Boyd from the three candidates Dudenhoefer and company had nominated. But when commission Chair Alisha Bell asked for a second … silence.
No one spoke.
The commission could have challenged Boyd’s nomination. It was a public meeting, a chance for voters to better understand who administers their elections, how they get that power and what their motives are.
“I wanted to get that moron in front of us and put him through his paces,” said Tim Killeen, the only Wayne County commissioner to respond to an interview request for this story. “Do you even know what the job of canvasser is? Do you understand magisterial duties? Do you plan to violate your oath of office? I wanted to smoke him out under oath.”
Yet he and his fellow Democrats quietly let that opportunity die on the floor. No one protested. No one raised a concern about the future of democracy. Just silence.
Killeen believes Democrats on the commission suspected Boyd would not be an honest broker of democracy. But he argued that vocalizing that would’ve done little good. By law, if the commission doesn’t make the appointment, the task falls to the county clerk. He said his colleagues “didn’t want to get their hands dirty” by voting on his nomination.
“I caved to political peer pressure,” he said. “I wanted to extract a few pounds of flesh. That was my desire, but it wasn’t my decision.”
In the end, Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett made the appointment. Boyd is now a Wayne County canvasser and will help administer the next election.
Reveal producer Najib Aminy and former Reveal reporter Byard Duncan contributed to this story. It was edited by Andrew Donohue and Maryam Saleh and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Winding 336 miles through Maricopa, Pinal and Pima counties, the Central Arizona Project supplies water from the Colorado River to 80 percent of the state’s population and 40 percent of its farmlands. A drought has prompted the U.S. Department of Interior to implement a Tier-1 shortage for the first time, which will cut 18 percent of Arizona’s water supply from the Colorado River. But during Arizona’s legislative session thus far, bills to address the water shortage have been overshadowed by the 140 bills aimed at preventing so-called election fraud.
Arizona residents like Perri Benemelis, a white 61-year-old water policy analyst, are tired of “election fraud” talk, and many are turning away from the Republican and Democratic parties and registering or identifying as independents.
Benemelis cited proposals for a desalination project in Mexico and the monitoring of groundwater pumping in Mojave County as ways to address the water shortage, but is doubtful it will gain ground in the state legislature.
“Considering the focus on election law probably means we’re not going to see a lot of substantive legislation addressing water availability,” Benemelis said. “We [Arizonans] keep chasing this fantasy that there was fraud in the last election that needs to be addressed. And because of this obsession by our Republican legislature, substantive issues — important issues to the citizens of the state of Arizona — are being largely ignored.”
Independents now make up the largest voter group in the country. As of mid-January, 46 percent of those surveyed by a Gallup poll reported they identify as independents, 28 percent identify as Democrats and 24 percent as Republicans. According to 2018 figures, Independents are most likely to be younger, male and white, but more recent data show their numbers growing among other demographic groups. This group is deciding election outcomes — or at least making election results less predictable. Independent voters, pivotal in swing states including Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, favored Donald Trump by 4 percentage points in 2016 and Joe Biden by 13 percentage points in 2020.
Since April 2021, President Biden’s approval rating among independents declined from 68 percent to 36 percent, according to a recent NBC poll. And if the early Texas primaries are any indication for other upcoming primaries later this year, twice the number of Texan independents came out to vote for Republican Gov. Greg Abbott than Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke. Republican primary turnout exceeded the Democratic primary turnout by nearly 74 percent, far greater than the 45 percent difference in the 2018 midterm elections. Most independents polled are opposed to efforts to remove books from schools and a total abortion ban.
What this means is that while most independents are opposed to culture war politics and extreme political views, which prompted their abandonment of Trump in 2020, the disillusionment with the Biden administration among independents may result in low voter turnout rates for Democratic candidates. Independents could unwillingly propel Republicans towards a congressional majority this year and in 2024 if the Democratic Party does not capture the energy of this growing group of voters.
For the first time in Maricopa County, registered independents and third-party voters, at 35 percent of the total number of registered voters, exceeded the number of registered Republicans and Democrats. Statewide, independents and third-party voters make up 34.2 percent, just behind Republicans but ahead of Democrats, according to the Arizona secretary of state’s voter registration report. The Open Primaries Education Fund, a nonprofit organization that advocates for reform of the primary election system, projects this trend to continue and for independents and third-party voters to reach 43 percent of the state voting population by 2036.
Hugh McNichol is one of many veterans who identify themselves as independent. According to a March 2020 Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America member survey, 41 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans identify as an independent or third-party voter, 36 percent as Republican and 22 percent as Democrat.
McNichol, who is a 39-year-old white man, resides in Lansing, Michigan, where he owned his own mechanic shop before being hired as a mechanic by Tesla. Prior to this, McNichol served as a mechanic in the U.S. Army for eight years and was stationed in Iraq from 2006 to 2007. McNichol says he voted for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in 2016 and Libertarian Gary Johnson in 2020, because they didn’t support the Iraq War.
“Veterans are realizing that neither one of the major parties have our best interests at heart,” McNichol told Truthout. “The vast majority of people in our country don’t care about what’s going over there…. But the politicians who sent us over there, they should be obligated to us, they should be obligated to those people there too. And I don’t feel like they held up their promises in either case.”
McNichol started to observe that promises to build infrastructure in Iraq turned into profits for private contractors, particularly for Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), which received $39.5 billion in war-related contracts. Dick Cheney was the chairman and CEO of former KBR parent company Halliburton until he became George W. Bush’s vice president in 2001.
“While I was there, I started hearing things like KBR gets $100 for a bag of laundry, KBR gets $100 for a plate of food, $6 for a can of soda, all these inflated expenses. And they weren’t keeping their promises of getting the infrastructure back up and running,” McNichol said.
Like McNichol, some veterans of the Afghanistan War report they feel as if they broke a promise to Afghans when U.S. troops withdrew from the country. Meanwhile, when McNichol returned home, he found the Department of Veterans Affairs inundated and unprepared to help returning soldiers.
McNichol worries about the lack of affordable housing and pollution in Lansing’s water sources. For years, the city has given tax cuts and subsidies to General Motors (GM), which polluted Lansing’s groundwater with dioxane, an industrial chemical that GM uses to clean oil off car parts. The pollution was discovered after the Revitalizing Auto Communities Environmental Response Trust was established by the federal government to take over the GM sites following the company’s bankruptcy in 2009. Earlier this year, GM announced it would invest $7 billion in manufacturing sites across Michigan. In Lansing, GM would partner with LG Energy Solution to spend $2.6 billion to build a new battery cell plant in Lansing and offer 1,700 new jobs to the area.
However, McNichol is wary about the long-term impact. “These toxins from the GM plans are still not cleaned up. They have no plans. The politicians in Lansing don’t care. They just want GM to come back again,” McNichol said.
Independent voters Truthout interviewed described a “rigged electoral system.” Despite the growing numbers of independents and third-party voters from diverse demographic and ideological groups, these voters face hurdles at the ballot box. Twenty-three U.S. states — including the battleground states of Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania — have closed presidential primaries. Fifteen states, including Florida and Pennsylvania, have closed congressional and state primaries. Thirty states — including Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania — require voters to declare a party affiliation upon registration. Those registered as independents are thus excluded from the two major parties’ closed primary elections, which, according to data from Ballotpedia, determines 35 percent of state legislative elections. In 11 states, more than half of all state legislative seats did not have major party competition in 2020. Registering with the two major parties often dictates the drawing of electoral districts, and poll workers are often only chosen from voters who register with the two major parties.
Advocacy groups such as Independent Voting and Open Primaries Education Fund want to see voter registration without party affiliation, nonpartisan primary elections and a restructuring of the Federal Election Commission to ensure nonpartisan election operations. According to the National League of Cities, 73 percent of the largest cities in the country already hold nonpartisan municipal elections.
“Independents began to see that the control of the electoral process by the two parties was fused with the larger economic and social circumstances in the country,” said Jacqueline Salit, president of IndependentVoting.org. “They began to feel that this was a country being run by a set of insiders, that the insiders had control over the political apparatus, and that unless and until we could change and transform the political apparatus, we weren’t going to be able to address issues of economic instability.”
Beyond open primaries, those interviewed support electoral reform measures, such as independent redistricting and having the top two or top four winners from primary elections compete in general elections. California, Washington State, Alaska, Nebraska and Louisiana already have such a system. Others support ranked choice voting, already adopted in 23 jurisdictions.
In Florida, for all the mainstream media talk of Latinos shifting their loyalties to the Republican Party after Trump made gains among Latino voters in Arizona, Texas and Florida in 2020, the data on independents present a less certain picture. According to the Florida Department of State’s October 2020 voter registration records, 36.5 percent of Latinos in the state registered as a third-party member or unaffiliated, behind Democrats and well ahead of Republicans. Data from earlier this year show independents now make up 28.7 percent of all registered voters statewide. If this trend continues, the state’s independent and third-party voters will exceed Republicans and Democrats by 2035.
Jose Torres, who is 65 years old, identifies as Hispanic, and lives in Jacksonville, Florida, begrudgingly voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Andrew Gillum for governor in 2018 and Biden for president in 2020. Torres describes himself as economically conservative and socially liberal. He identifies as an independent and advocates for open primary elections in Florida because he is tired of having to vote for the “lesser of two evils.”
“The Democrats have taken Hispanic voters for granted for 20 years. We are not monolithic,” Torres told Truthout.
Torres says that Republicans were able to use anti-communist rhetoric to make gains among Cubans in South Florida. Even though he doesn’t buy into this rhetoric, Torres says that the Democratic Party has also failed to address issues of concern to him: high prescription drug prices, stagnant state minimum wages and climate change, citing rising sea levels that threaten to immerse parts of Miami two feet underwater within the next 40 years.
Young first-generation Latino-American voters have even less affiliation to either of the major parties. According to the Open Primaries Education Fund report, 60 percent of Latinos in the U.S. are under the age of 35 and over 50 percent of Latino millennials are independents.
Dariel Cruz Rodriguez, currently a 17-year-old senior at Colonial High School in Orlando, Florida, will vote for the first time this year. Rodriguez identifies as an independent. He said he will probably vote for Democrats this year, because of the state’s Republican-dominated legislature’s efforts to restrict voting rights, but he is also frustrated with the Democrats and the Biden administration.
“I supported Joe Biden, mainly because I wanted to get the other guy out. But Biden made a lot of promises on the campaign trail, and failed to follow through with a lot of them, especially on student loan forgiveness, which is really important to me and a lot of my other classmates,” Rodriguez told Truthout.
Besides student loan forgiveness, Rodriguez wants to see the government address climate change and improve public transit. He also opposes Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which recently passed the State House Legislature.
“Politicians are using Florida’s children and students as playing cards in the state legislature,” Rodriguez said.
Originally from the city of Ludowici in southern Georgia, Ron Dumas, a 23-year-old Black man, is currently finishing up his bachelor’s degree at the University of North Carolina in Asheville. He is majoring in ethics because, as he states, “I care about what is right.”
Dumas describes his hometown in Georgia as lacking in educational opportunities and job mobility: “I always say that there’s just a gas station and a high school in Ludowici.” Ludowici, with a population of 2,442, according to 2020 census figures, is 56 percent white and 36 percent African American, and votes largely conservative. Dumas says the Democrats “abandoned the community when they believed they couldn’t compete for the vote.”
Dumas’s mom is a medical assistant and his stepfather a veteran and truck driver. He recalls being 9 years old when his mom allowed him to stay up late to watch Barack Obama’s 2008 inauguration ceremony. It was the first time his parents had ever voted — his mom told him she didn’t vote in 2004 because “it would not have mattered.”
Dumas voted for the first time in 2020, supporting Bernie Sanders in the primaries. He noted that there was less excitement among his peers when Biden had become the Democratic nominee.
Dumas’s and Rodriguez’s sentiments echo the findings of a September 2020 survey conducted by Politico among Gen Z voters. Almost half of the Gen Z respondents reported they voted more against Trump, rather than for Biden. Forty-two percent of the poll’s Gen Z respondents identify as independent, 39 percent as Democrats and 20 percent as Republican.
“There is a consensus that people are tired of polarization and tired of the sort of politics where you’re always voting against something and never for something,” Dumas said. He wants to see Biden follow through with his promises on voting rights legislation, affordable health care, affordable child care, affordable housing and passing the Build Back Better plan.
While on the campaign trail, Biden ignited backlash and had to apologize to Black voters when he said, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me, or Trump, then you ain’t Black.” But more than a quarter of Black voters registered as independent and may be looking for an alternative to both major parties. Since last April, the president’s approval rating has declined from 83 percent to 64 percent among Black voters.
Like Dumas, Jarrell Corley, a 35-year-old Black man, emphasizes that Black voters are not a monolith and that there are more than two sides to an issue.
Corley identifies as an independent because he says he is tired of seeing nothing change for the Black community under Republican or Democratic administrations. He voted for Clinton in 2016, but did not vote in the 2020 presidential election, saying, “There was no point in voting. I didn’t have a dog in the fight.”
Corley is originally from Chicago. He cites that in most urban centers with large Black populations, local governments are dominated by the Democrats, but conditions, including displacement and police brutality, are getting worse.
“The only reason Black people don’t feel comfortable voting for Republicans is because the Democrats are a mouthpiece for the issues of Black people. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything is getting done,” Corley told Truthout. “If you look into all these major cities run by Democrats, what’s going on? Gentrification. They’re displacing poor, marginalized groups of people for new high economic development. So you may talk about progress and police brutality and all these issues, but what are you really doing? It’s all a facade. Using Black tragedy as a means to galvanize power.”
At the University of Wisconsin (UW) in Madison, Sam Clayton, a 21-year-old white student, studies horticulture. Clayton is nonbinary, using they/them pronouns, and is the treasurer of the campus’s chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America. Clayton recently led the UW-Madison local chapter to work with other organizations to stop a city attempt to shut down homeless encampments in Madison’s Reindahl Park and instead helped push the city to use federal COVID relief money to construct shelters there instead.
Clayton said they voted for Biden in 2020 out of “duress” and with “no excitement,” and has not seen any improvement in their material conditions.
Millennials were reported to be the first generation to do worse economically than their parents, a trend that has continued for Gen Z as housing and college costs soar. Clayton describes how their parents paid off college expenses and bought their first home by the time they were in their 20s. “It’s generally hard for young people to imagine a good future. And the Democrats don’t inspire much confidence in anything other than the status quo,” Clayton said. “The Democrats rely on this assumption that because they’re using progressive language, that’ll translate into youth voters. But more and more people that I talk to, even folks who are not politically inclined, don’t like what’s going on. The phrase ‘settled’ encompasses how people feel about voting for Democrats.”
While Politico reported that young voters are less likely than registered voters of all other age groups to consider voting impactful, they are just as likely to believe they can affect politics and political affairs. Young voters are more likely to support protests than older voters. Millennial and Gen Z voters interviewed for this article expressed a distrust of the government to address the country’s problems, and believe they must rely on their communities instead.
Clayton is worried about rising temperatures, housing prices, utility bills and student loans. As a nonbinary person, they do not feel they would be safe under a Republican administration, but believes that the Democrats may lose in 2022 and even in 2024 because young people are not relying on the electoral system to affect change.
“I think the Democrats have done a very good job of turning young people off from voting because they haven’t done much for us,” said Clayton. “But there is an increase in people’s political militancy and political agitation in terms of protesting, not necessarily just at the ballot box.”
In Pennsylvania, which holds closed presidential, congressional and state primaries, several bills to open up primary elections have stalled in the state government. According to January 2022 voter registration data from the Pennsylvania Department of State, 14.8 percent of voters registered as unaffiliated or “other.”
Third-party or independent candidates lack access to voter rolls and funding that the two major parties have. Furthermore, they often face legal challenges from the two parties who fear a third-party candidate will draw voters away from them or “spoil” their race.
Matt Nemeth, a 27-year-old white man and chair of the Green Party Allegheny chapter in Pennsylvania, regrets his vote for Clinton in 2016 and expresses frustration with the argument that their members are “spoiling” the vote, as both Clinton and Trump “serve private interests.”
Nemeth’s parents voted for Trump twice because he promised to bring manufacturing jobs back to Pennsylvania. Nemeth, on the other hand, says that manufacturing jobs should not come at the cost of corporate accountability and clean air, a promise he believes that both Democrats and Republicans have not delivered on.
Last year, U.S. Steel canceled plans for a $1.5 billion upgrade to bring three plants in Pennsylvania’s Monongahela Valley up to health department regulations. The regulations were implemented after two fires erupted, releasing benzene and hydrogen sulfide into the air and causing asthma-related emergency visits among residents. While the plants currently remain idle, U.S. Steel is challenging the Allegheny Health Department’s regulations.
“Both parties made promises that they don’t want to keep or can’t keep, and then every four years, we switch to another party, and the cycle repeats,” Nemeth told Truthout.
If the voices of this growing group of independents and third-party voters are excluded or unheeded, it could spell further volatility in our elections in the coming years.
In Chattanooga, Tennessee, independent Amber Hysell, a 37-year-old white woman, is making another bid for a seat in the state’s 3rd Congressional District. Hysell is a working mom still paying off student loans for a college accounting degree she was unable to finish when her financial aid ran out with only two classes left to take. For much of her adult life, she worked graveyard shifts in service and retail jobs so that she could have time to spend with her child during the day.
Fed up with issues of concern to her being overlooked — wealth inequality, child care, health care, underfunded schools and affordable housing — Hysell decided to run for Congress. When she was courted by the Hamilton County Democrats in 2020, she was given a Democratic strategy book from the 1970s.
“The way they described how a campaign is supposed to work, it made me feel like they didn’t realize they were in Tennessee, that they were just incredibly out of touch with the problems in this district and in this state. It really did not seem to me to have an actual plan or the actual desire to win down here,” Hysell told Truthout.
As an independent, Hysell doesn’t automatically get access to voter contact information or funding sources as candidates from the two major parties do. But when asked why she was bothering to run when there were so many hurdles, Hysell replies: “Life is going to be difficult for the next generation. We’re not addressing climate change. We’re not addressing inequality in any meaningful way. Republicans and Democrats are two sides of the same coin and neither one of them is paying the bills. They have created a system that blockades anyone who doesn’t fall on one side or the other. And the best thing that I can do for my kid is do whatever I can to change that outcome.”
Ralph invites his old friend, “The Black Eagle” activist and radio host Joe Madison, to discuss the hunger strike he endured to advocate for the recent voting rights bill and what the Democrats need to do to finally get the job done. Then, Richard Winger, publisher of “Ballot Access News” updates us on the fight to break the stranglehold the two major parties have on our elections by restricting access to a candidate’s ability to get on a ballot. Plus, Ralph answers a listener question.
This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.
The Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices voted 3-2 today to subpoena the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) for information about its provision of sophisticated campaign software to its legislative members.
The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) filed a complaint with the Ethics Commission last July alleging that ALEC’s gift of valuable voter management software, developed by Republican operatives and linked to the Republican National Committee’s voter database, constituted an illegal and unreported in-kind campaign contribution.
Washington, D.C.: The Difficulties of Firing Police Officers
A group of hackers attacked the Metropolitan Police Department in 2021, leaking 250 gigabytes of data and confidential files.
Buried in tens of thousands of records, Reveal reporter Dhruv Mehrotra found a disturbing pattern. Records of disciplinary decisions showed that an internal panel of high-ranking officers kept some troubled officers on the force – even after department investigators substantiated allegations of criminal misconduct and recommended they be fired.
Aurora, Colorado: ‘Excited Delirium’ and Ketamine in Police Confrontations
When Elijah McClain was stopped by police in Aurora, Colorado, in 2019, he was injected with a powerful sedative, ketamine, and died after suffering cardiac arrest. His death sparked widespread protests.
KUNC reporters Michael de Yoanna and Rae Solomon covered McClain’s case, and it made them wonder how often paramedics and law enforcement use ketamine and why. What they found led to real change.
St. Louis: The History of Prisoner Disenfranchisement Laws in Missouri
Prisoner disenfranchisement laws have been on the books since the founding of our nation and disproportionately affect voters of color.
Reveal Investigative Fellow and St. Louis Public Radio journalist Andrea Henderson reports from Missouri, where about 63,000 formerly incarcerated people could not vote in the last presidential election. She speaks to a community activist who credits getting his right to vote restored as the start of putting him on his current path.
When Republicans blocked the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act on January 19, 2022, they removed the last safety net preventing the U.S.’s plummet toward authoritarianism. As a result, we are at this moment in a state of free-fall, the culmination of a state-level Legislative And Enforcement Landscape that directly mirrors Jim Crow — or as fascism scholar Jason Stanley recently put it, “America is now in fascism’s legal phase.” Although we do have ways of fighting back, the situation is dire.
The elected president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro (Libertad y Refundación, Libre), denounced this Sunday, outside the National Congress, that a dictatorship is trying to hijack the Legislative Branch in a bid not to respond to the popular mandate.
Hundreds of people continue to mobilize in the vicinity of the Parliament in defense of democracy and respect for the popular vote.
The US media is the most sophisticated propaganda apparatus that history has ever known, with the incredible ability to make a broad base of unexamined premises and consents widely accepted. Democracy is reduced to the process of electing representatives despite wide knowledge of the fact that the rich control the outcomes and those outcomes are invariably antithetical to the interest of working-class people, especially working class Brown and Black people.
A New York City law granting more than 800,000 lawful permanent residents the right to vote in local elections took effect Sunday after the recently elected mayor, Democrat Eric Adams, declined to veto it.
The New York City Council had voted 33-14—with two abstentions—for the measure to allow noncitizens who have resided in the city for at least 30 days to vote for mayor, council members, and other municipal offices beginning next year.
In a social media post on Wednesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) expressed openness to the idea that people should be temporarily banned from voting if they recently relocated from a Democratic-leaning state to a Republican-run one.
In her tweet, Greene shared a statement from Pedro Gonzalez, an associate editor for the right-wing Chronicles Magazine, who said that he “actively” supports “discriminating against transplants” who come from Democratic-leaning states.
“They shouldn’t be able to vote for a period, and they should have to pay a tax for their sins” of being from a liberal state, Gonzalez explained.
Greene endorsed the idea and added her own commentary.
“After Democrat voters and big donors ruin a state like California, you would think it wise to stop them from doing it to another great state like Florida,” Greene said. “Brainwashed people that move from CA and NY really need a cooling off period.”
All possible in a National Divorce scenario. After Democrat voters and big donors ruin a state like California, you would think it wise to stop them from doing it to another great state like Florida. Brainwashed people that move from CA and NY really need a cooling off period. https://t.co/NB2dVj7n2X
Greene said the idea would be especially possible “in a National Divorce scenario.” Although she didn’t elaborate on what that meant, her statement seemed to suggest that she was considering the possibility of Republican-led states seceding from the country.
Of course, Greene has been more than willing to accept campaign contributions from out of state, including from the states she derided in her tweet. Greene “has raised $179K from CA donors in the current cycle, the most of any state, per FEC,” said Seema Mehta, a political writer for the Los Angeles Times.
The Georgia congresswoman’s comments were widely disparaged on Twitter, including by lawmakers from the states she was criticizing.
“They will take your right to vote if you don’t agree with them,” the congressman said, adding that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) is “fully behind” Greene’s extremist sentiments.
The authoritarian and anti-democratic viewpoints espoused by Greene are increasingly common within the Republican Party, several historians have noted. If Republicans win in next year’s midterms or in the 2024 presidential race, some experts have warned that their leadership could push the United States toward fascism.
“This is real, this is serious and it’s frightening,” said Brian Clardy, a professor of history at Murray State University. In the next two election cycles, “democracy itself will be on trial,” he added.
Republican state lawmakers are showing no signs of slowing down the “tidal wave of restrictive voting legislation” that ramped up across the country in 2021, according to a new analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice on Tuesday that warns such attacks are set to continue or even escalate in the New Year.
The past year saw an undeniable acceleration of the passage of anti-democratic state laws, the Brennan Center reported Tuesday, with state legislatures enacting more voting restrictions in 2021 than in any year since the organization began tracking such laws in 2011. Nineteen states passed 34 restrictive laws between January 1 and December 7.
The analysis points to several categories of anti-voting restrictions, including laws restricting access to voting by mail, new or expanded voter ID requirements, the criminalization of “ordinary, lawful behavior by election officials” who try to help voters, and laws allowing voter purges.
The Brennan Center also highlighted “a new trend” in which “legislators introduced bills to allow partisan actors to interfere with election processes or even reject election results entirely,” such asArizona’s H.B. 2720, which would empower state legislatures to reject election results and Texas’s S.B. 7, which would allow elected judges to do the same.
Journalist and voting rights expert Ari Berman noted that despite the frenzied race by Republican lawmakers to pass laws they claim are aimed at maintaining “election integrity” — with 440 restrictive voting laws proposed in 2021 — zero states have found any evidence of widespread voter fraud.
Looking ahead to 2022, at least 13 bills have been pre-filed in state legislatures in four states — Arizona, Missouri, New Hampshire, and South Carolina — meaning they’ll receive top priority when the new legislative session begins.
“These early indicators — coupled with the ongoing mobilization around the Big Lie (the same false rhetoric about voter fraud that drove this year’s unprecedented wave of vote suppression bills) — suggest that efforts to restrict and undermine the vote will continue to be a serious threat in 2022,” reported the Brennan Center.
Dozens of what the report called “carryover bills” — which have not reached resolution in 2021 and will be debated next year — focus on restricting voters’ access to mail-in voting. Republicans in Pennsylvania and Kansas aim to shorten deadlines for applying for and delivering mail ballots, while Ohio lawmakers will continue debating whether election workers can assist people who return ballots.
Five carryover bills propose criminal penalties for election officials who mail out unsolicited ballots or for individuals who assist voters — including people with disabilities — with returning mail ballots.
Out of at least 74 pre-filed bills, at least seven also target voting by mail, “including shortening the time period in which a mail ballot may be requested, eliminating Covid-19 as an excuse for voting by mail, and expanding the grounds on which an absentee ballot can be rejected.” In at least five states, six bills that have been pre-filed for 2022 aim to establish “illegitimate partisan review boards of election results,” the group reported.
South Carolina’s H.B. 4550, for example, would amend the state’s code of laws “to create a joint committee to be known as the ‘Restore Election Integrity Now’ (REIN) Committee,” which would be empowered to review election security, the accuracy of the election process, and other aspects of voting.
“These reviews have typically been designed to set the stage for future efforts to suppress votes and subvert election outcomes,” said the Brennan Center, noting that four of the six pre-filed bills focus on continuing “questionable and politically motivated reviews of the 2020 election results” like those that were initiated in six states in 2021, while two would set up review boards for future elections.
Both are part of “a disturbing legislative trend,” said the organization, in which “partisan state legislators have empowered other partisan actors who are not part of the election administration process to access and review ballots and other materials.”
The Brennan Center identified several states—including Arizona, Texas, Michigan, Missouri, and Pennsylvania—as “key states to watch” in the coming year, noting that their legislatures have already passed several restrictive bills and are set to try to enact even more.
In Texas,S.B. 1,one of the country’s harshest anti-voting laws which “makes it harder for voters with disabilities and language access barriers to obtain assistance, constrains election workers’ ability to stop harassment by poll watchers, and bans 24-hour and drive-thru voting, among other measures,” landed the state on the list of key states.
Michigan was also identified as a hotspot for voter suppression in 2022, with anti-voting rights activists organizing a ballot initiative that wouldimpose new requirementson voters such as including the last four digits of their Social Security number on their voter registration or absentee ballot applications.
“There are solutions to this alarming and unprecedented attack on our democracy,” noted the Brennan Center. “Congress has the power to take bold action now to protect American voters from the kinds of restrictions enacted this year and the looming threats to voters and elections that may be imposed in 2022 and beyond.”
More than a third of all restrictive voting laws enacted in the last decade were passed in 2021. These attacks on voting rights will continue in 2022. The Senate must protect our democracy by passing the #FreedomToVoteAct and #JohnLewisVotingRightsAct. https://t.co/4eugYj6pt1
The organization urged the Senate to pass theFreedom to Vote Actand theJohn Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act,both of which have been passed by the House but remain stalled in the Senate due to the filibuster and the Democrats’ razor-thin majority.
“These attacks on voting rights will continue in 2022,” tweeted the group. “The Senate must protect our democracy.”
Despite Washington’s best effort to derail Nicaragua’s electoral process through hybrid warfare, strong voter turnout resulted in a decisive victory by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), and the reelection of President Daniel Ortega with 75.92% of the votes cast. Nicaragua’s non-partisan, independent Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) reported on Monday, November 8th that 65.23% of 4.4 million eligible voters (16 years and older) participated in Sunday’s election. Supporters attribute the FSLN’s success to its ability to ensure peace and achieve socioeconomic & political objectives that strengthen the wellbeing of the people of Nicaragua.
This markedly contrasts the widespread neglect and corruption endemic under Nicaragua’s U.S. supported neoliberal period from 1990-2007. It is precisely President Ortega and the Sandinista administration’s showing of evidence-based democracy that threatens the U.S., for Washington in comparison has become unabashedly authoritarian in its futile attempt to maintain its Hollywood-styled democratic image both domestically & abroad.
Last year after George Floyd’s murder, community organizers spurred a national conversation on the role of policing and public safety. The collective outrage and sustained protests led to democracy in action. In Tuesday’s election, Minneapolis voters have a chance to change the way the city handles public safety. Organizers like Miski Noor want voters to embrace the opportunity to change how the city deals with public safety and vote in favor of the public safety amendment known as Question 2.
State-level advocates are at the front lines of multiple intersecting battles in the larger quest to protect democracy. Often covered as separate and distinct considerations, the systematic attack on voting rights and abortion access are connected to the ongoing program of eroding constitutionally protected freedom and rights afforded to all individuals.
“When we think about voting rights and reproductive rights, we have to look no further than Texas,” said Jennifer Driver, senior director of reproductive rights at the State Innovation Exchange (SiX), a national resource center that aims to support state legislators in passing transformative policy.
Driver added: “It is no mere coincidence that the same week that Texas implemented SB-8 [Senate Bill 8, which bars all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy], they also pass an extremely problematic anti-voter bill. And what we know is that voting is an accountability measure. We vote for politicians who are going to represent our best interests.”
The intersection of these issues demonstrates the importance of protecting civil liberties and human rights to uphold democracy. Democracy is not a fixed point, but more of a practice that requires deliberate efforts to maintain.
And part of that practice and effort involves showing up for the people and issues that matter to our communities. Through its Reproductive Freedom Leadership Council, the State Innovation Exchange pulled together hundreds of legislators to join an amicus brief supporting legal abortion in the upcoming Supreme Court Case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
The State Innovation Exchange “organized the largest state legislator amicus briefs submitted to an abortion case in this country’s history,” Driver told Truthout. “Nearly 900 state legislators sign on to say to the court, ‘We want you to uphold the fundamental rights to abortion’.”
Driver says working with state legislators is really critical in elevating the connection between voting rights and reproductive rights.
The State Innovation Exchange “has been working both with legislators who are actively trying to protect abortion rights in their states and also the right to vote and push back against the redistricting that’s happening in states across the country,” Driver said.
In places like Ohio, partisan gerrymandering has paved the way for aggressive abortion restrictions. The Ohio Capital Journal describes the result of this gerrymandering as changing the landscape to benefit conservatives and pave the way for anti-abortion legislation to pass.
Aileen Day, communications director for Planned Parenthood of Ohio, described the issue as both simple and complicated at the same time.
“A majority of Ohioans believe abortion should be legal and accessible,” Day said. “Despite this, the Ohio Legislature is majority anti-abortion. This is possible because we don’t pick our legislatures. Gerrymandering allows our legislatures to pick us and give themselves disproportionate power.”
Day spoke with Truthout while en route to a protest of an Ohio Senate hearing on a trigger ban, which outlaws abortion in the event Roe v. Wade is struck down. Last month, the Ohio Senate moved forward a bill that does just that.
An October 2020 poll showed over 50 percent of Ohio voters believe abortion should be legal, while only 38 percent thought it should be illegal all or most of the time. Data published in July 2019 showed strong support for abortion despite the pre-viability ban proposed in the legislature.
“With more Republicans in our legislatures, that means more bills restricting and banning reproductive health care get signed into law, but with the addition of more extreme conservatives in our legislature, that means extreme bills banning reproductive health care get signed into law,” Day said.
Day shared that partisan gerrymandering contributed to more Republicans in the legislature and the restrictive approach paved the way for extreme ideologues to join the ranks. According to Day, there have been 30 anti-abortion and anti-reproductive health care bans and restrictions in Ohio in the past 10 years.
Those restrictions include state-mandated counseling and a 24-hour waiting period, forcing people seeking an abortion travel to a clinic twice. This can be burdensome for those who live in communities without a clinic. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 93 percent of Ohio counties did not have an abortion clinic in 2017, accounting for 55 percent of women age 15-44 in the state.
Day said the new Ohio district map gives Republicans over two-thirds of the legislative seats despite only winning 55 percent of the vote share in 2020. The ACLU of Ohio, the League of Women Voters of Ohio and the A. Phillip Randolph Institute sued last month challenging the new map.
“Redistricting should not be a one-sided, rigged political process. Voters should pick their politicians,” Alora Thomas-Lundborg, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said in a statement. “Politicians should not pick their voters.”
Litigation is often a last resort in ensuring values of fundamental fairness and constitutional protections are upheld. And as states like Mississippi, Kentucky and Georgia are awaiting the outcome of federal appeals processes, including Supreme Court decisions, organizers continue to move forward.
In 2019, the Georgia Legislature passed a sweeping elections bill, including an overhaul of the voting machines, and a six-week abortion ban. Both were fiercely fought by reproductive health advocates arguing Georgia’s six-week abortion ban is pending at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and is on hold until Dobbs is decided by the Supreme Court.
“Conservative Republicans don’t give a sh*t about reproductive choice and reproductive rights,” Nse Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project and the New Georgia Project Action Fund said. “It’s a part of the culture wars. And they know that they can use it to drive up turnout among evangelicals who make up a significant portion of their base.”
Manipulation of maps, and legislators picking their constituencies instead of the other way around keeps states locked in a regressive posture. As both Day and Ufot explained, communities of color are grouped in ways that limit their power and undermines the ability to shift legislative control.
“The only way for them to hold on to power is to take a sledgehammer to our election,” Ufot told Truthout. “That way they keep people on their toes, keep people fighting for their dignity and their humanity — things that they already have, which are already ensconced and enshrined in the Bill of Rights and in our Constitution.”
As a part of the Amplify Georgia campaign, which aims to expand and protect abortion access in the Peach State, the New Georgia Project co-produced a Georgia Reproductive Justice Voter Toolkit helping voters find candidates committed to helping communities not only survive but thrive.
Efforts like voter toolkits are important to cut through the deep misinformation used to whip right-wing voters into a frenzy. From claims of stolen elections to fabrications about gestational staging in abortion and claims of fetal pain with no basis in science, there is no waiting for magical federal or court intervention.
“We are talking about government and nation destabilizing disinformation campaigns,” Ufot said. “We’re talking about major fundamental, world-changing, world-threatening democracy and attacks on our elections.”
Paraphrasing the late Toni Morrison, Ufot says that white supremacy functions as a distraction to keep us from doing our work and shifting society forward in a way that uplifts people across the board instead of simply enriching a select few. Policies that permit people to exercise their rights and protect their personal well-being are determined by the people who hold seats of power.
When focused on maintaining partisan power, instead of fair representation of people and their interests, redistricting can enshrine power and tyranny of the few. Collective organizing of groups like the New Georgia Project, state Planned Parenthood staff and the State Innovation Exchange can provide a stopgap where federal intervention is delayed.
“We are seeing how conservative legislators at the state level have had this playbook for a very long time,” Driver said. She explained that people have relied on the federal system, whether the courts or Congress, to protect rights, but the worst attacks are happening at the state level. “We are reminding people of the power of the state legislature,” Driver concluded.
People in prison often begin their life in marginalized communities where their families’ right to vote has historically been suppressed. Today, voter suppression of those communities is again on the rise. The fact that people are actively trying to legislate additional hindrances to already marginalized communities’ right to vote highlights the need to ensure the right to vote for all of these communities’ members — even if they are in prison.
This is especially true because, once convicted, their imprisonment further marginalizes them from society. In Illinois, where I’m incarcerated, everyone in prison is completely stripped of their right to vote until release. (For the thousands of people sentenced to die in Illinois prisons, this is a lifetime denial of the right to vote.)
As someone who has been sitting in prison for the last two decades, I know the full effects of being disenfranchised. It leaves us vulnerable to a voting public that has almost zero concern for our welfare, and deprives us of both a voice in society and what could be a powerful tool to facilitate our return to useful citizenship.
Fortunately, the organization Chicago Votes has been working to pass Senate Bill 828 in partnership with State Representative Lashawn Ford. If passed, this bill will restore voting rights to the roughly 30,000 individuals incarcerated in Illinois prisons, including me. After nearly passing in the final days of the 2021 regular legislative session with 64 “yes” commitments in the House of Representatives, confusion over the bill’s constitutionality stalled its passage. Since then, Chicago Votes and advocates have worked to address misbeliefs around the bill’s constitutionality. Now, the bill is poised to move during the fall veto session, which would make Illinois the first state in the United States to restore voting rights to people in prison.
Those of us in prison are severely affected by our inability to vote. First, judges in Illinois are elected. For decades, getting elected required promising to be, or proving they were, “tough-on-crime” — meaning they would, or were, handing out overly harsh prison sentences. Those judges never had to worry about the victims of those harsh sentences voting against them in the next election, because prisoners do not have the right to vote.
This continues today and affects all of one’s appeals and resentencing hearings. Moreover, the inability to vote means we can’t vote for fair-minded judges who will protect our rights in civil court, nor vote against judges who openly discriminate against petitions filed by people in prison.
Second, most legislators don’t view anyone in prison as their constituents simply because they can’t vote. This is true whether they were a constituent prior to incarceration or whether the prison is in their district. If legislators don’t need to court the votes of people in prison, it ensures they are unlikely to take their concerns or viewpoints into consideration when passing legislation.
That simple fact greatly contributed to the passing of tougher and tougher sentencing guidelines, and also ensures that today’s “reforms” of those extreme sentencing laws won’t help the currently incarcerated.
Thus, for numerous reasons the disenfranchisement of people in prison helps to ensure that they serve more time in prison. This does not serve any true penological or public safety goal. Rather, it largely just serves to benefit the personal political careers of judges and legislators, many of whom have already retired. Therefore, those in prison have a serious liberty interest in obtaining the right to vote.
The fact that people in prison can’t vote for state legislators also leaves them extremely vulnerable to abuse by the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC). Legislators constantly cater to the guards’ union because they are a powerful voting bloc. This allows them to get legislation passed that is beneficial to prison guards, but detrimental to those of us in prison. This has negatively affected everything from our right to access public records, to our ability to peacefully protest inhumane living conditions via hunger strikes.
We are also captive consumers at the “mercy” of monopolistic companies that routinely engage in price-gouging and other anti-competitive business practices — all to the detriment of the incarcerated. Additionally, the IDOC adds unnecessary, and unjust surcharges, or increases prices by demanding kickbacks or “commissions.” This too is at our expense.
Without the right to vote, this is effectively “taxation without representation.” Thus, people confined to the IDOC were not only exploited by yesterday’s “tough-on-crime” politicians and ignored by today’s “reformers,” but are continuously exploited financially throughout our incarceration.
People in prison are also largely prohibited from earning a living wage, and are often forced to work for pennies per day with no days off for months on end in unsafe working conditions.
Being disenfranchised means we cannot vote for legislators who will look out for our interests — who will pass laws to stop our exploitation, require a living wage for prison labor, ensure we receive adequate medical care, have access to educational programming, and more.
Society has this misconception that people in prison are “anti-social” or hell-bent on destroying society and should therefore not be allowed to vote so they can’t “poison the system.” Nothing could be further from the truth, though. Don’t get me wrong; society’s constant efforts to marginalize, ostracize, oppress and discriminate against the incarcerated definitely doesn’t help engender strong ties to society; but despite all of that, ties to the community usually remain.
That’s because no matter how much society dehumanizes us, we remain just that — human. We are human beings with families and friends out in free society that we care deeply about. I myself am a son, father and grandfather. My right to vote, if restored to me, would be exercised primarily in support of my family’s safety and economic well-being.
My vote for candidates would also probably be much more informed than the average citizen’s, due to the fact that I have the time to research both the candidates and their stances on the issues. Moreover, I have the time to get a real understanding of the issues and not just vote along party lines or for someone who spouts the best misleading rhetoric.
People in prison also have a ton of experiential knowledge that can be used to help heal societal ills. We not only have firsthand knowledge about injustices embedded in our legal system, but we also have firsthand experience with oppression and being at the “mercy” of unaccountable agents of the state. For many people who come to prison, this makes us acutely aware of the injustices other people suffer and allows us to relate with empathy.
This is a significant factor not only in why people personally impacted by mass incarceration are at the forefront of the movement to decarcerate, but also why people who leave prison often get involved in working for nonprofits, become “violence interrupters,” fight against racial discrimination, corruption, and more.
Denying someone the right to vote is an extremely dehumanizing act. Rather than further ostracizing people in prison — the majority of whom will return to their communities someday — society should work to increase people’s attachments to society.
Restoring people’s right to vote while in prison would go a long way toward engendering feelings of belonging to society. This would both make it more likely that the incarcerated would work towards the betterment of society, and increase the likelihood that they will be “returned to useful citizenship,” as our state constitution insinuates should be the goal.
The right to vote should be available to everyone, incarcerated or not.
Yes 4 Minneapolis is working to amend the Minneapolis City Charter by removing a mandate for a mayor-controlled police department with a certain number of officers per resident (0.0017, to be exact). In its place, the amendment establishes a Department of Public Safety under the joint control of the mayor and the 13-member Minneapolis City Council. The radical restructuring would allow for future revisions. The new department could be led by a civilian and could easily redirect funds from armed officers to alternative responders, such as social workers. It would also be subject to more democratic control: the City Council represents a more diverse constituency than the mayor, who is primarily elected by wealthier, whiter parts of the city.
On Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed a bill into law that will ensure registered voters are automatically mailed a ballot whether they request one or not, legislation that will make voting in the state far more accessible.
California now joins a small handful of states, including Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah, that send ballots to voters automatically. However, if Golden State voters wish to cast their vote in person, they’re still able to do so under the new law.
Some lauded the policy change as one that should be implemented in other parts of the country as well.
“Vote by mail allows everyone equal access to our democracy,” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California) wrote on Twitter. “Time to take it nationwide!”
The chances of a similar policy being implemented in other states are low, however — Republicans have generally been against such moves, falsely claiming that the practice is linked to higher instances of voter fraud, and that expanding access to voting by mail only benefits Democrats.
Both ideas have been refuted by several studies.
“There is no evidence that mail balloting increases electoral fraud as there are several anti-fraud protections built into the process designed to make it difficult to impersonate voters or steal ballots,” the Brookings Institute noted last summer, citing research from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
A Stanford University study also looked at the impact of universal voting by mail procedures and found that the policy doesn’t give an advantage to either party — in fact, such voting methods produce partisan outcomes that “closely resemble in-person elections,” the study’s authors concluded.
Polling also reveals that the American people want voting by mail expanded, not limited. A Monmouth University poll from June of this year found that 69 percent of voters across the country supported “establishing national guidelines to allow vote by mail and in-person early voting in federal elections in every state,” while just 25 percent opposed the idea. Half of the respondents in the poll (50 percent) also expressed an eagerness to make voting by mail easier, while only 39 percent said it should be harder to do.
For decades, the Christian-right foot soldiers who form the backbone of the Republican Party have regularly and enthusiastically showed up for legislative battles over religious freedom and reproductive and LGBTQ rights. On Sept. 1, they scored one of their biggest victories yet: the Texas Heartbeat Act, which bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and deputizes private citizens to report anyone who helps a woman obtain an abortion.
Six days later, religious conservatives celebrated another critical legislative victory, one that signaled a new frontier in their movement. In the east Texas city of Tyler, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed the Election Integrity Protection Act of 2021, passed in late August after Democrats fled the state in a futile effort to stop it. The new law severely restricts voting access in Texas, with the biggest impact on voters of color; Abbott hailed it as a “good paradigm for other states to follow.” Also in attendance were his lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, and state Sen. Bryan Hughes, key architects of both the voter and abortion bills and heroes to evangelical Christians around the U.S. Patrick is well known to religious-right voters for his opposition to reproductive and LGBTQ rights and promotion of “Christian values.” The mood was jubilant.
The Christian right’s ability to mobilize its own voters has long made it one of the most potent forces in American politics. But this year, evangelical leaders have embraced a new strategy, one with direct roots in the outcome of the 2020 election: Religious activists have taken up the cause of “election integrity,” pushing bills to crack down on voter fraud, even though no evidence of widespread fraud in U.S. elections exists. In the process, they’ve helped restrict ballot access for millions of Americans – the most regressive wave of voting measures since the Jim Crow era – and drawn a direct connection between their new cause and their core religious beliefs.
The goal is to protect the gains made by the Christian right during Donald Trump’s presidency, especially in the federal courts – and to restore the White House and Congress to Republican control. The biggest prize, of course, is the U.S. Supreme Court, where – not coincidentally – all three of Trump’s appointees declined to block the Texas abortion bill from taking effect, signaling their willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade. White evangelicals were Trump’s most loyal supporters in 2020, giving him 84% of their vote, according to the Pew Research Center. Many saw Trump as anointed by God to save America at a critical juncture in its history, and they viewed his loss in cataclysmic terms. A January survey by the American Enterprise Institute found that religious conservatives were far more inclined than other Republicans to believe Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud, as well as wild conspiracy theories about QAnon, antifa and the “deep state.” The fervent evangelical support for Trump during his presidency has now morphed into support for his “big lie” – and for voter suppression bills that are a direct outgrowth of Trump’s continued insistence that the election was stolen from him.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks alongside former President Donald Trump during a June tour to an unfinished section of the U.S.-Mexico border wall in Pharr, Texas. Credit: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Across the country, Christian-right groups that saw their influence bloom during Trump’s presidency have taken up the cause not just in statehouses and fundraising appeals, but also in churches and prayer calls with followers. The Christian voter mobilization group My Faith Votes, for example, has launched an initiative called Election Integrity Now, complete with a prayer guide with seven ways to ask God “to protect America’s elections and deliver trustworthy results.”
“The 2020 elections revealed genuine concerns in the election process that could threaten election integrity and the very foundation of our Constitutional Republic. Yet, even more dangerous than election fraud is that many Christians have lost confidence in the election system,” the group’s CEO, Jason Yates, said in announcing the initiative.
It is also becoming increasingly evident to pollsters, demographers and religious-right leaders themselves that the model first pioneered by the Christian Coalition in the Reagan era – ensuring that religious conservatives registered to vote and turned out in overwhelming numbers on Election Day – isn’t working as well as it used to.
White evangelical Protestants now make up 14% of Americans, down from 23% in 2006, “the most precipitous drop in affiliation” for any religious group, according to the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2020 Religious Landscape Survey. Even though White evangelicals made up 34% of Trump’s voters, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of election data, their support wasn’t sufficient to propel him to reelection. “Without such broad support for Trump among White evangelicals, (Joe) Biden would have beaten him by more than 20 points,” the Pew analysts wrote earlier this year.
Trump’s defeat proves that even massive conservative Christian turnout is no longer enough to win. The strategy White evangelical supporters have coalesced around to supplement it: election laws built on the lie that the other side’s ability to turn outvoters must be “fraudulent.”
The new battlefront opened in Georgia immediately after the 2020 election.
As Trump tried to strong-arm state election officials to throw out the ballots of 11,780 Georgians and declare him the winner of the state’s 16 Electoral College votes, the Family Policy Alliance of Georgia sent a fundraising email to its supporters in December: “Election reform is coming to Georgia, and we are all in!”
Cole Muzio, the group’s executive director, acknowledged that this was new territory for his organization. “As you know, this is not one of our ‘core issues,’ ” he wrote. “However, issues like life, religious freedom, and school choice will never win if the vote is being diluted by radical leftists exploiting the system to cheat.”
Muzio’s organization was affiliated with Focus on the Family, the Christian-right icon known for opposing LGBTQ and reproductive rights. Elsewhere, Muzio acknowledged launching his groupin 2017 after “seeing that our state was rapidly moving ‘blue’ and that the Church had been weakened greatly.”
Throughout Georgia’s runoff campaign, which would determine control of the U.S. Senate, the Family Policy Alliance repeatedly attacked Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock as hostile to Christians, but particularly Warnock, a minister who leads the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once presided.
“Raphael Warnock holds the title of ‘pastor,’ ” the group wrote in one Facebook post. (The group has recently rebranded itself as the Frontline Policy Council.) “Yet, he OPPOSES what God’s Word clearly says about Life. His radical pro-abortion views are disgusting, wrong, anti-science, and anti-Scripture. Quite simply, he’s Unfit for the Pulpit and Unfit for the Senate.” A voter guide titled “Which Candidate Stands Firm on the Word of God?” accused Warnock of being a Marxist, anti-Semitic and anti-Israel – all lies – and attacked his views supporting abortion and transgender rights. Muzio initially agreed to an interview for this story but ultimately didn’t respond to requests to speak.
The Rev. Raphael Warnock attends a canvassing event Jan. 5 in Marietta, Ga. The Democratic Senate candidate won in a runoff election that day, though Christian-right groups had attacked him as hostile to Christians. Credit: Sandy Huffaker/AFP via Getty Images
When Democrats stunned even themselves by winning both seats in the Jan. 5 runoff, Georgia Republicans sprang into action, introducing a slate of bills that would – among other things – eliminate drop-box sites, impose more restrictive rules for absentee ballots and prohibit judges from extending voting hours at precincts experiencing long waits, all under the guise of stopping fraud. Another objective was to defeat Warnock, who is up for reelection in 2022.
The flurry of legislation overtly became about religion and race, pitting White evangelical Republicans against Black church leaders, whose flocks are predominantly Democratic. One provision would have eliminated Sunday voting, a potentially dire blow to get-out-the-vote efforts of Black churches and their “souls to the polls” events that have been at the core of Black voter mobilization for decades.
A national outcryled legislators to nix that provision. But Republican lawmakers ignored the objections of the state’s Black pastors to the bill’s many other restrictive provisions. Black leaders couldn’t even get a meeting with GOP leaders, said the Rev. Timothy McDonald III, senior pastor of the First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta. “They didn’t pay any of us any mind.”
Less than two months after the bill was introduced, Gov. Brian Kemp signed a 98-page law that criminalizes providing water or food to voters standing in line and empowers state officials to replace local election officials – for example, the Democratic registrar of voters in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta – with appointees from their own party. The impact would be greatest for Black voters. “It is How to Steal an Election 101,” McDonald said.
A volunteer passes out pizza to people waiting to vote in October 2020 in Lawrenceville, Ga. Earlier this year, the state passed new voter restrictions that, among other things, criminalizes providing water or food to voters standing in line. Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The ceremonial signing served only to highlight the bill’s racial overtones. It took place behind closed doors, with Kemp flanked by six White male legislators, sitting under a painting of a plantation. When state Rep. Park Cannon, a Black Democrat, knocked on the door to gain entry to the event, she was arrested for obstructing law enforcement and disrupting the General Assembly.
On the Family Policy Alliance website, Muzio denounced “the deranged media” and “Pretend-governor Stacey Abrams” – the Democratic candidate who narrowly lost to Kemp in 2018 – for their “outlandish and inflammatory rhetoric.” He called the claim that the bill is racist “wrong, disingenuous, a form of voter suppression, and, in fact, racist on its face.”
His words signaled a subtle reframing, echoing the Christian right’s perspective on almost every other issue in the culture wars: Progressives were the real over-reachers and evangelical Christians the true victims. The Georgia law didn’t suppress the votes of Democrats and people of color, Muzio was saying; it prevented the votes of religious conservatives from being suppressed.
Even as Black church leaders mobilized to contest the Georgia law in court, conservative groups were gearing up to replicate it in other states.
National Christian-right organizations embraced “election integrity” with fervor. In March, Heritage Action for America, a sister organization of the right-wing policy hub The Heritage Foundation, announced it would pour at least $10 million into lobbying and TV and online ads about the urgent need to “protect the rights of every American to a fair election.” In a video obtained by Mother Jones, a Heritage Action official admitted that the organization drafted the legislation in many states, including Georgia, and helped organize support.
At the same time, evangelical leaders opposed measures that would make it easier to vote. Advocates particularly targeted the For the People Act, which would create nationwide automatic voter registration, restore voting rights of the formerly incarcerated, and expand voting by mail and early voting, while also shoring up the security of election infrastructure. The Phyllis Schlafly Eagles – an offshoot of the group once headed by the late conservative icon best known for helping kill the Equal Rights Amendment – claimed (falsely) that the bill “would enshrine Democrat ballot stuffing into federal law forever.” The Family Research Council called it “a federal power grab that cripples states’ ability to run elections and increases the likelihood of voter fraud” (another lie). Other conservative activists contended that the act’s financial disclosure requirements violated First Amendment protections for religious speech.
In early February, the Family Research Council’s president, Tony Perkins, led a discussion at the influential megachurch Cornerstone Chapel in Virginia with Michael Farris, a longtime conservative activist and now president of the Christian-right legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom.
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins (right) welcomes U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to the Values Voter Summit in Washington in 2018. Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Declaring election integrity “vital for our future,” Farris claimed to have undertaken a “thorough study” of the 2020 election and to have found “constitutional irregularities in many, many states,” particularly in those where the election was close. He claimed the “central problem was the failure to follow the pre-established process in counting the votes” and insisted that if votes had been properly tallied, Trump would have won. Neither Farris nor his organization has ever provided proof of those accusations, and they did not respond to Reveal’s requests for Farris to share them.
The Family Research Council also deployed Kenneth Blackwell, its senior fellow for human rights and constitutional governance, who has long been a central player in the movement to limit access, dating back to his tenure as Ohio secretary of state, when civil rights advocates accused him of suppressing voters of color in the 2004 presidential election and helping Republicans keep the White House. In a March appearance on the video series “Pray Vote Stand,” Blackwell, who is Black, called the For the People Act a “heist” and a “power grab” that would “stifle individual religious liberty and the centrality of God in our lives.” Mostly, Blackwell urged religious voters to stay engaged. “We must claw back the responsibility and the authority of local governments and state legislatures” to control elections or else, he contended, Democrats would create “one-party control much like they have in Cuba, Venezuela and Russia.”
My Faith Votes’ national honorary chairman, talk show host and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, took credit for helping get 9 million new Christian voters to the polls in 2020 and promised, “in 2021, we will be doubling down.” Ralph Reed, chairman of the national Faith & Freedom Coalition, beseeched potential donors: “Though news of the radical left’s scheming is hard to read, remember that – thanks to your support and the support of Christian patriots like you – we still have a chance to save America in the 2022 midterm elections, and we will make the most of it.”
Republican lawmakers did their part to stoke the fires. At the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s national Road to Majority conference in June, for example, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham portrayed Democratic victories in 2022 and 2024 as an existential threat that would lead to statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico and the end of the Electoral College. “Winning in 2022 is the only option available for conservatism,” he said. “We need you to get people out of your churches into that voting booth.”
There were plenty of true believers. A Washington Post-ABC News poll from June found that while only 30% of all respondents favored passing “new laws making it harder for people to vote fraudulently,” 51% of White evangelicals supported such legislation. While 62% of all Americans expressed support for “new laws making it easier for people to vote,” only 43% of White evangelicals did.
By that time, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, 17 states already had enacted 28 new laws suppressing voting rights. And then came Texas.
During this year’s Texas legislative session, it wasn’t the anti-abortion Heartbeat Act that was deemed the greater threat by Texas Democrats, but voter integrity legislation. The abortion bill, targeting not just abortion but anyone helping a woman in the state obtain one, made it through the Legislature relatively unscathed and was signed into law May 19. Republicans’ attempt to pass a voter bill – including criminal penalties on election officials who send unsolicited mail-ballot applications and new powers for partisan poll watchers – required two special legislative sessions, after Democrats ran out the clock on the first bill, then fled the state for a month in protest.
At the first special session in July, many of the demonstrators on the statehouse grounds opposed the voting legislation. But Lori Gallagher of Williamson County, Texas, was there to show her support. The group she co-founded, the Texas Constitutionalists, describes itself as “grassroots conservatives with a mission to educate ourselves and our neighbors to be actively involved in Texas State and County government to secure our vote and restore our representational Republic.” But she saw its mission in starkly religious terms.
“I believe that the divine hand of providence was present when our constitutional and founding documents were formed,” she said. “I believe that’s the divine intersection between voting rights. The people’s voice – that comes from God. Your freedom comes from God. Liberty comes from God.”
Inside the hearing room, with just two minutes to speak, Don Garner, executive director of the Texas Faith & Freedom Coalition, focused more on politics, echoing Christian-right talking points that have become increasingly familiar this year. Election integrity is “foundational to the freedoms we enjoy,” he declared. “Nothing suppresses voting more than the erosion of trust or confidence in the election process itself.”
But Garner’s brief remarks had far less impact than his relationships. For 10 years, he served as the state director and national field director of the Capitol Commission, a network of organizations in state capitols that hosts Bible studies and other events with lawmakers. The goal: “making disciples of Jesus Christ in the Capitol communities of the world,” according to its website. His current organization, formed in March 2020, keeps voters informed “about important issues relevant to faith-based communities” and “supports Biblical principles.”
Republican Sen. Bryan Hughes, an author of the voting restriction and anti-abortion bills, is one of about a dozen Texas state legislators who serve on Garner’s advisory council. In an interview, Garner said Hughes is “a close friend and someone that I work very closely with on all kinds of things.” The House sponsor of the voting bill, Rep. Briscoe Cain, is another close ally. As the legislation was moving, Garner said he talked to Cain or his staff “every couple of days, all session long.” Garner said his coalition’s clout comes from its grassroots volunteers who show up when needed, canvassing 310,000 homes in the last election cycle and planning to hit twice as many next year. Lawmakers know “we’re actually getting out there and knocking on doors.”
Conservative Christian voters, Garner said, have always had concerns about election integrity, but especially so after the 2020 election.
“Obviously, there were a lot of concerns afterwards and among people on the right that maybe there had been improprieties, and certainly, people felt like it at least needed to be investigated,” Garner said. “Because of everything that – the way everything fell out, certainly it raised the level of concern.”
Even as Trump and his evangelical allies basked in their legislative victories in Texas, they used those concerns to promote their future political prospects. In a conference call for Intercessors for America the day after the abortion law took effect, Trump wasted no time in lambasting the Biden administration, saying, without specificity or evidence, that “what they’re doing to Christianity, it’s a very sad, sad thing for our country.”
Robert Morris, pastor of the Gateway megachurch in Dallas, closed the call with a plea: “I pray, Lord, that you will do something … for our election system, that we’ll never have another election stolen from us,” he intoned. “So Lord, whatever we need to do to fix the electoral process, I pray for that, I pray for our country, and I pray for President Trump and his family … in Jesus’ mighty name.”
Freelance journalist Alexandra Villarreal contributed to this story. It was edited by Nina Martin and Andrew Donohue of Reveal and Libby Nelson of Vox. It was copy edited by Nikki Frick of Reveal. Sarah Posner can be reached at sarahposner1@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter: @sarahposner.
Civil rights activists and faith leaders say they are readying a campaign of non-violent civil disobedience against Sen. Joe Manchin for his opposition to voting rights and expansive spending bills backed by Democrats.
Leaders of the Poor People’s Campaign are calling on Manchin to ditch the filibuster so Democrats can pass voting rights legislation and drop his opposition to a $15 minimum wage and $3.5 trillion in new social and climate investment.
All eyes have been on the conservative Democrat as of late, whose vote is key for reaching the 50-vote threshold his party needs to pass legislation as congressional deadlines loom. This has made Manchin, who prides himself as a bipartisan dealmaker, one of the most powerful members of Congress — and a target for protesters in his home state of West Virginia and beyond.
“This is not a game, and it’s time for [Manchin] to stop playing games and decide which side he is on,” said Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, during a press conference with activists from West Virginia on Monday.
Thanks in part to Manchin and other conservative Democrats, the party has failed to use its slim majority in Congress to thwart Republican voter suppression efforts at the state level, which social justice advocates criticize for feeding anti-democratic conspiracy theories and disenfranchising voters of color. While Manchin supports the latest voting rights bill from Senate Democrats, he has refused to support a workaround for the current filibuster rules, leaving Democrats in need of 10 Republican votes that are likely non-existent.
The Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package — which contains new investments in clean energy and “human infrastructure” such as education, child care and health care — may also be in peril. While Democrats can avoid a filibuster through reconciliation, they need a vote from Manchin, who has said that he would only support $1.5 trillion deal. In private discussions, Manchin has reportedly suggested that Democrats should wait until next year to vote on a package that is central to President Biden’s agenda.
Barber said much more than $3.5 trillion in social spending over the next decade is needed (the United States spent about $8 trillion on the war on terror over the past two decades), the civil rights and faith leader reminded reporters that lawmakers are doing much more than simply debating budget numbers. The budget reconciliation package contains proposals to lower the cost of higher education, invest in public schools and health care, provide paid leave for workers and extend an expanded child tax credit, for example.
For the estimated 140 million people in the U.S. who are poor or lower-income, Barber said, these investments are crucial, especially while the federal minimum wage remains frozen at $7.25. However, Manchin has echoed Republicans by balking at the price tag and suggesting that the child tax credit be tied to work requirements, which would punish low-income parents who can’t find work. Studiesshow work requirements are much better at taking benefits away from economically vulnerable people than increasing employment.
“[Manchin] is playing political games and maneuvering, but this is no damn game for poor and low-wealth people in this country and his state,” Barber said.
This week, the Poor People’s Campaign took out full-page ads in West Virginia’s major newspapers. The ads call on Manchin to stand with lower-income residents in one of the nation’s poorest states. Activists in West Virginia are still angry that Manchin proposed only an $11 minimum wage hike and blocked Democrats from raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour with a COVID relief bill earlier this year. In West Virginia, a minimum wage earner must work 68 hours a week to afford a two-bedroom apartment, according to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition.
In June, hundreds of protesters marched on Manchin’s office in Charleston, West Virginia, demanding he reverse his opposition to the For the People Act, a voting rights and elections overhaul bill passed by House Democrats earlier this year. The For the People Act is dead in the Senate, but Manchin threw his support behind the bill’s successor, the Freedom to Vote Act, after facing pressure from protesters and forcing negotiations with fellow Democrats.
Mass rallies for voting rights in late August singled out Manchin, whose refusal to budge on the filibuster has also prevented legislation for revitalizing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 from passing. Manchin also supports that legislation, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, but it appears impossible to pass without changes to filibuster rules that Manchin has so far opposed.
Rev. Liz Theoharis, an organizer with the Poor People’s Campaign in Virginia, compared Manchin’s support for the Freedom to Vote Act to a “photo op.”
“This is a cynical exercise of image polishing as Manchin stands in the way of For the People Act, fully restoring the 1965 Voting Rights Act, ending the filibuster, and raising minimum wage to $15/hour, all of which are widely supported by the people of West Virginia and the nation,” Theoharis said.
Voting rights experts say the Freedom to Vote Act contains some important improvements over the For the People Act, but Barber and other organizers oppose compromise language supported by Manchin on voter I.D. laws. Instead of striking down voter I.D. requirements, which critics say can disenfranchise marginalized voters, the Freedom to Vote Act would expand the types of identification voters can present.
“The language that seems to deem voter I.D. as essential to election integrity and election confidence … that language is codifying the Trump lie” about election fraud, Barber said.
The Poor People’s campaign is currently urging activists to flood Manchin’s office with phone calls demanding the senator change his positions on the filibuster and support Democratic priorities. If Manchin refuses, Barber said activists may organize sit-ins and other forms of civil disobedience but did not give the senator any firm deadlines.
“Our backs are against the wall, and we have no choice but to fight. And we will fight nonviolently, but we will fight,” Barber said.
Still, the reverend remarked that it’s not too late for Manchin to change his mind.
In a brief hearing following a trial last week challenging the state’s voting restrictions upon felons, Superior Court Judge Lisa Bell said two judges on the three-judge panel have agreed they would issue a formal order soon allowing more felony offenders to register. The judges are acting before issuing a final trial ruling, as voting in October municipal elections begins next month.
Zack Beauchamp in VOX of 28 July 2021 makes a strong but perhaps controversial plea that “In the fight for democracy’s future, Indian and American politics is more important than anything China is doing“:
Donald Trump and Narendra Modi.
One of the emerging tenets of the Biden presidency is that the United States and China are locked in ideological conflict over the fate of democracy.
In March, during his first press conference as president, he declared that “this is a battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies.” In April, during his first address to a joint session of Congress, he labeled this struggle “the central challenge of the age” — and that China’s Xi Jinping is “deadly earnest about becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world.”
More recently, in last week’s CNN town hall, he warned that Xi “truly believes that the 21st century will be determined by oligarchs, [that] democracies cannot function in the 21st century. The argument is, because things are moving so rapidly, so, so rapidly that you can’t pull together a nation that is divided to get a consensus on acting quickly.”
Inasmuch as there is a Biden doctrine, the notion that the US needs to protect democracy from China’s authoritarian model is at the center of it. “Biden’s administration [is] framing the contest as a confrontation of values, with America and its democratic allies standing against the model of authoritarian repression that China seeks to impose on the rest of the world,” Yaroslav Trofimov writes in the Wall Street Journal.
Biden’s thinking captures an important insight: that the struggle over democracy’s fate will be one of the defining conflicts of the 21st century. But his analysis is crucially flawed in one respect: China is not an especially important reason why democracy is currently under threat — and centering it is not only wrong, but potentially dangerous.
In countries where democracy is at real risk of collapse or even outright defeated — places like India, Brazil, Hungary, Israel, and, yes, the United States — the real drivers of democratic collapse are domestic. Far-right parties are taking advantage of ethno-religious divides and public distrust in the political establishment to win electorally — and then twist the rules to entrench their own hold on power. Leaders of these factions, like former US President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, aid and abet each other’s anti-democratic politics.
More traditional authoritarian states, even powerful ones like China or Russia, have thus far played at best marginal roles in this struggle.
“Much of the recent global democratic backsliding has little to do with China,” Thomas Carothers and Frances Brown, two leading experts on democracy, write in a recent Foreign Affairs essay. “An overriding focus on countering China and Russia risks crowding out policies to address the many other factors fueling democracy’s global decline.”
This misdiagnosis has real policy stakes. Leaning into competition with China could lead the US to excuse anti-democratic behavior by important partners, like Modi or the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, in a manner reminiscent of US relations with anti-communist dictators during the Cold War. Moreover, too much emphasis on competition with China could distract from the place where Biden has the most power to affect democracy’s fate — the home front, an area in which voting rights advocates increasingly see him as indefensibly complacent.
There are real problems associated with China’s rise. Its increasing military belligerence, predatory economic practices, and horrific human rights abuses in places like Xinjiang are all very serious concerns. But the fact that China is the source of many real issues doesn’t mean it’s the source of democratic erosion worldwide — and positioning it as such will do little to advance the democratic cause.
Democracies are rotting from within, not without
In his public rhetoric, Biden often argues that the US needs to prove that democracy “works” — that it can “get something done,” as he said last week — in order to outcompete the Chinese model.
While he hasn’t spelled out the nature of this competition all that precisely, the concern seems to center on Chinese policy success: that its rapid economic growth and authoritarian ability to make swift policy changes will inspire political copycats unless democracies prove that they can also deliver real benefits for their citizens.
“I believe we are in the midst of an historic and fundamental debate about the future direction of our world,” the president wrote in a March letter outlining his national security strategy. “There are those who argue that, given all the challenges we face, autocracy is the best way forward. And there are those who understand that democracy is essential to meeting all the challenges of our changing world.”
But at this point, the fear of Chinese political competition is mostly hypothetical. While the Chinese government and state media frequently tout the superiority of its political model to American-style democracy, there’s little evidence that these efforts are all that influential globally — and certainly not in the countries where democracy is most at risk.
A look back at the Soviet Union, the last major challenge to the hegemony of liberal democracy, is telling. ln ideological terms, there’s no comparison: Soviet communism was a far more powerful model than Chinese authoritarian state capitalism is today.
Xi Jinping.
Marxist ideals inspired revolutionary Communist movements and governments around the globe, successfully toppling Western-backed governments in countries ranging from Cuba to Vietnam to China itself. By contrast, there are vanishingly few foreign governments or even political parties today openly vowing to emulate modern China. While the Soviets had the Iron Curtain in Europe, modern China’s most notable client state is North Korea — perhaps the most isolated and mistrusted government on the planet.
In the countries that observers worry most about — established democratic states experiencing “backsliding” toward authoritarianism — Chinese influence is minimal at best.
In backsliding democracies, authoritarian-inclined leaders win and hold power through the electoral system for domestic reasons. Corruption scandals in India and Hungary, violent crime in the Philippines, a racist backlash against America’s first Black president: These are some of the key factors in the rise of authoritarian populists, and they weren’t created or even significantly promoted by China.
Elected authoritarians still bill themselves as defenders of democracy while in power — even after they start undermining the electoral system with tactics like extreme gerrymandering and takeovers of state election agencies. Their political appeal isn’t grounded in an overt rejection of democracy in favor of a Chinese model, but rather a claim to be taking democracy back from corrupt elites in the name of the “true” people, typically defined in ethno-nationalist terms.
The ideology driving modern democratic decline is vastly different from the sort that China promotes at home and through official state media. It represents a home-grown challenge inside the democratic world, rather than an externally stoked, Cold War-style threat.
That’s not to say China does nothing to undermine democracy outside its borders. It has, for example, exported surveillance technology and provided training in “cybersecurity” for foreign officials that amount to teaching them tools for controlling public opinion — underscoring its role as a global pioneer in using technology to repress dissent.
Yet even in this area, China’s influence can easily be overstated. Backsliding countries typically do not ban websites outright or arrest online dissidents in the way China does. Instead, they rely on spreading misinformation and other more subtle uses of state power. When they do use more traditional authoritarian tools, they often don’t need China’s help in doing so — as shown by recent reporting on Israel’s NSO Group, a company with close links to the Israeli state that sold spy software to India and Hungary (whose governments allegedly used it to surveil journalists and opposition figures).
In his recent book The Rise of Digital Repression, Carnegie Endowment scholar Steven Feldstein attempts to systematically document the use of digital tools and tactics for undermining democracy around the world. He found that while such practices were indeed becoming more widespread, this is largely due to domestic factors in authoritarian and backsliding countries rather than Chinese influence.
“China really wasn’t pushing this technology any more so than other countries were pushing advanced technology or censorship technologies,” he told me in an interview earlier this year. “What I saw — when I spoke on the ground to intelligence officials, government officials, and others — was that there were many other factors at play that were much more determinative in terms of whether they would choose to purchase a surveillance system or use it than just the fact that China was trying to market it.”
The problem with blaming China for democracy’s crisis
Biden and his team recognize that many of the challenges to democracy have domestic roots. But in casting the rise of anti-democratic populism as part of a grander ideological struggle against an authoritarian Chinese model, they conflate two distinct phenomena — and risk making some significant policy errors.
Again, an analogy to the Cold War is helpful here. One of the most grievous errors of America’s containment policy was its repeated willingness to align itself with anti-communist dictators. The perceived need to stop the expansion of Soviet influence consistently trumped America’s commitment to democracy — with horrific consequences for the people of Iran, Argentina, Indonesia, and Bangladesh (to name just a handful of examples from a very long list).
The more China is treated like the new Soviet Union — the principal ideological threat to democracy whose influence must be curtailed — the more likely the US is to repeat that mistake.
Take India, for example. In the past six months, Biden has courted Modi’s government as a potential counterweight to China. “There are few relationships in the world that are more vital than one between the U.S. and India. We are the world’s two leading democracies,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a July 28 press conference in New Delhi.
“There has long been a bipartisan consensus in Washington that India is a critical ally in its attempt to check Chinese influence in Asia,” the Indian intellectual Pankaj Mishra wrote in a June Bloomberg column. “In overlooking the Modi government’s excesses, Biden probably counts on support from a US foreign policy establishment invested more in realpolitik than human rights.”
If you take the notion that democracy’s crisis is emerging from within seriously, then it follows that very best thing that Biden could do for democracy’s global future has nothing to do with China or even foreign policy. It’s arresting creeping authoritarianism at home.
Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) are arrested during a protest to support voting rights outside of Hart Senate Office Building on Thursday, July 22, 2021.
Biden has acknowledged this at times, writing in his March letter that his global strategy “begins with the revitalization of our most fundamental advantage: our democracy.” And yet that urgency hasn’t translated into action — legislation necessary to safeguard American democracy from the GOP’s increasingly anti-democratic politics appears stalled out. Biden, for his part, has refused to publicly endorse more aggressive action to break the logjam — like abolishing the filibuster for voting rights bills.
The New York Times recently reported that “in private calls with voting rights groups and civil rights leaders, White House officials and close allies of the president have expressed confidence that it is possible to ‘out-organize voter suppression’” — an implausible claim that reflects an administration that, according to activists, has “largely accepted the Republican restrictions as baked in and is now dedicating more of its effort to juicing Democratic turnout.”
Shoring up American democracy after the recent attacks it has suffered should be the top priority of any US government concerned with democracy’s global fate. But for all of Biden’s lofty language about out-competing China and winning the future for democracy, there’s a striking lack of urgency when it comes to the perhaps the most important backsliding country — his own.
In this sense, China has very little influence over the future of democracy globally. The key battles are happening not in the South China Sea or the Taiwan Strait, but in the legislatures of New Delhi and Washington. If there really is to be a grand struggle for democracy’s survival in the 21st century, it needs to start there.
Since 2019, Brazil finds itself in the midst of one of its most difficult periods since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985, thanks to the inhumane policies of the Jair Bolsonaro regime which parallel those of Donald Trump’s administration. President Bolsonaro is an apologist for the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, and there is even the possibility that he may attempt to resort to the military guys who he thinks might back him up in the face of growing opposition to his handling of the pandemic.
Noam Chomsky has followed closely Brazilian and Latin American politics for many decades, and even visited Brazil’s former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in prison in 2018. In this interview, he discusses the factors that brought Bolsonaro to power, dissects his policies and compares them to the Trump regime, and assesses what the future may hold for the troubled nation.
C.J. Polychroniou: Jair Bolsonaro — an apologist for torture and dictatorship and part of the global trend towards authoritarianism that brought us Donald Trump — was sworn in as president of Brazil on January 1, 2019. Since that day, his administration has been pushing an agenda with disastrous consequences for democracy and the environment. I want to start by asking you of the conditions in Brazil that brought Bolsonaro to power, a development which coincided with the end of the “pink tide” that had swept across Latin America in the early 2000s.
Noam Chomsky: A lot is uncertain and documentation is slim, but the way it looks to me is basically like this.
With the fall of commodity prices a few years after Lula da Silva left office in 2010, the Brazilian right wing — with U.S. encouragement, if not direct support — recognized an opportunity to return the country to their hands and to reverse the welfare and inclusiveness programs they despised. They proceeded to carry out a systematic “soft coup.” One step was impeaching Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, in utterly corrupt and fraudulent proceedings. The next was to imprison Lula on corruption charges, preventing him from running in (and almost surely winning) the 2018 presidential election. That set the stage for Bolsonaro to be elected on a wave of an incredible campaign of lies, slanders and deceit that flooded the internet sites that most Brazilians use as a main source of “information.” There’s reason to suspect a significant U.S. hand.
The charges against Lula were withdrawn by the courts after they were completely discredited by Glenn Greenwald’s exposure of the shenanigans of the prosecution in connivance with “anti-corruption” (Car Wash) investigator Sergio Moro. Before the exposures, Moro had been appointed Minister of Justice and Public Security by Bolsonaro, perhaps a reward for his contributions to his election. Moro has largely disappeared from sight with the collapse of his image as the intrepid white knight who would save Brazil from corruption — while, probably not coincidentally, destroying major Brazilian businesses that were competitors to U.S. corporations (which are not exactly famous for their purity).
Though Moro’s targets were selective, much of what he revealed is credible — and not difficult to find in Latin America, where corruption is practically a way of life in the political and economic worlds. One can, however, debate whether it attains the level that is familiar in the West, where major financial institutions have been fined tens of billions of dollars, usually in settlements that avoid individual liability. One indication of what the scale might be was given by the London Economist, which found over 2000 corporate convictions from 2000-2014. That’s just “corporate America,” which has plenty of company elsewhere. Furthermore, the notion of “corruption” is deeply tainted by ideology. Much of the worst corruption is “legal,” as the legal system is designed under the heavy hand of private power.
Despite Moro’s own corruption, much of what he unearthed was real and had been for a long time. His main target, Lula’s Workers Party (PT), it appears, did not break this pattern. Partly for this reason, the PT lost an opportunity to introduce the kinds of lasting progressive changes that are badly needed to undermine the rule of Brazil’s rapacious and deeply racist traditional ruling classes.
Lula’s programs were designed so as not to infringe seriously on elite power, but they were nonetheless barely tolerated in these circles. Their flaw was that they were oriented towards the needs of those suffering bitterly in this highly inegalitarian society. The basic character of Lula’s programs was captured in a 2016 World Bank study of Brazil, which described his time in office as a “golden decade” in Brazil’s history. The Bank praised Lula’s “success in reducing poverty and inequality and its ability to create jobs. Innovative and effective policies to reduce poverty and ensure the inclusion of previously excluded groups have lifted millions of people out of poverty.” Furthermore,
Brazil has also been assuming global responsibilities. It has been successful in pursuing economic prosperity while protecting its unique natural patrimony. Brazil has become one of the most important emerging new donors, with extensive engagements particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, and a leading player in international climate negotiations. Brazil’s development path over the past decade has shown that growth with shared prosperity, but balanced with respect for the environment, is possible. Brazilians are rightly proud of these internationally recognized achievements.
Some Brazilians. Not those who consider it their right to wield power in their own interest.
Brazil became an effective voice for the Global South in international affairs, not a welcome development in the eyes of Western leaders, and a particular irritant to the Obama-Biden-Clinton administration when Brazil’s foreign minister Celso Amorim came close to negotiating a settlement on Iran’s nuclear programs, undercutting Washington’s intent to run the show on its own terms.
The Bank report also concluded that with proper policies, the “golden decade” could have persisted after the collapse of commodity prices. That was not to be, however, as the soft coup proceeded. Some analysts have suggested that a crucial turning point was when Dilma announced that profits from newly discovered offshore oil reserves would be directed to education and welfare instead of the eager hands of international investors.
The PT had failed to sink social roots, to such an extent that beneficiaries of its policies were often unaware of their source, attributing the benefits to God or to luck. The corruption, failure of mobilization and lack of structural reform all contributed to Bolsonaro’s electoral victory.
Bolsonaro’s victory was welcomed with enthusiasm by international capital and finance. They were particularly impressed by Bolsonaro’s economic czar, ultra-loyal Chicago economist Paulo Guedes. His program was very simple: in his words, “Privatize Everything,” a bonanza for foreign investors. They were, however, disillusioned as Brazil collapsed during the Bolsonaro years and Guedes’s promises remained unfulfilled.
Let’s talk now specifically about some of Bolsonaro’s policies, which have been denounced by activists, economists and organizations such as Human Rights Watch, as well as by Indigenous leaders. And how would you compare his policies to those of Donald Trump?
The analogy is apt. Trump was Bolsonaro’s unconcealed model, though not the only one. In casting his vote to impeach Dilma, he dedicated it to her torturer during the military dictatorship. That’s a level of depravity that even his hero Trump didn’t reach. His admiration for the dictatorship is also unconcealed, though he does have some criticisms of the military. His prime complaint is that they were too mild. They should have killed 30,000 people as the military did in Argentina next door. He has also criticized the behavior of the military in earlier years. They should have imitated the U.S. cavalry, which virtually eliminated the Native population. Instead, the Brazilian military left remnants in the Amazon. But Bolsonaro has made it quite clear that he intends to overcome that problem.
Like Trump, Bolsonaro’s most important policy commitments, by far, are to destroy the prospects for organized human life in the interest of short-term profits for his friends — in his case, mining, agribusiness and illegal logging that have sharply accelerated the destruction of the Amazon forests. Scientists had anticipated, pre-Bolsonaro, that in a few decades, the Amazon would shift from one of the world’s greatest carbon sinks to a carbon source, as it transitions from tropical forest to savannah. Thanks to Bolsonaro, that point may already be approaching. For Brazil, the effects will be devastating. Rainfall will sharply decline, with much of the rich agricultural land turning to desert. The world as a whole will suffer a severe blow, a wound that might prove to be lethal. For the Indigenous inhabitants of the forest, the outcome is genocidal.
As elsewhere in the world, the Indigenous in Brazil have been in the forefront for years in trying to protect human society from the depredations of “advanced civilization.” But time is growing short, and if the Trumps and Bolsonaros of the world are granted free rein, chances of decent survival are slim.
Again, as in the case of Trump, Bolsonaro’s malevolence is not exhausted by his commitment to destroy organized human society — along with the innumerable species that we are quickly driving to extinction. Like Trump, he can claim personal responsibility for tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of COVID deaths, to mention one salient contribution to the welfare of his country. Police killings, overwhelmingly with Black victims, have long been a plague, mounting under Bolsonaro. A particularly shocking recent incident of military assault on a Rio favela reached international headlines.
All too easy to continue.
What is the likelihood that Bolsonaro could face charges in The Hague over the Amazon?
Virtually none. His contributions to global suicide may be particularly severe, but once that door is opened…
Who is going to allow that?
Brazilians took to the streets recently demanding the removal of Bolsonaro over his handling of the pandemic. Indeed, it seems that public opinion has finally turned overwhelmingly against Bolsonaro, and Lula is expected to trounce him in the 2022 elections. However, in a rather unsurprising manner, and reminiscent of his idol Trump, Bolsonaro announced just a few days ago that he may not accept the results of the 2022 election under the current voting system. How likely is the chance that the generals, on whom Bolsonaro has relied on from the first day he got into power, will stay the course and support an attempt of his to stay in power even if he loses next year’s presidential election?
Since 2018, Bolsonaro has been claiming that the only way he can be defeated in an election is by fraud. He’s even claimed (of course, without evidence) that Dilma actually lost the 2014 election, which she won handily by over 3 million votes, mostly on sharp class lines, by historical standards a slim margin. He’s now stepped up the rhetoric, preemptively charging the 2022 election with attempted fraud by his political enemies and telling a crowd of supporters a few weeks ago that, “Elections next year will be clean. Either we have clean elections in Brazil or we don’t have elections” (Jornal do Brasil, 7-08-21).
Not exactly unfamiliar.
Right now, Lula is well ahead in the polls, just as in 2018, when measures were taken to bar his candidacy. There are legitimate concerns of a recurrence.
Parliamentary inquiries into the devastating mishandling of the pandemic by Bolsonaro’s government are now reportedly reaching the military. The three branches of the armed services recently released a statement declaring that no inquiry that impugns the honor of the military will be tolerated.
There have been reports of steps that might be preparation for a military coup, perhaps modeled on the 1964 coup that installed the first of the vicious “National Security States” that terrorized the hemisphere for 20 years.
The pretext for overthrowing the mildly reformist Goulart government in 1964 was the ritual appeal to save the country from “Communism.” Something similar could be concocted today.
How would Washington react? There are precedents that suggest an answer. One is 1964. The military coup that overthrew the parliamentary government was lauded by Kennedy-Johnson Ambassador to Brazil Lincoln Gordon as “the most decisive victory for freedom in the mid-twentieth century.” As I discuss in Year 501, it was a “democratic rebellion” that would help in “restraining left-wing excesses” and should “create a greatly improved climate for private investment” in the hands of the “democratic forces” now in charge. After 21 years of rule, Latin America scholar Stephen Rabe comments in The Most Dangerous Area in the World, the “democratic forces” left the country in “the same category as the less developed African or Asian countries when it came to social welfare indices” (malnutrition, infant mortality, etc.), with conditions of inequality and suffering rarely matched elsewhere, but a grand success for foreign investors and domestic privilege.
That’s putting aside the “systematic use of torture” and other crimes of state documented by the Church-run Truth Commission during the dictatorship’s last days.
We should also recall that the reaction to the Brazil coup — and possible involvement in it — was no exception. Rather, it was the norm after 1962, when JFK changed the mission of the Latin American military from anachronistic “hemispheric defense” to very live “internal security.” The predictable results were described by Charles Maechling, who led U.S. counterinsurgency and internal defense planning from 1961 to 1966. Kennedy’s 1962 decision, he wrote, shifted the U.S. stand from toleration “of the rapacity and cruelty of the Latin American military” to “direct complicity” in their crimes, to U.S. support for “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.”
Those who might innocently believe that things have changed can turn to the Obama-Clinton reaction to the military coup in Honduras in 2009, overthrowing the mildly reformist Zelaya government. Their support for the coup, almost alone, helped turn Honduras into one of the murder capitals of the world, stimulating a flood of terrified refugees now cruelly and illegally turned back at the U.S. border, if they can make it that far through the barriers imposed by U.S. clients.
The rich and ugly record might suggest something about Washington’s possible reaction to actions by the Brazilian military to “save the country from Communism.”
Peruvians elected as their president last month Pedro Castillo, a teacher and labor union leader, but the far right opponent Keiko Fujimori and her supporters are refusing the accept the outcome by crying fraud, allegations which have been rejected by international observers and while both the European Union and the United States praised the conduct of the election. But in places like Chile and Colombia, the right is also under pressure by citizens fed up with neoliberalism. Is another “pink tide” in the making across South America?
In Chile, a remarkable popular uprising is seeking to free the country at last from the clutches of the Pinochet dictatorship, a criminal enterprise backed even more strongly than usual by the U.S., with particular enthusiasm by the “libertarians” who then turned to launching the global neoliberal assault of the past 40 years. Colombia is being subjected to yet another renewal of the state and paramilitary violence escalated by Kennedy in 1962, when his military mission to Colombia, led by Marine Gen. William Yarborough, recommended “paramilitary sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents,” which “should be backed by the United States” — as it has been through many horrifying years, recently Clinton’s Plan Colombia.
There is turmoil and uncertainty throughout the hemisphere, including “the colossus of the North.” What happens here will, as always, have enormous impact.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
(@mtgreenee) 
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/69645731/1203088503.0.jpg)
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22746048/1233728428.jpg)
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22746057/1234113822.jpg)
