Voter Suppression/Election Integrity

[zeebaneighba]

6 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Even after all these years, it’s still strange to me that anyone would need to register to vote. I’ve said this before, but over here nobody needs to do that. Everyone is eligible to vote automatically once they turn 18. It doesn’t matter if it’s county, provincial or national elections. You get your ballots sent to your home address. I just don’t understand why you would go through the administrative process of registering voters over and over and over again. How horribly time consuming and unnecessary, and needlessly expensive.

You don't generally have to re-register unless you move states or get purged from the rolls for some reason. In fact, it's very hard to get them to DE-register you. It took years for Ohio to drop me after I moved to Kansas and it took me quite a while to convince Kansas that @Shoobydoo no longer lived here after she moved states.

[church_of_dog]

4 hours ago, zeebaneighba said:

You don't generally have to re-register unless you move states or get purged from the rolls for some reason. In fact, it's very hard to get them to DE-register you. It took years for Ohio to drop me after I moved to Kansas and it took me quite a while to convince Kansas that @Shoobydoo no longer lived here after she moved states.

Agreed.  When I was a pollworker I would see people on our county voter registration rolls who had moved away years ago.  I assume this meant they never re-registered to vote in their new location.

I tend to assume there must be some good reason why our complicated bureaucratic system was set up as it was, but when I hear how it goes so much more simply in other countries I do question the US system.  Could it be that we have so many people who would otherwise try to cheat somehow?  Or is it because of local elections that vary from state to state where knowing exactly where the person lives is key?

[fraurosena]

3 hours ago, church_of_dog said:

Could it be that we have so many people who would otherwise try to cheat somehow?  Or is it because of local elections that vary from state to state where knowing exactly where the person lives is key?

Although I don’t know the reason, I suspect it’s because maybe at one time it made sense to do it like this. There were fewer people and purging the rolls of people no longer living there, or who had died was simply the smart thing to do.

But now, when every citizen has a social security number, registering to vote should not be necessary. Your social security number identifies who you are, where you live and if you are living or dead. How difficult can it be to automatically register a person to vote once they’ve come of age? What else is that social security number good for, if not to identify you from everyone else?

The refusal to set up an administrative process that ensures everyone that is eligible to vote also automatically has the means to vote is downright baffling to me. 

[Xan]

7 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Although I don’t know the reason, I suspect it’s because maybe at one time it made sense to do it like this. There were fewer people and purging the rolls of people no longer living there, or who had died was simply the smart thing to do.

But now, when every citizen has a social security number, registering to vote should not be necessary. Your social security number identifies who you are, where you live and if you are living or dead. How difficult can it be to automatically register a person to vote once they’ve come of age? What else is that social security number good for, if not to identify you from everyone else?

The refusal to set up an administrative process that ensures everyone that is eligible to vote also automatically has the means to vote is downright baffling to me. 

This goes along with "why don't we have a national driver's license"?  None of this needs to be done state by state.  Voting and driver's licenses should be handled federally.  The reason they haven't done it with licenses is because that's a state money maker.  Every time you move to another state, you have to pay for a new driver's license.  The states like to keep control on things like this.  We're not a country so much as we are a collection of 50 countries.

[church_of_dog]

8 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Although I don’t know the reason, I suspect it’s because maybe at one time it made sense to do it like this. There were fewer people and purging the rolls of people no longer living there, or who had died was simply the smart thing to do.

But now, when every citizen has a social security number, registering to vote should not be necessary. Your social security number identifies who you are, where you live and if you are living or dead. How difficult can it be to automatically register a person to vote once they’ve come of age? What else is that social security number good for, if not to identify you from everyone else?

The refusal to set up an administrative process that ensures everyone that is eligible to vote also automatically has the means to vote is downright baffling to me. 

I suspect you're right.  I can think of counter-arguments but they are probably minor in the grand scheme of things and not the actual reason behind the arrangement -- things like, for example, my mailing address (which is where Social Security thinks I am) is different from my physical address (which is listed on my voter registration to determine which precinct I belong to).  But this is probably true for only a very small minority of Americans -- those who live so rurally or in such a small town that there is no home mail delivery -- we get our mail at PO Boxes at the post office.

Also, it used to be that lots of places asked for one's social security number -- even the library where I worked asked for it, as a way to distinguish between people with the same name.  But that practice stopped decades ago, because (as I understand it) of how much social security fraud/identity theft was happening.  Now we are encouraged to tell no one our SSN except those offices related to taxes, banking, employment, etc.

Again I don't assume this is an explanation for why the US is so poorly organized in these arenas, just that we would have these sorts of logistical details to deal with.
 

As @Xan said, we are really more like 50 small countries in many ways.  And half of our citizenry wants all the power to remain with the states anyway so it might be difficult to get changes made along those lines.

[zeebaneighba]

17 hours ago, church_of_dog said:

Agreed.  When I was a pollworker I would see people on our county voter registration rolls who had moved away years ago.  I assume this meant they never re-registered to vote in their new location.

I

I was registered in Kansas the entire time I was trying to get Ohio to drop me, just as Shoobydoo was registered in her new state.  There is no cross-checking between states.

[ADoyle90815]

My mom is registered in Nevada where she moved to, but my dad still got a ballot for her even though they've been divorced for over 10 years. This was despite telling the county court system that she had moved out of state, and to remove her from the jury duty list after moving. The problem is that even when people move and reregister to vote in the new state, they're still listed in their old state's list of registered voters.

[church_of_dog]

56 minutes ago, ADoyle90815 said:

My mom is registered in Nevada where she moved to, but my dad still got a ballot for her even though they've been divorced for over 10 years. This was despite telling the county court system that she had moved out of state, and to remove her from the jury duty list after moving. The problem is that even when people move and reregister to vote in the new state, they're still listed in their old state's list of registered voters.

At the polling place we always had a form for family members of deceased voters to have them removed from the list, as well as change of address and full-on voter registration forms (even if you're already registered, you need that to change your party, for example, or to change your mail-in ballot status).  I don't remember a specific form for removing someone because they are registered elsewhere -- them registering elsewhere is SUPPOSED to trigger the removal of them everywhere else, but clearly there are flaws in that system.  And of course it's easier on the bureaucracy to request a change during the quiet months between elections, not when it's hectic, but people forget.

[Howl]

*sputtering between spewing random swear words*  Texas' Secretary of State is conducting (note present tense) a fraudit of Texas' most populous counties: 

• Collin and Dallas counties = Dallas and the Dallas suburbs of Frisco, Plano, McKinney, Farmersville
• Tarrant Count = Fort Worth
• Harris County = Houston

WTA(GD)F?

[Ozlsn]

1 hour ago, zeebaneighba said:

I was registered in Kansas the entire time I was trying to get Ohio to drop me, just as Shoobydoo was registered in her new state.  There is no cross-checking between states.

Well that certainly indicates one possible way to vote multiple times!  It surprises me that there's not some level of cross-checking (or in fact better management of the rolls full stop - it should be much easier to do in this digital age). 

6 hours ago, church_of_dog said:

I can think of counter-arguments but they are probably minor in the grand scheme of things and not the actual reason behind the arrangement -- things like, for example, my mailing address (which is where Social Security thinks I am) is different from my physical address (which is listed on my voter registration to determine which precinct I belong to)

My husband's postal address (where they send the information etc to) and his physical address on the electoral roll were different - when he enrolled to vote at age 18 he listed his PO Box as the mailing address, and didn't bother changing it until last year when his electoral ballot was sent to his home town... normally not an issue, but when your home town is outside your 5km lockdown zone it suddenly becomes problematic! (As to why he hasn't changed the PO Box address to the post office where where we live, I don't know. I think it's his emotional connection to where he grew up.)

[Ozlsn]

33 minutes ago, Howl said:

*sputtering between spewing random swear words*  Texas' Secretary of State is conducting (note present tense) a fraudit of Texas' most populous counties: 

• Collin and Dallas counties = Dallas and the Dallas suburbs of Frisco, Plano, McKinney, Farmersville
• Tarrant Count = Fort Worth
• Harris County = Houston

WTA(GD)F?

Do all of them as a statewide exercise, seriously. Yes that is a lot of people. Deal with it, if it's run on a state level it should be audited on a state level. Now curious - the counties themselves aren't the electorates, are they? The electoral districts are made up of multiple counties (or populous counties are split?) That's how I thought it worked, but given I've been surprised by the US electoral system before I thought I'd ask. 

[church_of_dog]

1 hour ago, Ozlsn said:

Do all of them as a statewide exercise, seriously. Yes that is a lot of people. Deal with it, if it's run on a state level it should be audited on a state level. Now curious - the counties themselves aren't the electorates, are they? The electoral districts are made up of multiple counties (or populous counties are split?) That's how I thought it worked, but given I've been surprised by the US electoral system before I thought I'd ask. 

It's much more chaotic than what you probably expected.

The counties administer all elections (at least in California and I assume across the USA) but Federal Congressional districts, State Assembly districts, and State Senate districts do not necessarily conform to county boundaries.  For example, my county is the rectangle in the very northeast of California.

Here is the boundary of my federal congressional district:

You can see the county boundary lines under the green -- it looks like about eight counties are included, but down at the southern end, near Lake Tahoe, this district crosses (ie does not conform to) county boundaries.

Now here's my State Senate district boundary:

This does look like whole counties, and more of them than are in the federal district.

Now my state Assembly district:

This also appears to follow county boundaries, but includes fewer counties at the southern end than the senate district.  I have no idea why.

Of course some elected positions are countywide.  Other times we are voting on either a position (or a proposition) that applies to a district that is much smaller than a county -- such as mayor of a town, or who should be on a school board, hospital board, water board, cemetery district board, etc.

For voting purposes each county is divided into precincts -- those are groups whose physical voting location is all in one place.  I think there are only a few hundred voters in each precinct.  Some of our smaller precincts have gone to all mail ballots only since they don't have enough people to warrant a voting location.  A small city would have many precincts and a big city would have hundreds or more.   Each neighborhood voting location would be its own precinct.

I think a person can drop off a mail ballot in the "wrong" precinct (because it all goes to the same county elections office to be handled and counted) but up until recently with electronic countywide voter rolls, a person couldn't vote "in person" at the wrong precinct or would at least have to vote provisionally (because the pollworkers would only have the paper lists for their local precinct voters).  It might be allowed now but that voter might encounter a situation where some very localized item on his/her ballot (ie volunteer fire dept board or school board) might not be on the ballot of the neighboring precinct so they might miss the chance to vote on that item.

Clear as mud?

[Cartmann99]

3 hours ago, church_of_dog said:

 I don't remember a specific form for removing someone because they are registered elsewhere -- them registering elsewhere is SUPPOSED to trigger the removal of them everywhere else, but clearly there are flaws in that system.

When I moved back to Texas and registered to vote, I got a letter from Georgia letting me know that they knew and had purged me from the voter rolls. The tone of the letter implied that if I dared to cross back into Georgia after my defection, I'd be pelted with boiled peanuts and drowned in a stock tank of sweet tea. 

Bless their hearts...

[Alisamer]

On 9/25/2021 at 10:14 PM, church_of_dog said:

I tend to assume there must be some good reason why our complicated bureaucratic system was set up as it was, but when I hear how it goes so much more simply in other countries I do question the US system.  Could it be that we have so many people who would otherwise try to cheat somehow?  Or is it because of local elections that vary from state to state where knowing exactly where the person lives is key?

I might be just overly cynical, but I suspect a lot of our complicated bureaucracy especially related to voting has been passed down over the past couple hundred years. Oddly, countries who have been in existence much longer seem to have more modern systems in place.

I suspect a lot of the voter registrations stuff made sense when only white, male, landowners were allowed to vote. And keeping registration allows for requirements to be added to registration, to exclude "the wrong people" from voting. Like testing, during a time when African-Americans got subpar segregated education. 

A few republicans have come right out and said they don't want everyone to vote. That's what lost them Georgia. It benefits them to make it difficult to vote. The more hoops people have to jump through, the better.

[Howl]

On 9/26/2021 at 10:05 AM, church_of_dog said:

But that practice stopped decades ago, because (as I understand it) of how much social security fraud/identity theft was happening.  Now we are encouraged to tell no one our SSN except those offices related to taxes, banking, employment, etc.

MediCare FINALLY assigned us seniors ID numbers unique to MediCare (combination of letters and numbers) to replace use of SSN on MediCare cards.  

Circling back to fundy-dom.  Some parents with government paranoia never register their child's home birth to avoid assignment of a social security number, creating horrible potential problems for their kids down the line.  If you don't have a birth certificate, you can't prove you're a citizen, you can't get an SSN, you can't get gov't ID or drivers license or a passport or register to vote. 

 I'm talking about you, Penningtons of Kerrville, TX and you, Nicole Naugler.  Keep in mind the Pennington parents are well educated, both with college degrees from public universities and dad Pennington is a CPA.   

Edited September 28, 2021 by Howl

[47of74]

Iowa officials are trying to work around the GQP legislature fuck stickery. 

Quote

County auditors are trying to send absentee ballot request forms through the mail by placing the forms in local advertising circulars.

This effort comes after Iowa’s new election law bans auditors from sending absentee ballot request forms directly in the mail.

The law, which was backed overwhelmingly by Republicans, was signed back in March. It makes multiple changes to the absentee ballot request process, such as shortening the period of time voters have to request an absentee ballot. It also doesn’t allow auditors to send those forms in the mail directly to voters without a request form.

Linn County Auditor Joel Miller is using the Penny Saver to send absentee ballot request forms in the mail.

 

[CTRLZero]

Seattle Times - Kim Wyman WA Secretary of State (Republican) Hired to Help Biden Administration

So this is a little unusual.  Our secretary of state, Kim Wyman, is a republican, but has been considering running as an independent because she is dismayed and angry at how her party is behaving lately.  She's always been a good administrator of our voting systems, and most of us feel secure voting by mail, etc., under her leadership.  And now Biden has pulled her in to help with election security.  Anyway, here are some excerpts of the article.  I'm glad she's going to help at the national level.

OLYMPIA — Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman on Tuesday announced her resignation to take a key election-security position in President Joe Biden’s administration.

For the federal government, Tuesday’s announcement marks the recruitment of an administrator with depth of experience with mail voting and a rare Republican who has defended the method from both domestic critics and foreign adversaries.

For Democrats, the resignation of Wyman — the only statewide elected Republican — presents a fresh opportunity for an office that has eluded them in every election since 1964.

Former Democratic state Rep. Gael Tarleton of Seattle, Wyman’s opponent last year, signaled Tuesday she would seek an appointment to the vacancy.

Meanwhile, the state Republican Party on Tuesday swiftly called for Gov. Jay Inslee to appoint a member of the GOP to temporarily replace Wyman.

In her new role, Wyman will serve as the senior election security lead for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, according to a statement from her office. The agency is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

. . . .

Last spring, Wyman used her expertise in vote-by-mail elections — Washington is one of only a handful of states with long experience in that realm — to help other states expand or adopt the practice to reduce the risk of spreading COVID-19 during elections.

Before and since last year’s elections, she defended mail balloting, which in Washington came about through the encouragement of moderate Republicans.

Washington’s elections system has been considered by national experts as one of the more secure for voting.

Wyman has bucked Republicans elsewhere and refused to follow former President Donald Trump in trafficking baseless conspiracy theories about last year’s election.

She pushed back against claims of fraud elsewhere, publicly criticizing the recent “audit” of votes in Arizona’s Maricopa County as “political theater.”

Wyman likewise rejected claims by Loren Culp, Washington’s 2020 Republican gubernatorial candidate. Culp had filed a legal challenge alleging fraud but dropped the lawsuit after his attorney was threatened with legal sanctions.

. . . .

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"University of Florida bars faculty members from testifying in voting rights lawsuit against DeSantis administration"

Quote

The University of Florida barred three faculty members from testifying for plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging a voting-restrictions law enthusiastically embraced by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), which activists say makes it harder for racial minorities to vote. The school’s move raises sharp concerns about academic freedom and free speech in the state.

The public university said the three faculty members — political scientists Daniel A. Smith, Michael McDonald and Sharon Wright Austin — could present “a conflict of interest to the executive branch” and harm the school’s interests by testifying against the law signed by DeSantis in May.

“As UF is a state actor, litigation against the state is adverse to UF’s interests,” school officials said, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

Lawyers trying to reverse the Florida law, also known as Senate Bill 90, have sought to question DeSantis on whether he was involved in the decision to prevent the academics from testifying, according to the New York Times, which first reported on the university’s move.

The move to bar professors from being expert witnesses in public trials is highly unusual. In a letter to the university, lawyers representing the professors said that faculty members retain their First Amendment rights to free speech even if their remarks may “make a University’s relationship with funding sources more difficult.”

The attorneys cited U.S. Supreme Court rulings that protect the rights of individuals to disclose information acquired “by virtue of their public employment.”

The academics will file a legal challenge against the university if it does not change its stance, said Paul Donnelly, a lawyer representing Smith, McDonald, and Austin.

As Florida’s governor, DeSantis has influence over the funding of the state’s public institutions of higher education. He also has the authority to name six of the 13 members of the university’s board of trustees. All appointed trustees are subject to state Senate confirmation.

In a statement provided to The Post on Saturday, the university denied it had violated the First Amendment rights of its faculty members. Representatives for DeSantis could not be reached for comment.

After the 2020 presidential election, DeSantis and Florida’s Republican-controlled state legislature passed a law whose provisions include restricting voting by mail and barring everyone except election officials from providing food or water to voters waiting in long lines. In Florida, particularly during early voting in October, waiting to cast a ballot can mean standing in line in the hot sun.

This law was enacted despite a virtually flawless election in Florida last year. Former president Donald Trump, who has baselessly alleged electoral fraud elsewhere, won the state’s 29 electoral votes.

About 40 percent of all votes cast by Black Americans in last year’s presidential election were submitted by mail, or double the percentage for 2016, according to Demos, a think tank that is among the groups suing to reverse the new voting restrictions.

Multiple studies show that precincts with larger Black populations tend to endure longer lines on Election Day. Restricting mail voting will mean longer voting lines at more crowded polling stations, Demos said.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The ugliness of gerrymandering, epitomized in Ohio"

Quote

Among the many political abuses in our system of government, few things rank as high on the brazenness scale as gerrymandering. That’s in large part because redistricting is extremely complex and invites all kinds of tactics that casual voters just can’t be persuaded to evaluate, much less care about.

On Wednesday, though, a particularly brazen attempt by Ohio Republicans to skirt the will of voters was turned aside. It came after an extraordinary acknowledgment of the scheme by Republicans themselves and with an extraordinary prescription from the state’s chief justice, also a Republican.

The whole thing is a case in point when it comes to how this process is exploited and even abused — and often more successfully than in this instance.

The Republican-majority state Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down the maps for state House and Senate districts created by the GOP-controlled redistricting commission, sending the panel back to the drawing board.

That it got to this point isn’t hugely surprising. In September, we here at The Fix noted how cynical the Republican-controlled commission’s attempt to force through the maps was. And the GOP has a 4-3 majority on the Supreme Court in Ohio, where justices are partisan, elected officials. But on Wednesday, Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a known critic of gerrymandering, joined with the three Democratic justices in striking the maps down.

The crux of the matter was this: Voters in Ohio have passed constitutional amendments in the past decade requiring more fairness in the redistricting process. The maps needed to adhere to the relative statewide preferences of voters.

That was a problem for Republicans, who drew the maps overwhelmingly in their favor a decade ago and had the power to do so again (even through a supposedly less-political commission). So they tried.

But the new amendments posed a problem: How can you draw an overwhelmingly Republican-favoring map when the state constitution requires the districts to be drawn according to statewide vote preferences? Republicans win a lot more than Democrats in Ohio, but they generally get only about 54 percent of the vote.

So they came up with a scheme. They argued that, yes, Republicans win about 54 percent of the statewide vote in Ohio, generally speaking, but they also win the vast majority of statewide elections — 81 percent of them over the past decade. Thus, they argued, it’s valid to draw anywhere between 54 percent and 81 percent of districts favoring Republicans.

That might seem like an oversimplification, but that’s what they said in their official justification for the maps, which attempted to draw more than 64 percent of districts to favor Republicans.

And the thing is, even members of the commission didn’t try to put a good face on that. Gov. Mike DeWine (R) said that the 81 percent figure wasn’t, in fact, “any kind of mark that would indicate statewide preferences.” Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) said he didn’t see the justification until a minute before voting on it and called it, in a text message to his chief of staff, “asinine.”

But with the deadline for the maps looming, DeWine and LaRose voted for them, along with Ohio Auditor Keith Faber, who also criticized the maps. The three of them provided the decisive votes on a commission that also featured one appointed member from each party in each chamber.

The state Supreme Court found that the commission “did not attempt to draw a district plan that meets the standard articulated” in the state constitution. It added flatly, “This [81 percent] methodology … does not tell us the ‘statewide preferences of the voters of Ohio.’ ” It also echoed a point we raised in September, which is that in states in which one party wins virtually every statewide election, the justification offered by the commission would seem to validate drawing as much as 100 percent of districts to favor one party.

It pointed to an expert from Harvard University who ran a simulation creating 5,000 potential district maps. Not one of them was as slanted toward Republicans as the map the commission drew.

Perhaps the most remarkable result of the case, though, is what O’Connor added to the overall decision. In a concurring opinion, she offered Ohio voters another course. She suggested they might go further in preventing partisan politicians from attempting something like this again by instituting a more independent commission, which, as she detailed, several other states have done:

I write separately because readers should understand they have the power to again amend the Ohio Constitution to ensure that partisan politics is removed from the drawing of Ohio Senate and House districts that takes place every ten years. ... Having now seen firsthand that the current Ohio Redistricting Commission — comprised of statewide elected officials and partisan legislators — is seemingly unwilling to put aside partisan concerns as directed by the people’s vote, Ohioans may opt to pursue further constitutional amendment to replace the current commission with a truly independent, nonpartisan commission that more effectively distances the redistricting process from partisan politics.

Judicial decisions don’t generally include prescriptions for what legislators or voters might do to remedy the situation the justices are adjudicating. But here was a Republican justice suggesting that what Republican commission members did was egregious enough that voters might rise up against them and deprive those officials of the power to attempt it again.

And even if people can’t pay enough attention to the nitty-gritty of redistricting — though in this case that would seem prudent — that would seem a relatively simple response.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Making it hard to vote in Oklahoma:

 

And, as a bonus, private info may be made public:

Spoiler

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Because of course: "Supreme Court stops lower court order requiring Alabama to draw a new congressional district favorable to Black residents"

Quote

The Supreme Court on Monday put on hold a lower court’s order that Alabama must create a second congressional district favorable to Black voters, over the objections of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three liberals.

The court’s most consistently conservative justices put on hold a decision of a special panel of three federal judges that threw out Alabama’s new congressional map Jan. 24. That map had continued to draw only one of the state’s seven congressional districts to have a majority of Black voters.

Dissenting Justice Elena Kagan called the court’s order “a disservice to Black Alabamians who under [Supreme Court] precedent have had their electoral power diminished — in violation of a law this Court once knew to buttress all of American democracy.”

The unanimous lower court panel noted that over the past decade, the number of White Alabamians had declined while the state’s Black population grew, and now accounts for 27 percent of the state’s overall population. That means the state’s map should contain two districts with either Black majorities or “in which Black voters otherwise have an opportunity” to elect representatives they favor, the panel said.

“Black voters have less opportunity than other Alabamians to elect candidates of their choice to Congress,” the panel wrote in a 225-page ruling, finding challengers of the map were “substantially likely” to prevail on claims that the new maps violate the Voting Rights Act.

“We find that the plaintiffs will suffer an irreparable harm if they must vote in the 2022 congressional elections based on a redistricting plan that violates federal law,” the ruling stated.

The creation of a second congressional district favorable to minorities would be a boon for Democrats, who hold only one district.

The panel was composed of Judge Stanley Marcus from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, nominated by President Bill Clinton, and District Court Judges Anna M. Manasco and Terry F. Moorer, both chosen by President Donald Trump.

The case is the first for current Supreme Court justices to consider how to apply the Voting Rights Act to racial gerrymandering. In 2019, the court said federal courts had no role in policing partisan gerrymandering.

The judges delayed the qualifying period for congressional elections and gave the Alabama legislature two weeks to draw a new map. The judges said it would not be difficult because plaintiffs had already submitted nearly a dozen maps that showed that it could be done.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall (R) told the Supreme Court that the lower court got it wrong.

“The court-ordered redraw marks a radical change from decades of Alabama’s congressional plans,” Marshall wrote. “It will result in a map that can be drawn only by placing race first above race-neutral districting criteria, sorting and splitting voters across the State on the basis of race alone.”

Alabama’s Republican members of Congress running for reelection also asked the Supreme Court to step in.

“Alabama’s long-standing single majority-minority district comes as no surprise,” they wrote. “It is a consequence not of nefarious motives, but of dispersion and intermingling of state residents regardless of race.”

Marshall said the only way to create a second district majority-minority district would be to “split Gulf-area residents along racial lines, connecting black voters in urban Mobile with black voters in rural counties stretching more than 200 miles to the east.”

Alabama’s lone majority-Black district was also created by federal court order, decades ago, and has always been represented by a Black Democrat, currently Rep. Terri A. Sewell.

The challengers to the plan passed by the legislature and signed by Gov. Kay Ivey (R) include a state senator and the Alabama NAACP. They contend that Sewell’s district had been packed with more Black voters than necessary to ensure a minority candidate would win, and that the rest of the state’s Black voters have been spread across other congressional districts in numbers too small to make a difference.

In their filing, they say they have fulfilled Supreme Court precedent by “showing that it is possible to draw an additional majority-Black district in Alabama consistent with traditional districting principles.”

They said drawing such districts does not require race “to predominate over other factors. Alabama’s contrary argument seeks a wholesale revision” of Voting Rights Act precedent.

The case is Merrill v. Milligan.

 

[Cartmann99]

Rest of thread is under the spoiler:

Spoiler

 

Early voting began 2/14 and runs through 2/25. Election day is March 1st.

[GreyhoundFan]

Gee, another GQPer with a hinkey voter registration situation: "Mark Meadows, his wife, Debra, and their trailer-home voter registration"

Quote

“I don’t want my vote or anyone else’s to be disenfranchised. … Do you realize how inaccurate the voter rolls are, with people just moving around. … Anytime you move, you’ll change your driver’s license, but you don’t call up and say, hey, by the way I’m re-registering.”

— Mark Meadows, at the time White House chief of staff, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Aug. 16, 2020

“We need to make sure that everybody’s vote is cast. But we also need to make sure that no one else disenfranchises those by creating a fraud on the voting system.”

— Meadows, in an interview on ABC’s “This Week,” Aug. 23, 2020

In the run-up to the 2020 election, President Donald Trump repeatedly warned about potential election fraud — as did Meadows. But apparently what’s good for the goose is not always good for the gander.

About a month after Meadows made these statements, Charles Bethea of the New Yorker reported, Meadows and his wife, Debra, submitted voter registration forms that listed as their residential address a 14-by-62-foot mobile home with a rusted metal roof that sold for $105,000 in 2021.

The forms ask for a residential address — “where you physically live” — and are signed “under penalty of perjury.” According to Bethea’s reporting, Meadows and his wife have never lived there — and Meadows himself may have never set foot in the house. But the couple used that address to cast ballots in the 2020 general election, North Carolina voting records show.

Six months earlier, in March 2020, Meadows sold, for $370,000, a house in Sapphire, N.C., meaning the couple no longer had a place of residence in the state. Instead, they lived at the time in a condominium in Old Town Alexandria in Virginia. But that did not stop Debra Meadows from using the old Sapphire registration to cast a ballot in a June primary runoff election for someone she had fundraised for.

These votes appear to be the exact scenario that Meadows and Trump warned about. Indeed, in his memoir, “The Chief’s Chief,” Meadows wrote: “If we could get a few more Republicans to show up in places like Minneapolis and Bemidji in November, we would be able to win not only Minnesota, but the whole election — assuming, of course, the everyone else who votes was alive, a real person, and an actual resident of the state they were voting in. That last part turned out to be a little harder than we thought.”

Were Meadows and his wife actual residents of the state they were voting in? It does not look like it.

The Facts

When Meadows left Congress to join Trump’s White House, 12 candidates vied in the Republican primary for North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District on March 3, 2020. Lynda Bennett, a friend of the Meadows’, led the pack with 22.7 percent of the vote. In a surprise, political novice Madison Cawthorn finished second with 20.4 percent, edging out Jim Davis, a member of the General Assembly. The fractured showing required a runoff between Bennett and Cawthorn on June 23.

Debra had campaigned heavily for Bennett, attending fundraisers for her across the state. But on March 26, the Meadows sold their home in North Carolina, property records show.

That left the couple with only two undeveloped parcels of land in the state, according to his financial disclosure form.

Nevertheless, Debra voted in the June 23 runoff, using her Transylvania County registration to vote early, voting records show. Mark Meadows did not vote in the runoff, though he did secure an endorsement from Trump for Bennett two weeks before that election. Bennett’s overwhelming loss — Cawthorn beat her 66 percent to 34 percent — was considered a “black eye” for Trump and an embarrassment for Meadows.

Both Mark and Debra Meadows voted in the 2020 general election, with Mark listed as voting by absentee ballot; Debra voted early in person.

Less than two months before the election — and three weeks before the state’s voter registration deadline — Mark and Debra Meadows filed voter registration forms listing the mobile home as their residence. Both forms appear to have been filled out by the same hand; they were released with the signatures redacted.

Interestingly, Meadows’s mother, Mary Gail Garwood, had lived at and voted from the Sapphire property in 2012, 2014 and 2016. She then registered to vote in Georgia on Sept. 12, 2018. Mark listed the property for sale the next day, Sept. 13, 2018.

For many years before, the Meadows lived in and voted from Jackson County in a house they sold in 2016 for almost $1.3 million. They then moved to an apartment in Asheville in 2018, a move Meadows said was temporary, according to local newspaper accounts. The couple even switched party registrations in 2008 to vote in the Democratic presidential primary as part of “Operation Chaos,” a Rush Limbaugh-inspired tactic to keep alive the lengthy presidential primary battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Now, as the 2020 general election loomed, the couple listed a house four miles north of the border with Georgia that they did not own or live in as their primary residence. To register to vote in North Carolina, a citizen must have lived in the county where they are registering and have resided there for at least 30 days before the date of the election, according to the state’s board of elections.

The former owner (unidentified in the article) told the New Yorker that Debra Meadows had rented the house once but only spent one or two nights there; Mark Meadows never stayed at all. When the house was put on the market in the summer of 2020, she said, Meadows never expressed interest in buying it.

Both Mark and Debra listed a post office box as the mailing address. The director of the county Board of Elections told the magazine that if a voter registration card is not sent back as undeliverable, then the voter goes into the system. Both forms, filed Sept. 19, list the move-in date as the next day: Sept. 20.

Yet the real estate agent still listed the property for sale on Facebook on Sept. 23. The property’s address was later used by Meadows when he requested an absentee ballot on Oct. 1, records obtained by WRAL show. The absentee ballot was requested on his behalf by Debra, the document shows.

The 900-square-foot mobile home, with its modest bedrooms, is a far cry from the family’s old 6,000-square-foot house in Jackson County, which had four bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms and was on a nearly six-acre lot. As the mobile home’s current owner told the New Yorker: “It was not the kind of place you’d think the chief of staff of the president would be staying.”

Indeed, in 2021, Meadows purchased a three-story waterfront home of more than 6,000 square feet in South Carolina for nearly $1.6 million.

Ben Williamson, a spokesman for Mark Meadows, did not respond to text or phone messages. George Terwilliger III, a Meadows attorney, also did not respond to a request for comment. Debra Meadows did not respond to emails sent to her email address at Right Women PAC, where she is executive director, or several personal email addresses. She also did not respond to a phone message.

The Heritage Foundation maintains a voter-fraud database with numerous instances of politicians being charged for filing a false voter registration form.

Steve Watkins, a GOP House member from Kansas, was charged with three felonies in 2020 after he listed a postal box at a UPS store as his residence on a state voter registration form while living temporarily at his parents’ home during a 2019 municipal election. In Pennsylvania, Richard Cummings, a county school board member, moved from Westmoreland County to Allegheny County in 2009, but continued voting at his Westmoreland address through the 2016 general election. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to one year of probation.

The Bottom Line

Meadows, of course, had an important job for the federal government — White House chief of staff. Perhaps that’s a possible excuse, but he did sign the form.

Meanwhile, Debra Meadows appears to have voted twice under suspicious circumstances — first in the runoff primary from the address of a home that had been sold three months earlier, and then by signing a form under “penalty of perjury” that her primary residence was a trailer home in the mountains when she did not live there.

Voter fraud is relatively rare. It’s jarring to see such fishy behavior by someone who decried it.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Wow: "Supreme Court denies GOP requests to block new congressional maps in N.C., Pa."

Quote

The Supreme Court on Monday refused requests from Republicans in North Carolina and Pennsylvania to block new congressional maps approved by courts in those states, meaning the fall elections will be held in districts more favorable to Democrats than the ones created by the GOP-led legislatures.

North Carolina’s Republican leaders had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to embrace an unprecedented theory that the state’s judiciary could not impose a new map for congressional elections, even though it found the legislature’s version had violated the state’s guarantee of free and fair elections. The U.S. Constitution, they argued, leaves that question in the hands of the legislature, not courts.

The majority that declined the GOP-led requests did not explain its reasoning, which is often the case in emergency petitions before the court.

Three of the court’s dissenting conservatives — Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch — said that they would have intervened, that they thought the theory advanced by the challengers was probably correct and that they are eager to consider such a challenge.

Another conservative, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, expressed interest, too. But he said it was too close to the May 17 primaries to take up the North Carolina case now.

In the Pennsylvania case, the court turned down a request to put a hold on the state Supreme Court’s decision to impose a map. The action by Democratic members of the elected court came after the Democratic governor vetoed a map passed by the legislature, which is controlled by Republicans. The challenge was brought by Republican voters and candidates.

In an unsigned order, the U.S. high court said action now was premature, since a federal court is still considering the claim.

North Carolina is a purple state, with a legislature controlled by Republicans, a Democratic governor and an elected state Supreme Court with four Democrats and three Republicans. Donald Trump won the state in 2020 by a margin of 50 percent to 49 percent over Joe Biden.

Analysts said the map created by Republican legislators after the 2020 Census would have given the GOP an edge in 10 of 14 congressional districts. Democratic justices on the elected state Supreme Court said the redistricting maps had a partisan tilt “not explained by the political geography of North Carolina.”

The court concluded the maps “are unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt under the free elections clause, the equal protection clause, the free speech clause, and the freedom of assembly clause of the North Carolina Constitution.” The map it adopted gives the political parties relatively equal chance to win a majority of the seats, analysts said, as does the map adopted by the court in Pennsylvania.

Republican North Carolina legislative leaders asked the U.S. Supreme Court to find that under the “independent state legislature” doctrine, state courts had no authority to overrule the legislature’s authority to create congressional districts.

The theory comes from the U.S. Constitution’s election clause, which says that the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.”

In the election disputes leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh expressed support for the view that state courts could not usurp the role of the legislature in prescribing rules for federal elections.

In Monday’s opinion, Alito said that he would block the North Carolina court’s adoption of the new congressional map and that he thought the legislature had the better argument.

“If the language of the Elections Clause is taken seriously, there must be some limit on the authority of state courts to countermand actions taken by state legislatures when they are prescribing rules for the conduct of federal elections,” wrote Alito, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch. “I think it is likely that the applicants would succeed in showing that the North Carolina Supreme Court exceeded those limits.”

If adopted by the court, that would be a drastic change in the way the Supreme Court has seen the role of the state courts.

In a 2019 decision, all members of the court — including Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh — seemed to envision some role for state courts. In rejecting a role for federal courts in settling partisan gerrymandering lawsuits, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. specified that challenges could go through state courts.

“Provisions in state statutes and state constitutions can provide standards and guidance for state courts to apply” in policing partisan gerrymandering, Roberts wrote for the majority in Rucho v. Common Cause.

North Carolina officials defending the state Supreme Court’s actions said that “the claim that state legislatures are solely responsible for state rules governing federal elections — and, thus, that they may ignore requirements imposed by the people of a state through their constitution — simply cannot be the law.”

They also said it would cause chaos to change the congressional maps now, with qualifying already underway for the state’s primaries.

The U.S. Supreme Court in the past has expressed a reluctance to intrude in election procedures when campaigns are underway. Last month, it allowed an Alabama redistricting map to remain in place after a lower court had said it discriminated against Black voters.

That was Kavanaugh’s point in his opinion Monday. While he said the court should “carefully consider and decide” the independent state legislature issue next term, “it is too late” in the North Carolina case “for the federal courts to order that the district lines be changed for the 2022 primary and general elections.”

 

[Howl]

This could go in any number of places, Mike Lindell, QAnon, crazy Trumpers, but it's vote specific so here we go. 

Even though I live in Texas, I'm nominally interested in the politics of SW Colorado and have been following the case of Tina Peters. 

Tina is (still!) the elected county clerk in Grand County, Colorado.  Grand Junction is the county seat.  Tina went all "Stop the Steal", allowed an outside "Stop the Steal" person into a "secure" Grand County elections system update to  record the update and copy the election system,  which was subsequently published online. 

Tina was a featured speaker at Mike Lindell's  48-hour telethon (remember that?), then got a ride on Mike Lindell's jet from the conference to an "undisclosed" location and was on the lam for over two weeks before returning to Grand Junction.  As a responsible public servant, she claimed to have been working remotely the whole time!  Her actions compromised the elections system and voting machines in Grand County, resulting in the county having to purchase new machines.  

So...Tina f**ked around and found out!  She's been indicted by a grand jury and was arrested yesterday "on a mix of felony and misdemeanor charges, including allegations of attempting to influence a public servant and criminal impersonation."  She's currently being held without bail. 

I'm wondering if going on the lam for several weeks in a Mike Lindell safe house will make a bad impression when the judge sets bail.

The Colorado Sun has a summary of all the crazy.  Worth a read, because it's a cautionary tale about what happens when an election official falls down the "Stop the Steal" rabbit hole.  And yes, Grand County had Dominion voting machines. 

The Tina Peters saga, explained: Everything that’s happened with Mesa County’s clerk    Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters was indicted by a grand jury Wednesday. Here’s an explanation of everything that’s happened so far.

 

 

Edited March 10, 2022 by Howl