Voter Suppression/Election Integrity

[GreyhoundFan]

3 hours ago, WiseGirl said:

Do you ever find yourself planning an exit strategy from the country?  I do and I never ever thought in millions of years I would ever be thinking of that.  As in how far to the northern border and which crossing I think would have the shortest line or straight up through say a further north state or should I retire earlier and become an expat?

Yes, I have explored moving to several different places. As I am 100% work at home, I can work from anywhere, as long as there's good internet access. In fact, a team member of mine worked from outside of Manila for several months and nobody knew, except for me. There are several good websites for and about expats.

My dream location is Reykjavik, Iceland, but that won't work, since I don't have an EU passport. We lived in Germany when I was a child and I loved it, but I don't know that I could get work authorization there, even though my company has a couple of offices there. Costa Rica is a more likely choice, especially since I speak Spanish, but I hate the heat.

I keep coming close to pulling the trigger and going, but I just haven't been able to make the final decision. I think if the 2020 election goes badly, that may be the final straw.

Edited June 27, 2019 by GreyhoundFan

[WiseGirl]

5 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I keep coming close to pulling the trigger and going, but I just haven't been able to make the final decision. I think if the 2020 election goes badly, that may be the final straw.

 If you go please set up a place for other FJ refugees... 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump asks lawyers if census can be delayed, calls Supreme Court decision ‘totally ridiculous’"

Spoiler

President Trump said Thursday that he is seeking to delay the constitutionally mandated census to give administration officials time to come up with a better explanation for why it should include a citizenship question.

Trump’s announcement, in tweets sent from Japan, came hours after the Supreme Court put on hold his administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, saying it had provided a “contrived” reason for wanting the information.

“Seems totally ridiculous that our government, and indeed Country, cannot ask a basic question of Citizenship in a very expensive, detailed and important Census, in this case for 2020,” Trump wrote in his tweet. “I have asked the lawyers if they can delay the Census, no matter how long, until the United States Supreme Court is given additional information from which it can make a final and decisive decision on this very critical matter.”

Trump’s tweets were sent shortly after 2:30 a.m. local time in Osaka, where he is attending a summit with other global leaders.

Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution requires that the government count the U.S. population every 10 years.

Without a delay sought by Trump, it was unclear whether there would enough time for the Commerce Department to provide an explanation for the citizenship question that meets judicial approval. The administration has said a decision was needed by the end of June to add such a question; other officials have said there is a fall deadline.

The Constitution doesn’t specify when during the 10th year the census must be conducted.

“The problem at this point is not that the Constitution is dictating when the form needs to be finalized, but that the government has articulated the clock has run out,” said Stephen Vladeck, a constitutional law expert and professor at the University of Texas School of Law. “The government has arguably not been fully candid with the courts to this point, and it won’t help the administration if they end up changing their tune.”

The government has spent much of the past month arguing against efforts by challengers to develop further factual evidence on the grounds that June 30 was an unmovable deadline.

It would require a fair amount of chutzpah on the government’s part to turn around and say we now have plenty of time to fix it, Vladeck said.

Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University, said that Trump did not appear to be suggesting a marginal adjustment of the census schedule for purposes of litigation but rather was trying try to mold the process to his needs.

He called it an indication of “the administration’s contempt of the rule of law.”

“The combination of the president’s abject ignorance and manipulative flexibility on these matters is, at a minimum, quite telling,” Tribe said. “It suggests all matters — constitutional and legal — are subject to his whim.”

A string of lower-court judges found that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross violated federal law and regulations in attempting to include the question on the census.

They starkly rebutted his claim that the information was first requested by the Justice Department to enforce the Voting Rights Act, which protects minorities, and they noted Ross’s consultations with hard-line immigration advocates in the White House beforehand.

The decennial count of the nation’s population determines the size of each state’s congressional delegation, the number of votes it receives in the electoral college and how the federal government allocates hundreds of billions of dollars.

Opponents of the citizenship question have characterized it as a political maneuver by the Trump administration. They say its inclusion, particularly at a time when noncitizens feel targeted by the government, will deter many immigrants and their family members from participating, reducing the count’s accuracy and harming people who live in areas with large immigrant populations.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declined to say Thursday whether he thinks the census should be delayed when asked about the prospect at a news conference.

“I don’t know, I haven’t come to grips with that case,” he said. “I found it complicated.”

“I think it’s kind of confusing,” he added. “My general rule of thumb is if I’m confused about something, I don’t comment.”

Trump has publicly championed inclusion of the citizenship question for months.

Earlier this year, he tweeted that the census would be “meaningless” without the question and blamed “Radical Democrats” for trying to remove it.

 

[Howl]

Incredible Twitter thread.  I'm trying to get an unroll. 

[fraurosena]

This is the unroll of the above thread.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Gee, one way to ensure you win is to pay the company that counts the votes. Interesting thread:

 

 

[fraurosena]

Oh my! I'd love to see that discovery, and the GOP's reaction to it.

 

[fraurosena]

Follow-up to my previous post:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Mitch McConnell is right. Secure, open elections would elect more Democrats."

Spoiler

“They’re doing it as we sit here,” replied Robert S. Mueller III when asked in his testimony Wednesday whether Russia will again interfere in our elections. “And they expect to do it during the next campaign.”

The fact that Russia’s assistance to the Trump campaign got such high-profile discussion gave Democrats an opportunity to push a pair of election security bills in the Senate on Thursday. Here’s what happened next:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) blocked two election security measures on Thursday, arguing Democrats are trying to give themselves a “political benefit.” …

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) had tried to get consent Thursday to pass a House bill that requires the use of paper ballots and includes funding for the Election Assistance Commission. It passed the House 225-184 with [one] Republican voting for it.

But McConnell objected, saying Schumer was trying to pass “partisan legislation.”

“Clearly this request is not a serious effort to make a law. Clearly something so partisan that it only received one single solitary Republican vote in the House is not going to travel through the Senate by unanimous consent,” McConnell said.

Guess what: McConnell is right! Legislation to secure our elections is partisan. And the fact that it’s partisan shows just how pathological the Republican Party has become in its determination to hold on to power.

So here are some things that, in our system today, are “partisan” in the sense that if we were to do them they would advantage the Democratic Party over the Republican Party:

• Securing our voting systems from foreign hacking
• Allowing every American to vote
• Making it as easy as possible for Americans to vote
• Ensuring that all votes count equally

Now consider what it says about your party if doing those things would make it much more likely that you’d lose.

Republicans have quite plainly looked at our current state of electoral dysfunction and concluded that it’s working pretty darn well for them. Donald Trump is president, isn’t he? Why would we want to mess with a system that’s producing such wonderful outcomes?

The legislation to which McConnell refers, the one that passed the House, is pretty straightforward. It requires voter-verifiable paper ballots and voting machines that don’t connect directly to the Internet, so that recounts can be done accurately and there’s less vulnerability to hacking. It gives states money to secure their systems. It instructs the Election Assistance Commission to do a study to determine optimal ballot designs to minimize voter confusion and errors.

You wouldn’t think there’s anything there that would particularly advantage one party over another. But that’s only if you didn’t know how voting really works in this country.

That’s because so much of what plagues our election system works to the advantage of Republicans, in part because their voters tend to be older and wealthier, and in part because of all the effort Republicans have put into erecting obstacles in the path of Democratic-leaning constituencies attempting to vote, not to mention the gerrymandering that makes Republican votes worth more and the electoral college that does the same.

And of course, let’s not forget that the leader of the Republican Party said publicly that if a foreign power offered him help in his reelection bid, he’d accept it. Republicans just aren’t willing to impede the progress of any thumb on its way to the electoral scale, especially if the thumb belongs to Vladimir Putin. We don’t know if there are any hostile foreign governments ready to hack our elections in order to defeat Trump, but there’s at least one that is probably ready to help him.

So yes, securing our elections is partisan. So is making it easier to vote, because as Republicans surely know, the population of nonvoters as a whole is younger, less white and more liberal than the population of voters. If every American voted, more Democrats would win. Anything Republicans can do to keep them from getting the polls, they’ll do.

That’s where we are today: The last thing Republicans want is elections that are secure, fair, free and open. And they’ll make sure that’s not what we have.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Howl]

Council for National Policy = Deep State. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"‘It is not letting me vote for who I want’: Video shows electronic machine changing ballot in Mississippi"

Spoiler

Over and over again, the man touches a box on an electronic voting machine to cast his ballot for Mississippi gubernatorial candidate Bill Waller Jr. And over and over again, the machine instead checks off a vote for Waller’s opponent in Tuesday’s GOP runoff, Mississippi Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves.

“How would that happen?” a woman exclaims in the background.

“It is not letting me vote for who I want to vote for,” the man says.

The moment, captured on a video uploaded to Facebook and Twitter, where it’s gotten nearly 750,000 views as of early Wednesday, shows one of at least three malfunctioning voting machines reported in two counties in Mississippi, state elections officials confirmed.

Waller’s campaign told the Clarion Ledger it has also received reports of similar mishaps in at least seven other counties. Waller eventually conceded the race on Tuesday evening and, with Reeves leading 54 percent to 46 percent, it appears unlikely those malfunctions impacted the outcome.

But the viral video and reports of other machine errors are sure to spark new concerns among election security advocates, who have long warned that electronic voting systems — particularly the type used in Mississippi, which do not generate a verified paper backup — are vulnerable to hackers and mistakes.

“We should replace antiquated equipment, and paperless equipment in particular, as soon as possible,” the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law said in an Aug. 13 report on election risks.

Increased concern about paperless ballots has taken center stage since former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation found that Russia interfered in the 2016 election and will probably do the same in 2020. “They’re doing it while we sit here,” he said during congressional testimony in July, “and they expect to do it in the next campaign.”

Systems without a paper trail are particularly open to problems, experts say. In June, Election Systems & Software, one of the nation’s biggest voting machine vendors, pledged to stop selling paperless machines as primary voting devices and urged Congress to adopt new security measures, calling it “essential to the future of America.” Even President Trump has backed the idea, telling reporters in May that “going to good old-fashioned paper, in this modern age, is the best way to do it.”

A bipartisan bill from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), a Democratic presidential candidate, and Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) would have provided federal funding to help states phase out paperless machines, but that bill — along with most other election security measures — has effectively been blocked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

So for now, Mississippi is one of 11 states that still primarily use electronic machines in some counties and towns, the Brennan Center found. Overall, the state earned a “D” grade for its election security in a 2018 study by the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress.

During Tuesday’s election, voters in at least three precincts reported machines gone haywire, state officials told the Clarion Ledger.

The video showing one of those malfunctions was first shared before 9 a.m. on Tuesday by a woman named Sally Kate Walker, who posted it to Facebook with the caption, “Ummmm … seems legit, Mississippi.” Walker said in a comment that the incident happened in Oxford, Miss., in Lafayette County.

Anna Moak, a spokeswoman for the Mississippi Secretary of State’s Office, confirmed to the Clarion Ledger that Lafayette County officials responded and took down the machine, adding that “to our knowledge, only one machine was malfunctioning.” The device was “county-owned and tested by local officials,” Moak told the paper. In all, 19 votes were cast on the machine before it was taken offline.

By the end of the night, two other broken machines were reported, the Associated Press reported — one in Vardaman, where three votes were cast before technicians turned off the device, Moak said, and another in New Houlka, where technicians weren’t able to confirm any problem.

Waller’s campaign told the Clarion Ledger it had also received unconfirmed reports of malfunctions in Lamar, Leflore, Lincoln, Pearl River, Washington, Forrest and Scott counties.

Waller, 67, a retired state Supreme Court chief justice, conceded the race around 9 p.m. Tuesday to Reeves, 45, the state’s two-term lieutenant governor, who had been backed by most established party figures.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

This is why we went back to using paper ballots and red pencils to cast our votes in my country. Counting them by hand is very labor intensive but it’s the only way to have unhackable elections.

[Bethella]

The city clerk from Southfield, Michigan has been charged with 6 election related felonies. It’s not clear what happened but it was discovered during the post election audit. 

https://amp.freep.com/amp/2419363001

[Audrey2]

6 hours ago, Bethella said:

The city clerk from Southfield, Michigan has been charged with 6 election related felonies. It’s not clear what happened but it was discovered during the post election audit. 

https://amp.freep.com/amp/2419363001

Ugh! Let me guesswhich story will be played ad nauseam and discussed by Fox news for weeks to come.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is very true. I believe Wisconsin's primary was a trial balloon for repug voter suppression efforts:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

The nastiness of the repug party never fails to amaze me:

 

[fraurosena]

They’d like you to believe it’s Roe vs Wade, but no. This, this, is why the repugliklans are stacking the courts.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump intensifies war with Democrats over voting laws"

Spoiler

President Donald Trump’s political operation is expanding its legal effort to stop Democrats from overhauling voting laws in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Republican National Committee and Trump reelection campaign are doubling their legal budget to $20 million as litigation spreads to an array of battleground states. With the virus likely to complicate in-person balloting in November, Democrats have been pushing to substantially ease remote voting restrictions — something the Trump campaign and RNC are aggressively fighting in the courts.

Trump, who has long been fixated on voter fraud, has taken a personal interest in the project. He is expected to discuss the legal maneuvering during a meeting with his political team Thursday.

The battle over voting laws — specifically Democrats' efforts to make it easier for people to vote remotely during the pandemic — has emerged as a key front in the general election showdown between the parties.

More than two dozen Republican operatives are focusing on the legal battles and have been closely coordinating with party officials at the state and local levels. The Trump campaign and RNC recently intervened in Nevada, where Democrats are pushing for the state to ease restrictions by mailing ballots to all registered voters. Republicans have also been active in New Mexico, where they fought back a similar Democratic-led lawsuit.

The legal skirmishing has also been taking place in such battlegrounds as Pennsylvania and Georgia. While Republicans say they are open to some changes amid the pandemic, they are opposed to many of the farther-reaching reforms Democrats are pursuing.

“We will not stand idly by while Democrats try to sue their way to victory in 2020,” said RNC chief of staff Richard Walters. “Democrats may be using the coronavirus as an excuse to strip away important election safeguards, but the American people continue to support commonsense protections that defend the integrity of our democratic processes.”

The RNC and Trump campaign initially announced in February that they would direct $10 million to legal fights. But the party, Walters said, is prepared to sue Democrats “into oblivion and spend whatever is necessary.”

Democrats have long pushed to ease voting restrictions. Marc Elias, a prominent election law attorney who is leading the party’s effort, said Democrats were currently focused on litigation in more than a dozen states, including Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Many of the lawsuits, he said, involve expanding vote-by-mail rules.

He acknowledged, however, that the Republican Party’s massive investment is a hurdle.

“We’re not unrealistic about the fight that is ahead,” Elias said. “There is no question that Donald Trump and the Republican Party have made opposing voting rights a top priority for their campaign.”

Republicans insist public opinion is on their side. Earlier this month, the RNC commissioned a survey finding that nearly two-thirds of voters believed there was fraud in elections and that a majority thought fraud occurs more frequently when ballots are cast by mail.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Sadly,, this wont help. #MoscowMitch has no heart or soul.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good article from the WaPo: "Republicans are serious about voter suppression. Here’s how to stop them."

Spoiler

Voter suppression is at the very heart of Republican electoral strategy, and, as the New York Times reports Monday, they plan to go all-out in November:

The Republican program, which has gained steam in recent weeks, envisions recruiting up to 50,000 volunteers in 15 key states to monitor polling places and challenge ballots and voters deemed suspicious. That is part of a $20 million plan that also allots millions to challenge lawsuits by Democrats and voting-rights advocates seeking to loosen state restrictions on balloting. The party and its allies also intend to use advertising, the internet and President Trump’s command of the airwaves to cast Democrats as agents of election theft.

The efforts are bolstered by a 2018 federal court ruling that for the first time in nearly four decades allows the national Republican Party to mount campaigns against purported voter fraud without court approval. The court ban on Republican Party voter-fraud operations was imposed in 1982, and then modified in 1986 and again in 1990, each time after courts found instances of Republicans intimidating or working to exclude minority voters in the name of preventing fraud. The party was found to have violated it yet again in 2004.

“Voters deemed suspicious” by the GOP is a category that includes black people, Latinos, students, black people, and also black people.

The attempts to intimidate voters on Election Day are best understood as the culmination of a lengthy effort to make voting as cumbersome and difficult as possible for people whom the GOP deems to be the wrong kind of voter. While you can sometimes remove people outright from the voter rolls (and voter purges are a key component in the voter suppression arsenal), you don’t necessarily have to make it impossible for people to vote, as long as you make it hard.

So you pass voter ID laws, because you know poor people and minorities are going to be less likely to have approved IDs. Then you limit early voting and start closing polling places. Then when Election Day comes, you deploy your “ballot security” troops.

Let’s say there’s a polling location in a city like Milwaukee, which Republicans know is going to vote heavily Democratic. They send a few of their ballot security personnel there to challenge the credentials and identity of one voter after another, and since the poll workers have to deal with those challenges, the whole process slows down and the lines grow longer and longer. They don’t have to successfully keep any particular person from voting on Election Day; they just need to throw sand in the gears. Eventually, people start to say “I’m not going to stand here for hours,” and they drift off and go home. Mission accomplished.

So how can Democrats combat those efforts? They have their own legal teams mounting challenges to voter suppression laws, and groups organizing voters, and with the pandemic going on they’re pushing for more vote-by-mail. On Election Day, they’ll also be sending their own teams out to polling locations, to help push back on Republican challenges and help people assert their right to vote.

But there’s something else Democrats can do, something that might be even more important. And the recent experience of the chaotic primary in Wisconsin shows how effective it can be.

You’ll remember that the Republican Party, which controls the Wisconsin legislature due to an absolutely spectacular gerrymander (in 2018, they got about 45 percent of the votes for the state Assembly but came away with 64 percent of the seats), refused to postpone the primary election, which also included an election for a key state Supreme Court seat. Gov. Tony Evers (D) fought them all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in the legislature’s favor under the immutable legal principle that every election law case must be decided in favor of Republicans.

But then something unexpected happened. Despite all the Republican efforts to suppress the vote, Democrats sent in their absentee ballots in unexpectedly high numbers, and thousands went out to stand on line at polling places, literally risking their lives in order to cast a ballot. And the liberal Supreme Court candidate won. In fact, it wasn’t even close.

The lesson is that in that kind of a context — with a dramatic, high-profile fight over Republican voter suppression efforts — the Republican effort produced a backlash. As Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler said afterward, “Voter suppression might not be as clever as Republicans think it is. It can backfire by pissing voters off.”

The more attention is given to GOP voter suppression efforts, the more voter suppression itself becomes a campaign issue, one that can boost turnout among Democrats. However you might feel about Joe Biden, it becomes more important to exercise your right to vote if you think someone is trying to take it away.

Which suggests that as important as legal efforts and grass-roots organizing are for Democrats to push back on the GOP’s well-funded campaign of suppression and intimidation, the best weapons may be public attention and outrage.

Democrats may not be able to repeat the experience of Wisconsin, which was the only election taking place at the time and presented a unique set of circumstances with the conflict between the governor and legislature, culminating in the Supreme Court case. But they can draw as much attention as possible to what Republicans are trying to do. It’s something Democratic voters — and frankly, anyone who cares about democratic rights — should be angry about. Even angry enough to wait in line to cast a ballot.

 

[Dandruff]

I'm concerned that come mid- to late October word (true or not) will start coming out that the COVID-19 numbers are climbing.  If people have a hard time determining the truth, many will tend toward playing it safe and staying home on Election Day.  Meanwhile, I envision emails to the bleating Twitler supporters instructing them to ignore the fake news and get out and vote. 

It's critically important that people be enabled to vote early, and safely, with clear instruction on how to do so.