Eliana Willis

More than 10,000 people who Ohio believed had “abandoned” their voter registration cast ballots in the 2020 election, raising more concern that officials are using an unreliable and inaccurate method to identify ineligible voters on the state’s rolls.In August, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, released a list of 115,816 people who were set to be purged after the November election because the election officials in each of Ohio’s 88 counties flagged them as inactive. Voters could remove their name from the list by taking a number of election-related actions, including voting, requesting an absentee ballot, or simply confirming their voter registration information.Last week, LaRose’s office announced that nearly 18,000 people on the initial list did not have their voter registration canceled, including 10,000 people who voted in the November election. About 98,000 registrations were ultimately removed from the state’s rolls, LaRose’s office announced last month. There are more than 8 million registered voters in the state.In a statement, LaRose said the fact that so many people prevented their voter registrations from being canceled is a success of the state’s unprecedented efforts to notify voters at risk of being purged. But voting rights groups say the fact that Ohio nearly purged thousands of eligible voters is deeply alarming and underscores the inaccurate and haphazard way the state goes about maintaining its voter rolls.“If we have 10,000 people who on their own volition are voting, we know that there’s probably many more who are still living, breathing, eligible Ohioans, who also have not moved, who also have been removed from the rolls,” said Jen Miller, the executive director of the Ohio chapter of the League of Women Voters.Federal law requires states to regularly review their voter lists for ineligible voters, but Ohio has one of the most aggressive processes for cancelling registrations in the United States. A voter can be removed from the rolls if they don’t vote or undertake any political activity for six consecutive years and fail to respond to a mailer asking to confirm their address after the first two.Voting advocates argue Ohio’s process essentially removes people from the rolls because they don’t vote, which is prohibited under federal law, and is more likely to target minorities and the poor. The US supreme court upheld the Ohio process in a 5-4 decision in 2018.Naila Awan, a lawyer at Demos, a civil rights thinktank that helped challenge the Ohio process at the US supreme court, said she wasn’t surprised that eligible voters were flagged on the August list of people at risk of being purged.“Voting inactivity is a really poor proxy for identifying individuals who may have become ineligible by reason of having moved. The data across the board shows that this is fundamentally a flawed process and there has to be something better to use,” she said.The recent purge marks the second time in recent memory that Ohio has nearly purged scores of eligible voters from its rolls. Months ahead of a scheduled purge in 2019, the state released a list of 235,000 people who were set to be removed from the rolls. Voting rights groups found more than 40,000 eligible voters included on it and were able to prevent them from being removed.Democratic and Republican officials alike have overseen purging for years in Ohio, but a 2016 Reuters analysis illustrated the way the practice can disproportionally hurt Democrats. In the state’s three largest counties, voters in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods were struck from the rolls at twice the rate of those in GOP areas, the analysis found. In heavily Black areas of Cincinnati, more than 10% of voters were removed from the rolls between 2012 and 2016 because of inactivity, compared with just 4% in one of the city’s suburbs.In the months before the 2020 election, Keizayla Fambro, an organizer with the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a grassroots group that focuses on empowering people of color in the state, was focused on voter registration in counties that are home to some of Ohio’s biggest cities. She estimated her group encountered one to two people a week who were on the purge list and whom they urged to update their voter registration.“We would check them on a name and we would be like, ‘Oh my God, your voter registration needs to be updated, you could have been purged,’” she said. “Honestly, it was coincidence.”For those who move a lot, updating a voter registration was often the last thing they were thinking about, Fambro said. “You’re thinking about, ‘Oh, I have to get my kid in this school. I have to make sure we have somewhere to sleep,’” she said.People of color, the poor, non-English speakers and minorities also tend to experience more severe barriers in getting to the polls, making them more likely to be flagged for purging under a system that relies on inactivity, Awan said.“When you’re using something like the number of elections a person has missed, you’re going to, by necessity almost, be disproportionately targeting people who experience more barriers getting to the polling locations to begin with,” she said.Miller and other voting advocates have praised LaRose for taking the unprecedented step of making the purge list public months ahead of the removals to give voters adequate time to check their voter registration. But simply making the list public isn’t adequate, they say, especially because the increased transparency has underscored the way Ohio’s process can flag eligible voters for potential cancellation.“Before LaRose, we didn’t have any transparency, so we appreciate that. But what the transparency is doing is actually confirming that there are a lot of living, breathing Ohioans who are getting wrapped up in this process who shouldn’t be,” Miller said.“It’s been frustrating because to me he’s gotten this false praise of, ‘Oh, he opened up the list for the first time,’ which is all fine and dandy. To me, opening up, being transparent, doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have accountability,” said Bride Rose Sweeney, a Democrat in the Ohio state house of representatives.LaRose has called for more reform, focusing on centralizing and updating Ohio’s voter registration system. He has backed adopting automatic voter registration, which would help prevent wrongful purging by requiring state agencies to automatically update voter registration when they interact with eligible voters. Currently, counties are responsible for maintaining their voter rolls and compiling lists of people eligible to be purged, a system LaRose told USA Today last year was “prone to error” and “unacceptably messy”.“The secretary believes there are improvements to be made to the process. I certainly hope you include them in your story,” Maggie Sheehan, a LaRose spokeswoman, told the Guardian.Some changes are already in place. While the state used to only send voters one notice asking them to confirm their voter registration records, it recently started sending a second, final confirmation notice 30-45 days before the purge takes place. The state also announced in 2018 that voters at risk of being purged could confirm their addresses when they updated their driver’s licenses.But the fact that Ohio flagged so many eligible voters for removal despite those reforms is still alarming, said Stuart Naifeh, another Demos lawyer involved in the 2018 supreme court case.LaRose has insisted the purge process is outlined in state law, limiting any changes he can make. But advocates dispute that characterization, noting that LaRose has the authority to improve the process. State law does require officials to remove anyone who receives a confirmation mailer and doesn’t vote for four consecutive years from the rolls, but it doesn’t specify what triggers the confirmation notice. By relying on more reliable evidence that someone has moved, instead of two years of voting inactivity, LaRose could significantly improve the accuracy of the purge process, critics say.“He is not required by law to do this … State law allows it, it’s not barred,” said Sweeney, the Ohio state representative. “He is choosing to make this a more expansive process.” More

“The cry for survival comes from the planet itself, a cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear. And now a rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.”
This sentence, in Joe Biden’s inauguration speech, was manna from heaven for anti-fascists, including me, and in many ways a direct refutation of President Donald Trump’s “American carnage” speech four years ago. After decades of presidents minimizing the white supremacist threat, and four years of emboldening and protecting it, finally there is a president who dares to call the threat by its real name: white supremacy.
My relief was somewhat short-lived, however. A few days later Biden both narrowed and broadened his focus. While there were still implicit references to the far right, most notably the storming of the Capitol on 6 January, the focus was now on “domestic violent extremism”. Why we needed yet another neologism, rather than the common term “domestic terrorism”, was not explained – nor was the fact that most definitions of extremism include the threat or use of violence, which makes the phrase “violent extremism” redundant.
But leaving aside semantics, much more problematic was the generalization of the threat. Did jihadis storm the Capitol? Were “eco-terrorists” involved? Or antifa? No, the only people storming the Capitol were a broad variety of conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and other far-right adherents. (To make this absolutely clear, given that conservative and far-right media and politicians keep spreading this lie, antifa was not involved in the storming of the Capitol.)
So why focus on “domestic violent extremism” and not, specifically, on white supremacy or, perhaps better, the far right? I know that there are other “violent extremisms” in the US, but with the exception of the far right, they have not been ignored or minimized by the state. The threats from leftwing extremism, from antifa to the Animal Liberation Front, and Muslim extremism too, have been overemphasized for decades by intelligence agencies and politicians of both parties. It is far-right extremism, including white supremacy, that has generally been ignored.
My second disappointment came from the fact that Biden called for a “comprehensive assessment of the threat of domestic violent extremism” by the director of national intelligence, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, thereby reducing it to a militarized security issue. This not only prioritizes a certain type of expertise and experts (eg military and security), at the expense of others (eg social sciences), it also tends to operate in the grey zones of democracy, with limited oversight from Congress and little to none from the public.
Obviously, there is a security angle here, given the violent core in many far-right subcultures, including the alt-right, self-described “sovereign citizens”, QAnon conspiracy theorists and militia groups. In fact, most of these threats have long been acknowledged by agents on the ground. An FBI report in 2006 warned of far-right infiltration of law enforcement, while in 2014 a national survey of 175 law enforcement agencies ranked sovereign citizens as the most important terrorist threat in the country. Even Trump’s own FBI director and the acting secretary of homeland security called white supremacist extremists the most important domestic terrorist threat.
However, the core of the far-right threat to US democracy goes well beyond these still relatively small groups of potentially violent extremists. That is why these extremists have been minimized and protected by sympathizers in law enforcement and the political mainstream. If Biden really wants to fight far-right “domestic violent extremism”, he has to go to the core of the issue, not limit himself to the most violent outliers. In fact, the “domestic violent extremism” threat can already be reduced significantly by simply providing political cover for FBI and homeland security agents who have been investigating them for decades. No new agencies, laws or resources are necessary – just a refocus of existing resources away from jihadi terrorism and towards the domestic far right.
The real threat comes from the broader political and public context in which these “domestic violent extremists” operate – such as the enormous media and social media infrastructure that promotes white supremacist ideas and spreads conspiracy theories. Banning extremist rhetoric and conspiracy theories from social media might help a bit, but it doesn’t do anything about more powerful voices in traditional media, such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity on Fox News. Similarly, it is easy to focus on relatively marginal groups such as the Proud Boys, but their actions are insignificant compared with those of Republican senators such as Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz.
That is why the fight against the far right is, first and foremost, a political one. Our task is to call out the far right in all its guises, irrespective of connections and power. It is to reject far-right frames and policies, including the ones that have been part of the country’s fabric since its founding and those that have been mainstreamed more recently by the Republican party and Donald Trump. If Biden is not willing to go to the root of the problem, much of his fight against far-right “domestic violent extremism” will fail too, just as it did during the presidency of his friend, Barack Obama.
In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security published an intelligence assessment of “rightwing extremism” in the US, which warned that veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan might be particular targets for recruitment by extremist groups. The report sparked a conservative backlash which accused the Obama administration of unfairly targeting conservatives and veterans. Within days, secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, apologized, the report was effectively shelved, rightwing extremism was deprioritized, and the main author of the report resigned. The situation has not gotten better since. We know that the military, and police departments across the country, have been infiltrated and compromised by hate groups and far-right sympathizers. We also know that nearly one in five defendants in Capitol storming cases have served in the military.
So, the real questions are: does Biden understand how broad and entrenched the far-right threat to US democracy really is, and is he willing to boldly go where Obama did not dare? Or is he going to take the easy way out, as so many others have done before? I fear the Biden administration will engage in some rhetorical grandstanding and throw the might of the national security state at some of the more marginal far-right groups and individuals, further eroding civil liberties, while staying silent about the broader far right. While this might prevent some far-right terrorist attacks in the margins, it will also permit the further legitimization and mainstreaming of the far right at the heart of US politics and society.
Cas Mudde is Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, the author of The Far Right Today (2019), and host of the podcast Radikaal. He is a Guardian US columnist More

Donald Trump’s election lies and the 6 January attack on the US Capitol have highlighted how big tech has led our society down a path of conspiracies and radicalism by ignoring the mounting evidence that their products are dangerous.But the spread of deadly misinformation on a global scale was enabled by the absence of antitrust enforcement by the federal government to rein in out-of-control monopolies such as Facebook and Google. And there is a real risk social media giants could sidestep accountability once again.Trump’s insistence that he won the election was an attack on democracy that culminated in the attack on the US Capitol. The events were as much the fault of Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg – CEOs of Google, Twitter and Facebook, respectively – as they were the fault of Trump and his cadre of co-conspirators.During the early days of social media, no service operated at the scale of today’s Goliaths. Adoption was limited and online communities lived in small and isolated pockets. When the Egyptian uprisings of 2011 proved the power of these services, the US state department became their cheerleaders, offering them a veneer of exceptionalism which would protect them from scrutiny as they grew exponentially.Later, dictators and anti-democratic actors would study and co-opt these tools for their own purposes. As the megaphones got larger, the voices of bad actors also got louder. As the networks got bigger, the feedback loop amplifying those voices became stronger. It is unimaginable that QAnon could gain a mass following without tech companies’ dangerous indifference.Eventually, these platforms became immune to forces of competition in the marketplace – they became information monopolies with runaway scale. Absent any accountability from watchdogs or the marketplace, fringe conspiracy theories enjoyed unchecked propagation. We can mark networked conspiracies from birtherism to QAnon as straight lines through the same coterie of misinformers who came to power alongside Trump.Today, most global internet activity happens on services owned by either Facebook or Alphabet, which includes YouTube and Google. The internet has calcified into a pair of monopolies who protect their size by optimizing to maximize “engagement”. Sadly, algorithms designed to increase dependency and usage are far more profitable than ones that would encourage timely, local, relevant and, most importantly, accurate information. The truth, in a word, is boring. Facts rarely animate the kind of compulsive engagement rewarded by recommendation and search algorithms.The best tool – if not the only tool – to hold big tech accountable is antitrust enforcement: enforcing the existing antitrust laws designed to rein in companies’ influence over other political, economic and social institutions.Antitrust enforcement has historically been the US government’s greatest weapon against such firms. From breaking up the trusts at the start of the 20th century to the present day, antitrust enforcement spurs competition and ingenuity while re-empowering citizens. Most antitrust historians agree that absent US v Microsoft in 1998, which stopped Microsoft from bundling products and effectively killing off other browsers, the modern internet would have been strangled in the crib.The best tool to hold big tech accountable is antitrust enforcement: enforcing the existing antitrust laws designed to rein in companies’ influence over other political, economic and social institutionsIronically, Google and Facebook were the beneficiaries of such enforcement. Over two decades would pass before US authorities brought antitrust suits against Google and Facebook last year. Until then, antitrust had languished as a tool to counterbalance abusive monopolies. Big tech sees an existential threat in the renewed calls for antitrust, and these companies have aggressively lobbied to ensure key vacancies in the Biden administration are filled by their friends.The Democratic party is especially vulnerable to soft capture by these tech firms. Big tech executives are mostly left-leaning and donate millions to progressive causes while spouting feelgood rhetoric of inclusion and connectivity. During the Obama administration, Google and Facebook were treated as exceptional, avoiding any meaningful regulatory scrutiny. Democratic Senate leadership, specifically Senator Chuck Schumer, has recently signaled he will treat these companies with kid gloves.The Biden administration cannot repeat the Obama legacy of installing big tech-friendly individuals to these critical but often under-the-radar roles. The new administration, in consultation with Schumer, will be tasked with appointing a new assistant attorney general for antitrust at the Department of Justice and up to three members of the Federal Trade Commission. Figures friendly to big tech in those positions could abruptly settle the pending litigation against Google or Facebook.President Joe Biden and Schumer must reject any candidate who has worked in the service of big tech. Any former White House or congressional personnel who gave these companies a pass during the Obama administration should also be disqualified from consideration. Allowing big tech’s lawyers and plants to run the antitrust agencies would be the equivalent of allowing a climate-change-denying big oil executive run the Environmental Protection Agency.The public is beginning to recognize the harms to society wrought by big tech and a vibrant and bipartisan anti-monopoly movement with diverse scholars, and activists has risen over the past few years. Two-thirds of Democratic voters believe, along with a majority of Republicans, that Biden should “refuse to appoint executives, lobbyists, or lawyers for these companies to positions of power or influence in his administration while this legal activity is pending”. This gives the Democratic party an opportunity to do the right thing for our country and attract new voters by fighting for the web we want.Big tech played a central role in the dangerous attack on the US Capitol and all of the events which led to it. Biden’s antitrust appointees will be the ones who decide if there are any consequences to be paid. More

The US president, Joe Biden, has signed four executive orders aimed at healing the racial divide in America, including one to curb the US government’s use of private prisons and another to bolster anti-discrimination enforcement in housing. They are among several steps Biden is taking to roll back policies of his predecessor, Donald Trump, and to promote racial justice reforms that he pledged to address during his campaign
Biden signs more executive orders in effort to advance US racial equity
US politics – live More

The Biden administration is increasing vaccination efforts with a goal of protecting 300 million Americans by early fall, as the administration surges deliveries to states for the next three weeks following complaints of shortages and inconsistent supplies. ‘This is enough vaccine to vaccinate 300 million Americans by end of summer, early fall,’ Biden said. ‘This is a wartime effort,’ he added, saying more Americans had already died from the coronavirus than during all of the second world war
Biden vows to vaccinate 300m in the US by end of summer or early fall – live
Joe Biden appears to boost vaccination goal to 1.5m Americans per day More

Joe Biden vowed on Tuesday to ramp up vaccination programs so that most of the US population is inoculated by the end of summer or early fall.“This will be enough vaccine to fully vaccinate 300m Americans by the end of the summer,” the US president said on Tuesday afternoon, later adding “end of summer, beginning of the fall”, in a briefing at the White House.The new administration will increase vaccine supplies to states, exercise an option to buy a total of 200m more vaccine doses from Pfizer and Moderna and will give states more lead time on the amount of vaccine it will deliver.The administration’s immediate plan is to accelerate vaccine distribution to deliver roughly 1.4m shots a day and 10m doses a week for the next three weeks, as part of the White House’s earlier-stated ambition to vaccinate 100 million people in 100 days.“This will be one of the most difficult operational challenges we’ve ever undertaken,” said Joe Biden on Tuesday, announcing the plans. But, he added, “Help is on the way”.He indicated that the vaccination program he inherited from the Trump administration was not in adequate order.“When we arrived, the vaccine program was in worse shape than we expected or anticipated,” Biden said.He added: “Until now, we’ve had to guess how much vaccine to expect for the next week, and that’s what the [state] governors had to do. This is unacceptable.”The new purchase order is expected to allow the government to vaccinate 300 million people with a two-dose regimen of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, a senior administration official said earlier.The official said there were two “constraining factors”, for delivering vaccines quickly: supply and distribution. The official said the White House was working to increase capacity for both, by purchasing more vaccine, raw supplies and setting up federal vaccination sites.“This is a wartime undertaking, it’s not hyperbole,” said Biden.The official called the rollout a “daunting effort”, and called on Congress to pass a $1.9tn stimulus package which includes more money for state vaccination campaigns.The Biden administration has repeatedly said it aims to vaccinate 100 million people in 100 days, a goal that appeared to be in hand as the US exceeded 1m doses a day in the president’s first week. As of Tuesday, 19 million people had received one vaccine shot, and 3.4 million received a second.On Monday, Biden said he was hopeful the US was on track to deliver nearly 1.5m vaccinations a day, and that the US would be “well on our way” to herd immunity by the spring. Over the weekend, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, described 1m vaccinations a day as, “a floor, not a ceiling”.However, Biden also forecast a more harrowing death toll, and on Monday said the US “could see” 660,000 deaths total before the pandemic is brought under control. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) predicts up to 508,000 people in the US could have been killed by Covid-19 by 13 February. The death toll so far is 423,000, according to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus research center.The Biden administration is also planning to exercise an option to purchase 200m more vaccine doses, 100m from Pfizer/BioNTech and 100m from Moderna, the two producers with US emergency use authorization so far, through contracts first established by the Trump administration.This would increase the government-purchased vaccine supply to 600m doses, enough to inoculate 300m people. The senior official said the government expects to deliver 10m vaccine doses to states each week for the next three weeks, and will give states at least three weeks’ notice of upcoming shipments. Vaccine allotments are determined by state population.The vice-president, Kamala Harris, and the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, received the second dose of a Covid-19 vaccine on Tuesday afternoon. More

Twitter has permanently banned My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell, after he continued to perpetuate the baseless claim that Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election.Twitter decided to ban Lindell due to “repeated violations” of its civic integrity policy, a spokesperson said. The policy was implemented last September and is targeted at fighting disinformation.It was not immediately clear which posts by Lindell triggered his suspension.Lindell, a Trump supporter, has continued to insist that the election was rigged even after Joe Biden has begun work in the Oval Office.Major retailers such as Bed Bath & Beyond and Kohl’s have said they will stop carrying My Pillow products, Lindell previously said.Lindell is also facing potential litigation from Dominion Voting Systems for claiming their machines played a role in alleged election fraud. He also urged Trump to declare martial law in an attempt to overturn the election.Following the storming of the US Capitol earlier this month, Twitter has banned more than 70,000 accounts for sharing misinformation.Trump, who urged on the mob, has also had his account permanently suspended. More