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    Facebook restarts political ad ban in Georgia following runoff votes

    Facebook has announced it will again ban political advertising targeting users in the state of Georgia, following the election there on Tuesday.The social media company said that, starting on Wednesday, Georgia users would again be subject to the US-wide political ad ban instated following the 3 November presidential vote. Facebook had temporarily lifted the ban in Georgia ahead of the runoff elections to allow political messaging to reach more voters.“Following the Georgia runoff elections, Georgia will re-join the existing nationwide pause on social issue, elections and political ads,” Facebook said in a blogpost.“This is part of our ongoing efforts to reduce the potential for confusion or abuse,” the company told advertisers in an email reviewed by Reuters.Facebook and Google had introduced pauses on political ads after the November presidential election as part of measures to combat misinformation and other abuses on the platforms. Google lifted its pause in December, saying it no longer considered the post-election period to be a “sensitive event”.Facebook lifted its own ad ban on 15 December exclusively for the state of Georgia, due to “feedback from experts and advertisers across the political spectrum about the importance of expressing voice” and using Facebook to reach voters ahead of Georgia’s runoff elections. For the rest of the country, the ban remained.The change announced on Tuesday means any ads about the Georgia runoff elections would be paused and any advertisers who were previously allowed to run ads about the Georgia runoff elections would not be able to create new political ads.It comes after it was discovered that Republican politicians and other operatives were using advertising on Facebook to target Georgia voters with misinformation in the final days ahead of the vote.A report from the global human rights group Avaaz found a number of ads on Facebook sponsored by Republicans that featured misinformation or falsehoods meant to sway voter opinion. One sponsored by the Senate Leadership Fund claims the Democratic Senate candidate Jon Ossoff is “threatening to defund the police”, which he is not. Another from the Republican party run in December accused the US House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, of scheming to replace the president-elect, Joe Biden, with the vice-president-elect, Kamala Harris.Nearly half of these false ads were shared by political candidates in the race, who are exempt from Facebook’s fact checking rules. Facebook has come under fire for the broad exemptions it grants politicians who advertise on its platform. Its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has defended the policy, saying Facebook should not be the arbiter of truth in political scenarios.Critics of Facebook say the spread of lies ahead of the Georgia election underscore how ineffective the company’s measures to address these issues have been. The company’s oversight board, introduced in late 2020, was meant to adjudicate disputes regarding content. But the group is not able to take down content quickly, limiting its effectiveness in breaking news situations. A group of academics and civil rights leaders critical of Facebook, calling themselves the Real Facebook Oversight Board, say the misinformation exposed in Georgia this week is proof there is more to be done.“The Facebook Oversight Board is complicit in a misinformation campaign in Georgia,” the group said in a statement. “They must do better, and Facebook needs to be held accountable for their failure to protect voters from disinformation.”Reuters contributed to this report More

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    Georgia Senate runoff elections – live results

    Voters in the state of Georgia are back to the polls today to cast their ballots in two runoff elections that will determine control of the US Senate. This will significantly affect the extent to which President-elect Joe Biden will be able implement his agenda.

    Why these elections matter
    In the November general election the Democrats maintained their hold on the House of Representatives, but fell short of the 51 seats needed to retake the Senate, where the Republicans have had a majority for the past six years.
    Tom McCarthy said: “Control of the US Senate is on the line. If the Democrats win both races, the president-elect will gain a big opportunity to build a progressive legacy. If Democrats lose one or both races, the country will enter at least a two-year period of divided government, with the Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, retaining power and likely frustrating Biden’s agenda.
    “If Democrats win both races, the Senate would be split 50/50, but Democrats would effectively control the body with Kamala Harris, the vice-president-elect, in her role as president of the Senate, breaking any ties in a strict party-line vote.
    “The runoff races are being held in accordance with state election laws because no candidate in either race won 50% of the vote in the November elections.”
    Who are the candidates?
    Tom McCarthy said: “The Republican candidates include one sitting senator – the wealthy appointee Kelly Loeffler, 50 – and one senator whose term has just ended, David Perdue, 71.
    “Challenging the Republicans are fresh faces on the Democratic side. Documentary film-maker Jon Ossoff, 33, a former congressional staffer and failed House candidate, is running to replace Perdue, while Atlanta pastor and first-time candidate Rev Raphael Warnock, 51, is running to unseat Loeffler.” More

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    Josh Hawley dodges question during Fox News grilling on election challenge

    A prominent Republican senator has declined to clearly answer a question about whether he is involved in a bid to reverse the result of the 2020 presidential election that Democrat Joe Biden won convincingly in November.Asked if he was trying to “overturn the election” and keep Donald Trump in power, Missouri senator Josh Hawley told Fox News: “That depends what happens on Wednesday.”That is when Congress will meet to count Joe Biden’s 306-232 electoral college victory, which has been certified by all 50 states. Formal objections due to be raised by Hawley, around a dozen other senators and more than 100 Republicans in the House will not overturn the result – as Trump and his supporters hope they will.Democrats hold the House, guaranteeing defeat there, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and other senior Republicans in that chamber also oppose the objections.Speaking on Monday night, Hawley at first avoided questions about whether he was trying to overturn an election and thereby disenfranchise millions of Americans, insisting he was objecting to the handling of the presidential election in states including Pennsylvania.“I just want to pin you down,” anchor Bret Baier said, eventually, “on on what you’re trying to do. Are you trying to say that as of 20 January [inauguration day] that President Trump will be president?”“Well,” said Hawley, “that depends on what happens on Wednesday. I mean, this is why we have to debate.”Baier answered: “No it doesn’t. The states, by the constitution, they certify the election, they did certify it by the constitution. Congress doesn’t have the right to overturn the certification, at least as most experts read it.”“Well,” Hawley said, “Congress is directed under the 12th amendment to count the electoral votes, there’s a statute that dates back to the 1800s, 19th century, that says there is a right to object, there’s a right to be heard, and there’s also [the] certification right.”Baier countered: “It’s from 1876, senator, and it’s the Tilden-Hayes race, in which there were three states that did not certify their electors. So Congress was left to come up with this system this commission that eventually got to negotiate a grand bargain.”That bargain left a Republican president, Rutherford Hayes, in power in return for an end to Reconstruction after the civil war. In August, the historian Eric Foner told the Guardian: “Part of the deal was the surrender of the rights of African Americans. I’m not sure that’s a precedent we want to reinvigorate, you know?”Baeir continued: “But now all of the states have certified their elections. As of 14 December. So it doesn’t by constitutional ways, open a door to Congress to overturn that, does it?”“My point,” Hawley said, “is this is my only opportunity during this process to raise an objection and to be heard. I don’t have standing to file lawsuits.”Trump’s campaign has filed more than 50 lawsuits challenging electoral results, losing the vast majority and being dismissed by the supreme court.Hawley dodged a subsequent question about whether his own White House ambitions are the real motivation for his objection – as they seem to be for other senators looking to appease the Trumpist base of the party.Also on Monday night, activists from the group ShutDownDC held what they called an “hour-long vigil” at Hawley’s Washington home. Demanding he drop his objection, they said they sang, lit candles and delivered a copy of the US constitution.Hawley, in Missouri at the time, complained that “Antifa scumbags” had “threatened my wife and newborn daughter, who can’t travel. They screamed threats, vandalized, and tried to pound open our door.” More

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    Official plane used by Trump will fly to Scotland just before Biden inauguration – report

    The murk surrounding Donald Trump’s likely whereabouts on his last day as president has thickened considerably with news that an official plane he has used in the past is due to fly to Scotland the day before Joe Biden’s inauguration.Trump himself is sticking to his refusal to accept his decisive electoral defeat. He has been caught cajoling election officials to “find” thousands of extra votes and is encouraging his supporters to gather for a “wild” day of protest on Wednesday when Congress is due to ratify the result.The White House has refused to say what he will do when Biden is inaugurated on 20 January, raising the question of whether Trump will even leave the building voluntarily.Most Trump-watchers expect him to dodge any event that would involve acknowledging his election loss. They predict he will stage a spectacular diversion to detract from Biden’s first day on the job.Many versions of that scenario have the outgoing president flying to his private club in Florida, Mar-a-Lago. But Scotland’s Sunday Post has reported that Prestwick airport, near Trump’s Turnberry golf course resort, has been told to expect a US military Boeing 757 that has occasionally been used by Trump, on 19 January.The report said that speculation over a possible inauguration day drama has been fuelled by sightings of US military surveillance aircraft circling Turnberry for a week in November, doing possible advance work.“It is usually a sign Trump is going to be somewhere for an extended period,” the Post quoted an unnamed source as saying.The 757 is a smaller, narrower plane than the Boeing 747-200Bs that are normally designated Air Force One. It is more often used by the vice-president and first lady, Melania Trump, than the president.There was no immediate response to requests for comment from the White House or Prestwick airport. Leaving the country before formally leaving office would be unprecedented for a US president.Flying to Scotland before 20 January would be a way to get US taxpayers to pay for the first leg of a post-presidential holiday. It is also possible the flight was booked as a contingency by a candidate surprised by defeat and unsure what to do.Multiple reports suggest he will face severe difficulties in his heavily indebted business empire.New accounts published on Monday showed Trump’s array of golf properties in Scotland lost £3.4m in 2019, though Trump Turnberry showed a modest profit.Meanwhile his neighbours at Mar-a-Lago have launched a legal effort to stop him moving there full-time, saying he is precluded by an agreement he signed in the early 1990s converting the estate from a private residence to a club.Wherever Trump goes on 20 January, it is unlikely the exit will be quiet or particularly dignified. But it will be unlike any presidential departure the country has ever witnessed. More

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    Revealed: David Perdue bought bank stocks after meeting financial officials

    David Perdue, the Georgia Republican facing a Senate runoff election on Tuesday, has twice bought a significant number of shares in a US bank shortly after meeting with financial policy makers, raising more questions about his prolific stock trading while in office.In one case, in May 2015, Perdue bought between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of shares in Regions Financial Corporation two days after a 10-minute phone call with then treasury secretary Jack Lew.Perdue bought additional shares in the bank two years later, on 18 May 2017, two days after a half-hour meeting with then Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen.It is not clear in either case if Perdue discussed relevant financial regulation or other market-sensitive issues with Lew or Yellen or whether the discussions influenced his decision to buy the stock.At the time of the call with Lew, members of the Senate banking committee, on which Perdue sits, were engaged in close talks over a potential trade deal.But the purchase of more Regions stock in the wake of Perdue’s meeting with Yellen – who will be nominated to serve as treasury secretary by Joe Biden once the president-elect takes office – is possibly significant, because it came about two months before Yellen publicly discussed her support for raising the $50bn asset threshold for systemically important institutions, a change that meant Regions bank could see an easing of important financial regulations.As Yellen’s views on the topic publicly evolved in her role as chair of the Fed, so did Perdue’s buildup of stock in Regions. Perdue separately sought to advance deregulatory legislation that would be favorable for banks like Regions, which Regions and more than a dozen other banks publicly endorsed.Public records show that Perdue sold his full stake in Regions on 11 October 2019 and on 23 October 2019, suggesting that Perdue may have made a 21% return on his earlier investment. He then bought more shares of the stock in November 2019 and January 2020.John Burke, Perdue’s communications director, has said that Perdue does not handle day-to-day decisions about his portfolio, which Perdue claimed is managed by outside financial advisers.It is not uncommon for policy makers like Yellen to have meetings with senators. On the day of her meeting with Perdue in 2017, Yellen also met with Lord Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, had lunch with Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, and then met with another senator, Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown.Former government insiders say policy makers try to be cautious in such meetings, and try to avoid sharing information that could move markets. At the same time, it can be difficult to avoid the sharing of potentially valuable information if senators and policy makers are discussing any issue in depth, and a senator might be able to gauge an evolving policy position that could be market-sensitive.The new revelations come as Perdue’s frequent stock trading while in office has come under increased scrutiny in the press ahead of his runoff Senate election on Tuesday. If Democrats win two runoff elections, it will transfer control of the Senate from Republicans to Democrats.Previous media reports have focused on how Perdue has faced federal scrutiny for his frequent stock trading while in office, and whether his position as a senator with access to market-sensitive information, especially during the pandemic, may have influenced some trades. The New York Times, citing multiple anonymous sources, said Perdue’s sale of $1m in stock in a financial company called Cardlytics, where he served on the board, drew the attention of investigators at the Department of Justice last spring, who were undertaking “a broad review of the senator’s prolific trading around the outset of the coronavirus pandemic for possible evidence of insider trading”.The investigators ultimately concluded that a personal message that had been sent to Perdue from the company’s chief executive, alluding to “upcoming changes”, was not “nonpublic information”, and declined to pursue charges. Perdue sold his stock two days after he received the personal message from the CEO. About six weeks later, the chief executive resigned and the company revealed that results were below expectations, causing the stock to tumble.The New York Times separately reported that, as a member of the Senate’s cybersecurity committee, Perdue and others sought out the protection of the National Guard against data breaches. The newspaper said that beginning in 2016, Perdue bought and sold shares in a cybersecurity firm called FireEye on 61 occasions. Nearly half of those trades, the New York Times reported, occurred while Perdue sat on the cybersecurity committee, which could have given him access to sensitive information.Perdue’s senate campaign did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. He has formerly denied having any conflict of interest.But Perdue’s challenger in this week’s senator runoff, Democrat Jon Ossoff, has repeatedly raised the issue, and accused Perdue of using his office to enrich himself.Perdue’s spokesman has called the criticism “baseless” and he has emphasized being “totally exonerated” by federal investigators. More

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    Trump attacks and vote by mail: the top voting rights stories of 2020

    The fight over access to the ballot was one of the most important stories in America in 2020.
    The country faced a pandemic that both offered new barriers to the ballot box and exacerbated existing ones. After election day, America faced an unprecedented effort to undermine faith in the election results as Donald Trump and Republican allies baselessly claimed fraud and brought a flurry of unsuccessful lawsuits seeking to get election results overturned.
    Even though those efforts have failed, Republicans have created a dangerous precedent, laying out the playbook for future losing candidates to refuse to accept election results. More immediately, Republicans may use the uncertainty Trump helped create to justify new restrictions on the right to vote.
    Here are a few of the biggest stories around voting rights from 2020:
    Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine the election
    As it became clear that a record number of Americans were going to vote by mail, experts warned that election officials would probably need more time to count and verify ballots after the polls closed, making it unlikely that Americans would know the winner of the presidential race on election night. Moreover, because Democrats were more likely to vote by mail, they warned that initial election results might show Trump ahead, only to see his advantage slip away as more votes were counted. The uncertainty, they warned, opened a dangerous opportunity for Trump to claim victory before all votes were counted after months of falsely saying vote by mail would lead to fraud.
    On election night, Trump did exactly that, making a late-night appearance at the White House to claim he won the election as votes were still being counted. In the days that followed – as Biden’s lead widened – the president and his legal team escalated claims of wrongdoing, alleging things such as that poll workers weren’t given adequate access to observe ballot counting. They began waging long-shot legal battles in both federal and state court, which rejected them overwhelmingly. Trump tried, and failed, to pressure some state lawmakers to override the popular vote in their state and award him electors anyway.
    By December, Trump and his allies had lost dozens of cases in court across the country, but that didn’t seem to matter to many Republicans. A total of 126 Republicans in the US House, nearly two-thirds of the entire caucus, signed on to an amicus brief supporting a last-minute effort by Texas to block electors in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia – all states Biden won. The US supreme court rejected the case, but the fact that so many Republicans were willing to embrace the claims underscored how the party embraced Trump’s baseless claims.
    Switching to vote by mail
    When America began shutting down because of the Covid-19 pandemic, it became clear there was going to be a surge in the number of people who cast their ballots through the mail. That presented a huge problem for many states, including key swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where vote by mail was not widely used before.
    Loud alarm bells sounded early on. During an April election in Wisconsin, there were reports of voters not receiving their ballots on time while others waited hours in line to vote. In Pennsylvania’s June primary, there were reports of similar delays and election officials struggled to count the influx of ballots. The Brennan Center for Justice estimated states needed about $4bn to adequately conduct elections during the pandemic, but Congress allocated just a fraction of that in the spring, $400m.
    As state election officials scrambled to get new procedures in place, a significant new problem for mail-in voting emerged during the summer. Americans began experiencing severe mail delays, a problem critics attributed to changes implemented by Louis DeJoy, a prominent Republican donor who took over the US Postal Service in June. Many worried that a poorly functioning postal service would disenfranchise many voters, who would not be able to get their ballots and return them in time to have their vote counted. In a remarkable admission, Trump said publicly that he opposed additional funding for the postal service because it would make it harder to vote by mail.
    Facing several lawsuits and congressional inquiries, DeJoy pledged to reverse the changes and ensure timely delivery of ballots. As the election moved into its final months, there was a sprint to get voters to request and return their ballots as early as possible. State elected officials encouraged voters to return their ballots in person, either to an election office or to a ballot drop box. Some states, facing legal pressure, extended the deadline for returning an absentee ballot.
    When election day arrived, those efforts paid off – there were no reports of widespread disenfranchisement because of the mail. And preliminary data shows Democrats’ focus on voting by mail paid off. Some of the places where voters were the most likely to return their ballots saw some of the biggest swings towards Democrats compared to 2016.
    Drop boxes
    Amid worries about mail service, Republicans in some places began cracking down on ballot drop boxes.
    In Ohio, Frank LaRose, the state’s top election official, refused to allow counties to offer more than one location for voters to return their ballots, even as courts said there was nothing preventing him from doing so.
    The most egregious example may have been in Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, unilaterally said in October that counties could offer just one ballot drop box. The decision meant that Harris county, home to 2.4 million registered voters, could offer just one location for voters to leave their ballots instead of the 12 it had planned. Texas already makes it extremely difficult to vote by mail, and the decision meant that voters in Harris cunty, one of the most diverse in Texas, had to travel long distances if they wanted to return their ballots in person.
    The supreme court’s conservative turn on voting rights
    The unique conditions of the 2020 elections unleashed a flood of litigation aimed at easing rules around mail-in voting. The suits, filed in large part by Democrats and voting rights groups, sought to suspend things like witness requirements for mail in ballots as well as state policies that allowed officials to reject a ballot based on a voter’s signature without first giving the voter a chance to fix the ballot.
    Several of those cases reached the United States supreme court, where the court’s conservative majority kept restrictions in place. In June, for example, the court allowed Texas to keep in place a law that only allowed a certain group of voters to cast their ballot by mail. It also said Alabama could block some counties from offering curbside voting.
    In the week before the election, the supreme court declined to overturn decisions from state courts in North Carolina and Pennsylvania extending the ballot receipt deadline. But it did overturn a federal court ruling doing the same in Wisconsin. In that case, Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion strongly suggesting that state supreme courts could do little to question state election laws because the constitution gives state legislatures clear authority over elections. The opinion alarmed many observers, who worried it could handcuff state courts from striking down suppressive voting laws in the future.
    In a case not related to the pandemic, the supreme court also left in place a 2019 Florida law requiring people with felony convictions to repay fines and other court costs before they could vote again. Voting rights advocates challenged the measure, saying it effectively amounted to a poll tax and gutted a 2018 constitutional amendment eliminating Florida’s lifetime ban for people with felonies. An estimated 774,000 people in the state are blocked from voting because of the law, according to an estimate by the American Civil Liberties Union, which helped represent some of the plaintiffs in the case.
    The decision, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent, blocked some people from voting, “simply because they are poor”.
    Attacks on the census
    Even before the pandemic, the 2020 census, which aims to count every living person in America, faced enormous challenges. Advocates worried that immigrants, turned off by Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, would not respond to the decennial survey. They also worried about new technological changes – this was the first census where the government encouraged people to self-respond online.
    An inaccurate census would be catastrophic. The survey is used to determine how many seats in Congress each state gets as well as how $1.5tn in federal funds get allocated. Businesses and local governments also rely on the data to make decisions about where to open stores, build schools, roads and implement transportation routes.
    When the pandemic hit, it upended carefully prepared census plans and the bureau had to pause operations. After initially supporting an extension in completing the survey, the Trump administration reversed course, and said it was going to try to complete the census on-schedule, even as the bureau fell behind. That decision was probably linked to a July memo in which the president ordered undocumented immigrants excluded from the data used to determine how many seats in Congress each state gets. Several federal courts have since blocked the order, but the US supreme court reversed those decisions earlier in December without deciding on the merits of the memo, saying the suit was premature.
    Deep concerns remain about the reliability of the data, given the Trump administration’s rush to complete the process. The consequences of the rush are likely to become clearer when the bureau begins to release data in the coming weeks. More

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    Pelosi rebukes McConnell for saying 'no realistic path' for $2,000 relief stimulus bill – video

    The Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, says the bill that would direct $2,000 coronavirus relief payments to Americans has ‘no realistic path to quickly pass the Senate’. After Donald Trump and Democrats pushed for larger relief cheques, McConnell said he would not be ‘bullied’ by Democrats into quickly approving the measure. House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, criticised McConnell for adding a delay to the payments.’These Republicans in the Senate seem to have an endless tolerance for other people’s sadness,’ she said
    Mitch McConnell says ‘no realistic path’ for $2,000 relief checks bill More