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    Republican top Georgia elections officer says voting integrity lies hurt his party

    Georgia’s top elections official says he believes Republicans’ claims of doubting the integrity of the vote in November’s presidential election “will really hurt” their party’s chances at the poll.In an interview on Sunday with NewsNation, the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, defended the election process he oversees amid the casting of a record number of early votes in recent days. His comments came after the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Raffensperger’s fellow Republican, posted claims on X that a voting machine had misprinted a voter’s selections to the detriment of her party.Raffensperger, who took office in 2019, said that “spreading stories like that” will “really hurt our turnout on our side”.“I’m a conservative Republican, so I don’t know why they do that, it’s self-defeating,” Raffensperger added. “You know, you can trust the results.”Georgia, a battleground state, has been a central focus for Republicans in their unfounded claims of voter fraud. During the 2020 election, after Joe Biden won Georgia by a close margin and took the presidency from Donald Trump, Raffensperger announced a ballot recount. That recount confirmed that Biden had won the election.Ever since, legal and political showdowns have placed the state as a central focus for Trump’s attempt to return to the White House in a contest against the vice-president, Kamala Harris.Recent court rulings in Georgia have pushed back on Republican-led attempts to change how the state handles its elections.The Georgia state election board, a relatively obscure five-person panel primarily made up of Trump-aligned Republicans, passed a number of rules that would significantly change how the state handles its political races. The most controversial proposal sought to obligate poll workers to hand-count paper ballots on election night.Nonetheless, Georgia judges ruled against implementing those changes after Raffensperger warned they could lead to disrupting the certification of the election, confusion and delays. Georgia’s Republican party has appealed.More than 1 million voters have already cast their ballots in Georgia, cementing its status as a swing state in the race between Harris and Trump.After the 2020 elections, Trump-aligned Republicans lied that their candidate lost to Biden because of voter fraud. Fervor over those lies culminated in Trump supporters’ attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Raffensperger at one point received a phone call directly from Trump pressuring him to “find” him enough votes to prevent Biden from winning Georgia, though the secretary of state rebuffed him.

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    Georgia state prosecutors later filed criminal charges against Trump over his attempts to overturn the outcome of the presidential election there, all of which are part of the many legal problems that the former president has been confronting while running for the White House again.In an interview with the New York Times earlier in October, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, refused to answer whether the former president lost the 2020 election. Vance later clarified that he did not think Trump lost the 2020 race, saying: “So did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use.”Raffensperger on Sunday maintained Georgia was “ranked number one” for election integrity by organizations on both sides of the political spectrum.“That just shows you we’re doing the right thing,” Raffensperger said. “Voters trust the process we have in Georgia. It’s easy to vote. It’s hard to cheat.” More

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    JD Vance falsely claims Donald Trump didn’t lose 2020 election

    The Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, told a reporter on Wednesday that there were “serious problems” in the 2020 election and suggested for the first time that the then president Donald Trump did not actually lose the race.“Did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use,” Vance said in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. “But look, I really couldn’t care less if you agree with me or disagree with me on this issue.”He was pressed on his response by a reporter later in the day on another campaign stop in Wilmington, North Carolina, saying: “I think that big tech rigged the election in 2020. That’s my view. And if you disagree with me, that’s fine.”The response comes in the wake of a non-response earlier this month, when during an interview with the New York Times, Vance was given five opportunities to “acknowledge that Trump did not win in 2020” and he “refused to say so”.Trump notably lost the 2020 election and currently faces numerous charges related to election interference after being found guilty in May 2024 on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a New York hush-money trial.The Harris campaign criticized Vance’s responses to the question about the 2020 election.“There we have it – JD Vance finally admitted he denies the 2020 election results,” a Harris campaign spokesperson, Matt Corridoni, said in a statement. “As Governor Walz said on the debate stage weeks ago, Donald Trump selected Vance for this exact reason – he knows Vance will be a loyal soldier in Trump’s pursuit for absolute, unchecked, limitless power.”Previously, Vance has sidestepped answering the question directly, deflecting when pressed by the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Tim Walz, during a debate if Trump lost the 2020 election. He also downplayed the insurrection on 6 January, 2021.

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    “Tim, I’m focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their minds in the wake of the 2020 Covid situation?” Vance said.In September 2024, during a podcast interview, Vance responded to a question on what he would have done differently than the former vice-president Mike Pence in January 2021: “I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had.”Vance was once a critic of Trump, comparing him to Hitler ahead of the 2016 presidential election. He shifted toward backing Trump’s election denial claims as he vied to be his running mate.Shortly before joining the Trump campaign, Vance claimed in an interview with the ABC News This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos: “Mike Pence could have done more, whether you agree or disagree, Mike Pence could have done more to sort of surface some of the problems in the 2020 election.”Trump has claimed there will be a “bloodbath” if he does not win the 2024 election. He also claimed his supporters will not have to vote any more if he wins as Trump and his allies have laid the foundation to contest the 2024 election results. More

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    Georgia election rules passed by Trump-backed board are ‘illegal’, declares judge

    A Georgia judge has declared that seven new election rules recently passed by the state election board are “illegal, unconstitutional and void”.Fulton county superior court judge Thomas Cox issued the order Wednesday after holding a hearing on challenges to the rules. The rules that Cox invalidated include three that had gotten a lot of attention – one that requires that the number of ballots be hand-counted after the close of polls and two that had to do with the certification of election results.Cox found that the rules are “unsupported by Georgia’s Election Code and are in fact contrary to the Election Code”. He also wrote that the state election board did not have authority to pass them. He ordered the board to immediately remove the rules and to inform all state and local election officials that the rules are void and not to be followed.The Associated Press has reached out to the lawyers for the state election board, as well as the three Republican members who had supported the rules, seeking comment on the judge’s ruling. They could appeal but time is running short with less than three weeks to go until election day.The state election board, which is controlled by three Republicans endorsed by Donald Trump, has passed numerous rules in recent months mostly dealing with the processes that happen after ballots are cast. The former president narrowly lost Georgia to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election but claimed without proof that widespread fraud cost him victory in the state.Democratic party organizations, local election officials and a group headed by a former Republican state lawmaker have filed at least half a dozen lawsuits over the rules. Democrats, voting rights groups and some legal experts have raised concerns that some rules could be used by Trump allies to delay or avoid certification or to cast doubt on results if he loses next month’s presidential election to Kamala Harris.Cox’s ruling came in a lawsuit filed by Eternal Vigilance Action, which was founded and led by former state representative Scot Turner, a Republican. The organization had argued that the state election board overstepped its authority in adopting the rules.Reached by phone Wednesday evening, Turner said he was “thrilled with the victory”.“It was a complete and total victory for the constitution of the United States,” he said. “These rules were opposed by citizens that are Republican, as well as Democrats and independents. This is not about party. It’s about doing what’s constitutional and re-establishing separation of powers, and that’s something that every conservative in this country should be concerned with and support.”One new rule that the judge blocked requires that three separate poll workers count the number of election day ballots by hand to make sure the number of paper ballots matches the electronic tallies on scanners, check-in computers and voting machines.Georgia voters make selections on a touchscreen voting machine that prints out a piece of paper with a human-readable list of the voter’s choices as well as a QR code. That is the ballot that the voter puts into a scanner, which records the votes. The hand-count would be of the paper ballots – not the votes.Critics, including many county election officials, argued that a hand-count could slow the reporting of election results and put an extra burden on poll workers at the end of an already long day. They also said there isn’t enough time to adequately train poll workers.Fulton county superior court judge Robert McBurney on Tuesday had temporarily blocked the hand-count for the November election while he considers the legal merits. He said the hand-count may ultimately prove to be good policy, but it’s too close to the general election to implement it now.Cox wrote that the rule “is nowhere authorized” by Georgia laws, which “proscribe the duties of poll officers after the polls close. Hand-counting is not among them”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTwo other new rules that Cox invalidated were passed by the state election board in August and have to do with certification. One provides a definition of certification that includes requiring county officials to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” before certifying results, but it does not specify what that means. The other includes language allowing county election officials “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections”.Supporters argued those rules are necessary to ensure the accuracy of the vote totals before county election officials sign off on them. Critics said they could be used to delay or deny certification.The first certification rule is not part of Georgia law and “adds an additional and undefined step into the certification process”, Cox wrote, saying it is thus “inconsistent with and unsupported by” Georgia law, making it “void and unenforceable”. The second rule is “directly inconsistent” with Georgia law, “which provides the time, manner, and method in which election-related documents must be produced and maintained”, he wrote.The other rules Cox said are illegal and unconstitutional are ones that: require someone delivering an absentee ballot in person to provide a signature and photo ID; demand video surveillance and recording of ballot drop boxes after polls close during early voting; expand the mandatory designated areas where partisan poll watchers can stand at tabulation centers; and require daily public updates of the number of votes cast during early voting.At least half a dozen lawsuits had been filed challenging some or all of the new rules. The Democratic National Committee and the Democratic party of Georgia had filed two lawsuits and joined others. Election boards in some counties and individual election officials in other counties had also sued. More

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    Inside the Republican legal blitz to sow election doubt: ‘The claims are garbage’

    Nearly four years after waging an aggressive legal effort to overturn the 2020 elections, Republicans have filed a slew of lawsuits that appear to be aimed at seeding doubt about the outcome of the 2024 race in the event of a Donald Trump loss.From 2023 until September of this year, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and local affiliates have filed or are involved in at least 72 cases, according to an analysis by Democracy Docket, a left-leaning voting rights news platform founded by the Democratic lawyer Marc Elias. At the same point during the 2022 midterm election, Republicans had filed 41 lawsuits.There’s nothing unusual about an explosion of litigation over election rules ahead of a presidential election. But experts say what stands out this year isn’t the volume of the cases but their subject matter.Many of the lawsuits are based on a theory that states are not adequately maintaining their voter rolls and that there could be scores of ineligible voters, including non-citizens, on them. They make weak legal claims, election experts say, and instead appear to be more of a public relations effort to motivate Republican voters and echo Trump’s falsehoods about voting.“The underlying claims in the suits are based on totally unreliable data, shoddy methodology, and basically the claims are garbage,” said Ben Berwick, a lawyer at the non-profit group Protect Democracy. “They are also, in this case, brought by election deniers, in an attempt to spread a false narrative to mislead the public and undermine confidence in elections.”“If the fraud theme of 2020 was ‘Covid is allowing ineligible people to vote or ballots to be manipulated’, the 2024 theme seems to be ‘illegals are voting’, and that fits in very much with the kind of nativist anti-immigrant language coming from the top of the Republican ticket,” said Richard Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California Los Angeles.In Nevada, a swing state, Republicans claimed in a suit filed in September there were nearly 4,000 non-citizens on the rolls who appear to have voted.It was a claim that the Nevada secretary of state, at the time a Republican, already investigated and debunked (she said that those people were probably naturalized citizens). Republicans claim the state should have investigated more and also cited data from the cooperative congressional elections survey to suggest that there may be even more non-citizens on the rolls, but the authors of the study have long warned against using its data to try to claim there are non-citizens on the rolls.In North Carolina, another battleground this year, the RNC also filed two misleading lawsuits designed to give the impression that the state was not properly vetting its voters. In late August, the RNC accused election officials of not following a new law that requires them to use juror information to verify citizenship information. The state board of elections said the claim was flatly untrue.The RNC separately sued to potentially invalidate the registrations of 225,000 people for lacking information that’s required under federal law. A 2002 statute, the Help America Vote Act, requires voters to provide either their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their social security number when they register.In North Carolina 225,000 people don’t have that information recorded in the state’s voter registration database, but experts have noted that doesn’t necessarily mean that they lack that information. Voters may have registered before the law went into effect, or the absence may reflect clerical errors. Experts say such minor errors shouldn’t lead to wide swaths of voters getting disenfranchised.“If they’re talking about 225,000 people disenfranchised for a clerical error that was not their fault, I think that would be a wild overreaction,” Sam Oliker-Friedland, the executive director of the Institute for Responsive Government, a watchdog group, told the Raleigh News and Observer. “It would just simply mean that people can’t vote because of paperwork, and that’s not a fair outcome.”Asked for comment for this story, the Republican National Committee provided a statement from Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, that contained a number of falsehoods about voting.“Kamala’s open border is flooding illegal migrants into our country at the most dangerous rate we’ve ever seen. As this invasion escalates, Democrats are pushing for non-citizens to vote and influence the future of our country,” the statement said. While a handful of localities allow non-citizens to vote in local elections, it is already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections.“While radical Democrats have allowed non-citizen voting in California and DC, states such as Walz’s Minnesota have no system to keep non-citizens off the rolls, resulting in an open door to illegal voting,” she added. Incidents of non-citizen voting are extremely rare. “This is no coincidence, and Democrats aren’t even trying to hide their election interference schemes. President Trump will secure the border and secure our elections so that every American vote is protected.”The Harris-Walz campaign described the 2024 election as “the most litigious presidential election in American history, even more than 2020”, and said it had hundreds of lawyers in courts across the country “winning case after case”. It noted that Republicans had lost several of the cases they have filed in at least the trial court, including challenges to mail-in ballot rules in Nevada (the RNC is appealing some of the rulings).“For four years, Donald Trump and his Maga allies have been scheming to sow distrust in our elections and undermine our democracy so they can cry foul when they lose. But also for four years, Democrats have been preparing for this moment, and we are ready for anything,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, the Harris-Walz campaign chair, said in a statement.For Trump, lawsuits have crafted a misleading imprimatur of legitimacy around his false claims about elections. In 2020, nearly every lawsuit that he and allies filed after the election was thrown out. Nonetheless, the claims and affidavits from poll-watchers that were included – all filed with legal formatting, signatures from lawyers, and court stamps – helped shape the impression that there was legitimate evidence something had gone amiss.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLawsuits also can be a particularly powerful forum for spreading misleading information. Public officials sometimes won’t speak publicly about pending legal matters, leaving facts in an initial complaint or petition to go unchallenged in public discourse. It can be weeks before a response is filed or a hearing is held, long after a flood of initial headlines repeating the allegations in the suit. By the time a case gets thrown out, it may not get as much attention as the initial filing.Even though none of Trump’s cases attempting to throw out the 2020 election succeeded, the false claims in them – that suitcases of ballots were pulled out from under tables in Atlanta, that machines were flipping votes – live on today.“A lawsuit without provable facts showing a statutory or constitutional violation is just a tweet with a filing fee,” Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, has said.“A lot of it is sort of projecting to your audience that you’re actively pursuing problems and trying to resolve them and also just kind of creating energy on your base to get involved or stay vigilant,” said Rebecca Green, co-director of the election law program at William & Mary Law School.Hasen said some of the lawsuits may be “placeholders” that Republicans and Trump allies could point to after the election to argue they hadn’t waited too long to bring legal claims. Berwick called these suits “zombie cases”.“They’re dead on arrival, but will be resurrected after the election,” he said. “I am virtually certain that election deniers will focus on these narratives in the post-election period, both to discredit results they don’t like and as the basis for post-election legal challenges to try and throw out certain ballots, or even interfere with certification of results.”Aside from the public relations lawsuits, the RNC has waged an aggressive effort over rules for counting mail-in ballots, including a closely watched suit at the US Court of Appeals 5th circuit that could prohibit states from accepting mail-in ballots that arrive after election day. Eighteen states, including battleground Nevada, allow ballots to count if they are postmarked before election day but arrive afterwards and this rule could impact an election where the result could come down to just a few thousands votes in any given swing state.Republicans have also backed mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania that are missing a date or wrongly dated, even if the ballot is returned on time and the voter is eligible. They have also sought to limit counties from offering practices for voters to cure errors with their absentee ballots so they can be counted.Experts have also raised questions about the timing of some lawsuits. Federal law prohibits states from systematically removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election. Yet some of the RNC’s lawsuits challenging how states maintain their voter rolls were filed within that 90-day period.Republicans recently have also challenged the legality of ballots from overseas and military voters, filing lawsuits in North Carolina, Michigan and Pennsylvania (the RNC is the plaintiff in North Carolina and Michigan, and Republican members of Congress are the plaintiffs in Pennsylvania). The federal law that governs the practice of dealing with absentee ballots has been in place for decades, and states have long had their own policies in place.“The timing of these claims is laughable – the processes they challenge have been public for years, and they could have filed these lawsuits months ago, at least,” Oliker-Friedland said in an email. “Instead, they’re choosing to waste election administrators’ time with litigation that, even if successful, won’t practically change anything.” More

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    Far-right website admits there was no fraud at 2020 vote-count in Atlanta

    The far-right website The Gateway Pundit acknowledged for the first time on Saturday that there was not any fraud during ballot counting in Atlanta in 2020 when Donald Trump lost the presidency, a significant concession from one of the most influential conservative sites that plays a key role in spreading election misinformation.The statement, the first acknowledgment from the site that there was no proof of fraud in Atlanta, came days after the site settled a defamation lawsuit with Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Shaye Moss, two local election workers who the site falsely accused of wrongdoing. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed publicly, but the site appears to have removed all mention of the two women.“Georgia officials concluded that there was no widespread voter fraud by election workers who counted ballots at the State Farm Arena in November 2020,” the site’s co-founder, Jim Hoft, said in a statement posted on Gateway Pundit on Saturday. “The results of this investigation indicate that Ruby Freeman and Wandrea ‘Shaye’ Moss did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct while working at State Farm Arena on election night. A legal matter with this news organization and the two election workers has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement.”As Trump sought to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat to Joe Biden, Gateway Pundit relentlessly amplified a misleading video it said showed poll workers fraudulently counting ballots on election night. Gateway Pundit was the first site to identify Freeman and Moss as the two women in the video and published dozens of articles falsely accusing them of wrongdoing.Moss and Freeman have publicly spoken out about the severe harassment they faced. They received many death threats. People showed up unannounced at Freeman’s home, and she feared they were going to kill her. Both women testified last year that they were still afraid to go out alone in public.Hoft and his twin brother, Joe, who is also a contributor to the site, refused to back down from their false claims. They held a press conference on the sidelines of the Republican national convention in Milwaukee in July insisting that the video showed wrongdoing.Freeman and Moss previously settled a lawsuit with One America News Network, another far-right conservative outlet, which subsequently broadcast a correction to its reporting and noted the two women had not engaged in fraud.A Washington DC jury also ordered Trump ally Rudy Giuliani to pay the two women nearly $150m in damages last year. Giuliani has appealed the verdict and undertaken legal maneuvers to avoid payment. Lawyers for Freeman and Moss have asked a federal judge in New York to give them control over his assets.Gateway Pundit still faces a defamation lawsuit from Eric Coomer, a former employee of Dominion voting systems, whom the outlet falsely accused of rigging the election. More

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    Far-right site Gateway Pundit settles defamation suit with election workers

    The Gateway Pundit, the far-right news website that played a critical role in spreading false information about the 2020 election, has settled a defamation lawsuit with Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two Georgia election workers it falsely accused of wrongdoing.Notice of the settlement was filed in circuit court in Missouri, where Freeman and Moss had sued the site for defamation. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed in the filing.Nearly 20 articles that Freeman and Moss said had falsely accused them of wrongdoing were no longer available on The Gateway Pundit’s website as of Thursday afternoon, according to a Guardian review.“The dispute between the parties has been resolved to the mutual satisfaction of the parties through a fair and reasonable settlement,” the legal team for Moss and Freeman said in a statement. Attorneys for the Gateway Pundit did not immediately return a request for comment.After the 2020 election, the Gateway Pundit published a series of stories amplifying a misleading video that showed Freeman and Moss counting ballots. The site pushed the false claim that the two women were committing fraud and counting illegal ballots after counting had ended for the night. The Gateway Pundit was the first news outlet to identify Freeman and later identified Moss, who have been cleared of all wrongdoing.Even after Georgia election officials debunked the video, the site continued to publish numerous articles falsely accusing Moss and Freeman of fraud. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, also attacked the two women publicly. A Washington DC jury ordered Giuliani to pay nearly $150m to the two women last year for libel, a decision the former New York mayor is appealing. At the trial, Giuliani’s lawyer at one point accused the Gateway Pundit of being the basis of the false claims about the two women.The two women faced vicious harassment, including death threats, and fled their homes and went into hiding after people showed up unannounced at Freeman’s home. Moss’s son received death threats on his phone and fell behind in school. Freeman testified last year that she had nowhere to live. Moss testified to the committee investigating the January 6 attack in 2022, but has otherwise not spoken much publicly.“I was terrorized,” Freeman said during a trial in Washington DC last year. “I’d rather stay in my car and be homeless rather than put that on someone else.”The site’s founder, Jim Hoft, had refused to concede that the site said anything false about the women, even though the state quickly debunked accusations of wrongdoing and a longer investigation formally cleared them. Hoft and his twin brother, Joe, also a contributor, held a press conference in Milwaukee during the Republican national convention in July and repeated many of the false claims about Freeman and Moss.The settlement with the Gateway Pundit is notable because of the influential role the site plays in spreading misinformation. One recent analysis by the group Advance Democracy found that the site is continuing to spread false information about voting and seed the idea that the 2024 election could be stolen.The two women have already settled a settled suit with One America News, another far-right outlet. The network issued an on-air apology after the settlement.They are also seeking to collect on the money Giuliani owes them. Their lawyers recently asked a New York judge to allow them to take control over Giuliani’s assets.The Gateway Pundit still faces a libel suit from Eric Coomer, a former employee of the voting system company Dominion who was falsely accused of subverting the 2020 election.The site had declared bankruptcy in an attempt to delay the case, but a judge dismissed the effort earlier this year.The case was one of several libel lawsuits filed against Trump allies and conservative networks that aired false claims about the 2020 election. Nearly all of those cases have settled, which observers have said may underscore the limited role defamation law can have in curbing misinformation.More details soon … More

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    New Trump January 6 court filing highlights perils of possible JD Vance vice-presidency

    When the next electoral vote is certified on 6 January next year, Vice-President Kamala Harris will play a critical role – whether or not she’s the winner of the presidential contest. It’s a role that vice-presidents have routinely played throughout history: certifying the results of the election for a seamless transfer of power.The same might not be true for the election after that. In the most consequential line of the vice-presidential debate last week, the Republican nominee, JD Vance, refused to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and then pressed by moderators, declined to answer whether he would refuse to certify the vote this year if he had that power. (His opponent, Tim Walz, said in a clip that’s now been spliced for campaign ads: “That is a damning non-answer.”)The troubling nature of the answer was compounded less than 24 hours after the debate when the US district judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed a redacted version of the special counsel Jack Smith’s brief against Trump in the federal election interference case laying out new evidence of how the former president attempted to steal the election.In striking detail, the brief laid out how Trump made Vice-President Mike Pence a target of his angry supporters on January 6, how the Secret Service was forced to whisk him away to a secure location, and how Pence went on to certify the election after the violence had subsided.Under the US constitution, the vice-president has few specific powers. Walz and Vance debated last week about foreign policy, reproductive rights, immigration and other policies that the next administration will influence, though their role in any of it will be limited. But the constitution does spell out that the vice-president is the president of the Senate and is in charge of certifying the election results, and Vance, unlike Pence, has said multiple times that he would not have certified the vote in 2020.“I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had,” Vance said on a venture capitalist’s podcast in September. He made similar comments before he was tapped by Trump to be on the ticket, saying during an ABC News interview that he would have liked to see the certification of the 2020 election handled differently.The contrast between Vance leaving the door open to question election results, and the depiction of Pence’s role on January 6 laid out in the Smith indictment, is stark.According to Smith, Pence stood strong despite Trump’s pressure and threats. He told Trump he had seen no evidence of election-determining fraud and repeatedly tried to convince Trump to accept the valid results. Trump’s pressure campaign did not let up – he and his co-conspirators used “deceit”, lying to Pence that there was evidence of significant fraud and lying to the public that Pence had the ability to reject electoral votes and send them back to the state legislatures.Even after Trump tweeted: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” supporters started chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” and the Secret Service had to evacuate the vice-president to a secure location, Pence maintained that the Electoral Count Act didn’t allow him to legally reject the valid electoral votes.Although the riots on January 6 delayed certification for approximately six hours, the House and Senate resumed their joint session at 11.35pm, according to the brief, and at 3.41am, Pence announced the certified results of the election in favor of Joe Biden.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt’s not exaggeration to say that US democracy survived past January 2021 because of Pence. Had he refused to certify the vote, the peaceful transfer of power would not have occurred, and the chaos and violence probably would have continued.But Vance has already proved himself more eager to capitulate to Trump’s demands – despite previously condemning the former president, he’s transformed into a Maga acolyte who is in some ways “more Trump than Trump”, according to one retired Republican party operative. And he has explicitly said that he would have acted differently from Pence on the day Congress meets to certify the election.Trump is not currently president, so Vance won’t be able to refuse to certify and wreak havoc in January. But if Trump wins a second term, Vance will be in charge of certifying the vote after the 2028 election. Trump has now said multiple times that Americans “won’t have to vote any more” if he wins this year. It’s not far-fetched to think about what might happen if Trump and Vance refused to cede control of the White House in 2028. More

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    Stephen Colbert on report on Trump’s attempts to steal election: ‘Smells like consequences’

    Late-night hosts talk Jack Smith’s new report on how Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election and Republican hypocrisy over Joe Biden’s age.Stephen ColbertBack in July, the supreme court released a 6-3 decision declaring that Trump had immunity from prosecution on acts committed as president, “all but guaranteeing that the case would be delayed past the election, and no one would be talking about or learning any more about it”, said Stephen Colbert on Thursday’s Late Show.“Well, surprise!” he added, holding a 165-page report by special counsel Jack Smith on Trump’s efforts to steal the election. “Mhmmm, that’s beefy. Smells like consequences.”The report details efforts by Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 election, and “how they are not covered by that ridiculous immunity ruling”, said Colbert.“We knew stuff in this report already, but it’s still gratifying to read the novelization of the horror movie we all lived through,” he added. According to the report, Trump knew he lost the 2020 election, knowingly pushed false claims of voter fraud and in his bid to hold on to power, “resorted to crimes”.“Pretty damning language, but kinda weird word choice to say Trump ‘resorted’ to crimes,” said Colbert. “That’s like saying ‘With nowhere else to turn, the bear resorted to pooping in the woods.’”“Just to note, ‘resorted to crimes’ should not be confused with ‘crime resort’ – another name for Mar-a-Lago.”Seth MeyersAccording to Republicans, January 6 is ancient history, “which is why a new filing from special counsel Jack Smith in the election subversion case is so damning”, said Seth Meyers on Late Night. “It reminds everyone of what Trump and his allies tried to do, and how brazen they were about it.”According to Smith’s report, Trump was overheard saying to his daughter Ivanka: “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”“This is the most damning thing: in private, Trump knew he lost, despite what he was telling his supporters in public,” said Meyers.The report also details how Rudy Giuliani accidentally butt-dialed an NBC reporter, who overheard him discussing his need for cash and trashing the Biden family. “As a favor to Rudy, stop giving this man your phone number,” Meyers laughed. “The only two numbers he should have in his phone are his doctor and a liquor store that delivers.”“Rudy is the first criminal in history who has managed to rat on himself,” he continued. “The FBI doesn’t need to bug him or monitor his calls. They just have to sit around and wait until he accidentally sits on his phone and calls them.”Jimmy KimmelAnd in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel marveled at how Trump is now trying to get out of election fraud charges by claiming that the investigators rigged the election. “The old ‘he who smelt it dealt it’ defense,” said Kimmel.As Trump said in a recent far-right news interview: “The election was rigged. I didn’t rig it. They did.”“He’s actually right about some of that – he didn’t rig the election,” said Kimmel. “He tried to rig the election, and failed to rig the election. He’s rig-noramus, is what he is.”Meanwhile, Trump was “ranting and raving” in Michigan this week on the campaign trail. “If you watch any of his speeches from the last election, from 2020, you’ll see he’s slower,” said Kimmel. “He slurs his words, he repeats the same stories over and over and over again. He’s repeatedly promised to release his medical records and has not.”Which is notable, because Republicans “were very worked up about Joe Biden and how old he was, his energy levels and ability to lead, but even though Trump is only three years younger than Biden, they don’t seem too worried about that anymore”, said Kimmel before a montage of all the GOP Biden criticisms easily applied to Trump’s ravings on the campaign trail. More