US Politics

Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial begins in the Senate next week. Lawrence Douglas explains the process and politics of the spectacle ahead

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The US Senate will be transformed into a courtroom next week when Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial begins. After hearing evidence against the former president, the Senate’s 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats will have to decide whether Trump was guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors” when he incited supporters to storm the Capitol building and disrupt the election certification process. Lawrence Douglas, an Amherst College professor and Guardian opinion contributor, explains what kind of defence Trump is planning to mount, and whether any Senate Republicans are likely to vote to convict him. And the former Democratic senator Russ Feingold, who served during Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in the 90s, tells Anushka Asthana how the process has become more partisan than ever. Archive: CNN, C-Span, Rev, Bloomberg, CBS-DFW, Fox News, CBS, 60 Minutes (CBS), YouTube More

Donald Trump’s legal team has said the former president will not voluntarily testify under oath at his impeachment trial in the Senate next week, where he faces the charge from House Democrats that he incited the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January.
The lead House impeachment manager, Jamie Raskin, a Democrat, wrote to Trump asking him to testify under oath before or during the trial, challenging the former president to explain why he and his lawyers have disputed key factual allegations at the center of their charge that he incited a violent mob to storm the Capitol.
“You denied many factual allegations set forth in the article of impeachment. You have thus attempted to put critical facts at issue,” Raskin wrote in a letter made public on Thursday.
He went on to say that if Trump refused to do so, an adverse inference would be made from his reluctance.
Hours after the letter was released, the Trump adviser Jason Miller said that the former president “will not testify” in what he described as an “unconstitutional proceeding”. Trump’s lawyers dismissed the request as a “public relations stunt”.
The request from House impeachment managers does not require Trump to appear – though the Senate could later force a subpoena – but it does warn that any refusal to testify could be used at trial to support arguments for a conviction. Even if Trump does not testify, the request nonetheless makes clear Democrats’ determination to present an aggressive case against him even though he has left the White House.
The Senate impeachment trial starts on 9 February. Trump is charged with inciting an insurrection on 6 January, when a mob of his supporters broke into the Capitol to interrupt the electoral vote count. Democrats have said a trial is necessary to provide a final measure of accountability for the attack. If he is convicted, the Senate could hold a second vote to disqualify him from seeking office again.
In the letter, Raskin asked that Trump provide testimony about his conduct “either before or during the Senate impeachment trial”, and under cross-examination, as early as Monday, 8 February, and not later than Thursday, 11 February.
The request from Raskin cites the words of Trump’s own attorneys, who in a legal brief earlier this week not only denied that Trump had incited the riot, but also asserted that he had “performed admirably in his role as president, at all times doing what he thought was in the best interests of the American people”.
With that argument, Raskin said, Trump had questioned critical facts in the case “notwithstanding the clear and overwhelming evidence of your constitutional offense”. He said Trump should be able to testify now that he is no longer president.
Raskin said if Trump refuses to appear, the managers will use his refusal against him in the trial – a similar argument put forth by House Democrats in last year’s impeachment trial, when many Trump officials ignored subpoenas. Trump was eventually acquitted of the Democratic charges that he abused his presidential powers by pressuring the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden, now the president.
The impeachment managers do not have the authority to subpoena witnesses now since the House has already voted to impeach him. The Senate could vote to subpoena Trump, or any other witnesses, on a simple majority vote during the trial. But it is unclear if the Senate would be willing to do so.
Shortly after Raskin’s letter was made public, Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said he would listen to the House managers’ arguments if they felt a subpoena was necessary. But he said that “the more I see what’s already in the public record, the more powerful the case” against Trump, based on his own words and actions.
Trump’s statements before and after the attack on the Capitol “are the most powerful evidence”, Blumenthal said. “His own words incriminate him. They show his guilty intent.”
The South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s closest GOP allies, said he thought the letter was a “political ploy” and noted that Democrats did not invite or subpoena him to testify before the House, which voted to impeach Trump on 13 January.
Asked if he thought Trump would testify, Graham said it would be a “bad idea”.
“I don’t think that would be in anybody’s interest,” he said.
Associated Press contributed to this report More

Key events

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3.52pm EST15:52
Trump’s legal team signals he will not testify in impeachment trial

3.07pm EST15:07
Biden to sign executive order raising US refugee admissions to 125,000

3.02pm EST15:02
Biden says defense secretary will launch global posture review

2.50pm EST14:50
Biden at state department: ‘Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy’

2.47pm EST14:47
Senate vote-a-rama on budget resolution begins

1.54pm EST13:54
Biden sends message to global leaders: ‘America is back’

1.50pm EST13:50
Democrats criticize Greene’s remarks ahead of vote on committee assignments

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4.52pm EST16:52

House minority leader Kevin McCarthy denounced the resolution to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments over her extremist views.
McCarthy argued the resolution, if approved, would set a dangerous precedent that would only intensify partisan divisions in the House.
The Republican leader condemned Greene’s past racist and anti-Semitic comments, but McCarthy has refused to remove the congresswoman from her committee assignments.
McCarthy accused Democrats of being “blinded by partisanship and politics”.

4.47pm EST16:47

The House floor debate over whether Marjorie Taylor Greene should be removed from her committee assignments over her past racist, anti-Semitic and extremist comments is underway.
Ted Deutch, the Democratic chairman of the House ethics committee, denounced Greene for supporting conspiracy theories suggesting that school shootings, like the Parkland shooting that took place in Deutch, were staged.
“The 17 people who never came home from school on Feb. 14, 2018 were my constituents. Their families’ pain is real. And it is felt every single day,” Deutch said.
Greene said in a speech today that school shootings were real, but she did not apologize for her past comments.

4.25pm EST16:25

The House voted along partly lines, 205-218, to reject Republican congressman Chip Roy’s motion to adjourn for the day.

House Press Gallery
(@HouseDailyPress)
The motion to adjourn was rejected 205-218.The House is debating H.Res. 72 – Removing a certain Member from certain standing committees of the House of Representatives.

February 4, 2021

The House is now debating the resolution to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments over her racist, anti-Semitic and extremist rhetoric.

4.12pm EST16:12

The Guardian’s Kari Paul reports:
Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, announced last week the platform will no longer algorithmically recommend political groups to users in an attempt to “turn down the temperature” on online divisiveness.
But experts say such policies are difficult to enforce, much less quantify, and the toxic legacy of the Groups feature and the algorithmic incentives promoting it will be difficult to erase.
“This is like putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound,” said Jessica J González, the co-founder of the anti-hate speech group Change the Terms. “It doesn’t do enough to combat the long history of abuse that’s been allowed to fester on Facebook.”
Read Kari’s full report:

3.52pm EST15:52

Trump’s legal team signals he will not testify in impeachment trial

Donald Trump’s legal team has signaled that he will not testify in the Senate impeachment trial, despite the impeachment managers’ request for him to do so.
One of Trump’s senior advisers, Jason Miller, shared a letter to lead impeachment manager Jamie Raskin describing the congressman’s request for the former president to testify as a “public relations stunt”.

Jason Miller
(@JasonMillerinDC)
🚨Response to Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin🚨 pic.twitter.com/I13JBvbkmD

February 4, 2021

The letter to Raskin is signed by two of Trump’s lawyers, Bruce Castor and David Schoen.
“Your letter only confirms what is known to everyone: you cannot prove your allegations against the 45th President of the United States, who is now a private citizen,” Castor and Schoen wrote.
Castor also told NBC News that the former president did not intend to testify in the impeachment trial.

Carol Lee
(@carolelee)
Trump impeachment lawyer Bruce Castor tells @NBCNews the former president won’t testify, per House Dems request. “It’s a publicity stunt in order to make up for the weakness of the House managers’ case,” Castor says, calling the case “a winner” for Trump.

February 4, 2021

3.33pm EST15:33

The House has adopted the rule for the resolution to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments, clearing another procedural hurdle.

House Press Gallery
(@HouseDailyPress)
The rule for H.Res. 72 – Removing a certain Member from certain standing committees of the House of Representatives was adopted by a vote of 218-210.The House is voting on a motion to adjourn.

February 4, 2021

But Republican congressman Chip Roy has now introduced a motion to adjourn the chamber, which is expected to be defeated by the Democratic majority.
Roy’s motion will delay the final vote on Greene, who has been widely denounced for her racist and anti-Semitic views, until about 5:30 pm ET.

3.19pm EST15:19

Joe Biden also used his state department speech to emphasize the importance of an independent press in a healthy democracy.
“We believe a free press isn’t an adversary, rather it’s essential,” the president said. “The free press is essential to the health of a democracy.”
The comments represented a stark contrast to Donald Trump, who repeatedly attacked the press as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people” for revealing unflattering facts about him and his administration.
Biden’s speech at the state department has now concluded.

3.15pm EST15:15

Over his four years in office, Donald Trump brought down the cap on annual US refugee admissions to historic lows.

John Gramlich
(@johngramlich)
Here’s how the refugee cap (ie, the maximum number of refugees allowed into the US) has changed in recent fiscal years: 2017: 110,0002018: 45,0002019: 30,0002020: 18,000https://t.co/zpvLZi0p9B https://t.co/Ypspv3rEGj

February 4, 2021

Joe Biden said in his state department speech today that he would sign an executive order to raise annual refugee admissions back up to 125,000.
But the new president acknowledged it would take time to “rebuild what has been so badly damaged” after four years of Trump’s leadership.

3.07pm EST15:07

Biden to sign executive order raising US refugee admissions to 125,000

Joe Biden said he will sign an executive order to raise annual US refugee admissions to 125,000, after the Trump administration repeatedly slashed the refugee cap.
The president pledged that his administration would “begin the hard work of restoring our refugee admissions program to help meet the unprecedented global need”.
But Biden acknowledged it would take time to increase the US refugee capacity, after the Trump administration targeted some of the infrastructure that supports refugee admissions.
“It’s going to take time to rebuild what has been so badly damaged,” Biden said.

3.02pm EST15:02

Biden says defense secretary will launch global posture review

Joe Biden said his newly confirmed secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, will lead a global posture review to assess US military operations.
In the meantime, any US troop redeployments from Germany that were approved by Donald Trump will be frozen, Biden said.
The president’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, announced the global posture review at the White House earlier today.
Biden also confirmed Sullivan’s announcement that the US is ending support for offensive operations and relevant arms sales in Yemen.
“We’re going to continue to help and support Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty,” the US president added.

2.57pm EST14:57

Joe Biden criticized the Vladimir Putin’s government, after a Russian court ruled that opposition leader Alexei Navalny should be jailed for two years and eight months.
Biden said Navalny “should be released immediately and without condition,” as protests rage over the opposition leader’s detainment.
“We will not hesitate to raise the cost on Russia and defend our vital interests and our people,” Biden said at the state department.

2.50pm EST14:50

Biden at state department: ‘Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy’

Joe Biden is delivering a speech at the state department, outlining his vision for America’s foreign policy agenda.
“America is back,” Biden said, echoing his comments to state department staffers earlier this afternoon. “Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.”
The president also reiterated the need for America to strengthen its global alliances, after four years of Donald Trump belittling those relationships.
“We will repair our alliances and engage with the world once again — not to meet yesterday’s challenges but today’s and tomorrow’s,” Biden said. “We can’t do it alone.”

2.47pm EST14:47

Senate vote-a-rama on budget resolution begins

The Senate’s “vote-a-rama” on the Democratic budget resolution is now underway, and it will likely continue for hours.

Senate Cloakroom
(@SenateCloakroom)
NOW VOTING: Adoption of Wicker Amendment #261 in relation to S.Con.Res.5, Sanders Budget Resolution.

February 4, 2021

Republicans have prepared hundreds of amendments to the budget resolution, meaning the vote-a-rama could stretch well into the night.
With the Democrats in the majority, most of the Republican proposals will likely fail, but the amendments will force Democratic senators to take some painful votes on issues like abortion and immigration.
Once the budget resolution is approved, it paves the way for congressional Democrats to pass Joe Biden’s coronavirus relief package using reconciliation, meaning they will not need any Republican support to get the legislation to the president’s desk.

Updated
at 3.24pm EST

2.31pm EST14:31

The House has voted to move forward with the resolution to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments over her racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric.
The House voted 218-209, exactly along party lines, to approve the procedural motion in connection to the resolution. A second procedural vote is now underway.

House Press Gallery
(@HouseDailyPress)
The previous question on the rule for H.Res. 72 – Removing a certain Member from certain standing committees of the House of Representatives was ordered by a vote of 218-209.The House is voting on the rule for H.Res. 72.

February 4, 2021

Updated
at 2.42pm EST

2.26pm EST14:26

Congressman Don Beyer, a Democrat of Virginia, said Marjorie Taylor Greene’s floor speech was “filled with whataboutism that concluded with comparing American journalists to violent QAnon conspiracy theories”.
“She continued claiming to be a victim. She took no responsibility for advocating violence. She did not apologize,” Beyer said.

Rep. Don Beyer
(@RepDonBeyer)
Greene just took the House Floor to give a speech filled with whataboutism that concluded with comparing American journalists to violent QAnon conspiracy theories.She continued claiming to be a victim.She took no responsibility for advocating violence.She did not apologize.

February 4, 2021

The House’s procedural vote on removing Greene from her committee assignments over her racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric is still underway.
As of now, the vote has fallen exactly along party lines.

2.01pm EST14:01

A procedural vote on the motion to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments is now underway in the House.
Earlier this afternoon, Greene delivered a floor speech to defend herself amid widespread condemnation over her racist and extremist rhetoric.
In the speech, Greene claimed that she has not promoted the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory QAnon since she was elected to Congress.
But as a Daily Beast reported noted, that is not true. In December, Greene sent a now-deleted tweet promoting QAnon.

Will Sommer
(@willsommer)
Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed today that she hasn’t promoted QAnon since being elected. But on Dec. 4, she praised an article promoting Q in a now-deleted tweet. The story Greene praised as “accurate” calls QAnon an “objective flow of information” that’s “uniting Christians.” pic.twitter.com/nN3bnTCyPa

February 4, 2021

1.54pm EST13:54

Biden sends message to global leaders: ‘America is back’

Joe Biden is speaking at the state department, thanking its staffers for their service to the country at home and abroad.
The president praised the state department employees as “an incredible group of individuals,” after four years of decreasing morale among diplomats due to Donald Trump’s attacks on them.
Biden said he would later go up to the eighth floor of the state department to deliver a message to world leaders about the direction of his foreign policy agenda.
“America is back,” Biden said. “Diplomacy is back.” More

House speaker Nancy Pelosi said the House of Representatives would vote to remove Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene from committee positions after House Republican leaders declined to proactively discipline her. Pelosi said she was ‘profoundly concerned about House Republican leadership’s acceptance of an extreme conspiracy theorist’
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Republicans take no action against Cheney or extremist Greene after vote More

Democrats in the US House of Representatives moved forward on Thursday with ousting the extremist congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia from the committees she was assigned to, over incendiary statements she made before entering Congress.
The move is the latest development in Congress members’ attempts to deal with Greene, who has been a stated supporter of the QAnon myth, for years pushing such unfounded conspiracy theories and lies that included racist and antisemitic tropes.
A vote on Greene’s committee seats was due to take place on Thursday. Democrats, who have the majority in the House, could strip her of her positions without Republican votes.
A day earlier, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, the top congressional Republican, declined to take action against Greene, despite wider pressure from members of Congress to push some kind of punitive measure for uncovered past statements and social media posts.
These included supporting the assassination of Democratic members of Congress, denying that the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US ever happened, and perpetuating the myth that the Parkland, Florida, school shooting in 2018 was faked.
In a private meeting with her colleagues on Wednesday night, Greene received a standing ovation for apologizing for her association with QAnon.
Democrats nevertheless took steps to remove the Georgia congresswoman from her positions on the House budget and education and labor committees, respectively.
Greene addressed her past statements under the threat of losing a significant proportion of her legislative power. She stressed that she now believed “school shootings are absolutely real”, that they should be taken seriously, and that “9/11 absolutely happened”.
She portrayed her descent into conspiracy theories as a misguided period in her life that was over when she realized the falseness of the movement.
“I never once during my entire campaign said QAnon. I never once said any of the things that I am being accused of today during my campaign,” Greene said. Up until her Thursday speech, Greene did not deny any of her past statements and avoided having to publicly address them directly.
In December, after she was elected, Greene praised a tweet promoting the QAnon movement.
Democrats have been pushing for Greene to either be expelled from Congress or severely punished if she should stay. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader, has called Greene’s past comments “looney lies”.
In arguing that Greene should lose her assignments, Democrats pointed to the now former congressman Steve King of Iowa, a Republican, who lost his committee assignments after associating with neo-Nazis and making racist statements for years.
On Thursday, the House rules committee chairman, Jim McGovern, a Democrat, argued that Greene was not entitled to her committee postings.
“Serving on a committee is not a right, it is a privilege and when someone encourages violence against a member they should lose that privilege,” McGovern said.
After Greene’s speech, McGovern signaled that it was insufficient.
“I stand here today still deeply, deeply troubled and offended by the things that she has posted and said and still not apologized for,” McGovern said.
Republicans largely refrained from defending Greene’s previous comments directly and instead argued that taking away her committee appointments would establish a slippery slope.
Congressman Austin Scott of Georgia, a Republican, skeptically asked during a floor speech whether Democrats would stop with Greene if successful.
“We know better. We know better,” Scott said of his Republican colleagues.
Tom Cole of Oklahoma, McGovern’s Republican counterpart on the rules committee, argued that taking away Greene’s committees “opens up troubling questions about how we judge future members of Congress”. More

A voting technology company is suing Fox News, three of its top hosts and two former lawyers for Donald Trump – Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell – for $2.7bn.The lawsuit charges that the defendants conspired to spread false claims that the company helped “steal” the US presidential election, which was in fact fairly won by Joe Biden.The 285-page complaint filed on Thursday in New York state court by Florida-based Smartmatic USA is one of the largest libel suits ever undertaken.On 25 January, a rival election-technology company, Dominion Voting Systems, which was also ensnared in Trump’s baseless effort to overturn the election, sued Guiliani and Powell for $1.3bn.Unlike Dominion, whose technology was used in 24 states, Smartmatic’s participation in the 2020 election was restricted to Los Angeles county, which votes heavily Democratic.Smartmatic’s limited role notwithstanding, Fox aired at least 13 reports falsely stating or implying the company had stolen the 2020 vote in cahoots with Venezuela’s socialist government, according to the complaint.This alleged “disinformation campaign” continued even after the then attorney general, William Barr, said the Department of Justice could find no evidence of widespread voter fraud.For instance, a 10 December segment by Lou Dobbs accused Smartmatic and its CEO, Antonio Mugica, of working to flip votes through a non-existent backdoor in its voting software to carry out a “massive cyber Pearl Harbor”, the complaint alleged.“Defendants’ story was a lie,” the complaint stated. “But, it was a story that sold.”The complaint alleges that the Fox hosts Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro also directly benefitted from their involvement in the conspiracy.The lawsuit alleges that Fox went along with the “well-orchestrated dance” due to pressure from newcomer outlets such as Newsmax and One America News, which were stealing away conservative, pro-Trump viewers.Fox, Giuliani and Powell did not immediately respond to requests for comment.For Smartmatic, the effects of the negative publicity were swift and devastating, the complaint alleges.Death threats, including against an executive’s 14-year-old son, poured in as internet searches for the company surged, Smartmatic claims.With several client contracts in jeopardy, the company estimates that it will lose as much as $690m in profits over the next five years.It also expects it will have to boost spending by $4.7m to fend off what it called a “meteoric rise” in cyberattacks.“For us, this is an existential crisis,” Mugica said in an interview. He said the false statements against Smartmatic had already led one foreign bank to close its accounts and deterred Taiwan, a prospective client, from adopting e-voting technology.Like many conspiracy theories, the alleged campaign against Smartmatic was built on a grain of truth.Mugica is Venezuelan and Smartmatic’s initial success is partly attributable to major contracts from Hugo Chavez’s government, an early devotee of electronic voting.No evidence has emerged that the company rigged votes in favor of Chavez, and for a while the Carter Center and other observers held out Venezuela as a model of electronic voting.Meanwhile, the company has expanded globally. Smartmatic is represented by J Erik Connolly, who previously won what is believed to be the largest settlement in American media defamation, at least $177m, for a report on ABC News describing a company’s beef product as “pink slime”.“Very rarely do you see news organization go day after day after day the same targets,” Connolly said in an interview.“We couldn’t possibly have rigged this election because we just weren’t even in the contested states to do the rigging.” More

Happy Thursday,For the four years that Donald Trump was president, the Department of Justice (DoJ) did little to enforce America’s federal voting rights laws – though it’s the federal agency with the most power to do so. The department’s voting section, which is well-staffed with some of the best voting rights attorneys in the country, got involved in almost no cases. And when they did get involved in major cases in Texas and Ohio, the department chose to defend voting restrictions.“It just seems like there’s nobody home, which is tragic,” William Yeomans, a former DoJ official, told me back in June.That’s set to change in a big way.Last month, Joe Biden nominated Vanita Gupta and Kristen Clarke, two longtime civil rights lawyers, to top positions at the justice department.Gupta, who previously led the civil rights division, is Biden’s pick to be the associate attorney general, the number three official at the department.Clarke is Biden’s pick to lead the civil rights division, and would be the first Black woman to hold that role if she is confirmed. Over the last four years, she has been one of the people most raising alarm that DoJ wasn’t doing enough to enforce voting rights.Reminder– > This Justice Dept. hasn’t brought a SINGLE case under the Voting Rights Act despite the era of widespread voter suppression that we face across the country.— Kristen Clarke (@KristenClarkeJD) August 19, 2019
I am not aware of a single Voting Rights Act case brought by this administration under AG Jeff Sessions.Secy Wilbur Ross’ claim that a citizenship question on the #2020Census is needed to help with VRA enforcement is as false as it is laughable.https://t.co/jcp5gGjFh7— Kristen Clarke (@KristenClarkeJD) March 29, 2018
New prioritiesCivil rights activists and former department officials this week said they expected more aggressive enforcement on policing and voting rights, among other issues (in a sign of how quickly priorities are changing, DoJ withdrew a case challenging affirmative action policies at Yale on Wednesday). There are probably a stack of cases that have been pending in the pipeline that could be near ready to file, Bryan Sells, a former justice department attorney, told me last week.“You’re going to have someone in that office that really wants to make sure that the division to use the powers it has to enforce the voting rights laws,” said Ezra Rosenberg, co-director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers’ Committee.Cautious optimismBut don’t expect a quick change and a new flurry of cases. The justice department picks its cases carefully, and unlike outside civil rights groups that often file groundbreaking cases, the department is much more conservative. The lawyers at the justice department are also facing a federal judiciary that is much more conservative than it was four years ago after Donald Trump appointed an unprecedented number of judges. That could also affect the calculus in choosing what cases to bring. Much of the voting section’s work has traditionally been reviewing cases submitted under section five of the Voting Rights Act – a provision that was gutted by the US supreme court in 2013.Still, advocates say it will be refreshing to once again have an ally in the justice department.“It’s going to be really important and energizing and exciting to be able to be in conversation and discussion with people who understand the department’s role in civil rights enforcement,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “But it’s also going to be exciting, and as a matter of resources, to have the department actually do civil rights enforcement.”Also worth watching …I was struck by a story in the Advocate that highlighted a library board in Lafayette, Louisiana, that rejected a $2,700 grant for voting rights programming over concerns some of the speakers were too “far left”. The board apparently wanted the library to find someone to present the other side of the issue.
Thirty-one counties in Florida agreed to provide Spanish-language election materials, including ballots and lawsuits as part of a settlement in a federal lawsuit. In 2018, civil rights groups sued 32 counties in the state, arguing they were failing to comply with a provision of the Voting Rights Act that guarantees access to the ballot for non-English speakers. The groups filed the lawsuit after a surge in Puerto Rican immigrants to Florida following Hurricane Maria. The one county that didn’t settle was Charlotte county in south-west Florida.
Arkansas Republicans are advancing a measure that would eliminate a part of the state’s voter ID law that allows people to vote without ID if they sign an affidavit. These affidavit provisions are often included in voter ID laws as a safeguard to prevent people from being disenfranchised.
Missouri Republicans are also advancing a new voter ID measure, citing “questions”about the 2020 election.
Wisconsin election officials are seeing the sky high turnout from last year’s election carry over to 2021 contests that are typically lower profile. On election official in Madison said they’ve already sent out 20,000 absentee ballots so far. More

Sign up for the Guardian Today US newsletterMark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, announced last week the platform will no longer algorithmically recommend political groups to users in an attempt to “turn down the temperature” on online divisiveness.But experts say such policies are difficult to enforce, much less quantify, and the toxic legacy of the Groups feature and the algorithmic incentives promoting it will be difficult to erase.“This is like putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound,” said Jessica J González, the co-founder of the anti-hate speech group Change the Terms. “It doesn’t do enough to combat the long history of abuse that’s been allowed to fester on Facebook.”Groups – a place to create ‘meaningful social infrastructure’Facebook launched Groups, a feature that allows people with shared interests to communicate on closed forums, in 2010, but began to make a more concerted effort to promote the feature around 2017 after the Cambridge Analytica scandal cast a shadow on the platform’s Newsfeed.In a long blogpost in 2017 February called Building Global Community, Zuckerberg argued there was “a real opportunity” through groups to create “meaningful social infrastructure in our lives”.He added: “More than one billion people are active members of Facebook groups, but most don’t seek out groups on their own – friends send invites or Facebook suggests them. If we can improve our suggestions and help connect one billion people with meaningful communities, that can strengthen our social fabric.”After growing its group suggestions and advertising the feature extensively – including during a 60-second spot in the 2020 Super Bowl – Facebook did see a rise in use. In February 2017 there were 100 million people on the platform who were in groups they considered “meaningful”. Today, that number is up to more than 600 million.That fast rise, however, came with little oversight and proved messy. In shifting its focus to Groups, Facebook began to rely more heavily on unpaid moderators to police hate speech on the platform. Groups proved a more private place to speak, for conspiracy theories to proliferate and for some users to organize real-life violence – all with little oversight from outside experts or moderators.Facebook in 2020 introduced a number of new rules to “keep Facebook groups safe”, including new consequences for individuals who violate rules and increased responsibility given to admins of groups to keep users in line. The company says it has hired 35,000 people to address safety on Facebook, including engineers, moderators and subject matter experts, and invested in AI technology to spot posts that violate it guidelines.“We apply the same rules to Groups that we apply to every other form of content across the platform,” a Facebook company spokesperson said. “When we find Groups breaking our rules we take action – from reducing their reach to removing them from recommendations, to taking them down entirely. Over the years we have invested in new tools and AI to find and remove harmful content and developed new policies to combat threats and abuse.”Researchers have long complained that little is shared publicly regarding how, exactly, Facebook algorithms work, what is being shared privately on the platform, and what information Facebook collects on users. The increased popularity of Groups made it even more difficult to keep track of activity on the platform.“It is a black box,” said González regarding Facebook policy on Groups. “This is why many of us have been calling for years for greater transparency about their content moderation and enforcement standards. ”Meanwhile, the platform’s algorithmic recommendations sucked users further down the rabbit hole. Little is known about exactly how Facebook algorithms work, but it is clear the platform recommends users join similar groups to ones they are already in based on keywords and shared interests. Facebook’s own researchers found that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools”, an internal report in 2016 found.“Facebook has let white supremacists organize and conspiracy theorists organize all over its platform and has failed to contain that problem,” González said. “In fact it has significantly contributed to the spread of that problem through its recommendation system.”‘We need to do something to stop these conversations’Facebook’s own research showed that algorithmic recommendations of groups may have contributed to the rise of violence and extremism. On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that internal documents showed executives were aware of risks posed by groups and were warned repeatedly by researchers to address them. In one presentation in 2020 August, researchers said roughly “70% of the top 100 most active US Civic Groups are considered non-recommendable for issues such as hate, misinfo, bullying and harassment”.“We need to do something to stop these conversations from happening and growing as quickly as they do,” the researchers wrote, according to the Wall Street Journal, and suggested taking measures to slow the growth of Groups until more could be done to address the issues.Several months later, Facebook halted algorithmic recommendations for political groups ahead of the US elections – a move that has been extended indefinitely with the policy announced last week. The change seemed to be motivated by the 6 January insurrection, which the FBI found had been tied to organizing on Facebook.In response to the story in the Wall Street Journal, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice-president of integrity, who oversees content moderation policies on the platform, said the problems were indicative of emerging threats rather than inability to address long-term problems. “If you’d have looked at Groups several years ago, you might not have seen the same set of behaviors,” he said.Facebook let white supremacists and conspiracy theorists organize all over its platform and has failed to contain that problemBut researchers say the use of Groups to organize and radicalize users is an old problem. Facebook groups had been tied to a number of harmful incidents and movements long before January’s violence.“Political groups on Facebook have always advantaged the fringe, and the outsiders,” said Joan Donovan, a lead researcher at Data and Society who studies the rise of hate speech on Facebook. “It’s really about reinforcement – the algorithm learns what you’ve clicked on and what you like and it tries to reinforce those behaviors. The groups become centers of coordination.”Facebook was criticized for its inability to police terror groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaida using it as early as 2016. It was used extensively in organizing of the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in 2019, where white nationalists and neo-Nazis violently marched. Militarized groups including Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois and militia groups all organized, promoted and grew their ranks on Facebook. In 2020 officials arrested men who had planned a violent kidnapping of the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, on Facebook. A 17-year-old in Illinois shot three people, killing two, in a protest organized on Facebook.These same algorithms have allowed the anti-vaccine movement to thrive on Facebook, with hundreds of groups amassing hundreds of thousands of members over the years. A Guardian report in 2019 found the majority of search results for the term “vaccination” were anti-vaccine, led by two misinformation groups, “Stop Mandatory Vaccination” and “Vaccination Re-education Discussion Forum” with more than 140,000 members each. These groups were ultimately tied to harassment campaigns against doctors who support vaccines.In September 2020, Facebook stopped health groups from being algorithmically recommended to put a stop to such misinformation issues. It also has added other rules to stop the spread of misinformation, including banning users from creating a new group if an existing group they had administrated is banned.The origin of the QAnon movement has been traced to a post on a message board in 2017. By the time Facebook banned content related to the movement in 2020, a Guardian report had exposed that Facebook groups dedicated to the dangerous conspiracy theory QAnon were spreading on the platform at a rapid pace, with thousands of groups and millions of members.‘The calm before the storm’Zuckerberg has said in 2020 the company had removed more than 1m groups in the past year, but experts say the action coupled with the new policy on group recommendations are falling short.The platform promised to stop recommending political groups to users ahead of the elections in November and then victoriously claimed to have halved political group recommendations. But a report from the Markup showed that 12 groups among the top 100 groups recommended to users in its Citizen Browser project, which tracks links and group recommendations served to a nationwide panel of Facebook users, were political in nature.Indeed, the Stop the Steal groups that emerged to cast doubt on the results of the election and ultimately led to the 6 January violent insurrection amassed hundreds of thousands of followers – all while Facebook’s algorithmic recommendations of political groups were paused. Many researchers also worry that legitimate organizing groups will be swept up in Facebook’s actions against partisan political groups and extremism.“I don’t have a whole lot of confidence that they’re going to be able to actually sort out what a political group is or isn’t,” said Heidi Beirich, who is the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism and sits on Facebook’s Real Oversight Board, a group of academics and watchdogs criticizing Facebook’s content moderation policies.“They have allowed QAnon, militias and other groups proliferate so long, remnants of these movements remain all over the platform,” she added. “I don’t think this is something they are going to be able to sort out overnight.”“It doesn’t actually take a mass movement, or a massive sea of bodies, to do the kind of work on the internet that allows for small groups to have an outsized impact on the public conversation,” added Donovan. “This is the calm before the storm.” More