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    Election Workers in Georgia Are Fired for Shredding Voter Registration Forms

    The office was already under fire from Trump supporters, who passed sweeping legislation that could lead to a takeover by the Republican-controlled State Legislature.The elections office in Georgia’s heavily Democratic Fulton County said on Monday that two workers had been fired for shredding voter registration forms, most likely adding fuel to a Republican-led investigation of the office that critics call politically motivated.The workers, at the Fulton County Board of Elections, were dismissed on Friday after other employees saw them destroying registration forms awaiting processing before local elections in November, the county elections director, Richard Barron, said.Both the county district attorney and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the state’s chief elections official, were asked to conduct inquiries into the matter, the chairman of the Fulton County Commission, Robb Pitts, said in a statement.But it was Mr. Raffensperger who first revealed the allegations of shredded registration forms, issuing a blistering news release demanding that the Justice Department investigate “incompetence and malfeasance” in the agency. “After 20 years of documented failure in Fulton County elections, Georgians are tired of waiting to see what the next embarrassing revelation will be,” he said.His declaration only underscored the political implications of the document-shredding charges, which would almost certainly have been less freighted in any other election office. Fulton County officials did not say how many forms were shredded, but Mr. Raffensperger put the total at about 300 in a county with 800,000 voters on the rolls.While the charges of wrongdoing surfaced on Friday, it was unclear when the actual destruction of registration forms might have occurred.Mr. Raffensperger, who won national attention for rejecting former President Donald J. Trump’s request to “find” enough ballots to overturn President Biden’s narrow win in the state, faces a difficult primary race next spring against a rival endorsed by Mr. Trump. The Fulton County elections office, meanwhile, has become the object of fury by Trump supporters who baselessly claim that Mr. Biden’s win in the state was illegitimate.Some supporters are suing to conduct yet another review of the presidential vote in Fulton County, which includes a broad swath of metropolitan Atlanta and where 73 percent of voters favored Mr. Biden. The statewide Georgia vote has been counted three times with zero evidence of fraud.The Republican-dominated State Legislature approved legislation this spring that gives it effective control of the State Election Board, and empowers the board to investigate legislators’ complaints about local election bodies. Fulton County was quickly selected for an inquiry that eventually could replace the elections board with a temporary superintendent who would have sweeping powers to oversee the vote.Voting rights advocates and Democrats statewide have cast the inquiry as a first step toward a pro-Trump takeover of election machinery in the county most crucial to Democratic hopes in future elections.“I don’t think there’s another state in the union that has a State Election Board with the power to turn a nonpartisan elections office into a partisan arm of the secretary of state’s office,” Mr. Barron, the Fulton County elections director, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.The county’s performance in elections has been mixed. Primary elections last year were plagued by long lines, and county elections have long been the subject of complaints. A report by a state-appointed monitor concluded that elections there were “sloppy” but it found no evidence of “dishonesty, fraud or intentional malfeasance.”The elections board has cited recent improvements, such as revised training manuals and newly hired election managers, as evidence that it is addressing complaints. But the disclosure on Monday gives critics new ammunition at a time when the coming November election, for Atlanta’s mayor and City Council, is being seen as a test of the board’s competence.Mary Norwood, a Fulton resident who narrowly lost two races for Atlanta mayor, has been a longstanding critic of the board. She said she favored an inquiry into the shredding allegations.“If you have two employees who are terminated by the elections director, that certainly prompts an investigation and analysis,” she said. “It’s critical that we get this right.” More

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    Criminal inquiry into Trump’s Georgia election interference gathers steam

    GeorgiaCriminal inquiry into Trump’s Georgia election interference gathers steamThe disgraced former president faces a range of possible charges – including conspiracy and election fraud Peter Stone in WashingtonTue 5 Oct 2021 05.00 EDTLast modified on Tue 5 Oct 2021 05.28 EDTDonald Trump is facing increasing legal scrutiny in the crucial battleground state of Georgia over his attempt to sway the 2020 election there, and that heat is now overlapping with investigations in Congress looking at the former president’s efforts to subvert American democracy.A criminal investigation into Trump’s 2 January call prodding Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “just find” him 11,780 votes to block Joe Biden’s win in the state is making headway. The Georgia district attorney running the inquiry is now also sharing information with the House committee investigating the 6 January attack on the Capitol in Washington DC.Meanwhile, a justice department taskforce investigating threats to election officials nationwide has launched inquiries in Georgia, where election officers and workers received death threats or warnings of violence, including some after Trump singled out one official publicly for not backing his baseless fraud claims.Despite these investigations, Trump is still pushing bogus fraud claims in Georgia. Trump wrote to Raffensperger in September asking him to decertify the election results, which is impossible, and with an eye on the 2022 elections is trying to oust Raffensperger, as well as the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, and other top Republicans who defied his demands to block Biden’s win.Former justice department officials and voting rights advocates say Trump’s conspiratorial attacks on Georgia’s election results, and the threats to public officials, need to be investigated diligently, and prosecuted if warranted by law enforcement, to protect election integrity and public officials.Experts add that Trump’s alarming refusal to accept the Georgia election outcome and seek revenge on Republican officials who ignored his baseless fraud charges may affect a few pivotal 2022 races. His efforts may also encourage extremism and restrictions on minority and other voting rights similar to ones the Georgia legislature enacted this year.Veteran DoJ officials and prosecutors say the criminal inquiry launched by the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, into Trump’s call to Raffensperger and other efforts Trump made to overturn the Georgia results, seems well grounded, with ample public evidence. But they said it will probably take some time before Willis decides whether to bring charges.Willis has said prosecutors are scrutinizing “potential violations of Georgia law prohibiting the solicitation of election fraud, the making of false statements to state and local governmental bodies, conspiracy, racketeering, violation of oath of office and any involvement in violence or threats related to the election’s administration”.The Georgia investigation’s merits were bolstered in late September by the release of a well-documented 107-page study from the Brookings Institution detailing Trump’s high-pressure drive to block Biden’s win in the state. The report concluded that Trump faced “substantial risk of possible state charges predicated on multiple crimes”.Boasting extensive documentation from the public record, the report notes that Trump’s broad effort to nullify the outcome in Georgia included personal contacts with the governor, the state attorney general and the secretary of state’s chief investigator.“Trump engaged in a pattern of repeated personal communications aimed at altering the vote count and making himself the winner in Georgia,” Donald Ayer, one of several authors of the Brookings report and a former deputy attorney general in the George HW Bush administration, said in an interview.“He did so in the absence of any even arguable evidence of voting or counting irregularities. Unless there are other presently unknown facts that would explain it, this conduct appears to satisfy the requirements of a number of Georgia criminal statutes.”To further the Georgia inquiry, Willis reportedly has in recent weeks turned to the House select committee looking into the 6 January attack on the Capitol to share documents and information that could assist her work.Willis’s outreach to the congressional committee doesn’t surprise some expert observers.“Her resources to address local crime are already taxed and any investigative steps taken on Capitol Hill means her likely marathon of a case against the former president may be a little closer to the finish line,” Michael J Moore, a former Georgia prosecutor and Democrat, said in an interview.The district attorney’s progress was underscored by Raffensperger telling the Daily Beast in August that Fulton county investigators had “asked us for documents, they’ve talked to some of our folks, and we’ll cooperate fully”.According to the news outlet, at least four people in Raffensperger’s office have been interviewed, including attorney Ryan Germany and the chief operating officer, Gabriel Sterling.On another legal front, the FBI has begun interviews in recent weeks with several Georgia election officials about death threats and other dangerous warnings they received in the months after the election from Trump backers suggesting falsely that Georgia officials were involved in election rigging.For instance, Richard Barron, who heads the Fulton county board of elections, told the Guardian he was interviewed by two FBI agents in early September and informed them about two death threats he received, including one in the summer “full of white supremacist language” which warned he would be “served lead”.“I hope the FBI makes some arrests,” Barron added. “People need to be held accountable for making threats against public officials.” Barron noted that threats against him and his majority Black staff rocketed after the election, when Democrats also won two Senate seats in the historically red-leaning state. Threats against Barron escalated further after Trump singled him out by name at a rally, he said.Former justice department prosecutors say that the taskforce looking into these threats has to be aggressive. “Absent rigorous law enforcement, responsible citizens will shy away from seeking these types of important public jobs, especially if they feel their families will be under threat,” said Paul Pelletier, a former acting chief of the fraud section at DoJ.But even with these inquiries heating up, Trump has continued to spread his false claims about the election results, as he did at a campaign-style rally in Perry, Georgia, on 25 September, where a few of his favored Georgia candidates spoke –including Representative Jody Hice, who is hoping to defeat Raffensperger in a primary contest.Trump’s drive to retaliate against Republican politicians who defied his efforts to overturn Biden’s Georgia win has dismayed some veteran party operatives who see them as counterproductive.“I think the Trump presence in Georgia has not been good for the GOP’s politics the last two years,” said Republican lobbyist Ed Rogers, who hails from Alabama. “Politics is about addition, and vengeance is not consistent with addition.”TopicsGeorgiaDonald TrumpUS elections 2020US politicsnewsReuse this content More

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    As Washington Stews, State Legislatures Increasingly Shape American Politics

    From voting rights to the culture wars, state legislatures controlled by Republicans are playing a role well beyond their own state borders.With the release of the 2020 census last month, the drawing of legislative districts that could in large part determine control of Congress for the next decade heads to the nation’s state legislatures, the heart of Republican political power.Increasingly, state legislatures, especially in 30 Republican-controlled states, have seized an outsize role for themselves, pressing conservative agendas on voting, Covid-19 and the culture wars that are amplifying partisan splits and shaping policy well beyond their own borders.Indeed, for a party out of power in Washington, state legislatures have become enormous sources of leverage and influence. That is especially true for rural conservatives who largely control the legislatures in key states like Wisconsin, Texas and Georgia and could now lock in a strong Republican tilt in Congress and cement their own power for the next decade. The Texas Legislature’s pending approval of new restrictions on voting is but the latest example.“This is in many ways genuinely new, because of the breadth and scope of what’s happening,” said Donald F. Kettl, a scholar of state governance at the University of Texas at Austin. “But more fundamentally, the real point of the spear of Trumpism is appearing at the state and local level. State legislatures not only are keeping the flame alive, but nurturing and growing it.”He added that the aggressive role played by Republican legislatures had much further to run.“There’s all this talk of whether or not Republicans are a party that has any future at this point,” he said, “but the reality is that Republicans not only are alive and well, but living in the state legislatures. And they’re going to be pushing more of this forward.”The next battle, already underway in many states, is over the drawing of congressional and state legislative districts. Republicans control 26 of the legislatures that will draw political maps, compared with 13 for Democrats. (Other states have nonpartisan commissions that draw legislative districts, or have just one seat.)Democrats have embraced their own causes, passing laws to expand voting rights, raise minimum wages and tighten controls on firearms in the 18 states where they control the legislatures.But Republican legislatures are pursuing political and ideological agendas that dwarf those of their opponents. This year’s legislative sessions have spawned the largest wave of anti-abortion legislation since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Many Republican legislatures have seized power from Democratic-leaning cities and counties on issues including policing, the coronavirus and tree preservation. They have made base-energizing issues like transgender rights and classroom teaching on race centerpieces of debate.Most important, they have rewritten election and voting laws in ways that largely hinder Democratic-leaning voters and give Republicans more influence over how elections are run — and, critics say, how they are decided. And in some states, they are eyeing their own versions of the Arizona State Senate’s brazenly partisan review of the 2020 vote, a new and, to many, dangerous attack on the nonpartisan underpinnings of American elections.Anti-abortion demonstrators outside the Texas State Capitol in Austin in May.Sergio Flores/Getty Images One reason for the new activism is obvious: With Republicans out of power in Washington and Congress largely gridlocked, states are the party’s prime venues for setting policy.“I don’t know how long it’s been since Congress has even passed a budget,” said Bryan Hughes, a Republican state senator who sponsored Texas’ latest voting bill. “So yes, clearly more responsibilities have fallen to states.”Many Democratic legislators say Republicans are shirking those responsibilities.“We’re one of four states with no pre-K education,” said State Representative Ilana Rubel, an Idaho Democrat. “We have a major housing crisis. We have a property-tax crisis. Those were the things we thought would be discussed. Instead, we found ourselves in a Fox News fever dream where all they wanted to do was get into these manufactured crises at the national level.”The national role being played by state legislatures reflects in part the sorting of Americans into opposing partisan camps. Thirty years ago, 15 of the 50 state legislatures were split between Republican and Democratic control. Today, only Minnesota’s House and Senate are divided.And the system favors partisanship. Few pay attention to state assembly races, so roughly four in 10 seats nationwide are uncontested in general elections, said Gary Moncrief, a co-author of the standard work on state politics, “Why States Matter.”“That means the real decisions are made in the primaries,” he said, where voters tend to be hard-liners.Gov. Tate Reeves signed a bill in March that would bar transgender athletes from competing on female sports teams.Rogelio V. Solis/Associated PressAt first blush, state assemblies seem ill-suited to wield influence. Most are part-time affairs run by citizen lawmakers. But the minor-league image is not entirely deserved. State lawmakers control $2 trillion a year in spending and have a plate of issues, from prisons to schools to the opioid crisis, that can get lost in the whir of Washington politics.And increasingly, top Republican strategists and well-funded conservative groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, have poured in money and resources and policy prescriptions, figuring that legislation with no chance of getting through Congress could sail through friendly statehouses.“From where I stand, they have a far greater impact on the life of ordinary citizens than Congress,” Tim Storey, the executive director of the National Conference of State Legislatures, said of the state-level bodies.If there is one area where state legislatures have the potential to shape the nation’s politics to a degree that goes well beyond established boundaries, it is voting.Following former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, at least 18 states tightened voting rules, often in ways that most affect Democratic-leaning constituencies. Contractors examined and recounted ballots as part of an audit ordered by the Arizona Senate in Phoenix in May.Pool photo by Matt YorkMost glaringly, they also gave the party more power over the mechanisms of administering elections and counting ballots. Arkansas empowered the State Elections Board to investigate local elections and “take corrective action” against suspected irregularities, purportedly to give Republicans a fair shake. Iowa and other states would levy fines and even criminal penalties for missteps by local election officials, raising concerns that punishments could be used for partisan gain.Georgia’s legislature gave itself control over most appointments to the State Election Board and allowed it to investigate and replace local election officials. Already, lawmakers are seeking an inquiry in Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, although procedural hurdles in the law raise questions about how easily it could be used for partisan ends.The legislature also gave elected county commissioners sole power to appoint local election board members, a change that has already enabled the removal of at least 10 members of those boards, most of them Democrats.Republicans say they are seeking to deter fraud and ensure that elections are better run. Many experts and most Democrats call the laws worrying, given efforts by G.O.P. legislators and officials in at least 17 states to halt or overturn the election of President Biden and their continuing calls for often partisan ballot reviews of long-settled elections. Many fear that such failed tactics are being retooled to succeed as early as 2024.“That is the absolutely last step toward an authoritarian system,” said Thomas E. Mann, a co-author of two books about the implications of Republicans’ rightward drift, “and they’re just hellbent on getting there.”The Republican speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, David Ralston, rejected that. Claims that his state’s laws open back doors to sway election results, he said, amount to “hysteria.”Compared to voting laws in Democratic bastions like New York or Delaware, he said, “we’re much more ahead of the game.” And while Republican claims of fraud dominated Georgia’s 2020 elections, he noted that the voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams, who ran as a Democrat, had also refused to accept her loss in the 2018 race for governor, claiming voter suppression.Democrats from the Georgia House protested a restrictive voting law outside the State Capitol in March.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesLawmakers also pushed through legislation overriding or banning actions by local officials, generally urban Democrats. Among the targets were measures like mask requirements and proposals to reduce police department budgets in response to last summer’s unrest.Some see brakes on how far to the right Republican legislatures can go.Opponents are already taking the latest Republican initiatives to court. The federal Justice Department has sued to block portions of Georgia’s new voting law and has warned that partisan meddling with election reviews like the one in Arizona risk violating federal laws.Lawyers for Democrats and voting-rights advocates are taking aim at other voting measures. And in some states, Democratic governors like Roy Cooper of North Carolina are serving as counterbalances to Republican legislatures.“This state would look very, very different if Roy Cooper had not been governor,” said Christopher Cooper, a scholar of state politics at Western Carolina University, who is not related to the governor. “He’s vetoed more bills than any governor in North Carolina history.”Others doubt vetoes and court decisions will settle much. “I don’t see any solution from litigation,” said Richard Briffault, a Columbia University expert on state legislation. “If there’s going to be a change, it’s going to be through the political process.”And some say legislatures have the power to enact policy and a base that revels in what a few years back seemed like overreach. Why would they stop?“This has become the new normal,” said Trey Martinez Fischer, one of the Texas Democrats who fled the state in July to block passage of the restrictive voting bill. “And I would expect, with a Biden administration and a Democratic Congress, that we’re likely to see more.”Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting. More

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    Reporter Discusses False Accusations Against Dominion Worker

    Through one employee of Dominion Voting Systems, a Times Magazine article examines the damage that false accusations can inflict.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.As Susan Dominus, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, approached her reporting for an article on the attacks on Dominion Voting Systems, a business that supplies election technology, she wanted to tell the story of one of the Dominion employees who was being vilified by supporters of President Trump.She zeroed in on one man: Eric Coomer, whose anti-Trump social media posts were used to bolster false allegations that Dominion had tampered with the election, leading to death threats. Her article, published on Tuesday, is a case study in what can happen when information gets wildly manipulated. In an edited interview, Ms. Dominus discussed what she learned.How did you come upon Eric Coomer — did you have him in mind all along? Or did you want to do something on Dominion and eventually found your way to him?The Magazine was interested in pursuing a story about how the attacks on Dominion Voting Systems — a private business — were dramatically influencing the lives of those who worked there, people who were far from public figures. Many employees there were having their private information exposed, but early on, a lot of the threats were focusing on Eric Coomer, who was then the director of product strategy and security at Dominion. Eventually, people such as the lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani and the president’s son Eric Trump were naming him in the context of accusations about Dominion fixing the election.What was the biggest surprise you came across in your reporting?I was genuinely surprised to find that Mr. Coomer had expressed strong anti-Trump sentiments, using strong language, on his Facebook page. His settings were such that only his Facebook friends could see it, but someone took a screenshot of those and other divisive posts, and right-wing media circulated them widely. The posts were used in the spread of what cybersecurity experts call malinformation — something true that is used to support the dissemination of a story that is false. In this case, it was the big lie that the election was rigged. I think to understand the spread of spurious information — to resist its lure, to fight it off — these distinctions are helpful to parse. Understanding the human cost of these campaigns also matters. We heard a lot about the attacks on Dominion, but there are real people with real lives who are being battered in a battle they had no intention of joining, whatever their private opinions.There were so many elaborate theories of election fraud involving Dominion. How important were the accusations against Eric Coomer in that bigger story?It’s hard to say. But Advance Democracy Inc., a nonpartisan nonprofit, looked at the tweets in its database from QAnon-related accounts and found that, from Nov. 1 to Jan. 7, Eric Coomer’s name appeared in 25 percent of the ones that mentioned Dominion. Coomer believes the attacks on Dominion were somewhat inevitable but considered his own role as “an accelerant.”Trump’s Bid to Subvert the ElectionCard 1 of 4A monthslong campaign. More

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    Potential G.O.P. Takeover of Atlanta-Area Election Board Inches Forward

    Republicans in Georgia took a step toward gaining control over elections in Fulton County, a Democratic bastion.The Georgia State Election Board on Wednesday appointed a majority-Republican panel to review the performance of the Fulton County board of elections, another step toward a potential Republican takeover of the election system in the biggest Democratic county in the state.The three-person panel will include two Republicans and one Democrat: Rickey Kittle, a Republican member of the Catoosa County election board; Stephen Day, a Democratic member of the Gwinnett County election board; and Ryan Germany, a lawyer for the office of Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state.The moves surrounding the Fulton County election board have come as Republican-controlled legislatures across the country angle for greater power over election administration, often seeking to strip it from election officials and give it to partisan lawmakers. Those efforts come as former President Donald J. Trump continues to spread lies and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.Republicans have also pushed to restructure many county election boards in Georgia, potentially allowing more local G.O.P. officials to take over positions.The State Election Board was required to appoint the panel reviewing Fulton County under the Georgia voting law that Republicans passed in March. Republican state lawmakers who represent the county requested the review last month.Fulton County, which is the largest in the state and includes much of Atlanta, has a long history of struggles with elections, including a disastrous primary in June 2020 in which voting lines lasted for hours.But Democrats across the state have denounced the push for a performance review there, noting that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud last year and that the election results were affirmed by three recounts and audits. Democrats view the request as a political stunt at best, and at worst a partisan takeover in the most consequential county for their party in Georgia.President Biden carried Fulton County in November with 73 percent of the vote and more than 380,000 votes. It is home to the largest number of voters of color in the state. Mr. Trump and his Republican allies have falsely denied Mr. Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia, which has long been solidly Republican but last year tilted to the Democrats in the presidential election and two Senate runoffs.Voting rights groups criticized the review panel — all white and predominantly Republican — as unrepresentative of Fulton County.“Fulton County voters deserve better than this,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, the chief executive of Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group in Georgia founded by Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic candidate for governor.The review panel is one of several provisions in Georgia’s new voting law that lay the groundwork for the takeover of election administration by partisan lawmakers.But any potential change in control of the Fulton County election board would be a drawn-out process, most likely taking months given the many steps required by the voting law.Mr. Raffensperger, the secretary of state, indicated his support for the panel, writing on Twitter, “I have been saying for a long time that the state needs the authority to step in when counties have consistently failed their voters.”“I’m confident that the performance review team will do a good job, and I hope Fulton will cooperate with this process,” he said. More