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      Arizona Republican ‘audit’ finds even bigger lead for Biden in 2020 election

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      ArizonaArizona Republican ‘audit’ finds even bigger lead for Biden in 2020 electionHand count of the 2.1m ballots cast in Maricopa county found that Biden actually won 360 more votes than Trump than was reported Sam Levine and Oliver MilmanFri 24 Sep 2021 09.40 EDTLast modified on Fri 24 Sep 2021 09.41 EDTA partisan, Republican-instigated so-called “audit” of the 2020 election result in Arizona has confirmed that Joe Biden did indeed beat Donald Trump in Maricopa county, the state’s most populous county, according to a draft report of the review.A month-long hand count of the 2.1m ballots cast in Maricopa county, which includes Phoenix, found that Biden actually won 360 more votes than Trump than was reported in the November election. Biden won Arizona’s 11 electoral votes on his way to getting more votes nationally than any presidential candidate in history during the election.Cyber Ninjas, UV lights and far-right funding: inside the strange Arizona 2020 election ‘audit’Read moreTrump has repeatedly falsely claimed that he won the election and was a victim of fraud, despite no evidence of this, and state Republicans in Arizona seized upon these lies to demand an audit of vote in Maricopa county. Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based company with no experience of election audits, owned by a man who spread election conspiracy theories, wrote the report, entitled Maricopa County Forensic Audit.The investigation is the most extensive partisan effort to date to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 election and has been widely celebrated by Trump and allies who falsely believe the election is stolen.Even though the investigation was sanctioned by the GOP-controlled Arizona senate, it was funded by $5.7m in outside money, much of which came from conspiracy theorists, including $3.2m from Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com and an additional $1m from a non-profit founded by Michael Flynn.Election experts have widely panned the review, which they say was rooted in shoddy practice around a pre-determined effort to show there was fraud. Ben Ginsberg, a longtime Republican election lawyer, told reporters on Thursday that Trump allies were “desperate for a win” In Maricopa county, he said, they had gotten unprecedented access to look under the hood of an election. If they were not able to prove fraud there, they were unlikely to prove it anywhere else.Regardless of what the report says, Republican efforts to conduct similar reviews are underway. Republicans in both the Wisconsin and Pennsylvania legislatures are moving forward with similar investigations into the 2020 race. And on Thursday, Trump called for a review of the 2020 race in Texas, a state he carried in 2020 by nearly six points. Experts worry that the reviews suggest a new normal, where the losers of elections simply refuse to accept the results.The draft report emerged on Thursday and has been confirmed as authentic by a spokesman for the audit effort, who said it is “close” to the final report. Maricopa County’s board of supervisors, led by Republicans, said that the report confirmed that the county had run an accurate election.“This means the tabulation equipment counted the ballots as they were designed to do, and the results reflect the will of the voters,” said board chairman Jack Sellers, a Republican. “That should be the end of the story. Everything else is just noise.”Biden won Arizona by more than 10,450 votes in November, with this narrow victory in the state secured thanks to the more than 45,000 vote margin he managed in Maricopa county. Republicans, spurred on by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, then attempted to overturn this result despite no evidence presented of fraud.Earlier this year, Maricopa county hired two firms to audit its elections equipment and software, with these reviews finding no problems with the systems reviewed. This wasn’t enough for the state senate, controlled by Republicans, however, which hired Cyber Ninjas for the controversial audit.The recounting process was dogged with allegations of ballots being mishandled and cybersecurity concerns, with workers at one point using UV lights to check for bamboo fibers in ballots, part of a conspiracy theory that China had somehow planted votes into Arizona’s election. The review concluded in July.While the draft report does not claim that Trump did beat Biden in Arizona, it does criticize the state for the handling and integrity of how the election was run. Maricopa county’s board of supervisors has rejected this, stating on its Twitter feed that the report’s allegations are “littered with errors & faulty conclusions”.TopicsArizonaUS elections 2020RepublicansDonald TrumpUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Republicans in crosshairs of 6 January panel begin campaign of intimidation

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      US Capitol attackRepublicans in crosshairs of 6 January panel begin campaign of intimidationHouse leader Kevin McCarthy threatened retaliation against tech companies that share records with the committee Hugo Lowellin WashingtonMon 6 Sep 2021 02.00 EDTTop Republicans under scrutiny for their role in the events of 6 January have embarked on a campaign of threats and intimidation to thwart a Democratic-controlled congressional panel that is scrutinizing the Capitol attack and opening an expanded investigation into Donald Trump.The chairman of the House select committee into the violent assault on the Capitol, Bennie Thompson, in recent days demanded an array of Trump executive branch records related to the insurrection, as members and counsel prepared to examine what Trump knew of efforts to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win.House select committee investigators then asked a slew of technology companies to preserve the social media records of hundreds of people connected to the Capitol attack, including far-right House Republicans who sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election.The select committee said that its investigators were merely “gathering facts, not alleging wrongdoing by any individual” as they pursued the records in what amounted to the most aggressive moves taken by the panel since it launched proceedings in July.But the twin actions, which threatened to open a full accounting of Trump’s moves in the days and weeks before the joint session of Congress on 6 January, has unnerved top House Republicans, according to a source familiar with the matter.The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, decried the select committee’s investigation as a partisan exercise and threatened to retaliate against any telecommunications company that complied with the records requests.“A Republican majority will not forget,” he warned, in remarks that seemed to imply some future threat against the sector.The warning from the top Republican in the House amounted to a serious escalation as he seeks to undermine a forensic examination of the attack perpetrated by Trump supporters and domestic violent extremists that left five dead and nearly 140 injured.But his remarks – which members on the select committee privately consider to be at best, harassment, and at worst, obstruction of justice – reflects McCarthy’s realization that he could himself be in the crosshairs of the committee, the source said.Most of McCarthy’s efforts to undercut the inquiry to date, such as sinking the prospects of a 9/11-style commission to scrutinize the Capitol attack, have been aimed at shielding Trump and his party from what the select committee might uncover.But deeply alarmed at the efforts by House select committee investigators to secure his personal communications records for the fraught moments leading up to and during the Capitol attack, McCarthy went on the offensive to pre-emptively protect himself, the source said.McCarthy was among several House Republicans who desperately begged Trump to call off the rioters as they stormed the Capitol in his name, only to be rebuffed by Trump, who questioned why McCarthy wasn’t doing more to overturn the election.Thompson previously told the Guardian in an interview that such conversations with Trump would be investigated by the select committee, raising the prospect that McCarthy could be forced to testify about what Trump appeared to be thinking and doing on 6 January.The statement from McCarthy asserted, without citing any law, that it would be illegal for the technology companies to comply with the records requests – even though congressional investigators have obtained phone and communications records in the past.The threat is unlikely to be viewed as a violation of federal witness tampering law, which, as part of a broader obstruction of justice statute, makes it a felony under some circumstances to try to dissuade or hinder cooperation with an official proceeding.Congressman Jamie Raskin, a member of the select committee and the former lead impeachment manager in Trump’s second trial, said that he was appalled by McCarthy’s remarks, which he described as tantamount to obstruction of justice.“He is leveling threats against people cooperating with a congressional investigation,” Raskin said. “Why would the minority leader of the House of Representatives not be interested in our ability to get all of the facts in relation to the January 6th attack?”Meanwhile, other members on the select committee have also seized on McCarthy’s threat as a reminder that Republicans could not be trusted to engage in the inquiry in good faith, according to a source connected to the 6 January investigation.It also underscored to them, the source said, the nervousness among top Republicans as the select committee ramps up its work, even though the inquiry is still in its early days and has yet to sift through thousands of pages of expected evidence.Emboldened by McCarthy’s combative stance, Trump denounced the select committee as a “partisan sham”, while Republicans under scrutiny by the panel such as Marjorie Taylor Greene threatened any companies that complied with the records requests would be “shut down”.The chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, Andy Biggs, is now also asking McCarthy to remove from the Republican conference Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger – the two vocal critics of Trump appointed to the select committee – whom he called “spies” for Democrats.Biggs on Thursday suggested in a letter, first reported by CNN, that Cheney and Kinzinger should be ejected because they are involved in investigating Republicans over 6 January and the party should be able to strategize without having the pair present at conference meetings.Still, McCarthy remains unable to shape an investigation likely to prove politically damaging to Trump and to Republicans at the ballot box at the midterms next year, a reality that has come largely as a result of his own strategic miscalculations.The proposed 9/11-style commission into the Capitol attack had envisioned a panel with equal power between Democrats and Republicans, and McCarthy’s decision to boycott the select committee in a flash of anger inadvertently left Trump without any defenders.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS elections 2020US politicsRepublicansHouse of RepresentativesnewsReuse this content More

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      Trump’s coup attempt has not stopped – and Democrats must wake up | Robert Reich

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      OpinionDonald TrumpTrump’s coup attempt has not stopped – and Democrats must wake upRobert ReichHe still refuses to concede and riles up supporters with his bogus claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Tens of millions of Americans believe him Sun 5 Sep 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 5 Sep 2021 01.02 EDTThe former president’s attempted coup is not stopping. He still refuses to concede and continues to rile up supporters with his bogus claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Tens of millions of Americans believe him.Trump reportedly nears DC hotel rights sale as ally says ‘I think he’s gonna run’Read moreLast Sunday, at a Republican event in Franklin, North Carolina, Congressman Madison Cawthorn, repeating Trump’s big lie, called the rioters who stormed the Capitol on 6 January “political hostages”.Cawthorn also advised the crowd to begin stockpiling ammunition for what he said was likely to be American-versus-American “bloodshed” over unfavorable election results.“Much as I am willing to defend our liberty at all costs,” he said, “there’s nothing I would dread doing more than having to pick up arms against a fellow American.”On Tuesday, Texas Republicans passed a strict voter law based on Trump’s big lie – imposing new ID requirements on people seeking to vote by mail and criminal penalties on election officials who send unsolicited mail-in ballot applications, empowering partisan poll watchers, and banning drive-through and 24-hour voting.This year, at least 18 other states have enacted 30 laws that will make it harder for Americans to vote, based on Trump’s lie.On Thursday, at Trump’s instigation, Pennsylvania Republicans launched an investigation soliciting sworn testimony on election “irregularities”, scheduling the first hearing for next week.Arizona’s Republican “audit” will report its results any day. There’s little question what they’ll show. The chief executive of Cyber Ninjas, the company hired to conduct it, has publicly questioned the election results. The audit team consists of Trump supporters and is funded by a group led by Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn.The Republican chair of the Wisconsin state assembly campaigns and elections committee has begun “a full, cyber-forensic audit”, akin to Arizona’s. Trump’s first White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, says Wisconsin Republicans are prepared to spend $680,000.These so-called audits won’t alter the outcome of the 2020 election. Their point is to cast further doubt on its legitimacy and justify additional state measures to suppress votes and alter future elections.It’s a vicious cycle. As Trump continues to stoke his base with his big lie that the election was stolen, Republican lawmakers – out to advance their careers and entrench the GOP – are adding fuel to the fire, pushing more Americans into Trump’s paranoid nightmare.The three top candidates to succeed Richard Burr in North Carolina all denounced the senator’s vote to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial. The four leading candidates to succeed Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania all embraced Trump’s call for an “audit” of election results.A leading contender for the Senate seat being vacated by Richard Shelby in Alabama is Representative Mo Brooks, best known for urging the crowd at Trump’s rally preceding the Capitol riot to “start taking down names and kicking ass”. Brooks has been endorsed by Trump.Yet even as Trump’s attempted coup gains traction, most of the rest of America continues to sleep. We’ve become so outrage-fatigued by his antics, and so preoccupied with the more immediate threats of the Delta variant and climate-fueled wildfires and hurricanes, that we prefer not to know.A month ago it was reported that during his last weeks in office Trump tried to strong-arm the justice department to falsely declare the 2020 presidential election fraudulent, even threatening to fire the acting attorney general if he didn’t: “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the [Republican] congressmen.”The news barely registered on America’s collective mind. The Olympics and negotiations over the infrastructure bill got more coverage.A top Trump adviser now says Trump is “definitely running” for president in 2024, even though the 14th amendment to the constitution bars anyone from holding office who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the nation.Federal legislation that would pre-empt state voter suppression laws is bogged down in the Senate. Biden hasn’t made it a top priority. A House select committee to investigate the Capitol riot and Trump’s role is barely off the ground. The justice department has made no move to indict the former president for anything.But unless Trump and his co-conspirators are held accountable for the damage they have inflicted and continue to inflict on American democracy, and unless Senate Democrats and Biden soon enact national voting rights legislation, Trump’s attempted coup could eventually succeed.It is imperative that America wake up.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist
      TopicsDonald TrumpOpinionUS elections 2020US politicsUS voting rightsRepublicansUS elections 2024commentReuse this content More

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      Michigan judge sanctions pro-Trump lawyers who sought to overturn state’s 2020 elections

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      MichiganMichigan judge sanctions pro-Trump lawyers who sought to overturn state’s 2020 electionsAttorneys who alleged widespread election fraud presented unsubstantiated claims and abused the justice system, judge rules Maya Yang in New YorkThu 26 Aug 2021 12.23 EDTLast modified on Thu 26 Aug 2021 13.16 EDTA federal judge in Michigan has sanctioned a team of nine pro-Trump lawyers, including Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, who sought to overturn the state’s 2020 elections as part of a sweeping effort across the nation to challenge Joe Biden’s presidential victory via court action.In a 110-page ruling released on Wednesday, judge Linda Parker of the federal district court in Detroit ruled that the attorneys who alleged widespread election fraud in Michigan presented unsubstantiated claims and abused the justice system.“This lawsuit represents a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process,” Parker wrote. “This case was never about fraud – it was about undermining the People’s faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so,” she added.Parker ordered the lawyers to pay legal fees to the city of Detroit and state of Michigan, and will require them to attend legal education classes on pleading standards and election law within six months.She also referred the lawyers to the Michigan attorney grievance commission and other appropriate disciplinary authorities, where they could face further investigation and potential suspension or disbarment in the state.In a frenzied effort in the swing state of Michigan, then president Donald Trump last November met with Republican leaders from the state at the White House in an increasingly desperate attempt to subvert democracy after a series of courtroom defeats over his and his campaign’s allegations of voter fraud.This was all despite officials at the local and federal level declaring it the most secure election in American history.The Michigan lawsuit, which was filed in late November, was one of a series of lawsuits known as the “Kraken” cases that Powell filed across the country, alleging that Dominion Voting System’s voting machines were deliberately tampered with.The lawsuit argued that Biden’s win was fraudulent and asked Parker to declare Trump the winner of the state’s 16 electoral college votes.Parker rejected the request in December, writing: “If granted, the relief would disenfranchise the votes of the more than 5.5 million Michigan citizens who, with dignity, hope, and a promise of a voice, participated in the 2020 general Election.”Wednesday’s ruling marked the latest development in a series of legal woes mounting against pro-Trump attorneys who promoted election conspiracies.In January, Dominion Voting Systems sued Powell and Trump’s former personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, in a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit. A month later, Smartmatic USA, a rival election-technology company, sued the two lawyers for $2.7bn.Meanwhile, Lin Wood was facing his own legal headaches in Georgia, where he is challenging a state bar request that he take a confidential mental competency exam after it conducted an extensive review of his alleged legal misconduct over election challenges.In July, a US appeals court suspended Giuliani from practicing law in Washington DC, a month after he was suspended from practicing law in New York after a court ruled that he made “demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public in trying to overturn the election results”.One of the sanctioned lawyers from the Michigan lawsuit, Scott Hagerstrom, responded to Wednesday’s ruling, saying: “This is all political. This is all about sticking it to Donald Trump and the Republicans.”The other eight lawyers involved have yet to comment on the ruling.TopicsMichiganUS politicsRepublicansDonald TrumpUS elections 2020Reuse this content More

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      The data proves it: 2020 US election was a remarkable success | The Fight to Vote

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      Fight to voteUS newsThe data proves it: 2020 US election was a remarkable successDespite pandemic, election ‘report card’ shows record high turnout, embrace of mail and early voting and relatively few ballot rejections Sam Levine in New YorkThu 19 Aug 2021 10.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 19 Aug 2021 10.23 EDTSign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterHappy Thursday,A few months after every federal election, a little-known federal agency called the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC) releases a trove of data it collects from all 50 states on what happened in the election. The survey offers one of the clearest pictures of the nuts and bolts of the election: things like how people voted and registered, the demographics of poll workers, and provisional and mail-in ballot rejection rates. It’s a report card of sorts, and for the people who study how elections are run, it’s a bible of useful data.The survey for the 2020 election came out on Monday, and it provides unambiguous evidence of what a remarkable success the presidential election was, against all odds. Nearly every state recorded an increase in voter turnout. Overall, more than 67% of America’s citizen voting age population voted in the election – a record high. Despite fears that the surge in mail-in balloting would lead to an increase in ballot rejections, the overall rejection rate remained the same.“It is basically an indicator of the success of the election,” said Barry Burden, the director of the elections research center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Election administrators managed to pull it off and support a record number of voters.”Now Burden and other experts are poring over the data to see which trends might stick in future elections and which might have been a quirk of the pandemic and other unusual circumstances of voting in 2020.The survey shows, for example, that Americans dramatically shifted the way they voted. Only about a third of voters cast their ballots on election day, choosing instead to cast their vote either by mail (43.1%) or early in person (30.6%). That’s a sharp change from previous years, when the majority of voters cast their ballots on election day.“I don’t know if that’s going to be the way future elections are defined,” Burden said. “Some surveys of voters have indicated that quite a few of them who voted by mail want to go back to voting in person. But lots who voted by mail for the first time became fond of it, became aware of it, frankly.”“We’re likely to have this multi-modal system in place for years to come,” he added.An election system in which there are significant numbers of people voting three different ways (in person, early, and by mail) has significant political and administrative consequences. Election administrators will have to figure out how to run essentially three different elections for voters.It also makes running campaigns more complicated, Burden noted. Traditionally, campaigns run a heavy persuasion effort right until voting begins, and then invest in get-out-the-vote efforts. But more voting by mail means that people are casting their ballots earlier.“Now they need to be running both of those efforts kind of simultaneously from about mid-September, when the first absentee ballots go out, 90 days in advance to military and domestic absentees. That’s just complex, and I think some research has showed it’s more expensive to run campaigns in this way.”Charles Stewart, an election administration expert at MIT, said he plans to dig deeper into ballot rejection rates. Among rejected ballots, about a third went uncounted because of signature matching problems. Around 12% were rejected because the voter missed the deadline to return the ballot.“There was great concern about new people not following instructions and having a lot of rejections,” he said. But despite the fact that there were double the number of absentee ballots this year, “the percentage of absentee ballots rejected was about what it was in the past”.“Although, the way I think about these things is that since we doubled the number of absentee ballots, that means there was double the number of people whose votes didn’t get counted because of something wrong. But nonetheless, from this other perspective, it wasn’t all that bad,” he added.Even so, Stewart and Burden both want to investigate why a handful of states had rejection rates that appeared to far exceed the national rejection rate of 0.8%. Those states include Arkansas (6.4%), New Mexico (5.0%), New York (3.6%) and Mississippi (2.3%). Burden cautioned against drawing quick conclusions from the data:“I do have a concern that the data are still a little hinky. Not all of the states reported what share of absentee ballots were rejected, and a couple of them reported data that was not complete,” he said.Stewart also said he also wanted to better understand why Washington, Oregon and Colorado – states that long have had universal vote by mail – continued to have rejection rates around the national average, despite their expertise and experience in the area.“1% is a pretty high rejection rate,” he noted.Overall, Burden said, the survey should be used as hard evidence to help build trust in American elections.“I think what the average American hears about in the press is partisan disagreements over whether there was fraud or whether there’s going to be another audit in some state,” he said. “One way to rebuild the confidence of some voters is to remind them of how wonderful the election was.”Also worth watching…
      House Democrats introduced a fresh bill that would update the Voting Rights Act. It would put states back under federal supervision if they repeatedly discriminate against voters and strengthens Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, overriding a recent supreme court decision that made it more difficult to challenge discriminatory voting laws. Democrats plan a quick vote on the bill in the US House next week, but it still faces the obstacle of the filibuster in the Senate.
      The Republican-controlled state election board in Georgia voted to authorize a review of the board of elections in Fulton county, home to Atlanta and the most populous in the state. The review could lead to the state board taking over the county elections board under a controversial provision in Georgia’s new voting law.
      The FBI is now helping investigate whether a local clerk in Colorado illegally divulged election information to conspiracy theorists. The state’s top election official this week said that Tina Peters, the clerk in Mesa county, accessed a secure room in late May and copied election management software.
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      Are the Democrats doomed in 2022? Politics Weekly Extra

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      Analyst David Shor and Jonathan Freedland look at the data and the polls and discuss why the Democrats should be worried – and what they need to do to improve their chances of winning the next presidential election

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      When Joe Biden became the 46th US president in 2020 many Democrats were celebrating, but one – the data analyst David Shor – was nervous. After crunching the numbers and looking at the extensive data, David believes that if the Democrats continue as they are, the party is going to lose the next presidential election. The 30-year-old prodigy is one of the most in demand data analysts in the US – to such an extent that Politico has written an article about him entitled “The cult of Shor”. So what data has he seen to cause him such alarm? And what should the Democrats be doing to get back on track? David Shor talks problem and remedy with Jonathan Freedland. Archive: Freedom News TV Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More