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      Rightwing group nearly forced Wisconsin to purge thousands of eligible voters

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      A well-connected conservative group in Wisconsin nearly succeeded in forcing the state to kick nearly 17,000 eligible voters off its rolls ahead of the 2020 election, new state data reveals.
      The group, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (Will), caused a national uproar in late 2019 when it successfully convinced a county judge to order the state to immediately remove more than 232,000 people Wisconsin suspected of moving homes from the state’s voter rolls. The state, relying on government records, had sent a postcard to all of those voters asking them to confirm their address, and Will sought to remove anyone who had not responded within 30 days.
      Democrats on the commission refused to comply with the order, believing that the underlying data wasn’t reliable, and wanted to give voters until April 2021 to confirm their address before they removed them. Appeals courts intervened and blocked the removals; the case is currently pending before the Wisconsin supreme court. There were still more than 71,000 voters still on the list at the end of January who did not respond to the mailer (152,524 people on the list updated their registration at a new address).
      But new data from the Wisconsin Elections Commission shows how disastrous such a purge could have been. And the dispute underscores the way fights over how states remove people from their voter rolls – often called purging – has become a critical part of protecting voting rights in America.
      Across the country, Republicans and conservative groups have pushed for aggressive purging, saying it helps prevent fraud. Democrats and voting rights groups say the process can be done haphazardly, leaving eligible voters, particularly minority groups and students, at risk of being wrongly purged.
      Bar chart showing people in non-white zipcodes were more likely to be on the purge list.
      In Wisconsin, of the 232,579 people who were flagged for potential removal from the rolls in October 2019, 16,698 people – 7.2% of the list – wound up confirming they wanted to remain registered to vote at the same address. Nearly 11,000 of those people voted in the November election (Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by just over 20,000 votes in the state).
      “7.2% never moved. That is a huge error rate,” Mark Thomsen, a Democrat on the bipartisan Wisconsin elections commission, said during a meeting earlier this month.
      “17,000 voters is a lot of voters,” said Ann Jacobs, another Democrat on the commission.
      Richard Esenberg, Will’s president and general counsel, however, said the new data was actually evidence that Wisconsin’s process worked. “If the number is 7%, then I think it’s fair to say that the movers list was reliable for the purpose that it is being used for, ie, to ask voters to confirm their registrations,” he wrote in an email.
      Timeline
      Wisconsin officials are still trying to understand exactly why so many voters were getting wrongly flagged. 2019 was just the second time the state used data from the Electronic Registration Information Center (Eric), a multi-state consortium that uses records from the DMV, post office and other government sources to help election officials flag voters who may have moved. Thirty states and the District of Columbia belong to the consortium and the system is generally considered a reliable way of identifying voters who have moved.
      Wisconsin, however, is exempt from a 1993 federal law that requires states to offer voter registration services at DMVs. That may be leading to issues in matching DMV and voter records in the state; voters who change a car registration to a different address but haven’t actually moved may be getting incorrectly flagged as movers, Meagan Wolfe, the executive director of the Wisconsin elections commission, said during a meeting earlier this month.
      Figuring out whether or not the data Wisconsin is relying on is accurate is crucial because a state statute says that local election officials have to remove someone from the voter rolls if they have “reliable” information they have moved. Will says the data is reliable and so the voters must be removed. Democrats and voting rights groups say the data is not reliable enough to cancel registrations.
      The Guardian contacted more than 200 voters who informed the state at some point over the last year or so they were still living at the same address after they were flagged as movers in 2019. Several voters said they had temporarily moved out of Wisconsin but continued to vote absentee in the state.
      That’s what happened to Riley Freeman, a 23-year-old from Waunakee. In 2018, he asked the post office to begin forwarding his mail to his college address at Northwestern University, just outside Chicago, but continued to vote absentee in Wisconsin. He didn’t register to vote in Illinois, apply for a driver’s license or register his car there. The state flagged him as a mover, even though he was still eligible to vote in Wisconsin and wanted to do so. He voted by mail in 2020; had the 2019 purge gone through, he would have had to re-register to vote from college before he could vote by mail.
      “I still kind of considered myself a Wisconsin resident who just happened to live in Illinois nine months of the year,” he said, calling the process “a little bit unfair”.
      Carlos Martin Del Campo, a 20-year-old from New Holstein in north-east Wisconsin, was also among those flagged. Towards the end of 2019, he left Wisconsin to live temporarily in California with his father, but always intended to return to the state and vote there. By the time Wisconsin’s spring election in April came around, he was back in the state and voted in person at the polls after confirming to officials there that he had not moved.
      “In my case I would see why I was flagged. But it just concerns me the potential for my vote not being cast was there,” he said.
      It’s not clear why voters temporarily out of state may be getting flagged as movers.
      “If National Change of Address has it listed as temporary, and not with other codes or other dmv data also indicating a move, then we take them off the list,” Reid Magney, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said in an email. “But it’s also possible they checked the wrong box on the change of address form, or there was a data entry error by the post office. Or they had some other transaction at DMV regarding their vehicle, etc.”
      Voters in non-white and low-income zip codes were all more likely to get flagged as movers subject to a potential purge, according to a Guardian analysis of state data. People living in those same areas were also likely to be wrongly flagged as movers.
      Map showing where people were most likely to be on a list to be purged from the voter rolls.
      Researchers found similar trends when they studied racial disparities the first time Wisconsin attempted to remove voters using Eric data. In 2018, 4% of the voters flagged as movers wound up casting ballots at the same address. Minority voters were twice as likely to do so than their white counterparts.
      The study suggests that simply sending voters postcards to confirm their address is probably not the best way to identify who may have moved.
      “It highlights the challenges in doing [voter roll] maintenance when people have unstable addresses,” said Marc Meredith, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the authors of the study. “Postcards by themselves aren’t gonna cut it.”
      Esenberg and other defenders of the aggressive removals have argued that even if Wisconsin officials did erroneously remove some voters from the rolls, Wisconsin has same-day registration, which allows people to re-register when they show up at the polls. But several voters on the list also told the Guardian that they continued to vote absentee from an address abroad, casting ballots from places like the United Kingdom and Japan. Those voters are unlikely to have the option to re-register on election day, and it may be more difficult for them to get the necessary documents to prove their residency eligibility in Wisconsin.
      “We’ve just gotten through an election cycle where the right in this country, conservative activists and legislators are practically apoplectic over garden variety election irregularities. But in the context of this issue, they seem to be very comfortable with a 7% error rate,” said Jon Sherman, an attorney at the Fair Elections Center who went to court to try to stop the removals last year.
      “If a voting machine junked 7% of the ballots you fed it, I don’t think you would call that a reliable voting machine.” More

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      Key Biden aide said pandemic was 'best thing that ever happened to him', book says

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      A senior adviser to Democrat Joe Biden in his campaign for president believed “Covid is the best thing that ever happened to him”, a new book reports.It was, the authors add, a necessarily private comment that “campaign officials believed but would never say in public” as the US reeled from the impact of the pandemic amid hospitals stretched to breaking and with deaths mounting and the economy falling off a cliff.The remark, made to “an associate” by Anita Dunn, a Washington powerbroker who the Atlantic called “The Mastermind Behind Biden’s No-Drama Approach to Trump”, is reported in Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.The first major book on the 2020 election, a campaign indelibly marked by the coronavirus, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.This week, President Biden commemorated the 500,000th US Covid death with solemn ceremony and a request that Americans “remember those we lost and those we left behind”.Allen and Parnes, of NBC News and The Hill, also collaborated on Shattered, a similarly speedy history of Hillary Clinton’s White House run in 2016. In their new book they record Biden’s view of his predecessor in her defeat by Trump – he thought her a “terrible candidate” – and the views of Barack Obama, whom Biden served as vice-president from 2009 to 2017, as the 2020 campaign unfolded.Obama first “seemed to be enamored with a former Texas congressman, Beto O’Rourke”, Allen and Parnes write, then later told Biden’s aides he feared his friend, aged 77 when the primary began, would only succeed in embarrassing himself and tarnishing a distinguished Washington career.But Dunn’s reported comment points to what became the dominant theme of the election. As the pandemic capsized Trump along with the economy Biden, through a much more cautious approach to campaigning and basic public health concerns, appealed to voters as the right man to manage a recovery.Trump sought to hammer Biden for “hiding in his basement” – a reference to Biden’s decision to rarely leave home in Wilmington, Delaware, instead campaigning virtually while the president held rallies and ignored public health guidelines. But such attacks did not hit home.Though “both Trump and Biden were comfortable with the stylistic and substantive contrasts of their … responses to the coronavirus”, Allen and Parnes write, “Trump led loudly, Biden calmly said Trump misled”.Like many members of his family and inner circle, Trump contracted the virus. He was reportedly more seriously ill than was publicly admitted. Biden stayed healthy and won the electoral college 306-232 and the popular vote by more than 7m.Dunn, 63, is a veteran of six Democratic campaigns and three winning ones, having worked for Obama in 2008 and 2012. She has not taken a role in the Biden administration and according to her own consulting firm, SKDK, is “currently on leave … expected to return later this year”.According to the profile published by the Atlantic in the immediate aftermath of Biden’s win in November, Dunn “came of age in the time when aides were neither seen nor heard … and still values discretion above almost all else”. More

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      Democrats lost Texas because of Covid and Republican voter drive, report finds

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterGet-out-the-vote efforts hampered by the coronavirus pandemic and an 11th-hour voter registration surge for well-funded Republicans thwarted ambitions of a blue wave in Texas during the 2020 election, according to a new postmortem that state Democrats shared with the Guardian.“The majority of Texans, if they were in the ballot box, would vote for Democrats. The problem is that Republicans have a higher likelihood of turning out,” said Hudson Cavanagh, the Texas Democratic party’s data science director who authored the post-election report.Texas generated outsized buzz last year, as a spike in early voting made much of the nation wonder whether its 38 electoral college votes were finally up for grabs. Yet former president Donald Trump still triumphed by more than a five-point margin – a much closer presidential contest than any other in recent years, but one that reinforced Republicans as the state’s dominant party.Now, Democrats are blaming last fall’s defeat mostly on programmatic difficulties, which allowed Republicans to best them in get-out-the-vote operations. “Texas is still the next frontier,” said Abhi Rahman, the communications director for Texas Democrats.Despite record turnout in 2020, Texas ranked 44th out of 50 states in terms of ballots counted as a proportion of the total voting-eligible population, according to the United States Elections Project. High Asian voter participation marked “a major shift”, but still, “the electorate was whiter than projected”, Cavanagh noted in his analysis.Latinos – who are considered a key demographic to move Texas to the left – also eclipsed turnout projections. But Latino Republicans voted at a higher rate than Latino Democrats, and that differential turnout created a largely false impression that Democrats were losing ground with one of their most crucial blocs, too often lumped together as a monolith.One exception was the Rio Grande Valley, a typically Democratic stronghold where Latinos did in fact gravitate more toward Trump at the top of the ticket.While “Latino voters continue to strongly support Democrats,” the party needs “to empower Latino voices at the ballot box”, Cavanagh wrote in his report.On top of Texas’s reputation as a voter suppression state – based on voter ID requirements, a difficult registration process, restrictions on mail ballots and other barriers – Covid-19 added yet another obstacle for Texas voters in 2020. Polling locations closed because of infected workers, while long lines of constituents who weren’t required to wear masks threatened exposure to the virus.“It took a lot of bravery for a lot of these Democrats who understood the risk that, you know, they were putting themselves in to go vote,” Cavanagh told the Guardian. “I’m incredibly proud of the folks that did, frankly.”Amid the public health crisis, Texas Democrats decided against knocking on doors for face-to-face voter engagement, because “even one life lost is too many”, Cavanagh said. Republicans, on the other hand, connected with eligible voters in-person, a clear advantage in one of the few states where residents still cannot register to vote online.In the last months leading up to the election, a gargantuan push by Republicans to register new voters wiped out the gradual advantage Democrats had been honing for years, especially given that almost all of those new Republican registrations turned into net votes.“Their willingness to put people at risk to win the election, you know, made it really hard for us to keep up,” Cavanagh said.As Democrats turned to virtual registration drives and phone banking, they spent too much time speaking with reliable party members who would have voted regardless. Likewise, a dearth of contact information for young and rural Texans – as well as people of color – and the inability to canvas made it difficult to connect with voters who were less likely to turn out.Estimates indicate that there are still more than 2 million solidly Democratic unregistered voters in the state, and Cavanagh said the party needs to focus on registering them, then actually building relationships so they make it to the polls.“We know that that’s how Democrats win across this country,” he said. “We look people in the eyes, we tell them our values, we tell them what we believe in, and that’s how we get people to turn out.” More

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      Voting machine maker Dominion sues MyPillow CEO over false election claims

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      The voting machine manufacturer Dominion is suing the Donald Trump-supporting chief executive of MyPillow for more than $1.3bn, claiming he damaged the company with his “Big Lie” that it distorted the results of the 2020 election.Dominion delivered on its earlier threat to sue Mike Lindell by lodging the lawsuit on Monday in a federal court in Washington. The complaint alleges that the MyPillow boss used the falsehood that Dominion voting machines had been used to rig the election in favour of Joe Biden as a marketing ploy to sell his product, “because the lie sells pillows”.The suit accuses Lindell and MyPillow of deceptive trade practices and seeking to profit by making false and defamatory statements. It highlights discounts MyPillow offered on its products linked to the rigged-election conspiracy theory, and points out that the company advertised on rightwing media outlets that were pushing the baseless claims and sponsored public rallies that propagated Trump’s lies.After Dominion warned that they were minded to sue, Lindell responded by stepping up attacks on the company. Earlier this month he released a three-hour film, Absolute Proof, devoted to the fantasy that last November’s defeat of Trump at the ballot box amounted to a “communist coup”.His relentless pursuit of the stolen election lie earned Lindell a permanent suspension from Twitter.On Monday, Lindell told the Wall Street Journal he was “very, very happy” that the Dominion lawsuit had gone ahead.“I have all the evidence on them,” he said. “Now this will get disclosed faster, all the machine fraud and the attack on our country.”No credible evidence of fraud on the scale needed to overturn the 2020 presidential election result has ever been presented. Numerous election officials, including prominent Republicans, have rebuffed the idea, as did Trump attorney general William Barr and homeland security secretary Chad Wolf.The Dominion legal action is the latest in a flurry of lawsuits swirling around Trump’s baseless claim that the election was stolen. Last month Dominion sued Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and another pro-Trump attorney, Sidney Powell, over their role in forwarding the conspiracy theory.A rival voting machine company, Smartmatic USA, has sued Fox News for $2.7bn, alleging defamatory comments about its products were broadcast on the network. Fox News has filed to dismiss the case. More

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      Republican leader Steve Scalise refuses to admit Trump lost election to Biden

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      A senior Republican House leader has refused to admit Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election against Donald Trump.Congressman Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House minority whip, appeared on ABC’s This Week more than three months after Biden won the electoral college 306-232 and the popular vote by more than 7m ballots and just over a month after the Democrat was sworn into office.Trump now lives in Florida but he has refused to accept reality and concede, even after having the vast majority of cases mounted to pursue baseless claims of voter fraud laughed and thrown out of court.He was impeached a second time for inciting the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January, having told supporters to “fight like hell” to overturn the election. Thanks to Republicans in the Senate, he was acquitted.“Clear this up for me,” ABC host Jonathan Karl said to Scalise on Sunday. “Joe Biden won the election. He is the legitimate president of the United States. The election was not stolen, correct?”“Look,” Scalise said, “Joe Biden’s the president. There were a few states that did not follow their state laws. That’s really the dispute that you’ve seen continue on.“And, look, if you’re Joe Biden, you probably want to keep talking about impeachment and anything other than the fact that he’s killed millions of American energy jobs, that … they just signed the Paris [climate] accord. It’s going to kill manufacturing jobs in America.“But at the end of the day, when you look at where we are in this country, either we’re going to address the problems that happened with the election that … millions of people are still concerned about, the constitution says state legislatures set the rules for elections, that didn’t happen in a few states, and so, going forward – look, Joe Biden’s the president. But does he…”Karl interjected.“But, congressman, I know Joe Biden’s the president. He lives at the White House. I asked you, is he the legitimate president of the United States, and do you concede that this election was not stolen? Very simple question. Please just answer it.”“Look,” said Scalise, not answering the question. “Once the electors are counted, yes, he’s the legitimate president. But if you’re going to ignore the fact that there were states that did not follow their own … laws, that’s the issue at heart, that millions of people still are not happy with and don’t want to see happen again.“You know, look … you can rehash the election from 2020 all day long, but there are people concerned about what the next election is going to look like. Are we going to finally get back to the way the rule of law works?”Scalise’s comment about the rule of law echoed statements from Trump, his supporters and his lawyers, who have insisted he represents the forces of law and order despite having incited an assault on Congress in which a police officer was one of five people killed and scores of others were injured.Scalise told Karl he had recently visited Trump.“I was doing some fundraising throughout a number of parts of Florida,” he said, “ended up at Mar-a-Lago, and the president reached out, and we visited. I hadn’t seen him since he had left the White House. And it was actually good to catch up with him. I noticed he was a lot more relaxed than in his four years in the White House.“He still cares a lot about this country and the direction of our country. But, you know, it was a conversation more about how he’s doing now and what he’s … planning on doing and how his family is doing.”In the long term, Trump’s plans may include another run for office – or other ways of keeping congressional Republicans firmly under his thumb. In the short term, the former president will next week address the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Florida.His subject: the state of the Republican party. More

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      Keir Starmer can learn much from Joe Biden’s first weeks | Letters

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      I read Andy Beckett’s column (Think bigger: that’s the message for Starmer from Biden’s bold beginning, 11 February) with interest and a certain amount of agreement. Joe Biden has hit the White House floor running with his overturning of Donald Trump’s divisive issues and, indeed, confounding some of his critics. I feel, too, that Keir Starmer needs to take a leaf out of his presidential book, because it is not just enough to be “the grown up” in the chamber at prime minister’s questions. He needs to be radical and persuasive. I used to relish his forensic questioning but now find it slightly stale and predictable.He has real capabilities of forging the party into a fighting and vigorous entity, and not one to appeal to just one demographic. Biden is proving to be quite radical and forward thinking. Starmer needs behave in a similar manner before the public simply forgets all the government’s mistakes with the pandemic and just centres on the great success of the vaccine rollout. So please, Sir Keir, harness your inner passions and go for it, without weighing up all the pros and cons first. Judith A Daniels Great Yarmouth, Norfolk• Andy Beckett is right to encourage the new Labour leadership to “think bigger”. But the real lesson from the US is the way in which the existing political system handicaps parties of the centre-left.So Labour needs to work with other progressive parties to show how the necessary supply of public goods – health, housing, education, social care, social security, infrastructure – cannot be obtained without changes to the political system: ensuring that everyone who is entitled to vote can actually do so; introducing some form of proportional representation so that no one is deprived of a vote by where they live; placing limits on private political funding; and introducing much tighter control over the veracity of political claims and statements.This is the “bigger picture” that Labour needs to draw if there is to be any hope of another genuinely progressive government. Prof Roger BrownSouthampton• If we can learn anything from Joe Biden’s success, it is that a principled, centre-left man of integrity could be exactly what the population of the UK so badly needs. What we do not need is a populist masquerading as a committed politician, but who cannot unite the Labour party, let alone the country. Jeremy Corbyn was more inclined to alienate the core of the centre-left.Beckett rightly pairs Trump with Boris Johnson but, weirdly, chooses to call them charismatic! It may well be that Keir Starmer, whose integrity, intelligence and competence are indeed what Labour needs, will readily follow Biden’s values of “family, community and security”. What, after all, is the alternative? Boris Johnson? A man who has publicly praised Donald Trump and whose values would appear to fall short of those espoused by Biden and Starmer. Carolyn Kirton Aberdeen• I have to disagree with Andy Beckett when he credits the “surge” in leftwing politics in the US with Donald Trump’s defeat. While acknowledging the professional and pragmatic approach taken by the Democrats in their campaign both for the White House and Congress, it was clearly the damage wrought by Covid to the US economy, as well as the ensuing loss of life and its exposure of the inadequacies and downright incompetence of Trump and his ragbag administration, that gave Joe Biden and his party the ultimate victory. John Marriott Lincoln More

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      Georgia prosecutors launch criminal investigation into Trump election phone call

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      Prosecutors in Fulton county, Georgia, are investigating Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the southern state’s 2020 presidential election results, according to a letter, in the second criminal investigation faced by the former president.The Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has sent a letter asking state government officials to preserve documents, including those related to the then president’s call to the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, pressuring him to “find” more votes.“This matter is of high priority, and I am confident that as fellow law enforcement officers sworn to uphold the constitutions of the United States and Georgia, our acquisition of information and evidence of potential crimes via interviews, documents, videos and electronic records will be cooperative,” said the letter dated 10 February.“This letter is notification that all records potentially related to the administration of the 2020 general election must be preserved, with particular care being given to set aside and preserve those that may be evidence of attempts to influence the actions of persons who were administering that election.“Representatives for the county prosecutor’s office and for Trump did not immediately respond to requests for comment.On Monday, Raffensperger’s office opened its own investigation into Trump’s 2 January phone call pressuring him to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s 3 November victory in the state, based on unfounded voter fraud claims by the Trump team. Raffensperger said any further legal efforts would be up to the state’s attorney general.The New York Times first reported the investigation.Trump also faces criminal and civil fraud investigations in New York, with an ongoing crime inquiry into his finances by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, and a civil investigation by New York attorney general, Letitia James.The announcement of the Georgia investigation is important for Willis, who is new to the post.She is the first African American woman to hold the job in Georgia’s most populous county, the New York Times further reported, and has promised reforms.Willis is tackling high homicide numbers in Atlanta as well as a review of the handling of the police killing of Rayshard Brooks, last June. More

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      European monitors: US election was fair but must try harder on voting rights

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      The election arm of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), has brought out its final report on the 2020 US presidential election, concluding that it was well organised under the circumstances and there was no significant fraud.The report also found that Donald Trump’s rhetoric and refusal to accept defeat undermined public faith in democratic institutions, and warned the US has long-term problems with providing equal voting rights for all.As is routine for OSCE member states, its Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) sent a team out to observe the run-up, election day itself and the aftermath. Its report notes that voting infrastructure in the US is chronically underfunded, and the extra $400m disbursed to deal with the challenge of voting in a pandemic was insufficient.A total of 101 million Americans, 64% of all 2020 voters, cast an early ballot, but despite that unprecedented number, the report found that “early voting was generally well organised and implemented professionally”.“The number and scale of substantiated cases of fraud associated to absentee ballots were negligible,” it said.One of the main problems with the election and its aftermath, according to the findings, was the incumbent president.“On many occasions, President Trump created an impression of refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, claiming that the electoral process was systematically rigged,” the report said.“Such statements by an incumbent president weaken public confidence in state institutions and were perceived by many as increasing the potential for politically motivated violence after the elections.”The ODIHR report did not take an explicit view on Trump’s role in inciting the Capitol riot on 6 January and for which he was impeached a second time. But it noted that at his rally immediately beforehand, Trump “persisted in his accusations that the election had been stolen, urging his supporters to pressure representatives to overturn the counting of electoral college votes”.The ODIHR was most scathing about the state of voting rights in the US. It notes that after the supreme court invalidated key parts of the Voting Rights Act, “some states enacted laws which effectively compromised voting rights for some disadvantaged groups”.An estimated 5.2 million citizens are effectively disenfranchised due to a criminal conviction, even though half have served their sentences.The report concluded: “These restrictions on the voting rights of ex-felons and felons contravene principles of universal suffrage and the principle of proportionality in the restriction of rights, as provided for by OSCE commitments and other international standards.”The ODIHR made 38 recommendations on how to improve US democracy. It called on American politicians to stop using “inflammatory or discriminatory rhetoric”, and for all people with criminal convictions to have their voting rights restored on completion of their sentence.It also said US authorities should work on reducing the number of unregistered voters, by reducing “burdensome procedures and obstacles” to registration that have been erected in some states, draw up district boundaries on non-partisan principles, and review the electoral college system so that it confirms with the “principle of equality of the vote”. More