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      Georgia sees first major test for a Republican defending democracy | The fight to vote

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      Georgia sees first major test for a Republican defending democracyThe most important primary in the US might be the Georgia secretary of state race, where Brad Raffensperger is in a tough re-election battle after standing up to Trump Get the latest updates on voting rights in the Guardian’s Fight to vote newsletterHello, and Happy Thursday,I’m writing from Atlanta, where I’m spending this week reporting on the Republican primary for secretary of state.This race is perhaps the most important primary happening in America this year. Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s incumbent secretary of state, is in a really tough re-election battle after memorably standing up to Donald Trump in 2020 and refusing his request to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn the election 2020 results. The former president is backing Jody Hice, a conservative congressman who has embraced the myth the election was stolen in a bid to oust Raffensperger.It’s the first major test we’re seeing this year of whether a Republican who defends democracy can withstand the wrath of his own party. It’s also a major test for democracy both in Georgia and the US – one of several closely watched races this year in which candidates who have expressed willingness to overturn an election are seeking to be the chief election officials in their state.I spent Monday morning in a conference room at the headquarters of Georgia Public Broadcasting, watching a live stream of Raffensperger, Hice and two other candidates – David Belle Isle and TJ Hudson – debate downstairs (reporters were not allowed in the room). Nearly the entire hour was about the 2020 election, with the other three candidates repeating baseless and debunked claims of fraud. The first question Hice was asked was why voters should trust his judgment if he continues to believe the election was stolen. He dodged.“The big lie in all of this is that there were no problems in this last election. This last election was filled with problems,” Hice said. “Election security must be protected and Brad Raffensperger let that ball majorly fall.”Afterwards, I asked Hice something I’ve been asking almost everyone I meet who believes the 2020 election was stolen: is there anything he could see that could convince him that it was accurate. The election results in Georgia have been confirmed through multiple audits and recounts.“Not at this point, there’s nothing,” he said, going on to reference an allegation of illegal ballot harvesting from a conservative group that Raffensperger’s office is currently investigating. “This election was just overwhelmed with fraudulent activity. There’s nothing that can change my opinion of that.”I also asked Hice if he thought Trump’s call to Raffensperger was appropriate. If he was elected, what would he do if a president from his own party called him up and asked him to find votes for him?“Absolutely, there was nothing wrong with that request,” Hice said. “He was not saying go out and ‘find illegal ballots for me’. He was saying look at all the fraud that’s out here. Do your job. Make sure we have legal ballots that are cast, legal ballots that are counted, and had Brad done so, I believe the outcome would have been different.”But the January 2021 call from Trump to Raffensperger was not just a generalized call to investigate suspicious activity. As Trump and his team listed what they saw as irregularities, Raffensperger and his staff said that they were either investigating them or had debunked them. Trump made it clear that he wanted the outcome to be a reversal of the election results. “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state,” he said.During the debate, Raffensperger pushed back on Hice by repeatedly describing him as a liar while also trying to burnish his own conservative credentials. He repeatedly touted his focus on preventing non-citizen voting – which is virtually non-existent. He said he would be in favor of getting rid of a federal prohibition on giant voter removals within 90 days of an election. And he said he supported getting rid of no-excuse mail-in voting in Georgia. In any other race, all of those would be controversial positions on their own. During the debate on Monday, they seemed moderate in comparison with those of Hice, who refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the 2020 election.At one point during the debate, Raffensperger, a former engineer who is soft-spoken and sometimes speaks awkwardly, seemed exasperated. He detailed how his office had played a kind of Whac-A-Mole after the 2020 election, debunking claims about felon voting, underage voting and dead people voting.“The real problem that you have gets down to basic honesty,” he said. “It gets down to, it was actual, total, disinformation, misinformation, outright lying. And there’s not much I can do about that, because Jody Hice has been running from one rumor to another for the last 18 months. And how can you have confidence when people that should be holding a responsible position as a sitting congressman should be telling the truth.”Also worth watching …
      Georgia’s department of driver services quietly eliminated automatic voter registration on its website, but has since restored it.
      A decision striking down New York’s congressional map is a major blow to Democratic efforts to keep control of the US House this year
      Mississippi’s governor vetoed a bill that would make it moderately easier for people with felony convictions to get their voting rights back.
      TopicsGeorgiaFight to voteRepublicansUS politicsUS voting rightsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      My day with Pamela Moses after her charges were dropped | The fight to vote

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      ‘I’m like Rocky’: my day with Pamela Moses after her charges were droppedAfter prosecutors dropped criminal charges against Moses for trying to register to vote, I met her in person – and learned what’s next now that her case is over Get the latest updates on voting rights in the Guardian’s Fight to vote newsletterHello, and Happy Thursday,I’ve been closely following the criminal case against Pamela Moses, who was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to register to vote, for the last few months. But on Monday I met her in person for the first time.We were meeting just days after prosecutors announced they were dropping criminal charges against her, cancelling a scheduled court appearance where she was set to find out if they would retry her case. Even so, Moses insisted that she take me to visit the hulking criminal courthouse in downtown Memphis, a building simply known by its address, 201 Poplar.We went through security and walked downstairs into one of the courthouse’s main waiting areas, where electronic screens on the wall showed defendant names and where they stood on court dockets for the day. It was mostly empty, but on a normal day, Moses said, it’s crowded with Black people waiting to get their cases heard. She walked past a line of people waiting at a clerk’s office and asked a teller if a judge she knew was still around – he wasn’t.We took the elevator up to the seventh floor, which houses the courtroom where Moses’ case took place. When the doors opened, a sheriff’s deputy beamed, gave her a hug, and congratulated her on beating the case. “This man tried to kill me the first time he met me,” Moses said, laughing. She would later tell me he was one of the officers who took her into custody when the bail in her voting case was abruptly revoked in December. Now, she said, they were cool with each other.Back downstairs we ran into Kenneth Brashier, a lawyer Moses has known for a long time. He was beaming too and congratulated her. “Usually you have a cigar when you take a victory lap,” he told her. Moses said she’d take a victory lap once she changed Tennessee’s law around felon disenfranchisement.It was raining, so Moses and I spent the rest of the day driving around Memphis in her car. Waiting to pick up her son Taj from school, we talked about the case of Crystal Mason, the Texas woman appealing a five-year prison sentence for casting a provisional ballot while ineligible in 2016. Moses was stunned to learn Mason’s vote wasn’t even counted.She walked me through several of the criminal and other legal cases she’s been involved in, rattling off an encyclopedic knowledge of judges, lawyers, and other county officials. She’s outspoken and embraces her reputation as a bit of a troublemaker. “I’m like Rocky Balboa,” she said at one point with a laugh. When I asked her what would come next for her now that the voting case was over, she didn’t miss a beat. “I’m working on getting a man of out of prison who’s been there for 25 years,” she said. In her yard, she still has a sign up from her long shot 2019 mayoral campaign. It was that effort that prompted election officials to start investigating her voting eligibility.Earlier that morning, Moses had held a press conference at the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine motel, where Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated. It was the first time Moses had spoken about her case since the charges were dropped. Taj, 13, a tech whiz, helped set up two iPhones to stream the press conference. “I am so lucky to be here with my mom because I am blessed. Other children are not as fortunate as me to have their parents released and have their charges dropped,” he said.Moses said Tennessee should get rid of the form that people with felonies have to fill out if they want to vote, the document at the center of her case. Tennessee has one of the most confusing and harshest felon disenfranchisement policies in the country – more than 450,000 people, including more than 20% of the Black voting age population, can’t vote because of a felony conviction, according to an estimate by the Sentencing Project. She told me she saw her case as an effort to intimidate Black voters.“When it comes to Black people in the south, whatever we do, if it’s wrong, you’ve got to pay for it,” she said. “If there was a white person and I got treated the way I did, I would be just as upset, but you don’t see white people getting treated like that.”Moses also rebuked Amy Weirich, the district attorney who prosecuted the case. Weirich put out a statement on Friday suggesting Moses bore responsibility for her long sentence because she did not take a plea deal. Moses said the statement showed how the prosecutor was determined to get a conviction: “It showed who she is: arrogant, wants to be right. I think it just sounded like she wanted to win.” A Weirich spokesman declined an interview request.Moses urged people to vote in the Democratic primary for district attorney, which is going on right now (two of the candidates, Linda Harris and Janika White, watched from the audience). Afterwards, during a lunch at a barbecue restaurant across the street, Moses encouraged other Tennessee voters to talk to Harris.At the press conference that morning, she mentioned that she had considered committing suicide while she was in jail last year. Later she told me it was connected to the shock of being abruptly taken into custody.“Going to jail is not a bad thing for somebody who’s been before. It’s a bad thing when you’re not expecting it,” she said.Snacking on a steady stream of Jolly Ranchers from her front cupholder as we drove around that afternoon, she pointed out what she sees as deep inequalities in Memphis. Near Graceland, we drove by what looked like a busy voting precinct. People vote there, she said, because there’s money and tourism. Further down the road, Moses pointed out the neighborhood had changed: many of the buildings were abandoned, a consequence, she said, of white flight.“There’s so many things wrong in Memphis,” Moses said. “How dare you waste our tax dollars, waste our time, waste our manpower, how dare you do that? That’s what most people can agree on.”Also worth watching …
      Florida Republicans approved a congressional map that severely blunts Black political power in the state. There is already a legal challenge to the plan.
      The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, approved a new law that creates a statewide office to investigate election crimes and imposes other new restrictions.
      New York’s highest court struck down the state’s congressional map, saying it was too severely distorted to benefit Democrats.
      TopicsUS voting rightsFight to voteMemphisUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      New York court rejects congressional maps, seen as favoring Democrats

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      New York court rejects congressional maps, seen as favoring DemocratsLegal fight over process could be a factor in the battle between Democrats and Republicans for control of the House New York’s highest court on Wednesday rejected the state’s new congressional district maps, which had been widely seen as favoring Democrats.The legal fight over New York’s redistricting process could be a factor in the battle between Democrats and Republicans for control of the US House.New York is set to lose one seat in Congress in 2021. New York’s new maps would give Democrats a strong majority of registered voters in 22 of the state’s 26 congressional districts. Republicans now hold eight of the state’s 27 seats.Democrats had been hoping that a redistricting map favorable to their party in New York might help offset expected losses in other states where Republicans control state government.The state’s court of appeals agreed in a ruling with a group of Republican voters who sued, saying that the district boundaries had been unconstitutionally gerrymandered and that the legislature hadn’t followed proper procedure in passing the maps.The court said it will “likely be necessary” to move the congressional and state senate primary elections from June to August.A lower-level court had also ruled that the maps were unconstitutional and had given the legislature a 30 April deadline to come up with new maps or else leave the task to a court-appointed expert.Political district maps across the nation have been redrawn in recent months as a result of population shifts recorded in the 2020 census.Under a process passed by voters in 2014, New York’s new district maps were supposed to have been drawn by an independent commission. But that body, made up of equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, couldn’t agree on one set of maps. The Democratic-controlled legislature then stepped in and created its own maps, quickly signed into law by Governor Kathy Hochul.Republicans sued, seeking to have the maps tossed for violating a provision in the state constitution barring the redrawing of districts for partisan gain. Similar legal battles have been playing out in several other states.The legal battle has moved quickly through the courts, but not fast enough to quell uncertainty about the primary, now scheduled for 28 June.In the meantime, candidates have had to begin campaigning in the new districts, even as they are unsure whether those districts will still exist by the time voting begins.TopicsNew YorkUS voting rightsDemocratsKathy HochulUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Ron DeSantis signs bill to create Florida voter-fraud police force

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      Ron DeSantis signs bill to create Florida voter-fraud police forceRepublican governor embraces top priority of his party, following Donald Trump’s false claims that his 2020 re-election was stolen Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill Monday to create a police force dedicated to pursuing voter fraud and other election crimes, embracing a top priority of Republicans after Donald Trump’s false claims that his reelection was stolen.DeSantis, who is running for reelection and considered a potential 2024 Republican presidential candidate, made voting legislation a focus this year, pushing the Republican-controlled Legislature to create the policing unit in a speech where he referenced unspecified cases of voter fraud, which have become popular talking points in his party.Twitter agrees Elon Musk takeover dealRead moreVoter fraud is rare, typically occurs in isolated instances and is generally detected. An Associated Press investigation of the 2020 presidential election found fewer than 475 potential cases of voter fraud out of 25.5 million ballots cast in the six states where Trump and his allies disputed his loss to President Joe Biden.Republicans nationwide have stressed the need to restore public confidence in elections and have passed several voting laws in the past two years aimed at placing new rules around mail and early voting methods that were popular in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic disrupted in-person voting.Florida’s new law, which critics have deemed as politically motivated and unnecessary, comes after DeSantis praised the state’s 2020 election as smooth but later suggested more rules were needed.The law creates an Office of Election Crimes and Security under the Florida Department of State to review fraud allegations and conduct preliminary investigations. DeSantis is required to appoint a group of special officers from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement who would be tasked with pursuing the election law violations.Existing state law allowed the governor to appoint officers to investigate violations of election law but did not require him to do so.The law also increases penalties for the collection of completed ballots by a third party, often referred to as ballot harvesting, to a felony. It raises fines for certain election law violations and requires that election supervisors perform voter list maintenance on a more frequent basis.Democrats, the minority party in the state legislature, have criticized the bill as a way for DeSantis to appeal to Republican voters who believe the 2020 election results were fraudulent while he flirts with a presidential run of his own.Late last month, a federal judge struck down portions of a sweeping election law passed last year in a blistering ruling that alleged the state’s Republican-dominated government was suppressing Black voters, and ordered that attempts to write similar new laws in the next decade must have court approval.US district judge Mark Walker overturned a provision of last year’s law limiting when people could use a drop box to submit their ballot, along with a section prohibiting anyone from engaging with people waiting to vote. He also blocked a section that placed new rules on groups that register voters, including one requiring that people working to register voters submit their names and permanent addresses to the state.The DeSantis administration is working to reverse Walker’s ruling.TopicsFloridaRon DeSantisUS politicsUS voting rightsnewsReuse this content More

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      Overcoming Trumpery review: recipes for reform Republicans will never allow

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      Overcoming Trumpery review: recipes for reform Republicans will never allow The depth of Trump’s corruption is familiar but still astonishing when presented in the whole. Alas, his party shares itThe great abuses of power by Richard Nixon’s administration which are remembered collectively as Watergate had one tremendous benefit: they inspired a raft of legislation which significantly strengthened American democracy.The Presidency of Donald Trump review: the first draft of historyRead moreThis new book from the Brookings Institution, subtitled How to Restore Ethics, The Rule of Law and Democracy, recalls those far-away days of a functioning legislative process.The response to Watergate gave us real limits on individual contributions to candidates and political action committees (Federal Election Campaign Act); a truly independent Office of Special Counsel (Ethics in Government Act); inspector generals in every major agency (Inspector General Act); a vastly more effective freedom of information process; and a Sunshine Law which enshrined the novel notion that the government should be “the servant of the people” and “fully accountable to them”.Since then, a steadily more conservative supreme court has eviscerated all the most important campaign finance reforms, most disastrously in 2010 with Citizens United, and in 2013 destroyed the most effective parts of the Voting Rights Act. Congress let the special counsel law lapse, partly because of how Ken Starr abused it when he investigated Bill Clinton.The unraveling of Watergate reforms was one of many factors that set the stage for the most corrupt US government of modern times, that of Donald Trump.Even someone as inured as I am to Trump’s crimes can still be astonished when all the known abuses are catalogued in one volume. What the authors of this book identify as “The Seven Deadly Sins of Trumpery” include “Disdain for Ethics, Assault on the rule of law, Incessant lying and disinformation, Shamelessness” and, of course, “Pursuit of personal and political interest”.The book identifies Trump’s original sin as his refusal to put his businesses in a blind trust, which led to no less than 3,400 conflicts of interest. It didn’t help that the federal conflict of interests statute specifically exempts the president. Under the first president of modern times with no interest in “the legitimacy” or “the appearance of legitimacy of the presidency”, this left practically nothing off limits.The emoluments clause of the constitution forbids every government official accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State” but lacks any enforcement mechanism. So a shameless president could be paid off through his hotels by everyone from the Philippines to Kuwait while the Bank of China paid one Trump company an estimated $5.4m. (As a fig leaf, Trump gave the treasury $448,000 from profits made from foreign governments during two years of his presidency, but without any accounting.)Trump even got the federal government to pay him directly, by charging the secret service $32,400 for guest rooms for a visit to Mar-a-Lago plus $17,000 a month for a cottage at his New Jersey golf club.The US Office of Special Counsel catalogued dozens of violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits political activity by federal officials. Miscreants included Peter Navarro, Dan Scavino, Nikki Haley and most persistently Kellyanne Conway. The OSC referred its findings to Trump, who of course did nothing. Conway was gleeful.“Let me know when the jail sentence starts,” she said.There was also the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, addressing the Republican convention from a bluff overlooking Jerusalem during a mission to Israel. In a different category of corruption were the $43,000 soundproof phone booth the EPA administrator Scott Pruitt installed and the $1m the health secretary Tom Price spent on luxury travel. Those two actually resigned.The book is mostly focused on the four-year Trump crimewave. But it is bipartisan enough to spread the blame to Democrats for creating a climate in which no crime seemed too big to go un-prosecuted.Barack Obama’s strict ethics rules enforced by executive orders produced a nearly scandal-free administration. But Claire O Finkelstein and Richard W Painter argue that there was one scandal that established a terrible precedent: the decision not to prosecute anyone at the CIA for illegal torture carried out under George W Bush.This “failure of accountability” was “profoundly corrosive. The decision to ‘look forward, not back’ on torture … damaged the country’s ability to hold government officials to the constraints of the law”.However, the authors are probably a little too optimistic when they argue that a more vigorous stance might have made the Trump administration more eager to prosecute its own law breakers.The authors point out there are two things in the federal government which are even worse than the wholesale violation of ethical codes within the executive branch: the almost total absence of ethical codes within the congressional and judicial branches.The ethics manual for the House says it is “fundamental that a member … may not use his or her official position for personal gain”. But that is “virtually meaningless” became members can take actions on “industries in which they hold company stock”.Dignity in a Digital Age review: a congressman takes big tech to taskRead moreThe Senate exempts itself from ethical concerns with two brilliant words: no member can promote a piece of legislation whose “principal purpose” is “to further only his pecuniary interest”. So as long as legislation also has other purposes, personal profit is no impediment to passage.The authors argue that since the crimes of Watergate pale in comparison to the corruption of Trump, this should be the greatest opportunity for profound reform since the 1970s. But of course there is no chance of any such reform getting through this Congress, because Republicans have no interest in making government honest.Nothing tells us more about the collapse of our democracy than the primary concern of the House and Senate minority leaders, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell. Their only goal is to avoid any action that would offend the perpetrator or instigator of all these crimes. Instead of forcing him to resign the way Nixon did, these quivering men still pretend Donald Trump is the only man qualified to lead them.
      Overcoming Trumpery is published in the US by Brookings Institution Press
      TopicsBooksDonald TrumpTrump administrationUS politicsUS political financingUS voting rightsUS constitution and civil libertiesreviewsReuse this content More

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      Florida Republicans pass congressional map severely limiting Black voter power

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      Florida Republicans pass congressional map severely limiting Black voter powerPlan drawn by Ron DeSantis gives Republicans a significant boost and is one of the most aggressively gerrymandered maps in US Florida Republicans approved a new congressional map that severely curtails Black voting power in the state on Thursday, taking a final vote as Black lawmakers staged a sit-in on the floor of the legislature.The new plan, which was drawn by Governor Ron DeSantis, gives Republicans a significant boost in the state and is one of the most aggressively gerrymandered maps passed in recent months. Republicans would be expected to win 20 of the state’s 28 congressional districts, a four seat increase from the 16 they hold now. It also eliminates two of four districts where Black voters have been able to elect the candidate of their choice. DeSantis is expected to sign the districts into law, and lawsuits challenging the maps are immediately expected.“We are plainly in this map denying minority voters the ability to elect the representative of their choice,” said state representative Fentrice Driskell, a Democrat who represents the Tampa area.Black Democratic lawmakers halted the final debate of the bill Thursday morning just before noon. They took over the floor of the legislature, leading prayer and chants. One member, state representative Dianne Hart, was seen wiping tears from her eyes during the protest, according to the Miami Herald.The Sergeant at Arms removed an Associated Press photographer from the floor of the legislature while the demonstration was ongoing, the Miami Herald reported. The legislature reconvened and held a final vote on the maps while the protest was continuing, according to The Tributary.A focal point of the new maps has been the way it eliminates the fifth congressional district, which stretches from Jacksonville to Tallahassee. 46% of that district is currently Black, and it is represented by Al Lawson, a Black Democrat. DeSantis has openly called for getting rid of the district, saying it is unusually shaped and was unlawfully drawn based on race. After vetoing a proposal that would have allowed Black voters in Jacksonville to continue to elect the candidate of their choice, DeSantis’s map breaks up the district into four pieces in which Black voters comprise a much smaller share of the population.DeSantis and lawyers from his office have said the law allows them to dismantle the district, voting rights experts have said the plan brazenly disregards laws designed to protect the interests of minority voters.Republicans would be favored to win all of those districts.At one point during the debate on Thursday, Representative Randy Fine, a Republican who was the vice-chair of the redistricting committee, explained why he was opposed to drawing districts that prevented minorities from electing candidates of their choice if they don’t comprise a majority of voters.“When we guarantee that a group of people gets to select the candidate of their choice, what we’re saying is we’re guaranteeing that those who aren’t part of that group get no say. Chew on that one for a little bit,” he said. The 1965 Voting Rights Act was designed to prevent this kind of voting discrimination, ensuring that lawmakers could not split up sizable and compact minority communities to dilute their vote.“They’re trying to see what they can get away with,” said Stuart Naifeh, a lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “It’s pretextual to say that the district doesn’t make sense. He wants to dismantle a Democratic district, and in this case a Democratic district that’s been held for a Black person for a long time and that’s a majority-minority district. So it’s concerning that he’s diluting minority voting strength.”“It seems like it’s got all the hallmarks of intentional discrimination,” he said.TopicsFloridaUS voting rightsUS politicsRon DeSantisRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘Election integrity summits’ aim to fire up Trump activists over big lie

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      ‘Election integrity summits’ aim to fire up Trump activists over big lieThe Conservative Partnership Institute’s meetings promote poll watching and ‘clean’ voter rolls, sparking fears of vote suppression An influential conservative group that includes two Trump allies who helped push lies about voter fraud in 2020 is spearheading “election integrity” summits in battleground states, advocating for expanded poll watching, “clean” voter rolls and other measures watchdogs say could curb voting rights to help Republican candidates.The Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI) “election integrity network” is run by the veteran GOP lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who helped to spread misinformation about supposed election fraud in 2020.Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s last White House chief of staff, is a senior partner of the CPI and reportedly had a lead role in at least one of its summits.Mitchell, CPI’s senior legal fellow, has hosted multi-day summits, seeking to mobilize hundreds of conservative activists for elections this year in Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania, all states that Trump lost to Joe Biden, and Florida, which he won.CPI is slated to hold summits this spring in Virginia, Michigan and Wisconsin, as it seeks to build “election integrity” infrastructure in swing states.Powerful groups on the right such as Heritage Action and Tea Party Patriots Action have participated in previous summits.Ties between CPI and Trump were underscored last July, when the former president’s Save America leadership Pac donated $1m to the group weeks after the House voted to create a committee to investigate the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 by Trump loyalists seeking to disrupt certification of Biden’s election victory.Mitchell’s election summits began in February this year. Previously, she and other conservatives worked with legislators in states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Texas to spur the passage of voting laws, including new voter ID requirements and curbs on absentee voting, that seem heavily aimed at Black voters, voting rights advocates say.A participant at the CPI Arizona event said falsehoods about voter fraud in 2020 were voiced to gin-up enthusiasm for more aggressive election monitoring in 2022.“The event definitely used the false allegations of fraud in 2020 as a call to action to rally support for vigilant engagement this year in the election process,” the participant told the Guardian, speaking on condition of anonymity.“There was a large focus on recruiting precinct officials to watch the polls and all of the other processes associated with elections.”Voting rights watchdogs voiced strong concern about the CPI summits.“Ongoing efforts to promote false claims of widespread voter fraud are dangerous and damaging to our democracy,” Wendy Weiser, vice-president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, said.“There is a multi-pronged attack on the core principles of our democracy in the name of election integrity. The country’s history with these kinds of so-called ‘election integrity’ operations makes clear that they create a serious risk of racial targeting, voter intimidation, and vote suppression.”The push to forge state election “integrity” networks is occurring while Mitchell and Meadows face congressional scrutiny and other investigation of their efforts to help Trump stay in power.Mitchell participated in a 2 January 2021 call with the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump urged the state official to “find” 11,780 votes, in order to overturn Biden’s win in the state.The Fulton county district attorney and a special grand jury are investigating whether Trump and others broke laws barring the solicitation of election fraud and other statutes in Georgia. Last month, Mitchell was subpoenaed by the House January 6 committee that is investigating the Capitol attack.Meadows was a “keynote speaker” at a two-day CPI Georgia summit in February, where he was scheduled to discuss “what happened in Georgia in 2020 and what we must do to protect future elections”, according to the Citizen Times, a paper in Meadows’ home state, North Carolina.Meadows is now under scrutiny for alleged voter fraud in 2020. North Carolina officials announced last week the four-term congressman had been removed from voter rolls pending the outcome of an investigation prompted by a New Yorker report that in 2020 he registered to vote using an address he never lived at.In March, several days before the North Carolina inquiry was announced, Meadows pulled out of the CPI’s Arizona summit, where he had been billed as a top speaker. He has reportedly not participated in other events.Meadows also faces a criminal contempt of Congress referral to the US justice department, for refusing to comply fully with requests from the January 6 committee.‘Capitalizing on confusion’CPI declined to answer queries about the summits and about Meadows’ role.Watchdog groups say the summits are sham efforts based on the lie that the 2020 election was subject to widespread fraud.“The people who perpetrated the fraudulent notion that the 2020 election was stolen are capitalizing on the confusion they deliberately sowed to undermine the safety and security of future elections and, not coincidentally, rake in money in the process,” Melanie Sloan, a senior adviser to the government watchdog group American Oversight, said.Some details of CPI’s gameplan for the 2022 elections have been revealed by websites promoting state summits.In Pennsylvania, a three-day summit in late March was advertised to include sessions on how to form a “local election integrity taskforce”; how to protect “vulnerable voters from leftist activists”; “researching your local election office”; “monitoring voting equipment and systems”; and more.Some “election integrity” meetings have drawn powerful conservative groups such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity that have to varying degrees amplified false claims about the 2020 elections.Some groups at the summits have been bankrolled by donors including the oil and gas billionaire Charles Koch, billionaire businessman Richard Uihlein and the conservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, where Mitchell is a board member.CPI gatherings have also been attended by GOP figures including candidates running for governor in Pennsylvania and the sitting Florida governor, Ron DeSantis.According to the Center for Media and Democracy, at a secretive January meeting with leaders of Tea Party Patriots and conservative groups from several states, Mitchell and CPI distributed a “citizens’ guide to building an election integrity infrastructure” to promote the summits and her message.Mitchell was also tapped last March by FreedomWorks to spearhead what it billed as a $10m drive to push tougher voting laws in more than half a dozen states and to fight Democratic proposals to make voting easier.Some watchdog groups say the CPI summits pose several threats to voting rights in 2022.Sloan, of American Oversight, said the CPI agenda had echoes of “Jim Crow-style voter suppression techniques, and a recipe for more verbal and physical threats against election administration officials”, similar to ones that occurred in Georgia and other states after the 2020 elections.Weiser, of the Brennan Center, warned: “There is a growing risk that in the name of election integrity, partisans and vigilantes will mobilize to intimidate voters and thwart their participation.”TopicsRepublicansUS politicsUS voting rightsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Report raises alarm on ‘insidious’ effort to undermine US democracy

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      Report raises alarm on ‘insidious’ effort to undermine US democracyState legislatures using gerrymandering, voter suppression, misinformation and intimidation to make voting more difficult An “insidious and coordinated” effort between lawmakers and extremist groups is under way to undermine American democracy, according to a new report.On Tuesday, the nonpartisan civil rights organization National Urban League released the annual report in its analysis series The State of Black America. The report, called Under Siege: The Plot to Destroy Democracy, outlines the “conspiracy and the urgent case for a national mobilization to protect and defend our most sacred constitutional right”.It focuses on four main tactics that it says are used in this effort: gerrymandering, voter suppression, misinformation and intimidation.In 2021 alone, 20 states have leveraged census data to redraw congressional maps, it noted. The new maps proposed by Republican state lawmakers “are no more than modern-day gerrymandering that strips voting power away from communities with Black and brown voters”, the report said.It also listed 34 laws passed in 19 states between January 1 and December 7 2021 that make it more difficult for people to vote.In addition to shortening the window to apply and deliver mail ballots, those laws limit absentee voting lists, restrict assistance in returning a voter’s mail ballot, reduce the availability of mail ballot drop boxes, and increase barriers for voters with disabilities, among other restrictions.“The burden of these laws – strict photo ID requirements, the elimination or restriction of Sunday voting, voting by mail and early voting, and the closing of polling locations – overwhelmingly falls on Black voters,” Marc Morial, president and CEO of NUL, said in the report.“Since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the United States has seen a steady rise in disenfranchisement practices giving one party an edge over the other. But never before has the nation seen such an insidious and coordinated campaign to obliterate the very principle of ‘one person, one vote’ from the political process.”According to the report, state legislatures in 18 states carried over at least 152 restrictive bills from the 2021 legislative season. Additionally, in states that allow lawmakers to “pre-file” bills ahead of the next legislative season, at least 96 bills in 12 states would make it more difficult for voters to cast their ballots.The report also laid out steps that have been taken to sabotage elections, including discrediting the vote and outright aiming to establish one-party rule, as demonstrated by the Stop the Steal movement.It also notes an uptick in intimidation of election officials since 2020, with one in six local election officials saying they have personally experienced threats, and a quarter concerned about being assaulted because of their role.Additionally, the report found that election workers are resigning and retiring at alarming rates, with one in five saying that they are “very” or “somewhat” unlikely to continue serving through 2024.It cites a poll conducted by the strategic research and consulting firm Benenson Strategy Group in which an overwhelming majority of Black Americans said they believe strongly in the power of their vote to make a difference when it comes to social and racial justice, police violence and economic opportunity.However, nearly as many agree that elected officials are not doing enough to protect their voting rights and are in fact “doing more to limit voting rights than to protect them”.TopicsUS voting rightsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More