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      Georgia county purges Democrats from election board and cancels Sunday voting

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      Georgia county purges Democrats from election board and cancels Sunday votingThe takeover in Spalding county is part of Republican efforts to dominate elections mechanisms nationwide The judges met, in private, over a two-day period in May, for what might seem like a minor task: to choose the fifth member of an elections board in rural Spalding county, Georgia.But the meetings were by no means routine. There is no record of their vote or their discussions. The interviews with Democratic and Republican applicants were conducted in private, via Zoom calls. And the position was only vacant because of a new law, specific only to Spalding county, recently introduced by the area’s two Republican state lawmakers.In the end, the judges chose a Republican, someone who had never served in a government position related to elections, to be the fifth and deciding vote for the Spalding county board of elections and registration. Almost immediately, that Republican, James Newland, cast that deciding vote to cancel Sunday voting – a historically heavy turnout day for Black, largely Democratic voters.It was just the latest blow to the county’s Democrats, and another loss for a party that is losing control of election boards across the state as Republican laws make GOP takeovers possible. But what happened in Spalding county is also just a fragment of GOP efforts nationwide to take over the apparatus of American elections. Their goal? To secure party control at every level of government – from the White House to state legislatures and election offices, all the way down to the precinct level, by employing thousands of poll watchers to potentially call into question Democratic votes.Across the US, Republican legislatures have introduced more than 200 bills aimed at reducing local control over elections and restrict voting access, according to the States United Democracy Center. All of it is aimed at ensuring that Republicans will have control over voting and elections rules, in support of Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020.And the Peach State is ground zero, thanks to its increasingly central roles – as a swing state, and as the center of bogus disputes over the 2020 election results.The turn of events in Spalding county might have come as a shock to locals – a majority Democratic election board, with three Black women, becoming majority Republican, with two white men and another of Cherokee descent, virtually overnight – but Spalding county is no outlier. In at least five other Georgia counties, local election authorities have been restructured in favor of Republicans. It’s all part of the same story: the nationwide push to place GOP officials in positions of authority over elections.“The news isn’t really covering it because it’s so local,” said Zachery Fuller, a political organizer and former Democratic candidate for office in Griffin, the county seat. “But when it happens to so many counties it’s the same thing, even though it’s different laws: it’s voter suppression.”At the heart of what happened in Spalding county is that new law, which itself is an example of the tactics Republicans are pursuing across the country to ensure they control elections.Passed in March, HB 769 changed the rules for determining the tie-breaking vote for Spalding ounty’s election board. The five-person board always has two Democrats and two Republicans; previously, Democrats and Republicans would often flip a coin to determine the fifth member. But Republican state representatives David Knight and Karen Mathiak introduced a law requiring that the fifth member be chosen by a majority vote of the county’s superior court judges.Those judges – Chief Judge Fletcher Sams, Scott Ballard and Benjamin Coker – advertised the position in the local press for 30 days. All three judges are white; Sams said he identifies as an independent, while the other judges did not comment on their political affiliations. In the end, the judges chose the inexperienced Newland over at least two Black Democrats, including Vera McIntosh – who had been removed from her position on the board because HB 769 also required board members to live in Spalding county, which she did not – as well as Elbert Solomon, a longtime Democratic operative here.“All they wanted to see was the fact that I was Black – because they couldn’t tell by looking at my résumé,” Solomon said. “I went to white colleges, I was an executive at Procter & Gamble, even my last name wouldn’t tell you that I was Black. That’s all they wanted to know.”“I can’t help what people think but that’s ridiculous,” Sams said, denying that race played any role in the judges’ decision. “I was very impressed with at least one or two Democratic candidates, and they were seriously considered.”Regardless, the new law didn’t come out of nowhere. Ever since election day of 2020, Republicans in Spalding county have used alleged problems with voting to justify their efforts to replace Democratic election officials. On election day 2020, some voters had initially been prevented from casting their ballots on machines equipped with software from Dominion Voting Systems. Marcia Ridley, the county’s former Democratic elections supervisor, said it was a temporary software problem caused by Dominion, but soon the Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, was calling for Ridley to step down, citing “serious management issues and poor decision-making”. Knight and Mathiak joined Raffensperger in calling for Ridley’s removal, and less than two weeks later asked the state’s attorney general to investigate her for failing to properly post information about board meetings.It didn’t end there. After the election, local Republicans were up in arms over claims of mishandled ballots. Mathiak and a former Republican elections board member, Betty Bryant – who believes the 2020 election was “robbed” from Trump – both claimed they had heard from a person who had received 12 mail-in ballots. As a crowd gathered outside the board of elections, a Republican on the county commission recorded a video of the protesters, and posted it to Facebook. Later, he posted a picture of a ballot envelope that contained no ballot, apparently in an attempt to suggest electoral fraud. As the mood darkened, concerned for their safety, Glenda Henley, a former Democratic board member, asked police to escort election workers to their cars.Next, the crowds started showing up at previously sleepy elections board meetings. “We had so many people coming, and the audience would disrupt the meeting by shouting or saying ugly things,” Henley said. One particularly loud voice was Roy McClain, a shooting range coach with a lengthy military career who had replaced a previous Republican board member. McClain had ties to Mathiak: he had fundraised for her and appeared alongside her at numerous events.McClain “was always loud, always negative”, according to Henley. “When he came in, it was just turmoil, anything to disrupt the business of elections.” (McClain did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Knight or Mathiak.) Then, in April, just days before the end of the 2021 legislative session, Mathiak and Knight escalated the situation: they introduced HB 769. The bill caught some county officials off-guard, according to emails obtained by American Oversight. Former elections board members told the Guardian they had no prior warning that the bill was coming.But Solomon said the bill’s purpose was obvious. He and others had worked in 2020 to register new county voters, most of them African American – a get-out-the-vote effort that produced results and nearly led to the election of the Democratic candidate Daa’ood Amin as mayor of Griffin.“What happened is we increased registered voters here by 900 people in less than a year,” Solomon said. “We had a mayor’s race here and a Black person almost won – and only lost by 15 votes.”Demographics in Spalding county are changing, according to Solomon and Fuller: what was solidly Republican territory is now becoming more Democratic-leaning.“They see the writing on the wall,” Solomon said. If the new law was intended to increase Republican power, it worked: Newman was swiftly installed on the elections board. In an interview, Newman said he was chosen by the judges because they believed he would be an impartial tie-breaking vote – despite the fact that he is a self-proclaimed Republican – and rejected the notion that race played a role, noting that he is of Cherokee descent.Newland claimed the judges told him that they chose him “because I was the closest they could find, out of the people who applied to the job, to a neutral party.” As for why he voted to cancel Sunday voting, Newland claimed the county couldn’t afford a seventh day of voting.Even less neutral is the man appointed by the local GOP to one of the other two Republican board positions: Ben Johnson, a former election board member who resigned as head of the county Republican party to take the job. Johnson, a fervent proponent of the false belief that the 2020 election was beset with widespread voter fraud, also runs an IT firm, Liberty Technology, that does maintenance for the county’s computer equipment.Fuller calls it a clear conflict of interest for Johnson. “If his company has direct control over the servers for Spalding county and the city of Griffin, he can see all of the data from anyone who uses these public servers,” Fuller said. “[That] could be data collection used against voters to help organize – and that is data that other members of the board wouldn’t have access to.”Asked whether there was a conflict of interest, Mike Windham, the county’s IT manager, said, “Off the top of my head, no, but the optics are a little funny.”Johnson ignored repeated requests for comment, and at an election board meeting in early January responded to the Guardian’s questions by saying, “I don’t talk to fake news.”But Johnson’s beliefs are well documented on his Facebook page. A little more than a year after Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, Johnson posted about the “hours upon hours of video-taped ballot harvesting in Georgia, the phantoms all over, the dirty voter rolls, the withholding of subpoenaed materials, the list goes on”.In person, Johnson is generally known as an intelligent and capable member of the board of elections, according to current and former colleagues from both parties. But his social media posts show a different side than the calm and polite face he presents to election board meetings.Specifically, Johnson has taken issue with Dominion Voting Systems, which handles election software throughout Georgia and is the frequent target of conspiracy theories about voter fraud. Only last month, Johnson attacked Dominion at a board meeting, making a false claim that a judge in a Georgia lawsuit, brought by a Republican, had ruled that its software in Georgia was “illegal”.“[R]ight now, the judicial opinion is that the equipment we’re using is illegal, which blows my mind,” Johnson said.That’s not true. The judge has not ruled on the matter; a trial is pending.Then, last month, if all this turmoil weren’t enough, board members were hit with nearly 2,000 emails demanding yet another audit into the 2020 presidential election – despite three previous reviews, conducted by the Republican Raffensperger, which all confirmed the win for Biden. While it remains unknown who prompted more than 1,900 people, all from outside Spalding county, to join the email deluge, some clues can be gleaned from the demands themselves. The emails were form letters and include references to a notorious conspiracy theorist, Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, who was involved with the controversial and unnecessary audit by the Cyber Ninjas firm in Maricopa ounty, Arizona (which again confirmed Biden won there). According to Jim O’Brien, one of the two Democratic board members in Spalding county, the campaign has all the markings of an organized effort.It was a “cyber-attack intended to intimidate and harass”, O’Brien said. “I’d like to know if any local Republican officials knew about this.”Slowly, the sense is dawning in these communities that individual cases like Spalding county’s are not one-offs but are part of a pattern emerging nationwide. Henley, too, is concerned about the way things are going, and who is behind it. After more than six years on the board, she wants to know why the new law that allowed a Republican takeover in Spalding county was passed when it did, and who might be pulling the strings even higher up than the state Republicans who made it happen.“It was a sneak attack,” she said. “I think we were targeted, but I don’t have the evidence of what they were doing. I think it was even higher up. I think it’s more convoluted and embedded.”TopicsUS voting rightsRepublicansGeorgiaRaceUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Second world war veteran twice denied absentee ballot under Texas voting law

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      Second world war veteran twice denied absentee ballot under Texas voting lawKenneth Thompson, 95, must submit a social security or driver’s license number, which wasn’t required in the 1940s A 95-year-old second world war veteran twice denied an absentee ballot under a restrictive Texas voting law has attracted support from prominent figures including Beto O’Rourke, a voting rights campaigner and former presidential candidate now running for Texas governor.Arizona Republicans introduce election subversion billRead moreKenneth Thompson, who served in the US army in Europe, told Click2Houston, a Harris county news outlet, he had voted in every election since he was 21 and even remembered paying a 50-cent poll tax in the 1950s.“I’ve been voting many, many years and I’ve never missed a vote,” he said, adding that he considers voting a duty.But under a voting restriction bill known as SB1 and passed last August, Thompson could be unable to meet the state’s 31 January voter registration deadline for an absentee ballot.According to the new law, Thompson is required to submit a social security or driver’s license number that matches state or county records. When Thompson registered to vote decades ago, however, such requirements were not in place.“He registered to vote in the 1940s and they didn’t require that,” said Delinda Holland, Thompson’s daughter.Support for Thompson has poured in, including from O’Rourke, who tweeted out Thompson’s story and a call to fight against voting laws introduced by Republicans seeking to restrict voting among communities likely to vote Democratic.“Now we need to fight for him by taking on [Governor Greg] Abbott’s voter suppression law that is making it harder for Kenneth and millions of other Texans to participate in our democracy,” O’Rourke tweeted.As Thompson did not meet new requirements under SB1, his application for an absentee ballot was denied twice. He says he was not notified either time by county officials and had to call to confirm his status himself.“There’s gonna be a lot of people not gonna vote,” said Thompson. “If I hadn’t have called in about mine, people wouldn’t have known.”On behalf of her dad, she said, Holland tried to call authorities including the office of the Texas secretary of state, seeking to add his license number to his registration file. She discovered there wasn’t a way to do so, which meant he would have to re-register.“We know it’s a new law, we’re happy to correct [his registration],” said Holland. “He’s a law-abiding citizen. He doesn’t want to miss voting and yet there’s no mechanism to add that driver’s license to your record.”Thompson said he now checked his mailbox every day, hoping his absentee ballot had arrived. If it did not, he said, he would vote in person.“I can get out and move around and go to a regular polling place,” he said, “but … lots of people just can’t.”TopicsTexasUS voting rightsBeto O’RourkeUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Republicans just wiped out a Democratic district. Here’s how | The fight to vote

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      Republicans just wiped out a Democratic district. Here’s howThe Tennessee legislature’s splintering of Nashville is just one example of the gerrymandering taking place across the US Hello, and happy Thursday,On Tuesday afternoon, Jim Cooper, a moderate Democrat who has been in Congress for more than three decades, announced he was retiring. The timing was not a coincidence.Less than 24 hours earlier, the Tennessee legislature had approved a map with new boundaries for the state’s eight congressional districts. Since 2003, Cooper has represented a district that includes all of Nashville, and it has been reliably Democratic (Joe Biden carried it by 24 points in 2020). But the legislature’s new plan erased his district. Republicans sliced up Nashville into three different districts, attaching a sliver of Democratic voters in each to rural and deeply Republican areas. Donald Trump would have easily won all three of the new districts in 2020.Get the latest updates on voting rights in the Guardian’s Fight to vote newsletterCooper was blunt in his assessment of what had happened. Republicans, he said in a statement, had made it impossible for him to win re-election to Congress. Despite his best efforts, he said, he could not stop Republicans from “dismembering Nashville”.The map doesn’t just weaken the voice of Democrats, it also dilutes the influence of Black voters and other voters of color in Nashville. In Cooper’s current district, Black voters make up about a quarter of the voting-age population. They will comprise a much smaller share of the voting age population in the new districts, making it harder for them to make their voices heard.A masterclass in election-rigging: how Republicans ‘dismembered’ a Democratic strongholdRead moreAndrew Witherspoon, my colleague on our visuals team, and I put together an interactive map that shows exactly how Republicans transformed Cooper’s district. It’s one of the clearest examples of how politicians can essentially rig elections in their favor just by moving district lines. It underscores how gerrymandering is a remarkably powerful and efficient method of voter suppression – the influence of certain people’s votes matter less before a single ballot is even cast.Tennessee isn’t the only place this is happening. In Kansas, Republican lawmakers are advancing a plan that would similarly crack Kansas City, making it more difficult for the Democrat Sharice Davids, the first Native American woman elected to Congress, to get re-elected. In North Carolina, Republicans cracked the city of Greensboro in order to dismantle the state’s sixth congressional district, currently represented by a Democrat.Democrats have also shown a willingness to engage in this kind of distortion where they have control of the redistricting process, in places such as Illinois, Maryland and probably New York. Democrats will have complete control over drawing 75 congressional districts, compared with 187 for Republicans.The day before he announced his retirement, I spoke with Cooper about why he thought this was happening and what he thought the consequences would be for Nashville voters. What’s happening now is just “raw politics”, Cooper said.“In two previous redistricting cycles, none of the politicians in the state knew that I existed as a candidate. That made it easier – they weren’t trying to get Jim Cooper. And then in cycles where they did know I existed, it was either too difficult to rearrange the counties, or they were gentler,” he told me. Politico reported recently that after Republicans weren’t as aggressive as they could have been in states such as Texas and Georgia, there is some pressure to be even more aggressive in places like Tennessee.The Nashville constituents who are being sliced up into each of the three districts are likely to have much less importance to their new, Republican representatives, Cooper said. Any input they have, “at most, it will be tokenism”.“This is not a majority-minority community, but it will limit the ability for them to be heard. Because they’ll become essentially a rounding error in much larger districts that are dominated by the surrounding towns,” he said. “The center of gravity will shift.”Also worth watching …
      A federal court told Alabama to redraw its congressional districts after finding Republican lawmakers had discriminated against Black voters. Alabama is appealing the ruling.
      Arizona Republicans are proposing a suite of new voting restrictions after a widely criticized review of the 2020 election results.
      Texas continues to face significant problems after implementing sweeping new voting restrictions ahead of its 1 March primary.
      Ohio Republicans are redrawing state legislative and congressional maps after the state supreme court struck down earlier efforts as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders. There are still concerns the new state legislative maps are severely gerrymandered.
      TopicsUS voting rightsFight to voteNashvilleTennesseeRepublicansUS politicsDemocratsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Here’s how Republicans ‘dismembered’ a Democratic stronghold

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      Here’s how Republicans ‘dismembered’ a Democratic strongholdScroll through our visual guide to see why proposed Tennessee maps amount to a masterclass in gerrymanderingRepublican lawmakers in Tennessee gave final approval on Monday to an aggressive plan to split Nashville, a Democratic bastion, in a deeply Republican state, into several congressional districts as part of an effort to tilt the state’s congressional map in their favor. The plan is now waiting for approval from Governor Bill Lee, who is likely to sign it. Nashville currently sits in the state’s fifth congressional district, represented by Jim Cooper, a Democrat who has held the seat for nearly 20 years. It’s a solid Democratic district – Joe Biden carried it by nearly 24 points in 2020 – but on Tuesday, Cooper announced he was retiring from Congress.“Despite my strength at the polls, I could not stop the general assembly from dismembering Nashville. No one tried harder to keep our city whole,” he said in a statement. “I explored every possible way, including lawsuits, to stop the gerrymandering and to win one of the three new congressional districts that now divide Nashville. There’s no way, at least for me in this election cycle, but there may be a path for other worthy candidates.”The new districts crack the concentration of Democratic voters in Nashville and cram them into three districts that stretch across the state and are filled with reliable Republican voters. Donald Trump would have easily carried all three of the proposed districts in 2020. The plan is one of the clearest, and most brazen, efforts to dismantle a Democratic district to benefit Republicans. @font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline Full”;src:url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/fonts/garnett/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:italic}@font-face{font-family:”Guardian Headline 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      The fight for federal voting rights legislation is far from over | Jared Evans

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      The fight for federal voting rights legislation is far from overJared EvansThe Freedom to Vote: John R Lewis Act would restore key voting rights provisions and protect American democracy. We can’t give up American democracy is in a state of emergency. Without federal voting rights legislation, discriminatory voting laws will continue to pass unchallenged and harm millions in their wake. Following the US Senate’s recent failure to pass the Freedom to Vote: John R Lewis Act, civil rights leaders urged senators to continue pressing for the bill. But understanding how deeply the absence of its protections will continue to affect voters is key to the bill’s success.Arguably the most crucial measure of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was section 5’s pre-clearance requirement that states with a recent history of voter discrimination get approval from the justice department before implementing voting changes. However, the US supreme court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v Holder struck down the pre-clearance requirement claiming that voting conditions for racial minorities had improved and that its use was outdated. Since then, numerous states passed laws they had previously abandoned due to the threat of pre-clearance. Other states continued to enact laws restricting voting that were already under way before Shelby. These statutes are so restrictive they would have never seen the light of day if pre-clearance was still intact. New voter suppression laws in Texas, Georgia and Florida are the most recent examples of these efforts.The Freedom to Vote: John R Lewis Act (FTV) – which combines two previous bills to defend voting rights and democracy more broadly – would restore the section 5 pre-clearance provisions and create protections against the most common obstacles faced by voters.Those of us on the frontlines in the fight for voting rights know the immediate impact these bills would have on our communities. Last year in Iberia parish, a rural community on the Louisiana Gulf coast that is one-third Black, election officials closed eight polling locations – five of which were in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Voters were not properly notified of this change and, even more troubling, the closures were implemented just weeks before an election. At least 20,000 voters were affected, many of whom did not discover their polling location had changed until they arrived at the location they had been voting at for years. Under FTV, election officials would be required to publicly announce all voting changes at least 180 days before an election, allowing voters adequate time to become familiar with their new polling location, secure child or adult care, and notify their employer, if necessary.In Texas, FTV would immediately reduce the challenges voters of colors face. Nearly all the population growth from 2010 to 2020 in Texas was from communities of color, yet the map that the state legislature enacted reduced the number of districts in which voters of color make up the majority of eligible voters. If FTV were enacted, the redrawing of districts would be the responsibility of a non-partisan redistricting commission that would prevent elected officials from choosing their own constituents. States would also not be able to enact racially discriminatory maps without first submitting them for approval to the DoJ.Mississippi, the state with the largest percentage of Black voters, offers no opportunity for early voting and voters must get documents notarized to vote by mail. When every voter is forced to vote in-person on election day, it often leads to long lines at polling sites and heavy traffic. When voters are forced to get signatures on both the application to vote by mail and the ballot itself, it is especially difficult for elderly voters who often live alone to have their ballot counted.In 2020, this requirement’s burden increased dramatically due to the pandemic, particularly for the elderly, whose increased vulnerability to Covid meant attaining these necessary signatures risked exposure. During the 2020 general election, elderly Mississippians were forced to risk their health to vote in person on election day, unless they met the standards for one of the limited qualifications that allowed someone to vote by mail. FTV would require all states to have at least 15 consecutive days of early in-person voting, including two weekends, giving voters in states like Mississippi another option to cast their ballot.Without pre-clearance, states and localities will continue to suppress votes by enacting restrictive voting changes that target voters of color. While we still have section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that dilute minority voting strength, this measure is reactive, meaning advocates can only challenge a voting change after its implementation. However, section 2 was also weakened by the supreme court in 2021 by creating new and additional atextual burdens to the Voting Rights Act’s primary mechanism for challenging voting laws that have a discriminatory result. Until pre-clearance is restored, discriminatory changes will continue to be enacted – and will affect every election. The Senate must act to protect the fundamental right to vote and pass federal voting rights legislation by any means necessary – before it is too late.
      Jared Evans is a policy counsel at NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
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      Where egos dare: Manchin and Sinema show how Senate spotlight corrupts

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      Where egos dare: Manchin and Sinema show how Senate spotlight corruptsRobert ReichThe two Democratic senators chose to wreck American democracy, simply to feed their sense of their own importance What can possibly explain Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s decision to sink voting rights protections? Why did they create a false narrative that the legislation had to be “bipartisan” when everyone, themselves included, knew bipartisanship was impossible?Arizona Democrats censure Kyrsten Sinema for voting rights failureRead moreWhy did they say they couldn’t support changing Senate filibuster rules when only last month they voted for an exception to the filibuster that allowed debt ceiling legislation to pass with only Democratic votes?Why did they co-sponsor voting rights legislation and then vote to kill the very same legislation? Why did Manchin vote for the “talking filibuster” in 2011 yet vote against it now?Part of the answer to all these questions can be found in the giant wads of corporate cash flowing into their campaign coffers. But if you want the whole answer, you need also to look at the single biggest factor affecting almost all national politicians I’ve dealt with: ego. Manchin’s and Sinema’s are now among the biggest.Before February of last year, almost no one outside West Virginia had heard of Manchin and almost no one outside Arizona (and probably few within it) had ever heard of Sinema. Now, they’re notorious. They’re Washington celebrities. Their photos grace every major news outlet in America.This sort of attention is addictive. Once it seeps into the bloodstream, it becomes an all-consuming force. I’ve known politicians who have become permanently and irrevocably intoxicated.I’m not talking simply about power, although that’s certainly part of it. I’m talking about narcissism – the primal force driving so much of modern America but whose essence is concentrated in certain places such as Wall Street, Hollywood and the United States Senate.Once addicted, the pathologically narcissistic politician can become petty in the extreme, taking every slight as a deep personal insult. I’m told Manchin asked Joe Biden’s staff not to blame him for the delay of Build Back Better and was then infuriated when Biden suggested Manchin bore some of the responsibility. I’m also told that if Biden wants to restart negotiations with Manchin on Build Back Better, he’s got to rename it because Manchin is so angry he won’t vote for anything going by that name.The Senate is not the world’s greatest deliberative body but it is the world’s greatest stew of egos battling for attention. Every senator believes he or she has what it takes to be president. Most believe they’re far more competent than whoever occupies the Oval Office.Yet out of 100 senators, only a handful are chosen for interviews on the Sunday talk shows and very few get a realistic shot at the presidency. The result is intense competition for attention.Again and again, I’ve watched worthy legislation sink because particular senators didn’t feel they were getting enough credit, or enough personal attention from a president, or insufficient press attention, or unwanted press attention, or that another senator (sometimes from the same party) was getting too much attention.Several people on the Hill who have watched Sinema at close range since she became a senator tell me she relished all the attention she got when she gave her very theatrical thumbs down to increasing the minimum wage, and since then has thrilled at her national celebrity as a spoiler.Biden prides himself on having been a member of the senatorial “club” for many years before ascending to the presidency and argued during the 2020 campaign that this familiarity would give him an advantage in dealing with his former colleagues. But it may be working against him. Senators don’t want clubby familiarity from a president. They want a president to shine the national spotlight on them.Lindsey Graham, reverse ferret: how John McCain’s spaniel became Trump’s poodleRead moreSome senators get so whacky in the national spotlight that they can’t function without it. Trump had that effect on Republicans. Before Trump, Lindsey Graham was almost a normal human being. Then Trump directed a huge amp of national attention Graham’s way, transmogrifying the senator into a bizarro creature who’d say anything Trump wanted to keep the attention coming.Not all senators are egomaniacs, of course. Most lie on an ego spectrum ranging from mildly inflated to pathological.Manchin and Sinema are near the extreme. Once they got a taste of the national spotlight, they couldn’t let go. They must have figured that the only way they could keep the spotlight focused on themselves was by threatening to do what they finally did last week: shafting American democracy.
      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. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
      TopicsUS voting rightsOpinionUS politicsDemocratsUS SenateBiden administrationUS CongressJoe ManchincommentReuse this content More

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      Draft Trump order told defense chief to seize swing-state voting machines

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      Draft Trump order told defense chief to seize swing-state voting machinesUnpublished executive order, obtained by Politico, among documents provided to January 6 panel after court ruling

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      In the heady days between Donald Trump’s defeat in November 2020 and the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol, an executive order was prepared. It commanded the defense secretary to seize voting machines in battleground states, as part of Trump’s “big lie” that the vote was rigged.Michael Flynn allies allegedly plotted to lean on Republicans to back vote auditsRead moreThe draft executive order, obtained and published by Politico, was never sent and its author is unknown. It was part of a cache of documents handed over to the House committee investigating the 6 January violence, after the supreme court ruled this week that Trump could not shield himself from oversight on grounds of executive privilege.The disclosure of the draft order adds to evidence of the lengths to which Trump and his close advisers were prepared to go to keep him in the White House, against the will of the American people. Under the draft order, the defense secretary would have been required to carry out an assessment of the voting machines “no later than 60 days from commencement of operations”.That would have pushed the chaos that Trump assiduously attempted to sow around Joe Biden’s legitimate victory well beyond the handover of power at the inauguration on 20 January.The publication of the document will provoke intense speculation as to who wrote it. Politico pointed out that at the time the draft order was dated, 16 December 2020, the idea of seizing voting machines in key states was being vigorously promoted by Sidney Powell, a controversial lawyer who had Trump’s ear at the time.The document outlines the seizure of voting machines by the Pentagon under federal emergency powers. That would in itself have been incendiary, as it would have amounted to a dramatic display of federal over state power of the sort normally fiercely resisted by Republicans.The author of the draft order seeks to justify such a contentious move by regurgitating conspiracy theories. For example, pointing to voting machines, the document says there is “evidence of international and foreign interference in the November 3, 2020, election”.It names Dominion Voting Systems, a leading provider of voting machines that has become the target of rightwing conspiracy theorists and big lie merchants. Dominion has sued several purveyors of false claims that its products were used to swing the election from Trump to Biden.“Dominion Voting Systems and related companies are owned or heavily controlled and influenced by foreign agents, countries, and interests,” the draft order falsely claims.The draft also singles out Antrim county, Michigan. Claims that voting machines in that county were compromised have been thoroughly rebutted, including by state election authorities.A second document was also leaked to Politico from the new mountain of paperwork received by the 6 January committee. Titled Remarks on National Healing, it appears to be the text of a speech Trump never delivered.The tone of the speech is striking because it stands in stark contrast to the approach Trump actually adopted in the wake of the Capitol violence. Still president for two weeks, he attempted to belittle the significance of the day.Had this alternative speech been given, Trump would have sent out a very different message. It describes 6 January as a “heinous attack” that left him “outraged and sickened by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem”.The text added: “The Demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy.”TopicsUS elections 2020Donald TrumpUS politicsUS voting rightsTrump administrationnewsReuse this content More

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      Mitch McConnell under fire after saying African Americans vote as much as 'Americans' – video

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      Top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell has been criticised after saying that Black Americans vote ‘in just as high a percentage as Americans’. The comment came after Senate Democrats failed to pass voting rights protections in the run-up to this November’s midterm elections that will determine control of Congress in 2023. 
      A reporter asked McConnell if he had a message for voters of color who were concerned that, without the John R Lewis Voting Rights Act, they were not going to be able to vote in the midterm. ‘Well, the concern is misplaced because, if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans,’ McConnell said

      Mitch McConnell’s viral Black voter comments cause widespread furor More