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      US House passes government funding package to avert shutdown

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      The US House passed a three-month government funding package on Wednesday, sending the bill to the Senate with just days left to avert a shutdown set to begin next Tuesday.The vote was 341 to 82, with 132 Republicans and 209 Democrats supporting the legislation. All 82 votes against the bill, which will extend government funding until 20 December, came from House Republicans.The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, unveiled the legislation on Sunday after his original funding proposal failed to pass last week. Johnson’s original bill combined a six-month funding measure with the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) act, a controversial proposal that would require people to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote. Fourteen House Republicans and all but two House Democrats voted against that bill last Wednesday, blocking its passage.Days later, Johnson announced that the House would move forward with a “very narrow, bare-bones CR” that will extend government funding for three months, conceding to Democrats’ weeks-long demands.“Since we fell a bit short of the goal line, an alternative plan is now required,” Johnson said in a “Dear Colleague” letter sent on Sunday. “While this is not the solution any of us prefer, it is the most prudent path forward under the present circumstances. As history has taught and current polling affirms, shutting the government down less than 40 days from a fateful election would be an act of political malpractice.”The newly approved bill also includes an additional $231m for the Secret Service “for operations necessary to carry out protective operations including the 2024 Presidential Campaign and National Special Security Events”, following the two recent assassination attempts against Donald Trump.During the floor debate over the bill on Wednesday, Tom Cole, the Republican chair of the appropriations committee, urged his colleagues to support the legislation and avert a shutdown that he described as pointless.“It’s Congress’s responsibility to ensure that the government remains open and serving the American people,” Cole said. “We are here to avert harmful disruptions to our national security and vital programs our constituents rely on.”The bill was considered under suspension of the rules, meaning Johnson needed the support of two-thirds of the chamber to pass the bill. House Democratic leaders had indicated most of their caucus would support the funding package now that it was devoid of rightwing “poison pills”, and all present Democrats voted in favor of its passage on Wednesday.“We have an obligation in this chamber: to rule, to govern, to say to the American people: ‘We’re here on your behalf,’” Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the appropriations committee, said during the debate. “The legislative process is not one where one gets everything that they want. It is about compromise. It is about coming together to recognize that we do have this obligation and this responsibility.”The bill attracted significant opposition from hard-right Republicans, who have voiced staunch criticism of short-term continuing resolutions in the past.“We irresponsibly continue to spend money that we do not have, that we have not collected, and we continue to retreat to the corners of our safe political spaces and hide behind them in order to try to sell something to the American people,” Chip Roy, a hard-right Republican of Texas, said during the debate. “The American people look at us, and they go: ‘What on earth is wrong in Washington?’”Roy predicted that the passage of the continuing resolution would lead to the House approving a much broader full-year funding bill, known as an omnibus, before their December recess. Johnson has firmly denied that accusation, telling reporters at a press conference on Tuesday: “We have broken the Christmas [omnibus], and I have no intention of going back to that terrible tradition … We’ll deal with that in the lame duck.”During the floor debate, Cole suggested that the results of the November elections would provide Congress with clearer guidance on how to proceed on a full-year funding package.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We’re either going to shut the government down, without achieving anything by shutting it down, or we’re going to keep it open and keep working on our problems and, frankly, give the American people an opportunity in the election – through their votes and their voice – to decide who’s coming back here,” Cole said. “And I suspect that will clarify a lot of decisions in front of us.”The bill now advances to the Senate, which will have less than a week to pass the legislation to prevent a shutdown. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate majority leader, voiced confidence that the chamber would move swiftly to pass the bill and send it to Joe Biden’s desk before next Tuesday.“Both sides will have to act celeritously and with continued bipartisan good faith to meet the funding deadline,” Schumer said in a floor speech on Monday. “Any delay or last minute-poison pill can still push us into a shutdown. I hope – and I trust – that this will not happen.”Schumer reiterated his frustration over the last-minute nature of the funding deal despite widespread expectations that negotiations would ultimately end with a three-month continuing resolution. Schumer blamed the delay on Trump, who had urged Republican lawmakers to reject any funding bill that did not include “election security” provisions.“This agreement could have very easily been reached weeks ago, but Speaker Johnson and House Republicans chose to listen to Donald Trump’s partisan demands instead of working with us from the start to reach a bicameral, bipartisan agreement,” Schumer said. “That is outlandishly cynical: Donald Trump knows perfectly well that a shutdown would mean chaos, pain, needless heartache for the American people. But as usual, he just doesn’t seem to care.”It remains unclear how or when Trump might retaliate against Johnson for failing to pass a funding bill linked to “election security” measures. Johnson has downplayed any suggestion of a potential rift between him and Trump, insisting there is “no daylight” between their positions.“President Trump understands the current dilemma and the situation that we’re in,” Johnson told reporters earlier on Tuesday. “So we’ll continue working closely together. I’m not defying President Trump. We’re getting our job done, and I think he understands that.” More

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      Confusing language on gerrymandering proposal will stay on Ohio’s ballot

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      Ohio voters will see misleading language when they go to vote on an anti-gerrymandering proposal this fall after the state supreme court greenlit the deceptive wording written by Republicans.The Republican-controlled Ohio ballot board approved the language on Wednesday in a 3-2 party-line vote, two days after the Republican-led state supreme court voted 4-3 to correct various defects the justices found in what the board had already passed. The court’s ruling, however, did not require the ballot board to rewrite some of the most significant portions of the amendment.If enacted, the proposal – Issue 1 – would strip lawmakers of their power to draw the boundaries for state legislative and congressional districts and hand it to a 15-person bipartisan independent commission composed of regular citizens. The panel would be constitutionally prohibited from distorting district lines to give one party an unfair advantage, a practice known as gerrymandering.But the language the Ohio ballot board approved for the ballot says that the panel would be “required to gerrymander”. Citizens Not Politicians, the group behind the 5 November amendment, sued last month, asserting the language “may be the most biased, inaccurate, deceptive, and unconstitutional” the state has ever seen.In an unsigned opinion, the state supreme court said the language was acceptable. Because the panel would be required to draw districts that roughly represented the partisan results in recent statewide Ohio elections, it was not misleading to say that the panel would be required to gerrymander, the court majority said. “They mandate the new commission draw district boundaries that give a political advantage to an identifiable group – Republicans in some districts and Democrats in others,” the court said.The high court ordered two of eight disputed sections of the ballot description to be rewritten while upholding the other six the issue’s backers had contested. The court’s three Democratic justices dissented. “What the ballot board has done here is tantamount to performing a virtual chewing of food before the voters can taste it for themselves to decide whether they like it or not,” Justice Jennifer Brunner wrote for the dissent.Republicans, who currently control the mapmaking process, drew districts that gave them a distorted advantage and repeatedly ignored prior rulings from the state supreme court to redraw the lines.State senator Paula Hicks-Hudson, one of the two Democrats who sit on the ballot board, told reporters after it met: “This was done and it was created for the main purpose of hoodwinking voters.” The Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, who chairs the board, did not take questions from the press after the vote.In Monday’s opinion, the high court’s majority noted that it can only invalidate language approved by the ballot board if it finds the wording would “mislead, deceive, or defraud the voters”. The majority found most of the language included in the approved summary and title did not do that but merely described the extensive amendment in detail.The two sections that justices said were mischaracterized involve when a lawsuit would be able to be filed challenging the new commission’s redistricting plan and the ability of the public to provide input on the mapmaking process.The exact language of the constitutional amendment will be posted at polling locations. More

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      Florida officials investigate voters who signed abortion ballot initiative

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      Florida law enforcement officials are investigating voters who signed a petition to get a closely watched abortion rights measure on the ballot this fall, showing up at the homes of some residents unannounced in what activists say is an effort to intimidate voters.Organizers turned in more than 900,000 signatures in January to get a measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution. The deadline to challenge signatures has passed, but a state agency created by DeSantis to investigate voter fraud recently began investigating whether there was fraud in the gathering process.Isaac Menasche, a Fort Myers voter, said he signed a petition months ago when he was approached at a local farmer’s market. He wrote down his name, birthday, address, and scribbled a quick version of his signature. He didn’t think much of it until last week when a law enforcement officer showed up at his door and pulled out a copy of his signature on the petition, asking him to confirm that it was his – which it was.“The experience left me shaken. What troubled me was he had a folder on me containing my personal information – about 10 pages. I saw a copy of my driver’s license and copy of the petition I signed,” Menasche wrote in a Facebook post last week. “It was obvious to me that a significant effort was exerted to determine if indeed I had signed the petition. Troubling that so much resources were devoted to this. I wonder if the same could be said if the petition were for some innocuous issue.”The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, has defended the investigation. “They’re doing what they’re supposed to do,” he said at a press conference on Monday, according to the Tampa Bay Times. “It may be that the signature is totally different, and that voter will say, ‘No, I actually did do that.’ Maybe they signed their name. That is absolutely possible. And if that’s what you say, I think that’s probably the end of it.”But the investigation also comes as DeSantis and Florida Republicans have made other aggressive efforts to thwart the amendment, which needs the support of 60% of voters to pass this fall. The Florida agency for health care administration, a state agency, posted a webpage last week attacking the amendment, which DeSantis has denied amounts to electioneering.The Florida supreme court also allowed a misleading financial impact statement to be printed alongside the amendment on the ballot.Local election officials in Florida are responsible for verifying signatures that are turned in. Groups that sponsor the petitions are responsible for paying for the robust process, which requires verifying the voter’s signature with the one on file for registration purposes as well as their name, address and date of birth, said Lori Edwards, the supervisor of elections in Polk county (Edwards said the state had not requested any information from her office on the abortion amendment).The office of election crimes and security, a multimillion-dollar effort and first-of-its kind agency created by DeSantis to investigate voter fraud, said earlier this year that it had been “inundated with an alarming amount of fraud related to constitutional initiative petitions”.A spokesperson for Mary Jane Arrington, the supervisor of elections in Osceola county in central Florida told the Associated Press that her office had never received a request to review signatures that had already been validated in the 16 years she had been in her role.Florida Democrats and voting groups have ripped DeSantis for the investigation, saying it is an obvious effort to intimidate voters.“This is all about theater, this is all about intimidation of the voters as people are about to go to the ballot box,” Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party, said at a press conference on Monday.The Florida department of state told the Florida department of law enforcement in a letter earlier this summer it had opened an investigation into more than 40 people paid to circulate the abortion-focused petitions. The letter also says the department had obtained “credible information” that several petition circulators in Palm Beach county had submitted fraudulent signatures.The local supervisor of elections had secured some signed complaints from voters saying they did not actually sign petitions, the letter says. “Some of the above-named circulators also signed petitions on behalf of individuals who were deceased at the time the petition was allegedly signed. The circulators appear to have forged the voters’ signatures and inserted the voters’ personal identifiable information into the petitions without consent,” the letter says.The department of state provided copies of petition forms alleged to contain fraud, with the signature and voter information redacted. The agency also released three complaints from voters saying they had not in fact signed the petition.“We have a duty to seek justice for Florida citizens who were victimized by fraud and safeguard the integrity of Florida’s elections. Our office will continue this investigation and make referrals to FDLE as appropriate,” Mark Ard, a spokesperson for the Florida department of state, said in a statement.The campaign behind the amendment, Floridians Protecting Freedom, hired a private company, PCI Consultants, to handle most of the signature gathering. Angelo Paparella, the company’s president, said in an interview that his company reviewed all the signatures it collected before submitting them to local election officials. When they found some that looked fraudulent – a tiny fraction of the more than 1m they collected – they submitted those separately and flagged that they were suspicious.“My staff is pretty good at ferreting this out,” said Paparella, who has been collecting signatures in Florida since 1998. “Sometimes people are idiots and they try to take a shortcut, you know, taking names out of a phone book. It’s a very stupid thing to do. It’s a crime.”Still, he said, the tiny amount of fraud does not come anywhere close to the overwhelming number of valid signatures that were submitted.“If they find someone who committed any kind of forgeries, then prosecute them,” he said. “It takes nothing away from the nearly million valid signatures that the counties found.”It is not clear how many voters have been targeted in the abortion petition investigation, but the Tampa Bay Times reported that at least six counties had been asked to provide information on signatures that had already been approved.One of those counties is Alachua county, where state officials requested to review 6,141 petitions. All of them had been submitted by six circulators that the state believed had submitted fraudulent petitions. In Osceola county, the state requested to review around 1,850 petitions from specific circulators, Arrington’s office said. In Hillsborough county, officials wanted to review nearly 7,000 petitions to the state for review, the supervisor of elections’ office said.The state requested to review 17,000 signatures in Palm Beach county, according to the Tampa Bay Times. In Orange county, home to Orlando, they requested to review 11,500 petitions.The investigation is the latest salvo of the office of election crimes and security, whose mission has been criticized since voter fraud is extremely rare. In 2022, the agency drew scrutiny for arresting people with felony convictions who had voted but appeared to be confused about their eligibility. It has also pursued fines against voter registration groups for relatively minor errors. Many voter registration groups have ceased activity in Florida since.“It’s been clear from day one that the purpose of the election police was to harass voters who don’t have the same viewpoints as the governor,” said Brad Ashwell, the director of the Florida chapter of All Voting is Local, a voting rights group.“By going after a petition for Amendment 4, which is already on the ballot, Governor DeSantis is undermining the will of voters and stomping over their democratic freedoms for his own political gain.” More

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      Lawsuit seeking power to not certify Georgia elections is dismissed

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      A lawsuit arguing that county election board members in Georgia have the discretion to refuse to certify election results has been dismissed on a technicality, but the judge noted it could be refiled.Fulton county election board member Julie Adams filed a lawsuit in May asking a judge to declare that the county election board members’ duties “are discretionary, not ministerial, in nature”. At issue is a Georgia law that says the county officials “shall” certify results after engaging in a process to make sure they are accurate.Superior court judge Robert McBurney on Monday dismissed Adams’ lawsuit, saying that she had failed to name the correct party as a defendant. The Associated Press has reached out to Adams’ lawyers seeking comment on the ruling and asking if they intend to file a new complaint.Under Georgia law, the principle of sovereign immunity protects state and local governments from being sued unless they agree to it. But voters in 2020 approved an amendment to the state constitution to provide a limited waiver for claims where a party is asking a judge to make a declaration on the meaning of a law.That is what Adams was trying to do when she filed her suit against the board she sits on and the county elections director. But McBurney noted in his ruling that the requirements very plainly state that any such complaint must be brought against the state or local government.McBurney noted that Adams had amended her complaint and tried to recast her claims as being brought against Fulton county alone. But, he concluded, “that was too little, too late; the fatal pleading flaw cannot be undone.”However, McBurney noted, that does not mean this fight is necessarily over.“This action is done, but there can be another,” he wrote. Adams “can refile, name the correct party and we will pick up where we left off, likely with all the same lawyers and certainly with the same substantive arguments”. More

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      Georgia election deniers helped pass new laws. Many worry it’ll lead to chaos in November

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      Conservative activists in Georgia have worked with prominent election deniers to pass a series of significant changes to the procedures for counting ballots in recent weeks, raising alarm about the potential for confusion and interference in the election certification process in a key swing state this fall.Since the beginning of August, the five-member state election board has adopted rules that allow local election boards to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into election results before they are certified, and to allow any local election board member “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections prior to certification of results”. The same rule also requires local boards to reconcile any discrepancies between the total number of ballots cast and the number of voters who check in. If it can’t reconcile the numbers, the board is authorized to come up with a way to figure out which votes count and which do not.At its upcoming meeting in September, the board is also expected to approve a measure that would require local officials to hand-count ballots to check the machine tabulations. Experts have warned that hand-counts are unreliable, costly and time-consuming.Georgia law requires county officials to certify an election no later than 5pm on the Monday following election day (the deadline will be one day later this year because of a state holiday). Legal experts have noted that state law is clear about that deadline and that none of the recent rules change that.But at the same time, observers are concerned new changes are seeding the ground to give local county commissioners justifications to object to the certification of the vote.“State law clearly states the certification deadline. They can add on whatever they want, but cannot go against the existing state law that says it has to be certified by a specific date,” said Julie Houk, a voting rights attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. At the same time, she added: “What’s going to happen when they have not completed a review of those thousands of records? Are the board members going to say ‘we can’t certify’ even though it requires them to?”“What’s going to happen if certain board members or boards determine that now that we have all the records we’ve demanded, we can’t get through them in time to certify?”The changes have caused considerable alarm in one of the most competitive battleground states this presidential cycle, which is expected to be extremely close. Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020 by 11,799 votes, a razor-thin margin.Georgia’s state election board, charged with making election rules consistent with Georgia law, was not really paid attention to until this year. But in recent months it has moved forward with a blitz of changes. Earlier this year, Republicans essentially forced out a member who had rebuffed proposed changes and replaced him with someone who has been more sympathetic to the changes.That new member, Rick Jeffares, has previously posted in support of Trump’s election lies, though he recently told the Guardian he believed the former president lost in Georgia in 2020. He also said that he had proposed himself for a job with the Environmental Protection Agency in a second Trump administration.The new rules enacted by the board have been shaped with input from the Republican party and a network of election denial activists. The precinct reconciliation rule adopted on Monday, for example, was presented by Bridget Thorne, a Fulton county commissioner who has run a private Telegram channel filled with election conspiracies. She said during the meeting on Monday she had worked with a number of people on the proposal, including Heather Honey, a prominent activist in the election denialism movement.Input on rules has also come from the state Republican party, the New York Times reported. Julie Adams, who is connected to a network of election deniers and has refused to certify two elections this year as a member of the Fulton county election board, has also had input on the rules, ProPublica reported.Trump has publicly praised three of the Republicans on the board who have constituted the majority to enact the new rules. During a rally earlier this month he called them “pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory”.Three lawyers tied to Trump also spoke out in favor of the new rules on Monday. They included Hans von Spakovsky, a lawyer at the Heritage Foundation who served on Trump’s voter fraud commission, Ken Cuccinelli, who had a top role in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump, and Harry MacDougald, who is defending former justice department official Jeffrey Clark in the Georgia criminal case dealing with Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.John Fervier, the Republican chair on the board who voted against the rule, said he was also concerned about refusal to certify elections.“We’ve seen boards, or board members recently, that refused to certify because they didn’t see X, Y or Z documents. I think this just even opens the door more to that,” he said.During Monday’s meeting, those who supported the rule insisted that local county commissioners could refuse to certify an election if they did not believe the tally was accurate.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“One individual board member does not have authority to overrule other board members,” Thorne said. “Board members would have the right to disagree if they wanted to disagree. But hopefully by having this process in place, everyone will be confident and go ahead and certify.MacDougald, one of the lawyers supporting the proposal, suggested that a judge could not force a majority of election board members to certify a result they believed was incorrect. “The board members have the right to vote on certification, that necessarily gives them the right to vote against it,” he said.“Unless a board member has full confidence in the administration of the election, that it was done without error, they should not certify the election,” von Spakovsky said at the meeting.Election officials have expressed concern about the new rule that prevents them from counting any ballots in a precinct if the number of voters checked in doesn’t align with the number of ballots cast. These small discrepancies often occur because of human error – a voter might check in and leave with their ballot or a voter concerned about their mail-in vote counting might decide to cast a vote in person. These small discrepancies are almost always smaller than the margin of votes and are explained in a reconciliation report to the secretary of state after the election.There also could be problems with the portion of the rule that empowers local boards to come up with a way of tabulating the votes if the discrepancy, no matter how small, can’t be explained.“Let’s say I’m at a poll that has 500 ballots. And we go through and determined one of those 500 voters should not have cast that belt for whatever reason,” said Joseph Kirk, the election director in Bartow county, Georgia, which is about an hour north-west of Atlanta. “How do we know which ballot to take out of the box? They’re anonymous.”Even if the election result is eventually certified, any discovery found during the new investigatory phase could become fodder to continue to challenge the election results. In 2020 and 2022, Trump and allies seized on human errors to falsely argue that they were only the tip of a corrupt system.The Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, an organization that represents election officials across the state, called on the board to stop making changes, warning that continuing to do so would cause confusion.“Any last-minute changes to the rules risk undermining the public’s trust in the electoral process and place undue pressure on the individuals responsible for managing the polls and administering the election,” said W Travis Doss, the group’s president and the executive director of the board of elections in Richmond county, Georgia. “This could ultimately lead to errors or delays in voting, which is the last thing anyone wants.” More

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      Georgia approves election rule that could delay vote certification

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      The Georgia state election board approved a new rule on Monday that gives local officials more power to investigate votes after election day, increasing concerns the Republican-controlled body is steamrolling a series of consequential changes that could pave the way for chaos this fall.The rule approved Monday authorizes any member on a county board of election “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections prior to certification of results”. Even though Georgia law still requires certification of the vote by 5pm the Monday after election day, experts are concerned that these maneuvers give election deniers significant leeway to slow down the certification process and create uncertainty.“It provides no safeguards against requests unscrupulously designed to delay or obstruct the lawful certification process,” lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, the watchdog groups Citizens for Responsibilities and Ethics in Washington (Crew) and the Public Rights Project wrote in a letter to the board. “It would empower individual county board members to make unreasonable and vexatious demands for any election-related documents – even ones that have no bearing on certification – without providing any basis for their requests.”The board has moved aggressively to implement new procedures ahead of the election and three Republicans on it have earned public praise from Donald Trump. Earlier this month, it adopted a new rule that gives local boards the power to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into elections before certifying. It does not define what constitutes a “reasonable inquiry.”The new power to request all election-related documents comes as Julie Adams, a Republican on the Fulton county election board, has refused to certify elections in the state’s largest county and has claimed she has been denied access to adequate information. Adams is also suing the county board of the elections and its election director with the backing of the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute to require more access to election documents.Adams is connected to a network for election deniers led by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who aided his attempt to try and overturn the election. Several activists in that network helped shape the rule the board adopted on Monday, ProPublica reported.“Trump and his Maga allies have taken over the Georgia state election board to try and give a veneer of legality to their illegal scheme to disrupt the certification of Georgia’s 2024 election results,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, the chief executive of the voter rights organization Fair Fight. “Many of Trump’s key election denier allies are behind these illegal, anti-freedom changes to Georgia election rules, and it’s all with the goal of helping Trump win the ‘Peach State’, even if he doesn’t earn a majority of Georgians’ votes.”The new rule also requires the board of elections in each county to meet no later than 3pm on the Friday after the election to compare the total number of unique voter ID numbers in each precinct with the total number of ballots cast in that precinct. The votes in each precinct can’t be counted until the investigation is resolved. If the results can’t be reconciled, the board is authorized to “determine a method to compute the votes justly”.Several Republicans on the board framed the new rule, which it adopted with a 3-2 vote, as an effort to ensure that only valid votes were cast. “If the board found votes that were made illegally, they should not be counted,” said Janice Johnston, a Republican on the board.But others on the board said it was acting beyond its powers and said the proposal was opening the door to delay certification.“This board is once again exceeding our authority,” said John Fervier, the board’s Republican chairman, who joined the lone Democrat on the board to vote against the rule. “We are not elected officials. And we should not try to create law.”It’s not unusual for there to be small discrepancies between the total numbers of votes cast and the total number of voters. These differences are usually not large enough to affect an election outcome.“The most common cause for a discrepancy is usually if someone leaves with their ballot before casting it,” said Tate Fall, the director of elections in Cobb county in suburban Atlanta. “This would cause there to be one more check-in on the poll pads then there are ballots in the scanner. Typically poll workers catch these discrepancies early as they check the machine counts hourly.” She added that any discrepancies are always explained in a reconciliation report submitted to the Georgia secretary of state’s office after an election.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSara Tindall Ghazal, a Democrat on the board, said during Monday’s meeting that voters sometimes will cast a ballot in person after voting by mail because they’re worried their vote won’t count. In those cases, election workers will typically cancel the mail-in vote before tabulation, she said.The board is still considering a proposal to have election workers hand count every ballot cast on election day. The original proposal, submitted by Sharlene Alexander, a Republican election board member in Fayette county, would have required three workers at the precinct to separate ballots into stacks of 50 and count them by hand on election night. After receiving feedback from election officials, Janelle King, a Republican member on the board, amended the proposal to allow counties to begin counting the next day. They would still be required to complete the count by Georgia’s certification deadline.King’s amendment meant that the board had to put off a final vote on the rule until its next meeting in September.Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, has heavily criticized the proposed rule changes, saying they would lead to delays in election results and decrease trust in results.“Georgia voters reject this 11th hour chaos, and so should the unelected members of the State Election Board,” he said in a statement last week. “These misguided, last-minute changes from unelected bureaucrats who have never run an election and seem to reject the advice of anyone who ever has could cause serious problems in an election that otherwise will be secure and accurate.” More

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      Extremist or mainstream: how do Tim Walz’s policies match up globally?

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      Within hours of Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, being chosen by Kamala Harris to be her Democratic presidential running mate, Donald Trump and team began attacking him as a “dangerously liberal extremist”.Trump surrogates seized on Walz’s record of expanding voting rights for former felons, combatting the climate crisis, and other measures as proof that Harris-Walz would be the “most radical ticket in American history”.If you step back from the melee, and look at his gubernatorial acts through a global lens, they appear anything but extreme. From the perspective of other industrialised nations, what Trump denounces as leftwing radicalism looks little more than basic public welfare provisions.Far from being militant and revolutionary, initiatives such as paid family leave, free college tuition and rudimentary gun controls – all championed by Walz in Minnesota – have long been regarded as middle-of-the-road and unremarkable in large swathes of the world. Through this frame, it is not Walz who is the outlier, but his Republican critics.Here are how some of Walz’s most impactful reforms compare with the rest of the world.Free school lunchesView image in fullscreenWalz’s record: “What a monster! Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn.” That was Walz’s sardonic reply to CNN when he was asked about having introduced free breakfast and lunch for all Minnesota schoolkids. The 2023 measure puts Minnesota among just eight US states that offer school meals at no cost to all children, no matter their family’s income.Around the world: Several countries provide free lunches for their children nationwide. Sweden, Finland and the three Baltic nations all provide meals at no cost for all schoolchildren irrespective of income, and many more European countries provide targeted or subsidised meals. Even a developing country such as India ensures access to lunch for more than 100 million kids daily.“The idea of offering free meals to all students during the school day is hardly new – many countries already do so,” said Alexis Bylander at the Food Research and Action Center, a US anti-hunger organisation. “Numerous studies show the benefits, including improving student attendance, behaviour and academic success.”Combatting the climate crisisView image in fullscreenWalz’s record: In February 2023 Walz signed legislation committing Minnesota to having all its electricity produced by wind, solar and other clean energy sources by 2040 – an even more ambitious timeframe than adopted by California, America’s sustainable energy leader. The legislature also passed more than 40 climate initiatives, including expanding charging infrastructure for electric vehicles and introducing a new code for commercial buildings to cut energy use by 80% by 2036.Around the world: By global standards, Minnesota’s ambitions do not stand out. Some 27 countries have written into law target dates by which they will become net zero – that is, stop loading additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In the developed world, Finland is leading the way, pledging to be net zero by 2035, and to begin absorbing more carbon dioxide than it produces by 2040. In December, almost 200 countries at the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai agreed to call on all countries to transition away from fossil fuels and for global renewable energy to be tripled by 2030.Child tax creditView image in fullscreenWalz’s record: Last year the governor signed into law a child tax credit program for low-income Minnesota families. The measure sought to fill the hole left by a federal scheme that expired in 2021 after Congress failed to extend it. The Minnesota plan is the most generous of its type in the US, offering $1,750 per child and reaching more than 400,000 children.Around the world: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the forum of high-income democracies, reported in 2018 that 34 of the 35 countries with available information provided their people with some form of family benefit including tax credits. The OECD compared the value of family benefits for two-child families, measured as a percentage of average earnings, across 41 countries and found that the US came in at No 40, with only Turkey being less generous in its support.Basic gun controlsView image in fullscreenWalz’s record: The governor identifies as a proud gun-owner and hunter, and he accepted Harris’s invitation to be her running mate wearing a camo hat. That didn’t stop him in May 2023 enacting a slew of gun safety measures, including requiring all private sales of handguns and semi-automatic rifles to go through an FBI background check that looks for evidence of criminal or mental health risks. The changes also introduced a “red flag law” that allows relatives and other interested parties to intervene when someone is in danger of injuring themselves or others with guns.Around the world: International comparisons show that Americans own vastly more guns than civilians in other rich countries – 121 guns per 100 Americans, compared with five guns per 100 people in the United Kingdom. The number of gun killings per 100,000 people is also vastly higher: 4.12 in the US, 0.04 in the UK.Other countries also have much tougher gun controls that make those introduced by Walz look weak by comparison. Canada requires gun buyers to have a licence to possess or acquire a firearm and first time applicants have to wait a mandatory 28 days; it also imposes mandatory safety training and a ban on military-style rifles that does not exist in the US. The UK also bans some semi-automatic rifles and most handguns. Japan tightly restricts gun ownership, banning most guns other than air guns and a few other special categories and even then requiring owners to submit to annual inspections.Paid family and medical leaveWalz’s record: House File 2, enacted by the governor last year, gave Minnesotans access to up to 20 weeks in every year of partial wages to cover medical leave after a life-changing diagnosis, mental health leave, or time off to care for a new baby. “Paid family and medical leave is about investing in the people that made our state and economy strong in the first place,” Walz said as he signed the bill.Around the world: The US is the only OECD member country without a national law giving all workers access to paid leave for new mothers. Thirty-seven out 38 OECD countries offer national paid maternity leave – the only exception being the US. France, which holds the top spot, allows mothers and fathers to take paid leave until their child is three years old.The US is also one of only six countries with no form of national paid leave covering either family or medical leave in the case of a health concern.Voting rights for former felonsWalz’s record: The governor signed a bill that restores the vote to more than 50,000 Minnesotans who have been convicted of a felony. The Trump campaign denounced the measure as evidence of Walz’s “dangerously liberal agenda”, which is ironic, given that Trump himself, as a convicted felon, will only be able to vote for himself in November thanks to a similar reform in New York.Around the world: A report released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in June concluded that the US was an “outlier nation in that it strips voting rights from millions of citizens solely on the basis of a criminal conviction”. In 2022, more than 4 million people in the US were disenfranchised on those grounds. By contrast, when HRW surveyed 136 countries around the world, it found that the majority never or rarely deny the vote because of a criminal record, while those with restrictions tend to be much less draconian in their approach than US states. More

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      Black Alabama mayor reinstated after nearly four-year battle

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      Patrick Braxton, the first Black mayor of an Alabama town that has not held elections in several decades, has spent the last four years fighting to be recognized. Finally, after an extensive legal battle, he and the town officials who refused to acknowledge him as mayor have reached a settlement, according to federal court documents.Per the settlement agreement, Braxton will be officially seated as the mayor of Newbern, Alabama, and be able to fully serve in this capacity for the first time in nearly four years, pending approval by Judge Kristi K DuBose of the southern district of Alabama.The town has also committed to holding regular municipal elections, which will happen openly and transparently, beginning in 2025. Until then, all current town council members will resign. An interim town council, composed of new people and members of the town council Braxton originally appointed, will help guide the town until it has elections.Morenike Fajana, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund (LDF), which has been involved with the case since last year, said: “It’s been a really long battle.“It’s been four years that this has been ongoing and there have been different setbacks and challenges. But I feel like [Braxton] is appreciative of the fact that this is happening now and he is proud to have the opportunity to serve the town of Newbern.”Braxton said that he has kept his church and community members informed of daily updates about the court case and is happy to finally give them some good news.“Everybody is pleased and happy,” he said. “They’re glad we can put this behind us and start moving forward and working for the town … The children, some of them don’t quite understand about everything, and then some of them are old enough to know this is a big deal for the community.”All of the community will hear the news by 30 August, by which time the parties will hold a public town meeting informing Newbern residents of the agreement.Braxton is excited to finally do what he set out to do nearly half a decade ago: to unify and improve the town.“I think I got a wonderful team, people that’s going to work with me and help the community,” he said.Newbern, located about an hour and a half away from Montgomery, captured national attention in 2023 when it became widely known that white officials had refused for three years to allow Braxton, the first Black mayor in Newbern’s history, to exercise his mayoral duties.The 133-person town is about 80% Black and 20% white, but the town’s leadership, excluding Braxton and his town council, has been majority white for decades. The defendants in the lawsuit, including the previous mayor and council, refused to hold elections.During discovery for the case and last month’s hearing about a motion for preliminary injunction, those on the former town council admitted to never holding elections.“They claimed that they didn’t know they had to,” Fajana said. “Instead, their process was when a position became vacant, they would just kind of recruit among their community and the people that they knew. They would just appoint that person and it would happen, basically, in a covert manner. That had been the process for as long as anybody could remember. Anybody who was serving in the past town council said that’s how they came to power.”Per the settlement, the defendants “specifically deny having engaged in any wrongful practice, or other unlawful conduct”, saying instead they reached the “compromise” to avoid protracted litigation.Braxton told the Guardian in 2023 that the town’s previous mayor had told him that it wasn’t possible to have elections in the small town. He decided to run anyway, out of a desire to help his community, which has a significant poverty rate.“For decades, officials in my town have excluded me and other voters from participating in elections and having a say in what happens here,” Braxton said in a statement provided by the LDF earlier this year.In 2020, Braxton became mayor by default when he was the only person to file for office. Following his election and swearing in, he appointed a town council.Unbeknownst to him, or anyone else in the town, the previous town council and mayor held a secret, special election during which they voted themselves in as town council. Braxton did not attend their parallel town council meetings, not recognizing them as legitimate. The parallel town council removed him from office and reappointed the former mayor to the position. They were aided, the lawsuit alleges, by the town’s bank and clerk.“It’s really about those facts, it’s about what happened in 2020 with this alleged parallel election process and then also, which is equally important, the failure of the town to have any sort of municipal election, whether for mayor or town council, for decades dating back to as long as anyone who has been involved in this case can remember,” Fajana said.Now that he’s fully recognized as mayor and able to serve in that capacity, Braxton is looking towards the future.Per the agreement, he will submit a list of potential names for town council to the Alabama governor, currently Kay Ivey, who will fill the positions. If she does not, the probate judge of Hale county will declare a special election on 31 December 2024. All elected officials elected or appointed before the 2025 municipal election, including Braxton, will have their terms end that year, in pursuance with Alabama law.“Once we get my town council in place,” he said, “I think the town is going to take off and start moving from here.” More