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      Pennsylvania swing county to keep ballot drop boxes after controversy

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      A battleground county in north-eastern Pennsylvania will have ballot drop boxes this fall after its county manager faced pressure and reversed her decision to eliminate them.The announcement on Friday came less than a month after Romilda Crocamo, the county manager in Luzerne county, said she was getting rid of the county’s four drop boxes over concerns the county could not secure them. “I cannot secure the drop boxes. And, you know, sometimes I have to make difficult decisions,” she said in an interview last month.But voting rights groups sued Crocamo last week, saying she could not unilaterally get rid of the drop boxes.Elections in the county are jointly overseen by a five-member board of elections who are responsible for setting election policies, and the county manager, who is responsible for personnel. A hearing in the case had been scheduled for Monday. Voters in the state – a critical one for both Kamala Harris and Joe Biden – have already begun receiving and returning mail-in ballots.Pennsylvania’s attorney general, Michelle Henry, sent a letter to Crocamo advising her that county board of elections had the power to set policies over drop boxes.An agreement filed on Sunday in the Luzerne county court of common pleas says Crocamo does not concede she is under a legal obligation to deploy drop boxes, but that she won’t block their deployment this election cycle.“This is a huge victory for Luzerne county voters,” said Alisha Hoffman-Mirilovich, the executive director of In This Together NEPA, which sued the county over drop boxes.View image in fullscreen“All Pennsylvanians have the freedom to choose how they cast their ballots – in person on Election Day, by mail-in ballot, or by using a drop box. We applaud the Luzerne County Board of Elections for making drop boxes accessible in Luzerne County since 2020, and we applaud the County Manager for reversing course in the best interest of voters throughout the county,” Hoffman-Mirilovich said in a statement.Crocamo said in a statement that drop boxes at two county facilities were deployed “and under video surveillance”. She said the county was still waiting on approval from two private locations.“While Ms Crocamo remains quite concerned about security, manpower, and fiscal issues associated with deployment of ballot drop boxes in Luzerne County, she agrees that given the importance of the November 5th election, the residents of Luzerne County should have every opportunity to attend to their important civic duty and vote in the upcoming election,” Mark Cedrone, her lawyer, said in a statement. More

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      Republicans’ non-citizen voting myth sets stage to claim stolen election

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      James Cozadd, a 49-year-old plumber born in Montgomery, Alabama, has no idea why he got a letter from Alabama’s top election official telling him he was potentially ineligible to vote. He was born in the US, yet the letter said he was suspected of being a non-citizen and he would have to prove his citizenship to vote.“I’ve been racking my brain to try to figure out how I ended up on the list of purged voters, but I have no clue,” Cozadd said in a court filing in September.He was one of more than 3,200 voters the secretary of state asked to prove their citizenship – part of a wave of actions amid heated rhetoric among Republicans over the idea that non-citizens could be voting in large numbers in US elections, a theory that runs counter to data.It’s not just happening in Alabama. Alvaro Manrique Barrenechea, a Tennessee immigration law professor, got a letter this year claiming he could be illegally voting, despite becoming naturalized in 2019 and having the legal right to vote. And Nicholas Ross, an Ohio music professor, became a US citizen in May after nearly three decades in the country but received an accusatory letter from the Ohio secretary of state in June telling him he could be ineligible to vote because he wasn’t a US citizen. Voting as a non-citizen would be a crime, it warned.These purges are not just complicating the ability of some qualified voters to cast a ballot this year. They are also setting the stage for future laws to restrict voters’ access to the ballot and are giving fuel to Donald Trump and his allies to seed doubt about the integrity of elections and undermine results if he loses in November.Trump and other Republicans are already using the false idea that non-citizens could vote in widespread numbers to suggest the election could be stolen.“Our elections are bad,” Trump said during the 10 September debate. “And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.” .There is no proof that non-citizens are voting, or even registering to vote, in any meaningful numbers. It’s not the first time Republicans have made these claims, but the purges and rhetoric over non-citizen voting this year are, perhaps, at their apex.The rhetoric makes voting an immigration issue, linking two red-meat issues for Republicans. It also aligns with broad anti-immigrant sentiment the right is advancing, with much of it stemming from a conspiracy that there is an intentional and systematic effort to replace white Americans with minorities through mass migration – the great replacement theory.Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said the theory holds that the white population is being displaced by non-white immigrants “who will vote in a certain particular way”.“These attacks on non-citizens and voters are part and parcel of the great replacement conspiracy theory,” she said. “They’re indistinguishable.”David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said it was clear why Trump and supporters were leaning into the myth of non-citizen voting.View image in fullscreen“This is about setting the stage to claim an election was stolen,” he said. “This will be one of the primary, but among many, false claims made if Trump loses. And it will be false, but it still could be dangerous because it could incite his supporters to believing a totally secure election was stolen.”The myth of non-citizen voting has also taken hold after some of the most outlandish myths about the 2020 election weredebunked, said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian thinktank.“It keeps ‘Stop the Steal’ alive at a point where most of the other things about ‘Stop the Steal’ don’t have much currency,” he said, referring generally to the movement that tried to halt the certification of the 2020 election.”Republicans have waged an aggressive legal effort in Congress, state capitols and courtrooms to create the false impression that there are non-citizens on the rolls. Congressional Republicans are pushing a bill to address the nonexistent problem, though it is stalled in DC after a failed effort to tie it to a government funding bill.The Republican National Committee and other Trump-aligned groups have also filed suit in a number of battleground states – including Nevada, North Carolina and Arizona – accusing election officials of not doing enough to ensure non-citizens aren’t on the voter rolls. The state officials have all said there are adequate safeguards in place to ensure that only US citizens are voting.Republican statewide officials in several states – Tennessee, Alabama, Ohio and Texas – have also launched efforts to hunt for non-citizens on the voter rolls and have flagged thousands of voters for possible removal. Voting rights groups have raised deep concerns about those efforts, saying the methodology is flawed and that states are presenting misleading statistics to give an exaggerated impression of how many non-citizens may be on the rolls.The list of potential non-citizens flagged in Alabama has so far shown itself to be off-base, the US Department of Justice said in a lawsuit filed last week, claiming the purge was conducted illegally. In response to letters asking suspected non-citizens to provide documentation of their citizenship before voting this fall – an extra hoop to jump through before casting a ballot – more than 700 voters, nearly one in four on the list, have provided such proof.Ross, the Ohio music professor who received a letter from the state’s top election official, said he dug into why he might have been flagged and found a likely reason. He had renewed his driver’s license in January, when he had a green card, which seemed to land him on the secretary of state’s potential non-citizen list. He sent in paperwork to prove his citizenship after receiving the letter.“When you do this and just look at the last driver’s license, you’re just netting a lot of naturalized citizens,” Ross said. “And of course, my concern is, then you’re creating this narrative of lots of non-US citizens trying to vote by including those numbers.”Dan Lusheck, a spokesman for the office of the Ohio secretary of state, Frank LaRose, says it found “approximately 600 non-citizens registered to vote, a relatively small number considering there are over 8 million registered voters in Ohio”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLaRose’s office forwarded the flagged registrations to the state attorney general for potential prosecution, claiming some of them may have voted. Prosecutors say they have investigated and found little. A prosecutor in one county office told the Ohio Capital Journal that most cases involved people checking the box claiming they are not citizens on their registration forms. When told they should rescind their registration, almost all of them complied.“The secretary believes that voter fraud is extremely rare because we take it seriously here in Ohio,” Lusheck said. “A law that is not enforced isn’t a law, it’s a suggestion.”Many of the naturalized citizens erroneously on the list as non-citizens appear to have been flagged from outdated motor vehicles data. The voters may have driver’s licenses that have not expired, then got their citizenship. The guidelines for what to do after you become a citizen say a driver’s license can be renewed or updated, but it’s not a requirement.In Tennessee, state officials sent more than 14,000 notices to people asking them to prove their citizenship. The secretary of state’s office there has since said it would not remove voters who didn’t prove their citizenship. The office did not respond to a request for comment.One of the voters targeted was Manrique Barrenechea, an immigration law professor at Vanderbilt University, who became a US citizen in 2019 and has voted since. He did not feel comfortable sending documents in the mail to prove what he believes the state should already be able to confirm.“You’re putting the burden on me to get information that you already have as government,” he said.For some immigrants, the letter may read as intimidating, he said.“I hope it’s not that they’re trying to make it difficult for immigrants to vote, but it really generated an extra step to me,” he said.The Alabama secretary of state, Wes Allen, started a process to purge alleged non-citizens from the rolls within 90 days of an election, which both a private lawsuit and the justice department lawsuit claim runs afoul of federal law. Allen also referred the alleged non-citizens on the voter list to the Alabama attorney general’s office for criminal investigation, which the lawsuit argues amounts to voter intimidation.Allen’s office did not respond to a request for comment.Some eligible voters who were sent letters by Allen issued declarations in court. Cozadd, a Republican and lifelong Alabaman, received a letter claiming he had previously been issued a non-citizen identification number. He wrote in his declaration that he cannot figure out why the state would believe that.“I was stunned to receive that letter. It feels like they are trying to make me think I’ve broken the law – just for trying to exercise my right to vote,” he wrote.There have been some isolated examples of states that have had relatively small problems with non-citizens on their rolls. Oregon election officials recently said they would remove more than 1,200 people from its voter rolls after they failed to provide proof of citizenship when they registered. Only nine of them had cast ballots and there are 3 million registered voters in the state.Lorraine Minnitte, a professor at Rutgers who has studied incidents of voter fraud for decades, said that for years Republicans have seized on misunderstandings of the complex processes to maintain the voter rolls to suggest that non-citizens were voting.What’s different now is the scale at which they are claiming it’s occurring.“It’s now something that has almost a national audience where in the past it was a little more isolated to places like Texas or Arizona,” she said. Constant images of migrants coming over the border that are aired on Fox News and other conservative outlets, she said, had only augmented the myth.Kate Huddleston, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, said the messaging on this issue had ramped up over the past few years and coincided with racism and xenophobia. The misinformation about non-citizen voting could play into conspiracy theories and distrust of elections, she said.“This is an extremely rare problem,” she said. “Because people don’t understand that this is extremely rare, we see laws or policies that end up sweeping in large numbers of naturalized citizens, or sweeping in folks who don’t have easy access to documentary proof of citizenship, and then really taking away their fundamental right to vote.” More

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      Democrats sue Georgia election board over new ballot hand-count rule

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      Democrats sued the Georgia state election board on Monday over a new rule requiring officials to hand-count ballots cast on election day, asking a state court to declare it unlawful and block it from going into effect.The suit, filed in Fulton county superior court by both the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic party of Georgia, takes aim at a rule adopted in a 3-2 vote by the state election board on 20 September. The rule requires the poll manager and a team of two other workers in each voting precinct to separate ballots into stacks of 50 and hand-count them. They must all agree on the total count and ensure that it matches the totals from the machine tabulation. If there is an inconsistency, they are required to determine the reason and correct it, if possible.The rule has received widespread pushback from election officials in the state and voting rights groups, who are concerned the process could lead to delays and confusion after election night and cause chain-of-custody issues. Experts have long pointed out that hand-counts are less reliable than machine counts. The concern over post-election chaos is particularly acute in Georgia, a battleground state in this year’s presidential election.“To protect the sanctity of the state’s laws and to prevent election night chaos, this Court should declare that the Hand Count Rule exceeds [the state election board’s] statutory authority and enjoin that rule from going into effect,” the complaint says.The new rule is illegal for several reasons, the suit claims. First, there is no hand-count requirement outlined in Georgia law, and the state election board cannot enact requirements beyond what is written in state statute, lawyers wrote. Second, imposing a hand-count this close to an election would cause disorder, going against the board’s mandate to ensure orderly elections, the complaint says. Last, Democrats claim the board did not follow proper procedures to enact the measures.Even before the board passed the law, Chris Carr, the Georgia attorney general, advised the board that the new requirement was probably illegal. “The statutes upon which these rules rely do not reflect any provision enacted by the General Assembly for the hand-counting of ballots prior to tabulation,” he wrote in a memo.The rule is one of several that a new, pro-Trump majority on the state election board has enacted this year. Other rules allow local election officials to undertake an undefined “reasonable inquiry” before certifying election results and require local officials to explain any inconsistencies between the total number of voters who check in and the number of ballots cast in a precinct. Trump publicly praised the three board members at a rally earlier this year, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory”.Quentin Fulks, principal deputy campaign manager for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, said in a statement that Democrats were stepping in to ensure a free and fair election.“As Donald Trump invents facts to try to sow doubt in our elections, his Maga allies in Georgia passed a new rule just weeks before election day that will obstruct the process of counting votes so they can complain when voters reject Trump at the polls,” Fulks said. “We agree with Georgia’s Republican attorney general and secretary of state: This rule is unproductive and unlawful, and we are fighting it.”In 2020, when two hand-counts of the vote reaffirmed Joe Biden’s win, Trump still sought to overturn the election results. He asked Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top election official, to find him 11,780 votes, enough to switch the results in the state.In addition to the Democratic party, the other plaintiffs in the suit are members of the local election boards in Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinnett and Forsyth counties – all hubs near the Atlanta area poised to play a major role in determining the winner of the election in Georgia this year. More

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      ‘I see the apathy’: Saginaw city’s Black voters could be vital – if they vote

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      The largest bloc of registered voters in the city of Saginaw has yet to make a choice between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and probably never will. A majority of Black residents of the biggest city in the most closely contested county of the battleground state of Michigan simply don’t vote.To the frustration of civil rights activists and Democratic politicians struggling to secure every ballot in a state that the Harris campaign sees as crucial to victory, more than half of Saginaw city’s population has long been unpersuaded that elections make much of a difference to their lives.Now, against the backdrop of the drama of the US’s knife-edge 2024 election, Black organizations and churches are once again making a determined push to turn out voters, helped by the first female Black candidate for president and changes to Michigan law making it easier to vote.But Terry Pruitt, president of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) branch running voter education campaigns, said it was a struggle to generate enthusiasm in Saginaw.“I’ve been here all my life. I grew up on the east side of Saginaw and I see the apathy. This is not something that they put at the top of the priority list when they’ve got to figure out, can I get to work today?” he said.“My church is on the south side of Saginaw, probably the lowest socioeconomic district in Saginaw county other than a couple of rural areas, and when I walk through the neighborhood and talk to people about why they don’t vote, you’d be surprised how many of them say, ‘that’s not important to me.’ These folks are going to go ahead and do what they want to do. They don’t listen to me. They don’t want to hear what I have to say.”Black residents account for nearly half of Saginaw city’s 45,000 population with white people about one-third. Historically, a sharp racial divide was marked by the Saginaw river running through the heart of the city so that there were two downtowns on opposite banks.Neighborhoods on the east side are overwhelmingly Black. The west side was mostly white but the population has become more mixed in recent years as large numbers of white people moved to neighboring Saginaw Township.Voter turnout in the east of Saginaw city is consistently well below the other side of the river and anywhere else in the county. Many people are automatically registered to vote in Michigan when applying for a driving licence but do not do so.In the 2020 election, which saw the highest turnout of voters in Michigan history at 70.5% as sharp divisions over Trump drew more people to the polls, less than half of registered voters in Saginaw city cast a ballot. In most Black neighborhoods the figure was even lower, falling below 40% in some precincts.Even during Barack Obama’s first run for the White House in 2008, turnout in the east of Saginaw, where the man who would become the US’s first Black president picked up more than 95% of the vote in many precincts, was still much lower than elsewhere.But the number that some Harris supporters in Saginaw are focused on is Trump’s victory in Michigan in 2016 by fewer than 11,000 votes – only slightly more than the number of registered voters who did not cast a ballot in the city of Saginaw. Although Joe Biden narrowly won the state back four years later, Michigan is again on a knife edge. Michigan could help decide the whole US election, and Saginaw could help decide the whole of Michigan.Jeff Bulls, the president of the Community Alliance for the People in Saginaw, which is running a get-out-the-vote campaign, said the low turnout was not easily overcome.“The numbers are stupid. They’re really, really low. Some people, especially poorer people, they feel like their vote doesn’t count. Or people have become jaded with government. A lot of them feel like government doesn’t have any effect on their lives. That’s how people draw back from the process: ‘I’m going to go vote for what?’ A lot of people are disenchanted with the process. That’s not easy to change,” he said.Bulls said the sense of being overlooked by political leaders was especially evident in March, when Biden was still running for re-election. The president visited Saginaw city but failed to meet Black leaders or visit a Black church.“There was a lot of tension with people feeling like the president didn’t really care about the Black vote. His visit was specifically to come here and meet with Black leaders in the community and Black clergy to address that sentiment. When he got here, everything changed. He ended up meeting with white liberal Democrats and that pissed a lot of people off and set off a firestorm,” he said.Pruitt demanded an explanation from Biden’s campaign which, he said, apologized.“It left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths. It was clearly a mistake and, believe me, there were several of us who let him know that,” he said.Critics turned on the county’s Democratic party and its chair, Aileen Pettinger. She shakes her head in despair on being asked about the debacle.“Unfortunately, because I’m the party chair, I got the brunt of it. Honestly, we were only told the night before. In the past, they would ask our input. This time they did not listen to us at all,” she said.For some activists, the incident had echoes of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign when her staff arrived in midwestern towns waving data sets and riding roughshod over local advice, helping to cost her the election.Pettinger said the Harris campaign was a long way from that. Pruitt agreed.“I’m pretty sure that that would not happen with Harris,” he said.But Pruitt said the incident threw a spotlight on the alienation many in the city feel from established political parties.“There’s obviously the tendency for us who do vote to vote Democratic. But there’s a school of thought that the Democratic party takes that vote for granted and really doesn’t listen to what we really feel is important,” he said.Pettinger said she recognised the problem.“We have heard that on the doors but I’m seeing a huge shift out on the doors since Kamala has announced that she was running. It’s a huge difference. I haven’t seen hope like this since Obama, I haven’t seen this excitement,” she said.“I’m not losing hope. I feel very energised about it. We just have to make sure it carries over and make sure we get people to the ballot box.”Pruitt agreed that Harris had injected some enthusiasm into the election.“I don’t think it will drive it as much as Obama. I never had the slightest thought that I’d see an African American be elected president of the United States, so that phenomenon has already occurred,” he said.“But I see some people excited about the opportunity of a Black female being president and it will help drive our community to the polls. But in the end it’s the policies that matter to get people to vote. We have to help connect the dots for people. There has to be self-interest in voting which means you have to explain those two or three issues that you think are at the top of their list, and what we have to lose if we’re on the wrong side of voting on those things.”Pruitt said his get-out-the-vote campaign was focusing on the dangers Trump poses to “the social safety network”, including housing support, childcare assistance, and disability and social security payments.“As a national theme, abortion is out there and that’s what the parties are running with. That may be on the list for the average Black woman on the east side of Saginaw but it’s much further down the list. But if we start talking about losing the department of education and how that’s going to impact their children, that will hit home very quickly,” he said.Bulls said affordable housing was also a major issue in Saginaw even though the city’s population has dropped sharply over recent decades. Saginaw is dotted with grass-covered spaces where abandoned houses have been torn down, but rents for what remains are high and the quality often substandard.“In Saginaw city, almost 70% of our housing is over 60 years old. There’s a lot of blight, a lot of houses that have already been torn down or need to be torn down. There haven’t been any new builds in the city, en masse, probably this century. So we just have a huge need for new housing, whether it’s single family housing or apartments,” he said.Then there is policing in a city with one of the highest crime rates in the country. Bulls said some of the alienation comes from frustration at the political decision to bring the state police into Saginaw.“We’ve had a couple different community forums on it because people are really concerned. There’s a state programme called the secure cities partnership. It has largely brought a bunch of Michigan state police into the community. It’s been basically a stop-and-frisk program. They don’t answer 911 calls. They literally just patrol and pull people over. There’s a huge racial disparity on where they patrol and who they pull over. It’s been a very, very tense issue here, and it’ll continue to be until it’s dealt with,” he said.Still, campaigners see an opportunity in the introduction of nine days of early voting for this year’s presidential election which, they say, which will assist Black churches running “souls to the polls” initiatives to lead their congregations to vote after Sunday services.Pruitt has also looked to other places for advice, including to Stacey Abrams, the Georgia politician who created voting rights organisations that proved crucial in the Democrats winning two key seats in the US Senate four years ago.“We’ve had conversations with Stacey Abrams and people from Georgia because it was remarkable what she did. But when I started looking at how she did it, it takes an army of people and an awful lot of money to make it happen. That’s another side of this, the resources, because the frustration for people like me is marshalling the resources to get it done,“ he said.Bulls feels the same constraints, and laments what he sees as the tendency of white politicians to leave it to Black organisations to get out the vote in their community.“It shouldn’t be left to us but here we are. It’s important to us so we’ll do it anyway, but it shouldn’t be just us,” he said.Get in touchWe’d like to hear from Saginaw residents about the issues that matter to them this election. You can get in touch with us here. More

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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