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      Guiliani admits using ‘dirty trick’ to suppress Hispanic vote in mayoral race

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      Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has admitted to a “dirty trick” that his campaign used to suppress the Hispanic vote during the city’s 1993 mayoral race.On Tuesday, Giuliani revealed his voter suppression tactics to the far-right Donald Trump ally Steve Bannon and Arizona’s defeated Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake during a discussion on his America’s Mayor Live program.In the conversation, Giuliani – who was central to Trump’s efforts to subvert the result of the 2020 presidential election – lamented that he had been “cheated” during the 1989 mayoral race in which he lost before explaining his 1993 campaign strategy, saying: “I’ll tell you one little dirty trick,” to which Lake replied: “We need dirty tricks!”“A dirty trick in New York City? I’m so shocked,” Bannon sarcastically responded. Giuliani then interrupted the former Trump adviser, saying: “No, played by Republicans!”“Republicans don’t do dirty tricks,” Bannon said before Giuliani enthusiastically said: “How about this one?” Bannon replied: “Okay give it to me.”Giuliani explained that he spent $2m to set up a so-called Voter Integrity Committee which was headed by Randy Levine, current president of the New York Yankees baseball team, and John Sweeney, a former New York Republican congressman.“So they went through East Harlem, which is all Hispanic, and they gave out little cards, and the card said: ‘If you come to vote, make sure you have your green card because INS are picking up illegals.’ So they spread it all over the Hispanic …” said Giuliani, referring to the now defunct US Immigration and Naturalization Service before trailing off.“Oh my gosh,” Lake replied as she raised her eyebrows.Following its closure in 2003, the INS transferred its immigration enforcement functions to other agencies within the Department of Homeland Security, including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.Giuliani went on to reveal that following the election, which he won against then incumbent mayor David Dinkins by around 53,000 votes, then president Bill Clinton’s justice department launched an investigation into him.“[Then-attorney general] Janet Reno is coming after us, we violated civil rights,” Giuliani recalled his lawyer Dennison Young telling him. Giuliani then reassured Young, saying: “What civil rights did we violate? They don’t have civil rights! All we did was prevent people who can’t vote from voting. Maybe we tricked them, but tricking is not a crime.”“In those days, we didn’t have crazy prosecutors. Nowadays, they’ll probably prosecute you for it … and that’s the way we kept down the Hispanic vote,” Giuliani said.“Not the legal vote, the illegal vote,” Lake interjected.“Of course! The Hispanic illegal vote, which takes away the Hispanic legal vote,” Giuliani responded.The Huffington Post compiled a handful of media reports from the time which collectively point towards Giuliani’s voter suppression tactics during the election.A 1993 New York Times article published at the time of the election reported that Dinkins had called for a news conference to “accuse the Giuliani camp of waging ‘an outrageous campaign of voter intimidation and dirty tricks’”.One of the charges included English and Spanish pro-Dinkins posters that were allegedly put up at the time in Washington Heights and the Bronx, predominantly Hispanic and Black areas. “The posters suggested that illegal immigrants would be arrested at the polls and deported if they tried to vote,” the New York Times reported.An article published in the socialist journal Against the Current months after the election also mentioned the posters.“Cops put up phony Dinkins posters in mostly Dominican Washington Heights, saying the INS would be checking voters’ documents at the polls. In some cases police themselves asked Latino voters for their passports,” wrote labor and social activist Andy Pollack.Similarly, a Washington Post report published days after the election cited complaints surrounding voter suppression in the city.“Among the complaints are the placing of signs on telephone poles and walls in Latino areas warning that ‘federal authorities and immigration officials will be at all election sites … Immigration officials will be at locations to arrest and deport undocumented illegal voters,’” the Post reported.A statement issued by the then justice department on 2 November 1993 said: “The Department of Justice is aware that posters have been placed throughout New York City misinforming voters about the role of federal officials in today’s elections … Federal observers are in New York to protect the rights of minority voters. They are not there to enforce immigration laws.”Speaking to the Huffington Post, Sweeney dismissed Giuliani’s claims as “nonsense” and said that he ran a “legitimate” operation alongside Levine. Levine echoed similar sentiments to the outlet, explaining that the purpose of the operation was “getting poll watchers and attorneys when there was a dispute”.He added that he had “no knowledge” of the trick Giuliani described.Since the 1993 mayoral elections, voter suppression tactics have continued to be carried out in various ways across the city.In December 2021, the New York City council approved a bill that would have allowed for non-US citizens to vote in local elections. However, the law was struck down months later in June 2022 after state supreme court judge Ralph Porzio of Staten Island ruled the law “unconstitutional”.The same month Porzio struck down the law, the Democratic New York governor Kathy Hochul signed the John R Lewis Voting Rights Act into law, which seeks to prevent local officials from enacting rules that may suppress voting rights of individuals as a result of their race.In addition to local governments or school districts with track records of discrimination now being required to obtain state approval before passing certain voting policies, the new law expands language assistance to voters for whom English is not a first language, as well as provides legal tools to fight racist voting provisions.“We’re going to change our election laws so we no longer hurt minority communities,” Hochul said as she signed the bill into law. More

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      ‘A dangerous trend’: Florida Republicans poised to pass more voter restrictions

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      Florida Republicans are on the verge of passing new restrictions on groups that register voters, a move voting rights groups and experts say will make it harder for non-white Floridians to get on the rolls.The restrictions are part of a sweeping 96-page election bill the legislature is likely to send to Governor Ron DeSantis’s desk soon. The measure increases fines for third-party voter registration groups. It also shortens the amount of time the groups have to turn in any voter registration applications they collect from 14 days to 10. The bill makes it illegal for non-citizens and people convicted of certain felonies to “collect or handle” voter registration applications on behalf of third-party groups. Groups would also have to give each voter they register a receipt and be required to register themselves with the state ahead of each general election cycle. Under current law, they only have to register once and their registration remains effective indefinitely.Groups can now be fined $50,000 for each ineligible person they hire to do voter canvassing. They can also be fined $50 a day, up to $2,500, for each day late they turn in a voter registration form.Those restrictions are more likely to affect non-white Floridians. About one in 10 Black and Hispanic Floridians registered to vote using a third-party group, according to Daniel Smith, a political science professor at the University of Florida who closely studies voting rights. Non-white voters are five times more likely to register with a third-party group in the state than their white counterparts, “a fact likely not lost on those pushing the legislation”, Smith said.“This will likely be the final nail in the coffin for third-party groups to be able to register voters in Florida,” added Smith, who has served as an expert for groups challenging similar new restrictions.The bill passed the Florida senate on Wednesday and is expected to clear the Florida house later this week.The measures are the latest in a wave of new restrictions Florida Republicans and DeSantis, who is on the verge of a presidential bid, have enacted in a little over four years. After the 2020 election, the state passed sweeping legislation making it harder to request and return a mail-in ballot. Republicans have also made it nearly impossible for Floridians with a felony conviction to figure out if they are eligible to vote. Last year, DeSantis created the first of its kind state agency to prosecute election crimes.The new measure marks the second time since the 2020 election that Florida Republicans have raised the maximum fine for third-party voter registration organizations. In 2021, the legislature raised the maximum fine groups could face in a year from $1,000 to $50,000. The new bill would increase the maximum fine to $250,000.The higher fines will probably cause some groups to stop registering voters, said Cecile Scoon, the president of the Florida chapter of the League of Women Voters, which frequently hosts voter registration drives.“I think there are a lot of small organizations that don’t feel they can play in that league of fines,” said Scoon. “I think you’re going to get a lot of people that say, ‘hey we can’t handle this. We’re just a little church. We’re just a little chapter of a sorority. We don’t have the resources.”Republicans dispute that the bill will make it harder to vote.“This bill does not and will not hinder anyone’s right to vote, nor would I ever subscribe my name to something that could even remotely be concluded to be voter suppression. There is nothing in this bill that makes it harder for a lawfully registered voter to cast their ballot,” state senator Danny Burgess, a Republican who chairs the state elections committee, said during debate on the floor, according to the News Service of Florida.The office of election crimes and security, a new office created under DeSantis to target voter fraud, has targeted voter registration groups during its first year in operation. In 2022, the agency levied $41,600 in fines against voter registration groups, and made several criminal referrals.A spokesman for the Florida department of state, which oversees the agency, did not provide a detailed breakdown of the groups fined or their offenses.In an annual report filed with the Florida legislature, the office said that it had reviewed “a large number of complaints” involving voter registration applications that were turned in late.The new legislation would make it even harder for groups to turn in applications on time, giving them four fewer days to do so. That cut increases pressure on groups that take time to review the applications they collect to ensure that the information in them is accurate and that the voter is eligible.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen a group hosts a registration drive, they will often get people signed up from many counties who pass by. But a law passed in 2021 makes it so voter registration groups have to turn in applications they collect to the county in which the voter resides – they previously could return it anywhere – making it even more difficult to turn in the forms on time.“You’re either gonna burn gas and find the time to drive an hour or two hours to wherever it’s located from wherever you are. And where your volunteer is. Or are you gonna put it in the mail and cross your fingers,” Scoon said.Burgess, the Republican pushing the bill, said that it would ensure voters can get on the rolls.“The reality is if a third-party voter registration organization fails to submit timely somebody’s voter registration, that voter is disenfranchised,” he said, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.The language in the bill barring non-citizens from participating in third-party voter registration groups will also make it harder to reach immigrant communities, said Andrea Mercado, the executive director of Florida Rising, a non-profit group.“When we do our work to help register new citizens, it makes sense to hire people who come from that community. Sometimes they’re on the path to getting their US citizenship, but they don’t have it yet,” she said. “That doesn’t mean that they’re not excellent at reaching out to other people in the Colombian community, in the Venezuelan community, in the Jamaican community and talking to them about why voting matters and why you should be registered to vote.”The bill also appears poised to cause even more confusion about voting eligibility for people with felony convictions. The measure would change the language on the card people in Florida receive after registering to confirm their addition to the voter rolls to say that possession of the card is not proof of eligibility to vote. Republicans are making the change after reporting revealed that 19 people with felony convictions who were charged with illegal voting last year had received voter registration cards in the mail and had not been warned they were ineligible to vote.The sweeping changes are the latest move to restrict voting rights for people with felonies after Floridians approved a constitutional amendment in 2018 expanding the right to vote to many people with criminal histories. After the measure passed, the Florida legislature passed a law that required those with felonies to pay off any outstanding debts before they can vote again. Florida has no centralized database where people can look up how much they owe, and the state has been backlogged reviewing the applications.“Changing the law and adding such a disclaimer to Florida’s voter ID cards is a direct admission by the state that it is unwilling to or incapable of creating a centralized voter system to determine voter eligibility,” the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, the main group that pushed the constitutional amendment in 2018, said in a statement.The bill is an alarming attack on voters in Florida, Mercado said. “It represents a really dangerous trend in Florida and across our country that is moving away from democracy,” she said. More

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      Popularity is optional as Republicans find ways to impose minority rule

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      “We called for you all to ban assault weapons, and you respond with an assault on democracy.” These were the words of Justin Jones, a Black Democrat, to Tennessee Republicans after he and a colleague, Justin Pearson, were expelled for leading a gun protest on the state house of representatives floor.A week later, Jones and Pearson were reinstated amid applause, whoops and cheers at the state capitol in Nashville. But few believe that the assault on democracy is at an end. What happened in Tennessee is seen as indicative of a Donald Trump-led Republican party ready to push its extremist agenda by any means necessary.Opinion poll after opinion poll shows that Republicans are increasingly out of touch with mainstream sentiment on hot button issues such as abortion rights and gun safety. Accordingly, the party has suffered disappointment in elections in 2018, 2020 and 2022. Yet instead of rethinking its positions, critics say, it is turning to rightwing judges and state legislators to enforce minority rule.Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “The ballot box didn’t work – the voice of the people said, we’re not going to tolerate these kind of threats by Republicans. But Republicans are using other tools and shredding the fabric of American democracy. It’s a kind of minority authoritarianism.”Despite extraordinary pressures, democracy has proved resilient in recent years. It survived an insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Joe Biden was sworn in as the duly elected president and declared in his inaugural address: “Democracy has prevailed.” And election deniers were routed in last year’s midterms.But while Democrats control the White House and Senate, Republicans have proved expert at finding workarounds, using cogs in the machine that have typically received less attention from activists, journalists and voters. One of them is the judiciary.The supreme court, which includes three justices appointed during Trump’s single term, last year overturned the Roe v Wade ruling that had enshrined the right to abortion for nearly half a century, despite opinion polls showing a majority wanted to protect it.Lower courts have also flexed their muscles. Matthew Kacsmaryk, a judge nominated by Trump in Amarillo, Texas, has ruled against the Joe Biden administration on issues including immigration and LGBTQ+ protections. Earlier this month he blocked the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, the most common abortion method in America.A legal battle ensued with the justice department pledging to take its appeal all the way to the supreme court. The political backlash was also swift.Mini Timmaraju, the president of Naral Pro-Choice America, said: “One extremist judge appointed by a twice impeached, now-indicted former president, Donald Trump, was attempting to effectively ban medication abortion nationwide. The decision is a prime example of minority rule at its worst. These extremists will not stop until they control our reproductive health decisions.”Polling by Ipsos shows that two-thirds of Americans believe medication abortion should remain legal, including 84% of Democrats, 67% of independents and 49% of Republicans. Timmaraju added: “It’s obvious that anti-choice extremists and lawmakers are out of step with Americans. It’s really worth remembering how far out of step they are.”If judges fall short of the Republican wishlist, state governors have shown willingness to intervene. In Texas, Greg Abbott has said he will pardon an Uber driver convicted of murder in the July 2020 shooting of a man at a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Austin, the state capital.The case hinged on whether the shooting was in self-defence. A jury found that Perry, who is white, shot and killed Garrett Foster, a 28-year-old white man, who was carrying an AK-47, according to the Austin American-Statesman newspaper. Abbott tweeted that he will pardon Daniel Perry, 37, an army sergeant, as soon as a request from the parole board “hits my desk”.Earlier this year Abbott also led a state takeover of Houston’s public school district, the eighth biggest in the country with nearly 200,000 students, infuriating Democrats who condemned the move as politically motivated.In Florida another Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has centralised power as he assails gun safety and voting rights, the teaching of gender and race in schools and major corporations such as Disney. On Thursday he signed a bill to ban most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.In this he is backed by a supermajority in the Florida state legislature. State governments, which receive less and less scrutiny as local newspapers go extinct, are another key weapon in the Republican arsenal. In deep red states they have imposed near or total bans on abortion, loosened gun restrictions, curbed LGBTQ+ and voting rights and endorsed Trump’s false claims of election fraud.RaceMinority rule is, more than anything, about race. Whereas white Christians made up 54% of the population when Barack Obama was first running for president in 2008, they now make up only 44%.Activists point to Republican-dominated state governments pushing legislation that would allow them to control Black-led cities and push hardline policies on crime. Examples include expanding the jurisdiction of state police in Jackson, Mississippi, and removing local control of the St Louis police department in Missouri. Republicans in the US Congress itself overturned police reform in Washington DC.Makia Green, a lead strategist for the Movement for Black Lives, said: “A lot of it is not only taking away the people we sent to speak for us – to make sure that our voices are heard and that we are part of the process – but also to overwhelm Black voters, to instil apathy in Black voters so that it feels like, ‘I went out, I voted, I did what I had to do, and they took the power away from me, so why should I show up next year?’”Green, co-founder of Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, a Black community organisation in the Washington area, added: “Our democracy has holes in it, especially with the record number of attacks on voting rights and civic education. Republican and rightwing extremists have been making it harder and harder for our people to vote and so people are questioning, do I still live in a democracy?”Then there was Tennessee where, on 6 April, Republicans sparked national outrage by kicking out Jones and Pearson, two young Black Democrats, as punishment for breaking rules of decorum a week earlier by leading a protest inside the house chamber. The demonstration was prompted by a March school shooting in Nashville in which three children, three adults and the attacker were killed.Just as on abortion, Republicans are demonstrably at odds with public opinion on gun safety. A poll last year by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows 71% of Americans say gun laws should be stricter, including about half of Republicans, the vast majority of Democrats and a majority of those in gun-owning households.Meagan Hatcher-Mays, director of democracy policy at the progressive movement Indivisible, said: “It’s never the situation that the GOP moderates their position on something. It’s always a reflexive pivot to attacking and undermining democracy and that’s exactly what they did in this situation.”But Hatcher-Mays added: “If there’s any silver lining to the way that the GOP behaves it’s that they can’t hide forever from the bad and unpopular things that they do.”Republicans have long been struggling against demographic headwinds and political trends. They have lost the national popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. They suffered another reminder of abortion’s potency when a Democratic-backed Milwaukee judge won a recent Wisconsin supreme court race with the fate of the state’s abortion ban on the line.Republicans remain competitive in the US Senate – the body that approves nominated judges – because small, predominantly white states get two seats each, carrying as much weight as vast, racially diverse ones. In 2018 David Leonhardt of the New York Times calculated that the Senate gives the average Black American only 75% as much representation as the average white American, and the average Hispanic American only 55% as much.Kurt Bardella, a Democratic strategist, noted that the government was founded with checks and balances to ensure that minority viewpoints could be heard. “But it was not the intent of the framers and founders to have those minority views imposed on the majority and certainly not to have those in the minority attack the rule of law to try to unravel majority rule, which is what’s happening right now. It doesn’t get more anti-democratic than expelling members from a legislative body for expressing themselves in a constitutionally protected way.“Republicans are inflicting injury and harm on democracy. It’s a continuation of what they started to do with the big lie [that the 2020 election was stolen] … which paved the way for an insurrectionist attempt. We’re seeing other extreme iterations of that play out in individual states. When you have a minority of people exercising power over the majority, that’s authoritarianism.”Additional reporting by Lauren Gambino More

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      How Ron DeSantis waged a targeted assault on Black voters: ‘I fear for what’s to come’

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      Al Lawson felt the weight of his victory the night he was elected to Congress in 2016.He was born in Midway, a small town that’s part of a stretch of land in northern Florida dotted with tobacco fields once home to plantations. A former basketball star, he was once reprimanded for drinking out of a whites-only water fountain. In some of his early campaigns for the state legislature, he ran into the Ku Klux Klan.There was jubilation when he was elected.“Everywhere I would go, it was like a celebration,” Lawson said one morning last month in his office in downtown Tallahassee. “People saying: ‘Boy, I wish my daddy, my granddaddy – I really wish they could see this.’”In Congress, Lawson was a low-key member known for delivering federal money for things like new storm shelters to help his northern Florida communities. He was easily re-elected to the House in 2018 and 2020. But when he ran for re-election in 2022, he lost to a white Republican by nearly 20 points.Lawson’s loss was nearly entirely attributable to Governor Ron DeSantis. The governor went out of his way to redraw the boundaries of Lawson’s district to ensure that a Republican could win it. It was a brazen scheme to weaken the political power of Black voters and a striking example of how DeSantis has waged one of the most aggressive – and successful – efforts to curtail voting rights in Florida.In addition to reducing Black representation in Congress, the governor has tightened election rules, created a first-of-its-kind state agency, funded by more than $1m to prosecute election fraud and gutted one of the biggest expansions of modern-era voting rights.“Governor DeSantis has really targeted Black folks in his efforts to strip, restrict and suppress our vote in the state of Florida. That has been his number one mission,” said Jasmine Burney-Clark, the founder of Equal Ground, a nonprofit that works to register voters.As DeSantis prepares to launch a run for president, his war on voting rights is a dangerous omen for what he could do in the White House. Several states have already passed similar voting restrictions and implemented their own units dedicated to prosecuting election fraud, which is extremely rare. DeSantis’ office did not respond to a request for comment on this story.“At the end of the day, this is all about his blind political ambition,” said Angie Nixon, a Democratic state lawmaker who led a sit-in on the floor of the state legislature in protest of DeSantis’s attack on voting rights. “I fear for what’s to come.”A new Republican voting mapLawson’s election was a big deal in Gadsden county, the only majority-Black county in Florida. Near the stately old courthouse in Quincy, the county seat, Brenda Holt, a county commissioner, can quickly point out the tree that was used to lynch Black people.“We needed a Black congressman. We needed one simply because he would come to all these little places and help us with things. He understood about raising hogs and he understood about being out there in the tobacco fields,” said Holt, who has also served as the chair of the county Democratic party. “When he walked in the room, you didn’t have to say nothing. We didn’t have to explain ourselves so much to him. Because he lived it.”Lawson’s election was no accident. In 2015, the Florida supreme court ordered the state to draw a district that stretched across northern Florida, from Tallahassee to Jacksonville. Such a district was legally required, the court said, to preserve the ability of Black voters in that part of the state to elect the candidate of their choosing.When it came time to redraw Florida’s congressional districts last year, the Republican-controlled legislature offered up a plan that kept Lawson’s district intact for at least another decade.Then DeSantis stepped in.On Martin Luther King weekend last year, the governor submitted his own proposal for Florida’s 28 congressional districts. His plan chopped Lawson’s district into four different ones, all of which favored Republicans. DeSantis took issue specifically with the idea that the state was required to draw an irregularly shaped district to benefit Black voters. Such an approach, he said, was unconstitutional.The legislature did not back down. It passed a map that kept Lawson’s district in place. But it also passed a backup map which broke up the majority of Lawson’s district, but kept Jacksonville contained in one congressional district. It was a compromise.DeSantis rejected that plan too, saying it was dead on arrival.Eventually, the legislature caved and invited DeSantis to draw a congressional map.“I served in the legislature for 17 years and never in the history of the legislative body have we turned over the redistricting to the governor. Never heard of that – never,” said Tony Hill, a former Lawson staffer who unsuccessfully ran for Congress last year.Lawson was blindsided. Some top Republicans in the state, he said, including Senator Rick Scott and Ted Yoho, privately told him they were surprised by what DeSantis was doing.DeSantis, who had already been working with top Republican mapmakers, proposed a plan that sliced up Lawson’s district and heavily favored Republicans in 20 of Florida’s 28 congressional seats, a bump up from the 16 GOP seats that the legislature proposed. DeSantis’s map also cut the number of districts in which Black voters had a chance to elect a candidate of their choice from four to two.The legislature passed his map. Last November, white Republicans won all four seats in northern Florida.“This is a lynching,” Holt said. “You’re treating us like a dog. They treat dogs better than us. We’re pissed off.”It’s now harder for Jacksonville residents to access federal resources to address issues like housing affordability, food deserts and crime. Several residents said they have not yet seen any town halls or events from Aaron Bean, the new GOP congressman who represents the area. A Bean spokesperson did not say whether he had held any events in Jacksonville. “Congressman Bean has been enthusiastic about seeing all corners of this newly drawn congressional district. From town halls to chamber of commerce events, from groups of thousands to groups of one, he has made it his mission to engage with as many residents of north-east Florida as possible,” she said.Ben Frazier, an activist who leads a nonprofit called the Northside Coalition of Jacksonville, emphasized the need for federal assistance as he drove around the city’s 33209 zip code – one of the most dangerous in the city – pointing out boarded-up businesses and houses.“It is unfortunate that [DeSantis] has chosen to operate like that because he’s not only a danger to Black people and people of color,” he said. “He’s a danger to democracy.”“It’s people of color that all of this redistricting is concerned about,” said Lee Harris, the senior pastor at Mt Olive Primitive Baptist church in Jacksonville. “If you notice, as long as they think they have control and the majority, they will push whatever law is beneficial to them.”DeSantis’s attack on Black representation appears to have aims far outside Lawson’s district.The governor has waged a legal battle over a 2010 constitutional amendment, overwhelmingly approved by Florida voters, making it illegal to draw districts that reduce political access for racial minorities. Getting rid of Lawson’s district would seem to violate that provision.“It was a performing, crossover district where Black voters had long successfully elected their candidate of choice. And in dismantling it, it raises all kinds of indicia of discriminatory intent,” said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.If DeSantis succeeds in dismantling districts like Lawson’s, it could ultimately provide legal cover for other states to do the same, Li said. In the federal courts, DeSantis’s approach joins a long line of conservative cases that have been pushing to raise the bar for when race can be considered in redistricting.“It’s basically trying to divorce any consideration of race or racial impacts in a redistricting map from the actual drawing and construction of a redistricting map,” said Chris Shenton, an attorney at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice who is challenging the Florida maps.“That’s a distinction that only makes sense on paper and only makes sense if what you’re trying to do is prevent the Voting Rights Act from working.”‘Fear’ and confusionBeyond redistricting, one of the key elements of DeSantis’s crackdown on voting has been his use of a law enforcement unit to pursue charges of voter fraud.One morning last August, Ronald Lee Miller, a Miami man in his late 50s, heard a knock on his door and answered, still in his underwear. When he opened the door, he saw that police had surrounded his home, some with their guns drawn and pointed at him. They put him in handcuffs and told him he was under arrest.A few hours later, DeSantis appeared at a press conference in a Fort Lauderdale courtroom, flanked by uniformed law enforcement officers, and announced Miller was among 19 people with prior criminal convictions being arrested for voter fraud and would “pay the price”. They were charged with multiple counts of third-degree felonies, each punishable by up to five years in prison. The arrests were the first made under the office of election crimes and security, a new $1.2m office DeSantis had created a few months earlier.Many saw it as a thinly veiled effort to keep Black people from voting (14 of those arrested were Black). And records showed that many of those charged believed they were eligible to vote. Even though they all had prior convictions that resulted in a lifetime voting ban in Florida, none of them had been warned they couldn’t vote. All of them, including Miller, had received voter registration cards before casting a ballot.Ahead of the arrests, DeSantis and Florida Republicans had also made the rules for voting with a felony conviction in Florida extremely confusing.In 2018, Florida voters overwhelmingly approved one of the largest expansions of the right to vote in the modern era. They approved a constitutional amendment that allowed people with most felony convictions to vote. Those convicted of murder and sex-related offenses – as the 19 people in the arrests had been – were excluded.DeSantis and the GOP legislature followed up by passing a law that required people with felony convictions to pay off outstanding fines and fees before casting a ballot. But Florida has no central mechanism for people to check how much they owe and state officials quickly became backlogged.“They want to put fear, the same type of spirit, fear into people so that you won’t vote,” said Rosemary McCoy, a Jacksonville activist who had her voting rights restored in 2019.Miller and his lawyer, Robert Farrar, eventually got his case dismissed on procedural grounds, successfully arguing that the statewide prosecutor didn’t have the authority to bring the case.But DeSantis did not let it go. In February, the legislature passed a law that expanded the power of the statewide prosecutor, bolstering their authority to go after cases like Miller’s. DeSantis has also requested increasing the office of election crimes and security’s budget to $3.15m and nearly doubling the number of personnel.Now the governor and the legislature could cause more confusion. An election bill unveiled last week would make it so that all voters receive a warning that they may not be eligible to vote when they receive their official voter registration card.“This has all become nothing more than political theater. It’s a waste of time, waste of money, waste of judicial assets,” Farrar said.The office of election crimes and security also targets groups that register voters.In Florida, Black and Hispanic voters are five times more likely than white voters in Florida to register through a third-party group. But in its first year, the office of election crimes and security levied $41,600 in fines against these voter registration groups. Those fines came after DeSantis and the legislature passed sweeping new voting restrictions and raised the maximum fine that could be levied from $1,000 to $50,000.Burney-Clark said her nonprofit Equal Ground registered 10,000 voters in the lead-up to the 2020 election. But since then, it has scaled back and only registered a handful of voters – the group can’t afford the risk of high fines.‘We’re going to silence you’Cecile Scoon, president of the Florida chapter of the League of Women Voters, sees a clear through-line in all of DeSantis’s efforts to attack voting rights.“It’s all connected to ‘we don’t care what you vote,’” she said. “‘We don’t care what you say. We know better and we’re going to silence you.’“We are not in the land of the free any more in the state of Florida.” More

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      North Carolina court appears poised to overrule itself in gerrymandering case

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      The North Carolina supreme court heard oral arguments on Tuesday in a major gerrymandering case that could have significant implications for US voting rights.In a highly unusual move, the North Carolina court appears poised to overrule itself and get rid of congressional and state legislative districts it approved last year. The GOP-drawn map that was struck down could have produced a 11-3 advantage for Republicans in the congressional delegation. The one that replaced it was far less advantageous to the GOP and wound up producing a 7-7 split in the 2022 midterm elections. The court’s decision would likely allow Republicans to get a more advantageous map back in place.Demonstrators gathered outside the state supreme court in Raleigh on Tuesday as the justices heard oral arguments in the case, Harper v Hall. Much of the back-and-forth at the hearing focused on whether there were metrics the court could use to measure partisan gerrymandering. Phil Strach, a lawyer for the legislature, argued that because there were no clear metrics, it was not something the court could regulate.Anita Earls, a Democrat on the court, pushed Strach to explain whether that meant the legislature could essentially do whatever it wants when it comes to drawing districts. If the state legislature were to adopt a rule that explicitly said any congressional plan had to result in an 11-3 advantage for Republicans, she asked, could the state supreme court do anything to stop it? Strach suggested it could not.“Some things, your honor, are beyond the power of this court,” he said.Lali Madduri, a lawyer representing those challenging the map, accused lawmakers of playing a “cynical game, hoping that this newly constituted court will reverse course and abdicate its fundamental duty of judicial review”. Sam Hirsch, another lawyer for the challengers, said that an effort to impose new legislative districts could be unconstitutional since North Carolina’s constitution prohibits mid-decade redistricting for the state general assembly.Republicans won control of the North Carolina supreme court last fall and the new 5-2 GOP majority granted a request from the legislature to reconsider its redistricting ruling last month. The court had only granted similar requests twice before in the last 30 years. US courts do not typically grant requests to overrule their own rulings absent a major change in the case. The only thing that changed in the North Carolina case was the makeup of the court, Earls wrote in a searing dissenting opinion earlier this year.“It took this court just one month to send a smoke signal to the public that our decisions are fleeting, and our precedent is only as enduring as the terms of the justices who sit on the bench,” she wrote. “I write to make clear that the emperor has no clothes.”That rehearing decision could have reverberations at the US supreme court, which is separately considering the case and could issue a decision that could upend US election law.In December, lawyers for the legislature asked the justices to overrule the state court and endorse a fringe legal theory that would prohibit state courts from policing the drawing of congressional districts and other federal election rules. Such a ruling from the US supreme court would upend US election law, removing state courts from policing federal elections. Earlier this month, the US supreme court asked for briefing on how the decision to rehear the case in North Carolina affected its own authority to issue a ruling.In addition to the redistricting case, the North Carolina supreme court is also set this week to rehear a previous decision striking down the state’s voter ID law. More

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      Georgia Republicans race to pass laws to restrict and challenge votes

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      Georgia Republicans race to pass laws to restrict and challenge votesIn the final days of the legislative session, there’s also a push to create a mechanism to unseat county election board membersIn the final few days of this year’s Georgia assembly legislative session, Republican lawmakers raced to propose laws seeking to restrict voting access, and make it easier for citizens to challenge and subvert normal election processes.‘We will prosecute death threats’: Arizona’s new attorney general fights to protect election workersRead moreSenate bill 221, house bill 422 and house bill 426 are just a few of the newly proposed election laws, which come after state Republicans, including the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, praised election officials for smooth elections in the past two years. They include measures to eradicate absentee ballot drop boxes, allow citizens to more easily challenge voter registrations – which Republican conspiracy theorists had already done with little backing evidence during the midterms – and even unseal ballots for review.While some of the elements of these proposed laws offer expanded flexibility and resources for elections, including the popular bipartisan effort to eradicate runoff elections in the state, other aspects are grounded in unfounded claims and conspiracy theories surrounding mass election fraud stemming from the 2020 election.Cynthia Battles, policy and engagement director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, a civil rights advocacy organization, recently raised her concerns at a hearing for house bill 426. “We continue relitigating the 2020 election, and the Georgia assembly is making legislation to try and appease some conspiracy theories,” she said.SB221: ‘weaponizing voter challenges’SB221, the most controversial law, allows voter eligibility challenges to proceed without adequate due diligence. Last year, the number of challenges statewide was nearly 100,000, yielding many unfounded claims from apparent election deniers, and clogging up the process for overwhelmed election officials during a critical time. Under SB221, voters could be purged from rolls simply based on allegations that include “a sworn statement by any person with relevant information”.“We have seen a lot of organized and weaponized groups that have been weaponizing voter challenges for partisan gain,” said Isabel Otero, Georgia policy director at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “That causes a lot of concern for us.”In addition, the bill proposes using the National Change of Address (NCOA) database to determine a voter’s eligibility to vote in elections. However, according to Otero, this could directly violate federal law.“That program is not very reliable as a tool for establishing the eligibility of a voter,” said Otero. “And there are federal laws that provide for safe harbor provisions when removing voters from the rolls using the NCOA data because the NCOA data is known to be inaccurate.”The proposed changes under SB221 don’t end at voter eligibility. In a last-minute change during a senate committee on ethics meeting, Republican senators amended the proposed legislation to include language that completely eliminates the use of drop boxes throughout the state. This comes after previous legislation slashed the number of drop boxes available by more than half after the 2020 election when record numbers of voters returned their absentee ballots via drop boxes. There is no evidence that drop boxes increase voter fraud.HB422: an assault on members of the election boardMeanwhile, house bill 422, which is specific to Ware county, would allow the political party that receives the most votes in the preceding election – in this case, the Republican party – to unseat current election board members and appoint replacements of their choosing. If this law is passed, it will unseat the county’s three Black board of elections members. This is in direct contrast to other counties in the state that hold spaces for members of both parties.Shawn Taylor, the current co-chair of the Ware county board of elections, is concerned that without safeguards in place, those nominated to the board will not properly represent the population of the county.“The board currently has three Black members,” said Taylor. “We believe that this legislation is an assault on not only the members of the board but on the Black and brown members of the community.”Fallon McClure, deputy director of the ACLU of Georgia, said HB422 is part of an alarming and growing pattern of legislation that allows biased political motivations to rule in local election boards.“We must take partisanship out of elections administration and make it a fair process where everyone can have their voice heard,” said McClure.Some south Georgia residents are concerned that even though this law currently only affects Ware county and does say that Democrats can submit nominations for the election boards, stark partisan divides make this just a formality that will give way to Democrats losing their voice.“We are very concerned that the fair process will fail,” said former state house candidate Lethia Kittrell. “Our major concern is that this is already feeding down into other areas.”HB426: removing a ‘check against partisanship’Though the proposed law’s connection to election conspiracy theories is not as direct, another proposed bill has a much clearer connection. HB426 aims to remove the court seal on paper ballot verifications. As it stands, a lawsuit must be filed to access physical copies of election documentation. However, under HB426, only a request would need to be made for public access of ballots.While the bill’s sponsor, Representative Shaw Blackmon, says it will improve transparency and help guarantee a truly “citizen-run election”, those opposed to the bill maintain that this is another tool that can disenfranchise voters and burden election officials.“The court seal provides a check against partisanship,” said Phil Olaleye, a Democratic state representative. “I would not want to lower the barrier for potentially inundating our local officials and staff with an endless stream of requests coming from folks who are upset at the politics of the day.”Anne Gray Herring of Common Cause Georgia echoed Olaleye’s sentiments. “Consider the real risks of an unmanageable quantity of review requests, including those that are made in bad faith and the limits of time and resources for county officials,” she said.Controversial election legislation is nothing new for Georgia. Like the contentious SB202 in 2021 – which overhauled the state’s voting system – these newly proposed laws will significantly affect election officials and voters.“Right now in our election system, we see an enormous amount of burnout and an enormous amount of turnover,” said Vasu Abhiraman of the ACLU of Georgia. “This should be an emergency to try to make the lives of local election officials easier.”Voting advocates like Abhiraman agree that this type of sweeping legislation each session is a direct result of election lies and conspiracy theories.“[This is] nothing more than continued political appeasement of the folks who have ripped so many lives apart and who have suppressed the vote in Georgia,” said Abhiraman.“Underlying it is the perpetuation of a false narrative and an attempt to disenfranchise a subset of voters.”TopicsUS newsThe fight for democracyGeorgiaUS voting rightsRepublicansUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Biden pays tribute to heroes of Selma’s ‘Bloody Sunday’ and highlights voting rights

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      Biden pays tribute to heroes of Selma’s ‘Bloody Sunday’ and highlights voting rightsThe president spoke of the civil rights movement march that led to passage of landmark voting rights legislation nearly 60 years agoJoe Biden paid tribute to the heroes of the “Bloody Sunday” civil rights march nearly 60 years ago and used its annual commemoration to warn of an ongoing threat to US democracy from election deniers and the erosion of voting rights.The US president joined thousands of people in Selma, Alabama to mark the movement that led to passage of landmark voting rights legislation shortly after peaceful marchers were brutally attacked by law enforcement on a bridge though town.Speaking on a Selma stage with the bridge as a backdrop, Biden warned that the right to vote in the US – which the civil rights marchers had sought to gain for Black Americans – was far from safe amid a concerted push to weaken voting rights legislation across the US and prominent Republican efforts to call into question election results.“The right to vote – to have your vote counted – is the threshold of democracy … This fundamental rights remains under assault,” Biden said.He added: We have to remain vigilant … In America hate and extremism will not prevail though they are raising their ugly heads again.”The speech presented Biden with a chance to speak directly to the current generation of civil rights activists. Many feel dejected because the president has been unable to make good on a campaign pledge to bolster voting rights and are eager to see his administration keep the issue in the spotlight.‘We’re hitting the soil’: Georgia activists mobilize voters in an off yearRead moreBiden underscored the importance of commemorating Bloody Sunday so that history can’t be erased, while making the case that the fight for voting rights remains integral to delivering economic justice and civil rights for Black Americans, according to White House officials.This year’s commemoration came as the historic city of roughly 18,000 is still digging out from the aftermath of a January EF-2 tornado that destroyed or damaged thousands of properties in and around Selma.Ahead of Biden’s visit, the Rev William Barber II, a co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, along with six other activists wrote to the president and members of Congress to express their frustration with the lack of progress on voting rights legislation.In his speech, Biden vowed to push ahead with those laws and also to keep up the pressure to get new laws passed on police reform, though that will not be easy now that Republicans control the House of Representatives after securing a narrow win in the 2022 midterm elections.Other parts of Biden’s address sounded like a stump speech as the US awaits a widely expected announcement from the president that he will run for a second term. He touted his economic achievements and strove to strike a tone of optimism for the US as it seeks to overcome hard times.Former president Donald Trump has already declared his own intention to run for the White House again. Trump’s own election pitch is full of false claims about the 2020 election though he remains a strong favorite to secure the Republican nomination.Few moments have had as lasting importance to the civil rights movement as what happened on 7 March 1965 in Selma and in the weeks that followed.Some 600 peaceful demonstrators led by Lewis and Williams had gathered that day, just weeks after the fatal shooting of a young Black man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, by an Alabama trooper.Lewis, who would later serve in the US House representing Georgia, and the others were brutally beaten by Alabama troopers and sheriff’s deputies as they tried to cross Selma’s Edmund Pettus bridge at the start of what was supposed to be a 54-mile walk to the state capital in Montgomery, part of a larger effort to register Black voters in the south.The images of the police violence sparked outrage across the country. Days later, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr led what became known as the “Turnaround Tuesday” march, in which marchers approached a wall of police at the bridge and prayed before turning back.President Lyndon B Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act of 1965 eight days after Bloody Sunday, calling Selma one of those rare moments in American history when “history and fate meet at a single time”.The Associated Press contributed to this reportTopicsCivil rights movementUS voting rightsJoe BidenUS politicsAlabamaMartin Luther KingnewsReuse this content More

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      Biden honors Martin Luther King Jr with sermon: ‘His legacy shows us the way’

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      Biden honors Martin Luther King Jr with sermon: ‘His legacy shows us the way’ President gave sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and spoke about the need to protect democracy Joe Biden marked what would have been Martin Luther King Jr’s 94th birthday with a sermon on Sunday at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, celebrating the legacy of the civil rights leader while speaking about the urgent need to protect US democracy.There’s one winner in the Biden documents discovery: Donald TrumpRead moreBiden said he was “humbled” to become the first sitting president to give the Sunday sermon at King’s church, also describing the experience as “intimidating”.“I believe Dr King’s life and legacy show us the way and we should pay attention,” Biden said. He later noted he was wearing rosary beads his son, Beau, wore as he died.“I doubt whether any of us would have thought during Dr King’s time that literally the institutional structures of this country might collapse, like we’re seeing in Brazil, we’re seeing in other parts of the world,” Biden said.In a sermon that lasted around 25 minutes, the president spoke about the continued need to protect democracy. Unlike some of his other speeches on the topic, Biden did not mention Donald Trump or Republicans directly.The GOP has embraced new voting restrictions, including in Georgia, and defended the former president’s role in the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.“Nothing is guaranteed in our democracy,” Biden said. “We know there’s a lot of work that has to continue on economic justice, civil rights, voting rights and protecting our democracy.”He praised Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who noted at a ceremony after she was confirmed it had taken just one generation in her family to go from segregation to the US supreme court.“Give us the ballot and we will place judges on the benches of the south who will do justly and love mercy,” Biden said, quoting King.Biden preached in Atlanta a little over a year after he gave a forceful speech calling for the Senate to get rid of the filibuster, a procedural rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation, in order to pass sweeping voting reforms.“I’m tired of being quiet,” the president said in that speech.A Democratic voting rights bill named after John Lewis, the late civil rights leader and Georgia congressman, would have made election day a national holiday, ensured access to early voting and mail-in ballots and enabled the justice department to intervene in states with a history of voter interference.But that effort collapsed when two Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, refused to get rid of the filibuster. Sinema is now an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.Since then, there has been no federal action on voting rights. In March 2021, Biden issued an executive order telling federal agencies to do what they could do improve opportunities for voter registration.The speech also comes as the US supreme court considers a case that could significantly curtail Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the 1965 law that was one of the crowning achievements of King and other activists. A ruling is expected by June.Biden’s failure to bolster voting right protections, a central campaign pledge, is one of his biggest disappointments in office. The task is even steeper now Republicans control the House. In advance of Biden’s visit to Atlanta, White House officials said he was committed to advocating for meaningful voting rights action.“The president will speak on a number of issues at the church, including how important it is that we have access to our democracy,” senior adviser Keisha Lance Bottoms said.Bottoms, who was mayor of Atlanta from 2018 to 2022, also said “you can’t come to Atlanta and not acknowledge the role that the civil rights movement and Dr King played in where we are in the history of our country”.This is a delicate moment for Biden. On Thursday the attorney general, Merrick Garland, announced the appointment of a special counsel to investigate how Biden handled classified documents after leaving the vice-presidency in 2017. The White House on Saturday revealed that additional classified records were found at Biden’s home near Wilmington, Delaware.Biden was invited to Ebenezer, where King was co-pastor from 1960 until he was assassinated in 1968, by Senator Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor. Like many battleground state Democrats in 2022, Warnock kept his distance from Biden as the the president’s approval rating lagged. But with Biden beginning to turn his attention to an expected 2024 re-election effort, Georgia can expect plenty of attention.Warnock told ABC’s This Week: “I’m honored to present the president of the United States there where he will deliver the message and where he will sit in the spiritual home of Martin Luther King Jr, Georgia’s greatest son, arguably the greatest American, who reminds us that we are tied in a single garment of destiny, that this is not about Democrat and Republican, red, yellow, brown, black and white. We’re all in it together.”In 2020, Biden won Georgia as well as Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Black votes made up much of the Democratic electorate. Turning out Black voters in those states will be essential to Biden’s 2024 hopes.The White House has tried to promote Biden’s agenda in minority communities, citing efforts to encourage states to take equity into account under the $1tn infrastructure bill. The administration also has acted to end sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses, scrapping a policy widely seen as racist.The administration highlights Biden’s work to diversify the judiciary, including his appointment of Jackson as the first Black woman on the supreme court and the confirmation of 11 Black women judges to federal appeals courts – more than under all previous presidents.King fueled passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Members of his family attended Biden’s sermon. The president planned to be in Washington on Monday, to speak at the National Action Network’s annual breakfast, held on the MLK holiday.TopicsJoe BidenBiden administrationUS voting rightsUS politicsCivil rights movementMartin Luther KingRacenewsReuse this content More