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      Rightwing group pours millions in ‘dark money’ into US voter suppression bid

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      Rightwing group pours millions in ‘dark money’ into US voter suppression bid Tax filings reveal advocacy arm of Heritage Foundation spent $5m on lobbying in 2021 to block voting rights in battleground statesThe advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, the powerful conservative thinktank based in Washington, spent more than $5m on lobbying in 2021 as it worked to block federal voting rights legislation and advance an ambitious plan to spread its far-right agenda calling for aggressive voter suppression measures in battleground states.This article was produced in partnership with Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism projectPreviously unreported 2021 tax filings from Heritage Action for America, which operates as the foundation’s activist wing, shows that it spent $5.1m on contracting outside lobbying services. The outlay comes on top of $560,000 the group invested in its own in-house federal lobbying efforts that year, as well as registered lobbying by Heritage Action staffers in at least 24 states.The 990 tax filing was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with the Guardian. It points to the pivotal role that Heritage Action is increasingly playing in shaping the rules that govern US democracy.The efforts help explain the unprecedented tidal wave of restrictive voting laws that spread across Republican-controlled states in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. The Brennan Center reported that more voter suppression laws were passed in 2021 than in any year since it began monitoring voting legislation more than a decade ago.The expenditures also signal a dramatic increase in Heritage Action’s advocacy activities. In 2020, Heritage Action had reported no spending at all on outside lobbying.Republicans filed record number of anti-voting lawsuits in 2022 – reportRead moreHeritage Action, whose board includes the Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, is set up as a 501(c)4 under the US tax code which exempts it from paying federal taxes. It operates as a “dark money” group, avoiding disclosing the sources of its total annual revenue of over $18m.In the past two years the organization through its public messaging has echoed Donald Trump’s lie that US elections are marked by rampant fraud. A private plan prepared by Heritage Action last year set out a two-year, $24m “election integrity” strategy.The plan, obtained by Documented, proposed a two-pronged approach that would work to block moves by Democrats in Congress to bolster voting rights while at the same time pressing Republican-controlled states to impose restrictions on access to the ballot box. It said: “Where Democrats hold power, we must defend against bad policy. Where conservatives and our allies are in power, we must advance changes that protect the lawful votes of Americans.”The Heritage Action plan, which was first reported by the New York Times, is being published by the Guardian for the first time.Download original documentPart of Heritage Action’s two-year strategy is to promote what it calls “model election laws”, focusing initially on eight battleground states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas and Wisconsin. In a private meeting with donors in Tucson, Arizona, in 2021, the group’s executive director, Jessica Anderson, boasted about the role Heritage Action had played in pressing Republican-controlled legislatures to impose strict restrictions on voting, including limits on mail-in voting and early voting days.In a video of that meeting obtained by Documented, Anderson told the donors that the group acted “quickly and quietly”, bragging that “honestly nobody noticed” their behind-the-scenes influence. Heritage Action staff have registered to lobby in at least two dozen states. Voting rights in 2023: what are the key issues for US democracy?Read moreThe laser-like focus on key swing states like Georgia appears to have had an impact. The New York Times found that one-third of the 68 voting bills filed in Georgia in 2021 contained policy measures and language that aligned closely with proposals from Heritage Action.The group has publicly claimed that it had a hand in advancing 11 voting bills in at least eight states in 2021, though in some cases legislation was passed in only one chamber or went on to be vetoed by the state’s governor.Heritage Foundation, under the auspices of its elections supremo Hans von Spakovsky, curates an “election fraud database”. It claims to expose the errors, omissions and mistakes made by election officials, but it presents incomplete and misleading information and underscores how exceptionally rare fraud is within the US system.Its records stretch back 40 years, a period in which billions of votes have been cast. Yet the database records only 1,402 “proven instances of voter fraud” – a “molecular fraction” of votes cast nationwide, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.The newly disclosed tax filings also show that Heritage Action ramped up its spending on advertising as it sought to influence lawmakers and the public around its controversial voting agenda. In 2021, the organization reported paying $6.1m to outside contractors for “marketing and advertising” – a sharp rise from $1.8m the previous year.Among the top contractors employed by Heritage Action was CRC Advisors, the consulting firm tied to Leonard Leo, a chairman of the Federalist Society who is best known for his decades-long campaign to pack federal courts with rightwing judges. CRC Advisors was paid over $797,000 for “marketing and advertising” in 2021.Some of that ad spending was targeted in Georgia. After that state’s 2021 restrictive voting law caused a backlash from businesses and led Major League Baseball to move the All-Star Game from Georgia to Colorado, Heritage Action spent nearly $1m on TV ads defending the law aired on CNBC and local TV stations.Conservative donors pour ‘dark money’ into case that could upend US voting lawRead moreThe group also spent nearly $500,000 on Georgia TV and digital ads during the MLB All-Star Game, and spent at least $700,000 more on ads supporting the Georgia bill’s passage.On the federal level, Heritage Action also ran ads in West Virginia, Arizona, Montana and New Hampshire urging the Democratic senators in those states to oppose reforming the filibuster to pass democracy reform legislation with a simple majority. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment,” Anderson said of potential filibuster changes at the April 2021 donor summit.Heritage Action was formed in 2010 out of the rightwing policy empire embodied in the Heritage Foundation, which dates back to 1973. The foundation was created by Paul Weyrich, a richly networked conservative who wanted to inculcate small government, anti-regulation ideology at both federal and state level.From the start, restricting access to voting was a core part of Weyrich’s mission. In 1980 he infamously articulated his thinking by saying: “I don’t want everybody to vote … Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”This article was produced in partnership with Documented, an investigative watchdog and journalism project. Brendan Fischer is a campaign finance specialist with DocumentedTopicsUS political lobbyingThe fight for democracyUS politicsUS voting rightsnewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      The untold story of how a US woman was sentenced to six years for voting

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      The untold story of how a US woman was sentenced to six years for voting The case of Pamela Moses sparked a national outcry – but newly uncovered documents reveal the extent of its injusticeIt was the morning after Labor Day and Pamela Moses was in a rush.All summer, the outspoken activist had been feuding with election officials in Memphis, Tennessee. She wanted to get her name on the ballot for Memphis’s 2019 mayoral election, even gathering enough signatures to do so. But officials said she could not run – a prior felony conviction made her ineligible to seek office.Now, there was a new problem. In late August, the local elections commission sent her a letter saying they were going to cancel her voter registration. Moses was confused – she had been voting for years. That day, she was determined to sort it out.But what unfolded over just a few hours that day on 3 September 2019 would upend her life. It would lead to a sudden arrest months later at O’Hare airport in Chicago and culminate in a six-year prison sentence for voter fraud.Her case would go on to touch a nerve in the US and cause a national outcry. While there’s no comprehensive data on voter fraud prosecutions based on race, it was one of several recent examples in which Black defendants like Moses have faced long criminal sentences for voting errors, while white people have faced little punishment for more fraud. Long after the abolition of poll taxes and literacy tests, Black Americans still face significant scrutiny for trying to exercise their right to vote.What I learned from my interview with Pamela Moses, imprisoned for a voting errorRead moreTo make matters worse there is a byzantine bureaucracy in Tennessee and other US states, which can make it nearly impossible for people with felony convictions to vote again. The system has allowed officials to block people from voting for owing small sums of money and prosecutors to bring charges against others who make good-faith mistakes about their voting eligibility.But at the center of the Moses case was a relatively simple question: should someone who makes a voting mistake face serious criminal charges?Nearly everyone in Memphis seems to know Moses, 45, or has heard of her.She’s a self-taught student of the law – the librarians in the county law library know her by name – and has sued many of the top officials in Memphis, frequently representing herself in court. She’s appeared in local papers over the years. She’s had disagreements with other local activists and founded her own non-profit.“If she sees something that she feels is unjust, she’s going to say something about it,” said Dawn Harrington, who has been friends with Moses for over two decades and is the executive director of Free Hearts, a criminal justice non-profit. “She’s not going to be afraid of the backlash that might happen.”“She’ll always take you to the limit,” said Michael Working, a criminal defense attorney in Memphis who has represented Moses and known her for a decade. “She’s willing very often to be publicly flogged by the government on principle.”In person, Moses is at times mercurial, but often charming. She can rattle off the history of Memphis neighborhoods, the names of local judges, lawyers and statutes that she’s researched, sprinkling in bits of hip-hop history (she also writes and produces her own music). She is fiercely protective of Taj, her teenage son.Few officials attracted Moses’s ire as much as Amy Weirich, a Republican who served as the district attorney in Shelby county, which includes Memphis. Several years ago, Moses made local headlines when Weirich prosecuted her for stalking and harassing a local judge, tampering with evidence and forgery.In 2015, Moses pled guilty to those charges and was sentenced to several years of probation. Years later, she would say that pleading guilty and not fighting the case “was the worst mistake of my life”. She believed she was innocent, but the conviction led people to think she was guilty.Harrington, her longtime friend, said that the case cemented her status as someone who was disliked by people in high office in Memphis. “She had been on the bad side of the powers that be there,” she said.When Moses pled guilty, there was a hearing in which a judge questioned her and made sure she understood the consequences of her decision. But there was one ramification that neither the judge nor any of the lawyers present brought up: Moses would lose the right to vote for life.To understand Moses’s case, one needs to know that America has long stripped people convicted of felonies of the vote.After constitutional amendments in the 19th century expanded the franchise to Black Americans, many states passed felon disenfranchisement laws as a way to continue to keep African Americans from the ballot box and therefore prevent them from wielding political power, said Christopher Uggen, a professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied the topic closely. He suggested the laws have persisted because people with criminal convictions are stigmatized, and so seeking redress for them is politically fraught.Today, the laws continue to heavily affect Black Americans – 5.3% of the adult Black population is disenfranchised because of a felony, compared to 1.5% of the non-Black adult population. Overall, an estimated 4.6 million people can’t vote because of a felony conviction in the US.Bar chart comparing felony voting disenfranchisement of Black Americans to all AmericansMoses’s home state of Tennessee strips any person convicted of a felony of the right to vote. Nearly 472,000 people of voting age can’t vote in Tennessee because of a felony conviction, the vast majority of whom have completed their sentence, according to the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. It’s estimated that more than one in five Black people of voting age in the state can’t vote because of a felony.In Tennessee, it is also extremely difficult for these people to get their voting rights back once they complete their sentences. There are three different sets of rules, depending on when the person was convicted. A request to even just fill out the state’s required application for the restoration of voting rights can be rejected for any reason – without explanation.Tennessee’s confusing system isn’t unusual. Many US states, particularly in the south, require anyone with a felony conviction to go through a bureaucratic process if they want to vote again.In Mississippi, people with certain felony convictions have to petition the legislature to restore their voting rights individually – and hardly anyone makes it through.In Florida, voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment in 2018 to repeal the state’s lifetime voting ban for most people with felonies. But the Florida legislature quickly stepped in and passed a measure that said completing a sentence meant paying all outstanding fines and court fees, which put voting again out of reach for many. Even if people can afford to pay, it’s extremely difficult to figure out how much they owe since the state has no centralized way of keeping track.Bar chart of the five states with the highest estimated rates of Black felony voter disenfranchisementThat uncertainty is the point of these laws, said Nicole Porter, the senior director of advocacy at the Sentencing Project.“I think there is intentionality behind the complications,” she said. “It’s about chilling or minimizing participation in the electorate by certain constituencies. It’s the modern day manifestation of very hard policies that dominated the Jim Crow era.”This was the tangled web Moses stepped into just after Labor Day in 2019.Because she didn’t realize she had lost her voting rights, she had been voting regularly until the summer of 2019. When she was informed that her voter registration was about to be canceled, Moses called the elections commission and asked what to do. She said a staffer advised her to go through the restoration process. (The elections commission declined to say to the Guardian whether it had ever advised her to do so.)The next step Moses took was the one on which her conviction – and its reversal – rested.One of the people required to fill out the form for her voting rights restoration was a probation officer, who had to confirm that Moses’s criminal sentence had concluded. When Moses showed up at the probation office on 3 September, she met with the manager on duty, named Kristoffer Billington, who had worked for the probation office for five years. He had never filled out the form before, he would later testify in court.Moses told him her probation was finished, and he went to the back of the office to research her case. Billington called a colleague in a different office for help. They both looked at Moses’s file in the computer system.According to the information they saw, it looked like Moses had finished her probation in 2018. But there was a problem – Moses’s computer file still showed she was on unsupervised probation. Billington thought this was a bureaucratic error and believed someone had forgotten to close out her file.As he was examining the case, the receptionist repeatedly called Billington’s office to tell him Moses was growing impatient and wanted to turn in the form to the election office, he would later testify. After about an hour of research, he wrote on the form that Moses had completed her probation, signed it and returned it to her.Billington had made a mistake. Unbeknownst to him, there were more case files that showed Moses’s felony probation wouldn’t expire until the following year, 2020. In parallel, Moses had been fighting in court that summer to have a judge declare that her sentence was over because she wanted to run for mayor. In court filings, she argued that her probation had expired. But courts disagreed. Moses didn’t think those rulings were correct and thought Billington and the probation office would be able to give her a more definitive answer.It might seem hard to believe that there was a dispute about something as basic as when Moses’s sentence ended. But those kinds of ambiguities are actually quite common, Uggen said.“People who aren’t subject to supervision don’t really understand how fuzzy things like release and supervision dates are,” he said. “Anybody inside the system or across jurisdictions knows that what’s written on this piece of paper might be very different than that other piece of paper.”And these bureaucratic mistakes can land people in prison.Just 30 minutes after Moses left his office, Billington got a call from someone in the Tennessee attorney general’s office telling him he made a mistake on the form. And after Moses turned in the form, the elections office quickly caught the mistake too. A few days earlier, they had referred her to prosecutors for potential voter fraud, owing to the fact they had learned she had been regularly voting while on probation.“Isn’t whether or not she completed the required probationary period for the 2015 felonies the subject of the [ongoing court case],” Pablo Varela, an attorney for the elections commission, emailed Kirby May, a prosecutor in the district attorney’s office shortly after Moses turned in the form. “How can the Court Clerk issue this attached document stating she has been granted final release from incarceration or supervision?”‘It’s a scare tactic’: Pamela Moses, the Black woman jailed over voting error, speaks outRead moreMay responded later that afternoon and attached a copy of a July court order saying Moses was still on probation. She was still ineligible to vote, he said.Vicki Collins, a staffer at the elections commission, forwarded Moses’s application to the Tennessee secretary of state’s office to review. “The Shelby County Election Commission has been in an ongoing lawsuit with Ms. Moses. She has been denied the right to be on the ballot for Mayor because she is still on probation until 2020,” wrote Collins, who specialized in helping people with felony convictions get their voting rights back. A little over an hour later, a lawyer with the secretary of state’s office wrote back. She agreed Moses was ineligible to vote, but offered a new reason for why.In 2015, one of the crimes Moses pled guilty to was tampering with evidence, which causes a permanent loss of voting rights in Tennessee. All of the research Billington had done at the probation office was irrelevant. It didn’t matter whether she was on probation or not.The next morning, Collins, the elections staffer, appeared happy to learn Moses was permanently barred from voting. “LOOK AT HER STATUS!!! PERMANENTLY INELIGIBLE,” she wrote in an email, including a smiley face.The same day, the elections office also received a letter from the Tennessee department of corrections alerting them to Billington’s error. The letter didn’t say that Moses was to blame or that Billington was deceived.The elections office quickly wrote to Moses explaining she was permanently banned. “Absent a change in state law, future attempts to register to vote anywhere in Tennessee may be considered a class D felony,” read the letter from Linda Phillips, the election administrator in Shelby county.Later that evening, Phillips expressed concern that she hadn’t received a reply from Moses. “I am a bit concerned that Pamela Moses did not respond to my email telling her she would never be able to register to vote.” She hinted at concerns for her own safety over the issue, writing “I do have a concealed carry permit,” in an email to a member of the election commission.In a response to questions from the Guardian, Phillips said: “If incorrect information is provided to our office, intentionally or unintentionally, the state of Tennessee alerts us about the inaccuracies. That’s what happened in Ms Moses’s case.”She also defended the emails she and Collins sent after learning Moses was ineligible to vote.“Any email exchanges within [the elections commission] regarding announcements of Ms Moses’s ineligibility to vote should be perceived as urgent notice to ensure staff awareness, considering Ms Moses’s frequent and sometimes harassing visits to our offices,” she said.TimelineTimeline of Pamela Moses caseShowMarch 2014 After a felony conviction more than a decade earlier, Moses successfully has her right to vote restored.April 2015 Moses loses her voting rights again after she pleads guilty to several felonies, including tampering with evidence and perjury.July 2019 Moses is blocked from running for mayor of Memphis because of a prior felony conviction. A judge says she is still serving a probationary sentence from her 2015 conviction.August 2019 Shelby County Elections Commission tells Moses she is ineligible to vote and will be removed from voting rolls.September 2019 Probation office and local clerk fill out and approve a form saying Moses is eligible to vote. Election officials reject Moses’ request, telling her she is permanently banned from voting.November 2019 Moses is indicted for illegal registration and voting. She is arrested while traveling through customs at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. November 2021Moses is convicted of making false entries on an official registration or election document. January 2022 Moses is sentenced to six years in prison.February 2022 A judge orders a new trial for Moses, in part because of documents not turned over to her defense.April 2022 Prosecutors announce they are dropping charges against Moses.Two months later, prosecutors filed a 14-count indictment, charging Moses with illegally voting nearly a dozen times after her 2015 guilty plea. She was arrested at O’Hare airport while returning to the US from a trip abroad.Later, prosecutors offered her a deal, saying if she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge she would get six months of unsupervised probation and no additional prison time. She refused.“It was about the principle to me,” Moses said. “I hadn’t done anything wrong. All I did was try to get my right to vote back and you don’t like me,” she said. “I was okay with going to jail if people could understand what this is really about. I don’t regret making that decision.”Just before the trial began, prosecutors dropped 12 of the 14 charges, declining to prosecute her for illegally voting. There was no evidence that anyone had told Moses she was ineligible to vote, and the fact that the elections office had sent her voter information made it harder to prove she knew.The trial began on 3 November 2021 and lasted just two days. A single question remained: did Moses knowingly trick Billington to falsely say she was off probation when he filled out the form?May, the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, zeroed in on the numerous times after 2015 that Moses had asked courts to declare she was off probation and judges had rejected her requests.“It’s like a child going up to both her parents, ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme’ … They make the mistake and give it, even though they’d told no, no, no. It’s the same thing, she knew what she was doing on September 3rd,” he said at the trial. “She was desperate to try to get her rights restored, she wanted to run for mayor, whatever, she was desperate. She didn’t care, she was going to try anyway. This was her last stitch [sic] effort.”When Billington testified, he owned up to his mistake. But May argued Moses had deceived him, even though she was not in the room when he did his research and signed off on the form. Billington said Moses had told him she was off probation when she walked into the office and was acting impatient as he researched her case.Ferguson, Moses’s lawyer, argued that the state was punishing Moses for its own mistake. “If they can’t get it right, we can’t convict her for not getting it right,” he said in his closing argument.Ultimately the jurors found Moses guilty. In late January, W Mark Ward, the judge overseeing the case, sentenced Moses to six years in prison. Weirich, the prosecutor, said Moses had brought a trial and any harsh punishment on herself by refusing to take the plea.“I gave her a chance to plead to a misdemeanor with no prison time. She requested a jury trial instead. She set this unfortunate result in motion and a jury of her peers heard the evidence and convicted her,” she said at the time.Local reporters had been following Moses’s case, but in early February, it started to receive national attention. The Guardian published a story highlighting Moses’s punishment. The next evening, Rachel Maddow did a segment on Moses’s case, comparing her six-year sentence to those of white Trump supporters who had received lesser sentences for intentional acts of voting fraud. The New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press, among other outlets, followed. Moses, detained in prison, didn’t know her case was getting more attention.Then, a few weeks later, new information came to light.Through a public records request, the Guardian obtained the result of an internal investigation from the Tennessee department of corrections looking into why Billington had signed off on Moses’s voting eligibility. The supervisors who had investigated squarely placed the blame on Billington for the error, undercutting the prosecution’s idea that Moses had deceived him into signing off on the form.Perhaps most significantly, Moses’s lawyers had never seen the document before – prosecutors hadn’t turned it over with all of the other evidence in the case. That lack of disclosure was potentially unconstitutional and entitled Moses to a new trial.The day after the Guardian published the document, Moses had a previously scheduled hearing to request a fresh trial. Judges rarely granted such requests – the hearing was supposed to be a formality on the way to an appeal. At any rate, that morning, Moses’s lawyer submitted the missing document to the court.Harsh punishments for Black Americans over voting errors spark outcry | The fight to voteRead moreRemarkably, Ward unexpectedly granted Moses’s request for a new trial. He said that the document should have been turned over to Moses’s lawyers before the initial trial and that he had erroneously allowed certain other evidence to be admitted. Moses, who had been in jail, broke down in tears in the courtroom.It wasn’t the first time Weirich’s office has come under fire for failing to disclose evidence to a defendant. A 2014 study by the Fair Punishment Project found her office ranked first in Tennessee in prosecutorial misconduct. Weirich sought to distance herself from the error. The department of corrections, not her office, was to blame for not turning over the missing document, she said.Two months later, Weirich announced she would drop all charges against Moses. “She has spent 82 days in custody on this case, which is sufficient,” she said in a statement, also noting Moses remained permanently barred from voting. “In the interest of judicial economy, we are dismissing her illegal registration case and her violation of probation.”Both Weirich and Ward would go on to lose their re-election bids in August.Moses’s case may have prompted a national outpouring of disapproval, but tendentious-seeming voter fraud charges have not disappeared.In August, for instance, Florida governor Ron DeSantis announced the state was prosecuting 19 people with prior criminal records for voter fraud. Many of the people charged said they were confused about their eligibility and that no one had told them they couldn’t vote.Crystal Mason, a Black woman in Texas, is still appealing a five-year prison sentence for casting a provisional ballot in the 2016 election while on supervised release for a federal felony. Mason has said she had no idea she was ineligible, and the ballot had even been rejected.Moses, as well as those who have followed her case, doubt that it will be one of the last.Both the Shelby county elections commission and the Tennessee department of corrections declined to say whether they had changed their processes for helping people determine their voting eligibility in the wake of Moses’s case. “Any changes in that process would be done at the state level,” Phillips said.One morning at the end of April, just after the charges were dropped against her, Moses held a press conference at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. She was there to speak publicly for the first time about Weirich’s decisions to drop the charges against her.“When it comes to Black people in the south, whatever we do, if it’s wrong, you’ve got to pay for it,” she said. “If there was a white person and I got treated the way I did, I would be just as upset. But you don’t see white people getting treated like that.”Since her case was dropped Moses has been working on an album and documentary, and she’s continued to push to be able to vote again.She’s still seeking a gubernatorial pardon from her 2015 conviction is suing Tennessee to try to get the state’s felon disenfranchisement law declared unconstitutional. She’s also suing local officials for damages in her voter fraud case. “I don’t know what the future holds, but I do know I will get to vote again,” she said.“I want people to take away that it’s not over just because Pamela is free,” said Dawn Harrington, Moses’s friend.” Because there are so many other Pamelas all across the state.”Brandon Dill contributed reporting from MemphisTopicsTennesseeThe fight for democracyLaw (US)US politicsUS prisonsUS voting rightsRaceMemphisfeaturesReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      Jamie Raskin: electoral college is a ‘danger to the American people’

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      Jamie Raskin: electoral college is a ‘danger to the American people’Democratic congressman says recent changes to electoral college laws are unlikely to stop another January 6 Recent reforms to the laws governing the counting of electoral college votes for presidential races are “not remotely sufficient” to prevent another attack like the one carried out by Donald Trump supporters at the Capitol on January 6, a member of the congressional committee which investigated the uprising has warned.January 6 report review: 845 pages, countless crimes, one simple truth – Trump did itRead moreIn an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, the Maryland House representative Jamie Raskin on Sunday renewed calls echoed by others – especially in the Democratic party to which he belongs – to let a popular vote determine the holder of the Oval Office.“We should elect the president the way we elect governors, senators, mayors, representatives, everybody else – whoever gets the most votes wins,” Raskin said. “We spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year exporting American democracy to other countries, and the one thing they never come back to us with is the idea that, ‘Oh, that electoral college that you have, that’s so great, we think we will adopt that too’.”After Trump served one term and lost the Oval Office to Joe Biden in 2020, he pressured his vice-president Mike Pence to use his ceremonial role as president of the session where both the Senate and House of Representatives met to certify the outcome of the race and interfere with the counting of the electoral college votes.Pence refused, as supporters of the defeated Trump stormed the Capitol and threatened to hang the vice-president on the day of that joint congressional session in early 2021. The unsuccessful attack was linked to nine deaths, including the suicides of traumatized law enforcement officers who ultimately restored order.Raskin was one of nine House representatives – including seven Democrats – who served on a panel investigating the January 6 uprising.The committee recently released an 845-page report drawing from more than 1,000 interviews and 10 public hearings that, among other findings, concluded Trump provoked the Capitol attack by purposely disseminating false allegations of fraud pertaining to his defeat as part of a plot to overturn his loss. Committee members also recommended that federal prosecutors file criminal charges against Trump and certain associates of his.Hundreds of Trump’s supporters who participated in the Capitol attack have been charged, with many already convicted.Raskin said the US insistence on determining presidential winners through the electoral college facilitated the attempt by Trump supporters to keep him in power.“There are so many curving byways and nooks and crannies in the electoral college that there are opportunities for a lot of strategic mischief,” Raskin told Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, adding that the institutions which prevented the Trump-fueled Capitol attack “just barely” did so.As part of a government spending package passed Friday, Congress updated existing federal election laws to clarify that the vice-president’s role in the proceedings to certify the results of a race is just ceremonial and merely to count electoral votes. It also introduced a requirement for 20% of the members of both the House and Senate to object to a state’s electoral college vote outcome when it had previously taken just one legislator from each congressional chamber to do so.Raskin on Sunday said those corrective measures are “necessary” yet “not remotely sufficient” because they don’t solve “the fundamental problem” of the electoral college vote, which in 2000 and 2016 allowed both George W Bush and Trump to win the presidency despite clear defeats in the popular vote.Another House Democrat – Dan Goldman of New York – went on MSNBC’s the Sunday show and made a similar point, saying that US lawmakers “need to be thinking about ways that we can preserve and protect our democracy that lasts generations”.Many Americans are taught in their high school civics classes that the electoral college prevents the handful of most populated areas in the US from determining the presidential winner because more voters live there than in the rest of the country combined.‘Hatred has a great grip on the heart’: election denialism lives on in US battlegroundRead moreStates generally determine their presidential electoral vote winner by the popular vote.But most give 100% of their electoral vote allotment to the winner of the popular vote even if the outcome is razor-thin. Critics say that, as a result, votes for the losing candidate end up not counting in any meaningful way, allowing for situations where the president is supported only by a minority of the populace.Meanwhile, such scenarios are preceded by a convoluted process that most people don’t understand and whose integrity can be assailed in the court of public opinion by partisans with agendas. That happened ahead of the Capitol attack even though Trump lost both the popular and electoral college votes to Biden handily.“I think,” Raskin said, “that the electoral college … has become a danger not just to democracy, but to the American people.”TopicsUS politicsElectoral reformUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpDemocratsRepublicansUS voting rightsnewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      US supreme court hears case that could radically reshape elections

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      US supreme court hears case that could radically reshape electionsCase brought by North Carolina would give partisan state legislatures near total control over elections with no role for courts The US supreme court heard arguments on Wednesday in Moore v Harper, one of this term’s highest profile and most contentious cases which has the potential to fundamentally reshape elections for Congress and the presidency.The justices appeared to be starkly divided along predictable ideological lines as they mulled over the power of state courts to strike down congressional districts drawn by state legislatures because they violate state constitutions.The most terrifying case of all is about to be heard by the US supreme court | Steven DonzigerRead moreRepublicans from North Carolina who brought the case argue that a provision of the US constitution known as the elections clause gives state lawmakers virtually total control over the “times, places and manner” of congressional elections, including redistricting, and cuts state courts out of the process.The Republicans are advancing a concept called the “independent state legislature theory”, never before adopted by the supreme court but cited approvingly by four conservative justices.The direction of questioning at Wednesday’s hearing suggested thatthree of those conservative justices – Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas – were open to the idea of adopting the theory, despite decades of precedent from their own court dismissing it. They seemed to have the slightly more tentative backing of Brett Kavanaugh, who was part of the legal team in 2000 that assisted George W Bush through Bush v Gore, the case that in modern times put the independent state legislature theory on the map.On the other side of the argument, the three liberal-leaning justices were profoundly critical of the notion that state legislatures should be given free rein to control federal elections virtually unrestrained by state constitutions and judicial review from state courts. Questions from John Roberts suggested he might be seeking a more narrowly-drawn compromise position.Which left all eyes on Amy Coney Barrett, the third of Donald Trump’s three appointees. Potentially, she might find herself casting the decisive vote.Though it gives little clue as to which side of the fence Barrett will be standing on when the ruling comes down, she did ask several probing questions of the lawyer representing North Carolina’s Republicans. She said that those pushing for state legislatures to be freed up from oversight had a “problem” defining their terms, and she questioned whether the theory had any bearing in legal text.For their part, the liberal justices – Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor – robustly argued that incorporating the theory into constitutional law would be a threat to democracy. Elena Kagan cited three recent supreme court rulings that all counter the theory.Kagan made an impassioned speech about the potential impact of siding with North Carolina’s Republicans. “Think about consequences, because this is a theory with big consequences … This is a proposal that gets rid of the normal checks and balances on the way big governmental decisions are made in this country, at exactly the time when they are needed most.”She warned that a broad ruling could unleash state legislatures to carry out extreme forms of gerrymandering, tear up voter protections and even certify election results according to their own political interests.Moore v Harper came about after the North Carolina state supreme court struck down districts drawn by Republicans who control the legislature because they heavily favored Republicans in the highly competitive state. The court-drawn map used in last month’s elections for Congress produced a 7-7 split between Democrats and Republicans.North Carolina is among six states in recent years in which state courts have ruled that overly partisan redistricting for Congress violated their state constitutions. The others are Florida, Maryland, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania.State courts have become the only legal forum for challenging partisan congressional maps since the supreme court ruled in 2019 that those lawsuits cannot be brought in federal court.In North Carolina, Republican lawmakers will not have to wait for the court’s decision to produce a new congressional map that is expected to have more Republican districts.Even as Democrats won half the state’s 14 congressional seats, Republicans seized control of the state supreme court. Two newly elected Republican justices give them a 5-2 edge that makes it more likely than not that the court would uphold a map with more Republican districts.One of the striking features about Wednesday’s legal debate was how the usual ideological positions of the two sides were turned on their heads. The conservative justices, who have often invoked states’ rights in previous rulings – not least in last year’s seminal decision to overturn abortion rights – sounded at times to be almost anti-federalist.After the US solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, accused the petitioners of making an “atextual, ahistorical, and destabilizing interpretation of the elections clause”, Thomas intervened. “I must say, it seems a bit ironic that you’re on the other side of the federalism issue,” he said, apparently unaware of the irony of his own position.By contrast, lawyers speaking against the state legislature theory turned on several occasions to the historical record of the founding fathers as well as close textual analysis of the constitution – tactics normally associated with the rightwing supermajority. “Over 233 years, this court has never second-guessed a state court interpretation of its own constitution in any context,” said Neal Katyal, a lawyer representing Common Cause, an ethics-in-government group which is opposing what it claims is an attempted Republican power grab in North Carolina.TopicsUS supreme courtLaw (US)US voting rightsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      The key candidates who threaten democracy in the 2022 US midterms

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      ExplainerThe key candidates who threaten democracy in the 2022 US midterms In several states, Republican candidates who dispute the 2020 election results are running for positions that would give them control over elections

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      Several races on the ballot this fall will have profound consequences for American democracy. In some states, Republican candidates who doubt the 2020 election results, or in some cases actively worked to overturn them, are running for positions in which they would have tremendous influence over how votes are cast and counted. If these candidates win, there is deep concern they could use their offices to spread baseless information about election fraud and try to prevent the rightful winners of elections from being seated.In total, 291 Republicans – a majority of the party’s nominees this cycle – have questioned the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, according to a Washington Post tally.What are the US midterm elections and who’s running?Read moreUp and down the ballot, election deniers are running for offices that could play a critical role in future elections.They’re running to be governors, who play a role in enacting election rules. They’re running to be secretaries of state, who oversee voting and ballot counting. They’re running to be attorneys general, who are responsible for investigating allegations of fraud handling litigation in high-stakes election suits. They’re running to be members of Congress, who vote to certify the presidential vote every four years. They’re running to be state lawmakers, who can pass voting laws, launch investigations, and, according to some fringe legal theories, try to block the certification of presidential electors.Here’s a look at some of the key candidates who pose a threat to US democracy:Doug MastrianoUpdate: Mastriano lost to the Democrat Josh Shapiro on election night.Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, played a key role in efforts to overturn the 2020 election. He was the “point person” for the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania as lawyers put together fake slates of electors for Trump, according to emails obtained by the New York Times. He also organized an event with Rudy Giuliani after the 2020 election in which speakers spread misinformation about the election. He hired buses and offered rides to the US Capitol on January 6 and was there himself. He has supported the idea of decertifying the presidential race in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state, which is not possible.If elected, Mastriano would wield considerable power over elections in Pennsylvania. The state is one of a handful where the secretary of state, the chief election official, is appointed by the governor. Mastriano has said he has already picked someone, but hasn’t said who. The Philadelphia Inquirer has speculated he could pick Toni Shuppe, an activist who has spread voting misinformation and false theories linked to the QAnon movement. Mastriano has also said he would decertify election equipment and cause all voters in the state to reregister to vote.Mark FinchemFinchem, a member of Arizona’s state house of representatives, is the Republican nominee for Arizona secretary of state, which would make him Arizona’s chief election official. Finchem, a member of the Oath Keepers, was at the US Capitol on January 6. He introduced a resolution this year to decertify the election. In 2020, he was one of several lawmakers who signed a joint resolution asking Congress to reject electors for Joe Biden.He has said, falsely, that Joe Biden did not win the election in Arizona in 2020. “It strains credibility,” he told Time magazine in September of Biden’s victory. “Isn’t it interesting that I can’t find anyone who will admit that they voted for Joe Biden?” When a reporter asked him whether it was possible that people he didn’t know voted for Biden, Finchem said: “In a fantasy world, anything’s possible.”Kari LakeA former news anchor with no prior political experience, Lake made doubting the 2020 election a centerpiece of her successful bid to win Arizona’s GOP nomination for governor.If she wins the governor’s race, Lake would be one of the statewide officials charged with certifying the results of the presidential election. She has called the 2020 election “corrupt and stolen” and said she would not have certified it. She joined an unsuccessful lawsuit to require ballots in Arizona to be counted by hand, which experts say is unreliable and costly. She has backed ending mail-in voting, which is widely used in Arizona.Abraham “Abe” HamadehThe Republican candidate for Arizona attorney general, Hamadeh has never held elected office and is making his first attempt to win a seat. Hamadeh, a former prosecutor, said he would not have signed off on Arizona’s election results, which showed Joe Biden won. Hamadeh, who is endorsed by Trump, has called the 2020 election “rotten, rigged and corrupt” and said if he won, he would “prosecute the election fraud of 2020 and secure the 2024 election so when Donald Trump runs and wins again in 2024, everyone will know it’s legitimate”.Blake MastersMasters, the Republican candidate for US Senate in Arizona, is endorsed by Trump and has received major financial backing from his former boss the tech billionaire Peter Thiel. Early in his race, Masters posted a video saying: “I think Trump won in 2020.” He also said he would have objected to certifying the 2020 election results during the primary, as other Republican senators did on January 6.Since winning his primary, he has sought to soften his views on the topic. He removed language from his campaign website that claimed the election was stolen. During a debate, he pointed to media coverage and big tech going against Trump instead of outright saying the election was stolen. But he has strongly stated the election was stolen to certain audiences, telling Fox News that he still believes Trump won. And Trump himself called Masters after a debate against the Democratic senator Mark Kelly, with Trump telling Masters he had “got to go stronger” on election fraud claims to win in November.His rhetoric on elections has remained heated during the general election. When Trump came to Arizona in October, Hamadeh told the crowd he would “lock up some people and put handcuffs on them”, but then, during a debate with his opponent, Democrat Kris Mayes, he would not say exactly who should be locked up or for what.Andy BiggsUpdate: Biggs won re-election against the Democrat Javier Ramos, confirmed on Wednesday.Arizona’s Biggs was one of 147 Republicans in Congress who voted against certifying the election results, but his involvement in January 6 went further than that. Ali Alexander, who helped organize the “Stop the Steal” protests, has said that Biggs helped him formulate strategy, according to Rolling Stone. Biggs is also said to have requested a pardon for his actions around January 6.Anthony KernAs an Arizona state representative in 2020, Kern was present at the Capitol on 6 January. He also briefly participated in a widely panned review of the 2020 election in Maricopa county that provided fodder for more baseless claims but ultimately affirmed Biden’s victory. He also signed on to a letter requesting that Pence delay the count of the electoral vote. Trump endorsed Kern in November 2021, saying Kern “supported decertifying” the election results.Jim MarchantMarchant is the Republican nominee for secretary of state in Nevada. He is linked to the QAnon movement; he has said he was pushed to run for the position by Trump allies and a prominent QAnon influencer. He leads a coalition of far-right candidates seeking to be secretary of state in key battleground states.He lost a 2020 congressional race by more than 16,000 votes, but nonetheless challenged the result by alleging fraud. He has since traveled around the state pressuring counties to get rid of electronic voting equipment and instead only hand-count paper ballots. Such a switch would be unreliable – humans are worse at counting large quantities of things than machines – as well as costly, and take a long time, experts say. He has falsely said voting equipment is “easy” to hack and said that Nevadans’ votes haven’t counted for decades. He has claimed there is a global “cabal” that runs elections in Nevada and elsewhere.Kristina KaramoUpdate: Karamo lost to the Democrat Jocelyn Benson, confirmed on Wednesday.Karamo, the GOP nominee for secretary of state in Michigan, became nationally known after the 2020 election when she claimed she witnessed wrongdoing as ballots were being counted in Detroit. The allegations were debunked, but Karamo, a community college professor who has never held elected office, went on to rise in conservative circles. She appeared on Fox News and was a witness at a high-profile legislative hearing about election irregularities. She joined an unsuccessful lawsuit to try to overturn the election. She has claimed “egregious crimes” were committed and said on a podcast: “It’s time for us decent people in the Republican party … to fight back. We cannot have our election stolen,” according to Bridge Michigan.Abortion on the ballot: here are the US states voting on a woman’s right to chooseRead moreShe has also come under fire for comments on her podcast comparing abortion to human sacrifice and opposing the teaching of evolution in schools, according to Bridge Michigan.Matthew DePernoDePerno lost to the Democrat Dana Nessel, confirmed on Wednesday morning.DePerno, a lawyer who has never held elected office, became a celebrity in conservative circles for his work after the 2020 election. He helped lead a lawsuit in Antrim county, in northern Michigan, where a clerk made an error and posted incorrect information on election night. He claimed election equipment was corrupted, and a judge authorized an investigation of the county’s election equipment that became the basis of an inaccurate report that Trump allies used to spread misinformation about the election. A Republican-led inquiry into allegations of fraud found his actions to be “​​misleading and irresponsible”. DePerno has said he would arrest Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat serving as Michigan’s top election official, as well as Dana Nessel, his Democratic opponent in the attorney general’s race.DePerno also faces potential criminal charges for unauthorized access to voting equipment. A special prosecutor is investigating the matter.Steve CarraCarra won his re-election bid against Roger Williams, confirmed on Wednesday.Carra, who is running for re-election to the Michigan house of representatives, signed a letter in 2020 asking Mike Pence to delay Congress’s counting of electors. He also sponsored legislation to require an audit of the 2020 race, even after the 2020 results were already confirmed there.Kim CrockettCrockett lost to the Democrat Steve Simon, confirmed on Wednesday.Joe Biden won Minnesota by more than 230,000 votes in 2020. But Kim Crockett, the Republican nominee for secretary of state, has nonetheless called that victory into question.Crockett has described the 2020 election as “rigged” and agreed with an interviewer who suggested it was “illegitimate”. She has said, “I don’t think we’ll ever know precisely what happened” when it comes to the 2020 race. That is false – there’s no evidence of fraud or other malfeasance in Minnesota, which had the highest voter turnout in the US in 2020.Crockett has harshly criticized Steve Simon, the incumbent secretary of state, for reaching a court settlement that required the state to count late-arriving ballots (an appeals court blocked the agreement). If elected, Crockett has pledged to cut the early voting period in the state (Minnesota has one of the longest early voting periods in the US), get rid of same-day voter registration, and require photo identification to vote.Audrey TrujilloTrujillo lost to Democrat Maggie Toulouse Oliver on election night.Trujillo, the Republican nominee for secretary of state in New Mexico, has called the 2020 election a “coup”.“Until we get a handle on the voter fraud in NM, all elections are going to continue to be rigged. Why run? Run to lose? Thoughts anyone?” she tweeted last year.She has also appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast, where she falsely suggested Biden could not have won the election because she only saw Trump signs in the state (Biden easily won the state by nearly 100,000 votes). She supported an effort in one county not to certify the primary election because of unproven fraud allegations.She has also pushed other conspiracy theories related to school shootings and Covid vaccines, according to Media Matters.Tim MichelsMichels lost to the Democrat Tony Evers, confirmed on Wednesday.Michels, the Republican nominee for governor in Wisconsin, said earlier this year that the 2020 election was “maybe” stolen. Donald Trump, who lost Wisconsin by 20,682 votes, only requested a recount in two of the state’s largest counties, both of which affirmed Biden’s victory in the state.After pressure from Trump, Michels said this year he would consider signing legislation to decertify the 2020 election, which is not legally possible.Ken PaxtonPaxton won his re-election bid against the Democrat Rochelle Garza, confirmed on Wednesday.Paxton, seeking his third term as Texas attorney general, was one of Trump’s closest allies in the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 race. He filed a lawsuit at the Texas supreme court seeking to block Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania from certifying their election results.Burt JonesA state senator who is running to be Georgia’s lieutenant governor, Jones served as one of 16 fake electors in Georgia in 2020. He helped amplify Trump’s baseless fraud claims after the 2020 vote and was among a group of state senators who called on Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, to convene a special session to address changes to election law – a suggestion Kemp rejected. If elected lieutenant governor, he would oversee the Georgia senate and have a role in controlling the flow of legislation in the chamber.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022US politicsRepublicansPennsylvaniaArizonaNevadaMichiganexplainersReuse this content More

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      US far-right group sparks legal firestorm over drive to monitor drop-box voting

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      US far-right group sparks legal firestorm over drive to monitor drop-box votingMelody Jennings of Clean Elections USA teamed up with True the Vote for project that echos Trump’s false claims about 2020 A far-right group run by a Christian pastor has sparked a legal firestorm by spearheading a drive to aggressively monitor drop-box voting for fraud in Arizona and other states, in an echo of Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election results were rigged.Melody Jennings, who runs Clean Elections USA, has teamed up with the conservative group True the Vote, which has a track record for making debunked charges of voting fraud. Together they are promoting a project to hunt for alleged drop-box fraud, which Jennings boasted in multiple interviews on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room and the MG Show, a conspiratorial QAnon program.Michigan’s top election official: ‘Every tactic tried in 2020 will be tried again’Read moreJennings’ frequent messages advocating using cameras and videos in drop-box surveillance fueled lawsuits last month by Arizona voting rights groups charging that voters have faced intimidation tactics from her followers, some of whom have been armed, as they have put their ballots in boxes.Nationwide, more than 4,500 people have reportedly signed up to help monitor drop boxes as part of the Clean Elections drive, which has discussed plans to share photos, information and videos with True the Vote, an organization recently enmeshed in legal battles.Oklahoma-based Jennings has said her campaign to investigate Arizona drop boxes, where people can legally drop off their ballots, was inspired by a teaser on Trump’s Truth Social website for the widely discredited film 2000 Mules, which True the Vote helped make. Jennings has roughly 30,000 followers on the platform.“We’ve got people ready to go in 18 states to go out in shifts and guard these boxes,” said Jennings, whose moniker is Trumper Mel, to Bannon on a 15 October podcast. “We’ve got people out there, on the ground and doing the work.”On Monday, the justice department (DoJ) supported a lawsuit brought by the League of Women Voters against Clean Elections and two other rightwing drop box surveillance operations. The DoJ brief outlines organized campaigns to intimidate voters with video recording and photography.The brief also noted that a legitimate role exists for poll watchers, but said private “ballot security forces” probably violated the federal Voting Rights Act.On Tuesday, a federal judge in Arizona issued a temporary restraining order against Clean Elections and its allies: the order barred them from taking videos and photos of voters and promoting baseless charges of voter fraud, and banned them from openly carrying guns and wearing tactical gear.Judge Michael Liburdi, a member of the conservative Federalist Society, also required that Clean Election drop box watchers stand at least 75 ft (23 metres) away from the boxes they’re monitoring, and publicly correct past false charges they have made about the state’s election laws.Shortly before the restraining order, Clean Elections announced its volunteers would halt certain tactics, such as openly carrying guns and wearing tactical gear. A lawyer for Jennings and the group has said it’s likely that an appeal would be filed on first amendment grounds, contesting some parts of the order.The judge’s restraining order and the Arizona lawsuits came after several drives by Clean Elections volunteers to target alleged drop-box fraud in Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa, including one where two armed individuals wearing tactical gear identified themselves as being with Clean Elections, an action that Jennings sought to distance her group from.Similarly, last month the Arizona secretary of state received a report from one individual stating that a Clean Elections representative accused one voter of being a “mule” and had the voter’s license plate photographed, after being followed into a parking lot.Some Arizona GOP officials voiced alarm about the drop box monitoring tactics by Clean Elections and some allied groups, and deplored how their efforts were fueled by the 2000 Mules movie, created by conservative firebrand Dinesh D’Souza and True the Vote. The movie’s sweeping claims of nefarious, but unsubstantiated, ballot-box stuffing has drawn widespread criticism.“If it were not for 2000 Mules, organizations and activists in our state would not be engaging in aggressive monitoring of drop boxes which has bordered on unlawful voter intimidation,” said Bill Gates, the GOP chairman of the Maricopa board of supervisors.Gates added that GOP candidates running for governor, secretary of state and attorney general in Arizona have “pointed to 2000 Mules as evidence that the 2020 election was marred by fraud”.Arizona Republican state senator Paul Boyer also voiced strong criticism of the aggressive actions some groups have taken in their pursuit of drop box fraud.“For those who monitor ballot drop boxes, there are the malicious actors who wear military fatigues thereby insinuating voting is akin to war. It is not. No Arizona citizen should ever feel intimidated when dropping off their ballot,” Boyer said.But there’s no doubt that Jennings has been zealous in spreading debunked allegations about 2020 election fraud as revealed by internet archives of now deleted Clean Election USA blog writings and other group materials.“We often hear people say things like, ‘there is always some election fraud’ as if it is OK at a certain level. However, with the help of our heroes mentioned above, we now know that the level of fraud in 2020 was unprecedented and determinative, meaning Joe Biden is now NOT our duly elected representative and neither is Kamala Harris.”“The rabbit hole goes much deeper, but this is all we need to know for now. It means that we do not have free and fair elections in the US and this should be concerning for all,” Jennings said in a previously unreported Clean Elections document found using internet archives.The alliance between Clean Elections and True the Vote to target drop boxes seems to have been fostered in part to obtain evidence to support the unsubstantiated claims in 2000 Mules. The film slings allegations of “ballot trafficking” by 2,000 people – dubbed mules – who were hired by nonp-rofits to stuff drop boxes with potentially bogus absentee ballots in five key states that Joe Biden won.Last month, before the start of early voting in Arizona, Votebeat first revealed that True the Vote’s Gregg Phillips raved about the fledgling partnership with Clean Elections in a video on the conservative website Rumble: “This is the greatest opportunity for us to catch the cheaters in real time, maybe that’s ever existed. So we’re excited about it.”True the Vote is expected to offer new information to conservative sheriffs including a group, launched by the Pinal county sheriff, Mark Lamb, who has been working with True the Vote for several months on other fraud finding missions involving drop boxes.Jennings has denied charges that her group has broken any laws. “All activities supported by Clean Elections USA are lawful and designed to support lawful elections,” she wrote to Votebeat.But Jennings sees her battle to uncover alleged election fraud in apocalyptic terms.“Luckily, people are standing up and the truth is being uncovered. We have some real American heroes out there,” she wrote in a previously unreported blog earlier this year. Jennings cited True the Vote’s leader Catherine Engelbrecht, Phillips and D’Souza among other heroes “who literally put their lives on the line to uncover what is clearly a planned effort to undermine our democratic republic”.Meanwhile, True the Vote has faced mounting legal scrutiny in Arizona and Texas – where two of its leaders were arrested on Monday and cited with contempt of court – related to conspiratorial allegations about voting fraud in the 2020 election.Last month, Arizona’s Republican attorney general, Mark Brnovich, requested an investigation of True the Vote by the IRS and the FBI into potential tax violations by the non profit tax exempt group after the group failed to provide his office evidence of voting fraud they had promised for months.A Brnovich investigator in a letter last month said True the Vote has “raised considerable sums of money alleging they had evidence of widespread voter fraud”.The letter concluded that given True the Vote’s non-profit IRS status, “it would appear that further review of its financials may be warranted”.The letter also revealed that the attorney general’s office had three meetings over the course of about a year with Engelbrecht and her key associate, Phillips. True the Vote leaders have called the attorney general’s charges inaccurate, but didn’t offer proof to rebut them. Engelbrecht and Phillips did not respond to calls seeking comment.In a separate legal firestorm facing True the Vote in Texas, both Engelbrecht and Phillips were arrested on Monday, after being cited with contempt of court by a judge in a defamation lawsuit brought against the group by a Michigan election software firm, Konnech, for alleging that the company’s leader was a “Chinese operative” and that Konnech had engaged in the “subversion of our elections”.True the Vote in podcasts and other places had stated it authorized “analysts” to hack Konnech’s computers that it claimed gave China access to the names of 2 million election workers, to support its allegations against the firm. Last month, a Texas judge ordered True the Vote to hand over the Konnech data and reveal the name of the person who helped them obtain the information.Georgia ballot rules mean voters are falling between cracks, advocates sayRead moreOn Monday, US district judge Kenneth Hoyt ordered the True the Vote leaders detained for “one day and further until they fully comply” with his demand last week that they disclose the name of a person of interest in the case who True the Vote had cited in its defense in court but referred to mysteriously as a confidential FBI informant.A True the Vote spokesperson has said the group’s lawyer would appeal against the judge’s action and demanded the pair’s “immediate release”.As for Jennings, just days before the justice department brief and the judge’s restraining order against her group she dropped some hints about her looming legal problems during another interview with Bannon.Jennings told Bannon that her group was rebranding some by changing its name to the Drop Box Initiative in Arizona, but keeping her original name in other states.“We are going to rebrand a little bit,” Jennings told Bannon, noting that “I don’t need any more people in Arizona, honestly”. But she added that her drive was still trying to recruit more volunteers in many states.Appearing on War Room again two days later, Jennings appealed to the podcast’s audience to help her legal defense by donating funds to True the Vote.TopicsArizonaUS midterm elections 2022US voting rightsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Georgia ballot rules mean voters are falling between cracks, advocates say

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      Georgia ballot rules mean voters are falling between cracks, advocates sayThe key state is seeing record early voting – but some say restrictions are disproportionately affecting certain groups Just six days before the midterm election, Madison Cook, an eager first-time Georgia voter and a college student at school in Mississippi, awaited the arrival of her requested absentee ballot. She continued to follow up with her county election officials. But nearly one month after her application was processed, it appeared to be lost in the mail.“Here’s a great example of a voter who is falling through the cracks,” said Vasu Abhiraman, deputy policy and advocacy director at ACLU of Georgia, who received an email seeking help for Cook. “If she doesn’t get her ballot, she has almost no hope of voting.”‘We’re watching you’: incidents of voter intimidation rise as midterm elections nearRead moreHere in Georgia, early in-person voting was projected to reach 2.4m by the end of Friday – the last day of early voting – marking the highest voter turnout of a midterm election in the state’s history. But voting rights organizers say that this year’s high in-person voter turnout is reflective of the impact Georgia’s new restrictive voting law has had on other forms of voting, such as casting an absentee ballot by mail or on election day.In this year’s midterm elections, about 200,000 of the nearly 300,000 requested absentee ballots had been returned as of Friday. That’s proportionally far less than the 2020 presidential election, when voters cast more than 1.3m absentee ballots throughout the state.“The hurdles are up in front of Georgia voters, and some are having difficulty jumping those hurdles on the way to the ballot box,” said Abhiraman. “Voters in Georgia are not feeling as confident when they cast their ballots this time around.”Advocates say the restrictions disproportionately affect specific demographics throughout the state who continue to grow within Georgia’s rapidly changing electorate. Asian voters make up less than 2%, or about 35,000, of early votes in the state’s midterm elections this year – a noticeable downward turn from the 134,000 ballots cast by the same community at this point in 2020.“Asian Americans in Georgia make up 3.8% of Georgia’s electorate,” said Abhiraman. “If you go back to 2020, the AAPI community was more likely than any other group to vote absentee by mail. So, it’s these nuances in data that show voters who relied on certain methods of voting are finding it difficult to cast their ballots.”Groups such as Asian Americans Advancing Justice Atlanta (AAJA) point to the language barriers Asian and other immigrant communities can experience during the election process. The organization, which works to aid voters through tools such as translations of voting documents, filed a lawsuit alleging that changes shortening absentee request deadlines make it more challenging to ensure equitable access to the ballot.Georgia’s electorate is proven to be highly engaged, thanks in part to voting rights organizers. AAJA-Atlanta is a part of the grassroots, multi-issue, voting rights coalition growing throughout the state that has worked to educate voters on a comprehensive scale.“We are lockstep across all of these groups saying vote early in-person,” said Abhiraman. “You have three processes available to you, but [the Georgia] legislature attacked absentee by mail, and the legislature made it much harder to vote on election day given that you can’t cast a provisional ballot outside of the one location that is assigned to you.”State Republicans, who are also celebrating high voter turnout in Georgia, are comparing this election to 2018, the state’s last midterm election. However, Abhiraman said that we should be examining voter turnout as it compares with 2020 as the ballot more closely aligns with the general election.The 2018 midterm elections featured the state’s gubernatorial election, and several US House races. However, this year’s midterm elections feature the highly visible gubernatorial rematch between Stacey Abrams and the current governor, Brian Kemp, and US Senate race between Senator Raphael Warnock and the Republican Herschel Walker. The state’s Senate race is one of the major elections determining which party will hold political power in the nation’s capital in the coming year.“Voters in Georgia are cognizant of the fact that their vote really matters on a national stage. They are taking the information they get and jumping over hurdles in record numbers,” says Abhiraman. “But, while we are seeing high turnout, we are still losing people in the cracks because it’s easy to forget these folks exist when we’re seeing millions of people turn out.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022The fight for democracyGeorgiaUS politicsUS voting rightsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      ‘We’re watching you’: incidents of voter intimidation rise as midterm elections near

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      ‘We’re watching you’: incidents of voter intimidation rise as midterm elections nearDrop box watchers, threatening letters and harassment – voters and election officials alike report increase in occurrences In suburban Mesa, Arizona, people staked out an outdoor ballot drop box, taking photos and videos of voters dropping off ballots. Some wore tactical gear or camouflage. Some were visibly armed.‘The Trump playbook’: Republicans hint they will deny election resultsRead moreOthers videotaped voters and election workers at a ballot drop box and central tabulation office in downtown Phoenix. They set up lawn chairs and camped out to keep watch through a fence which had been added around the facility for safety after 2020 election protests.Some voters claim the observers approached or followed them in their vehicles. Other observers hung back, watching and filming from at least 75ft from the drop boxes.In total, the Arizona secretary of state has received more than a dozen complaints from voters about intimidation from drop box watchers, many of which have been forwarded to the US Department of Justice and the Arizona attorney general as of late October, as well as a threat sent to the secretary of state herself. A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order on 1 November to limit the watchers’ activities.These activities have led to calls from Maricopa county officials to “decrease the temperature” of heated rhetoric and actions in advance of Tuesday’s midterm elections. But though Arizona has become a hotbed for these tactics, it is also a sign of the mounting national threats to security that voters are facing as the 8 November elections near – part of an orchestrated countrywide strategy pushed by rightwing groups who believe baseless conspiracy theories that the 2020 presidential election was rife with fraud and irregularities.“I think that this drop box monitoring could very likely take hold in a number of different states,” said Jared Davidson, an attorney with Protect Democracy, a non-profit, non-partisan organization involved in one legal challenge against the drop box watchers. “I certainly hope it doesn’t and I hope that a win in our case will send a strong deterrent effect to folks who are organizing in other places.”‘All of a sudden now, we’re reaching voter intimidation’Drop box watching efforts have been largely coordinated by election deniers belonging to several different groups across the country, usually inspired by the viral movie 2000 Mules, which makes false, debunked claims about so-called “mules” stuffing drop boxes with ballots in a widespread spree of fraudulent voting during the 2020 presidential election. In recent months, drop box watchers spread the word on rightwing-friendly social media platforms like Truth Social and Telegram. One of the groups, Clean Elections USA, intends to send the photos, videos and information it collects to True the Vote, the organization behind 2000 Mules, Votebeat reported.The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said in recent days that the justice department “has an obligation to guarantee a free and fair vote by everyone who’s qualified to vote and will not permit voters to be intimidated”. The department also filed a “statement of interest” in one of the Arizona drop box lawsuits, saying that the behavior probably violates federal voting rights law.In Michigan, a local offshoot of a group called the America Project is training volunteers to set up hidden cameras to monitor drop boxes and to carry guns in case they encounter criminals while watching the boxes, the Detroit Free Press reported.A pastor in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, told PennLive he had seen increased traffic in his community, where trucks with Maga flags drive through regularly, which he sees as an attempt to intimidate the largely Black community. In response to concerns over such intimidation and efforts by election deniers to recruit and train poll observers and workers, the faith community in Philadelphia is encouraging people to become poll monitors.‘We will be watching’Arizona became a sort of ground zero for drop box watching during early voting in October. Arizona voters extensively use no-excuse mail-in voting, and early voting at the polls and via mail and drop boxes begins 27 days before election day.“There’s nothing in and of itself that’s unlawful to sit and film a drop box – it’s odd behavior in my opinion,” Bill Gates, the Republican chairman of the Maricopa county board of supervisors, said in an interview. “When you have a weapon, and then you have camouflage on, and then you make a statement like ‘I’m out here hunting mules’ – all of a sudden now, we’re reaching voter intimidation.”Rural Yavapai county saw plans for drop box watches in what was dubbed “Operation Drop Box”, organized by the Lions of Liberty, a rightwing group that claims the US has been “hijacked and undermined by global elites, communists, leftists, deep state bureaucrats and fake news”, and the Yavapai County Preparedness Team, which is affiliated with the Oath Keepers extremist group, according to its website. Those groups told their volunteers to “stand down” after they were sued in federal court.But drop box watchers have been encouraged by some rightwing elected officials and candidates who have feigned credulity of false claims of a stolen election. One state lawmaker, the Arizona senator Kelly Townsend, encouraged “vigilantes” to stake out drop boxes (the same lawmaker then said last month that “wearing tactical gear while watching a ballot drop box could be considered voter intimidation”, so people shouldn’t do it). The Republican candidate for Arizona secretary of state, Mark Finchem, tweeted in late October to tell his followers to “WATCH ALL DROP BOXES. PERIOD.” He also urged followers to record voters using them.Voters who have filed complaints against the practice said they felt intimidated and found the drop box watchers’ behavior alarming.“I’m a senior and was very intimidated by his actions,” one complaint about a Phoenix drop box watcher reads.“Camo clad people taking pictures of me, my license plate as I dropped our mail in ballots in the box. When I approached them asking names, group they’re with, they wouldn’t give anything,” another complaint from Phoenix reads.“I felt very intimidated and scared about who was watching me deposit my ballot in the box. A man with a camera was snapping shots of me, my car and my license plate. Definitely without my permission,” yet another reads.The Maricopa county sheriff, Paul Penzone, said that he was increasing security and directing more deputies to monitor the drop box situation in response to claims of voter intimidation. But the presence of uniformed law enforcement can also be a concern for voters who may distrust police, particularly voters of color.On 28 October, federal judge Michael Liburdi ruled against voter advocacy groups in a case brought by the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans and Voto Latino. Liburdi wrote that, while some voters may be “legitimately alarmed” by the drop box watchers, their activity was protected by the first amendment.But a separate lawsuit from the League of Women Voters of Arizona, represented by the non-profit Protect Democracy, claims the drop box watchers violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. Also before Judge Liburdi, that case prevailed in getting the practice curtailed in several ways that should make watchers’ activities less threatening to voters.Now, because of a temporary restraining order that Judge Liburdi issued, observers affiliated with the Clean Elections USA group cannot take photos or videos of voters within 75ft of a drop box, nor can they post images online implying someone is committing a crime. They now have to be 250ft away from a drop box if they are wearing body armor or carrying guns. Even then, the threat continues.‘How did we get here?’It’s not just the drop box activities that have election workers, voters and activists worried. Across the country, elected officials have been receiving threats from the same groups that are closing in on voters.One email sent to several workers at the Arizona secretary of state’s office, including the secretary of state herself, Katie Hobbs, vulgarly harassed the employees, threatened to find their addresses using local tax records and referred to the French Revolution. Hobbs, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate for governor, has been subjected to threats after 2020, resulting in federal charges for one man who made a death threat against her. Two other local elected officials, the Maricopa county supervisor, Clint Hickman, and county recorder, Stephen Richer, have faced threats that resulted in federal charges this year as well.The chairs of all 15 Arizona county Democratic parties also received unsigned threatening letters, featuring the words “WE ARE WATCHING YOU”. “Retirees with nothing else to do will be filing hundreds of lawsuits, if not more,” the letter said. “They will be locating your homes, your social media profiles and pictures and posting them online as well.”Bonnie Heidler, the chair of the Pima county Democratic party, received the letter at the office’s headquarters and immediately informed the FBI. She wanted the letter on record, in case anything happens. She pointed out that the language of the letter was similar to an 14 October social media post from Finchem directed at Pima county, in which the candidate said: “We will be watching.”The county party’s building is up for sale, and someone called the realtor saying they wanted to buy the building so they could blow it up, Heidler said. The party is discussing ways to improve security, she added.“What Trump did was, he let the genie out of the bottle. And now we can’t get the genie back in. And that’s the problem. He’s given them credence that they’re ‘very fine people’,” Heidler said.Election workers in other states have also faced harassment and threats for doing their jobs. Election officials now routinely receive calls, voicemails, emails and social media posts that range from vitriolic to frightening.A mother and daughter who were election workers in Georgia told the January 6 committee they were threatened and told they should be jailed or killed.The entire election staff in rural Gillespie county, Texas, quit earlier this year, having finally had enough of the onslaught of harassment and false claims after 2020.The threats have left polling places understaffed or with inexperienced staff, as seasoned election workers decide to leave. In some areas, like Akron, Ohio, local officials have put laws in place to increase penalties for people who harass or interfere with election workers.Few Republicans have stood up to stolen election claims, and the ones who have have faced harsh electoral consequences from Trump’s rabid base. The Republican governor, Doug Ducey, who ignored Trump’s phone call while signing off on Arizona’s 2020 results, is not up for re-election, but he has still largely remained quiet. Arizona’s house speaker, Rusty Bowers, who refused to overturn the election results, lost his primary. County elected officials, who have been steadfast in support of the way the county ran the election, have faced endless outrage and threats.“How did we get here?” Gates said. “We got here because there are a few people that have normalized this sort of behavior, and then a bunch of my fellow Republicans who remain silent while that goes on, out of fear of some political ramification.”He doesn’t think the fervor will die down unless other Republicans start calling out those who are undermining democracy.“Literally, the eyes of the world are on Maricopa county,” Gates said. “If we engage in this kooky behavior, that’s not a good image to be providing to the rest of the country and the rest of the world. We’re better than that.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022US voting rightsArizonaUS politicsPostal votingfeaturesReuse this content More