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      Wisconsin electors and voter file lawsuit against fraudulent 2020 Trump electors

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      Wisconsin electors and voter file lawsuit against fraudulent 2020 Trump electors Suit seeks fines and damages from those casting fake ballots and prohibition from serving the future Two of Wisconsin’s presidential electors and a voter in the state filed a lawsuit Tuesday seeking to punish a group of Republicans who tried to cast fake electoral votes for Donald Trump in 2020, asking a state court to order them to pay up to $2.4m collectively in damages and bar them from ever serving as legitimate electors in a presidential election.Biden tells Buffalo shooting mourners: ‘Evil will not win. Hate will not prevail’ – liveRead moreWisconsin was one of seven states Trump lost in 2020 where allies cast an alternative set of electoral votes as part of his effort to overturn the election. The suit, filed by Law Forward and the Georgetown Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (Icap) on behalf of the legitimate electors, is the first of its kind seeking civil punishments against the electors. Federal prosecutors and the January 6 commission are reportedly also reviewing the fake slates.The lawsuit, filed in Dane county, targets the 10 Republicans who served as the fake elector slate, as well as Jim Troupis, an attorney for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin, and Kenneth Chesebro, a Boston-area attorney who aided their efforts. It asks a judge to order each of them to pay a $2,000 fine as well as up to $200,000 each in damages in addition to blocking them from ever being able to serve as electors.“Although Defendants were unsuccessful in having their fake ballots counted, they caused significant harm simply by trying, and there is every reason to believe that they will try again if given the opportunity,” the complaint says. “Defendants actions also violated a host of state and federal laws. Thus far, however, none of the fraudulent electors has been held accountable. This lawsuit seeks to change that.”Chesebro sent Troupis a memo in November 2020, two weeks after election day, laying out the rationale for why alternate slates of electors should meet and cast votes for Trump in states he lost. “It may seem odd that the electors pledged to Trump and [Vice-President Mike] Pence might meet and cast their votes, even if, at that juncture, the Trump-Pence ticket is behind in the vote count,” he wrote in the memo. “However, a fair reading of the federal statutes suggests that this is a reasonable course of action.”The Trump campaign endorsed the effort and electors in Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and New Mexico all met on 14 December 2020, the day the electoral college met, to cast their votes for Trump. They sent certificates of their votes to the National Archives in Washington.“Their fraudulently submitted electoral votes fed into the false narrative that was relied on by those who violently attacked the US Capitol on January 6, halting the counting of the legitimate Electoral College votes,” Mary McCord, executive director of Icap said in a statement. “As important as it is that we hold accountable those responsible for that attack, it’s just as vital that we demand accountability for those whose fraudulent activity undermined the electoral process and weakened our democracy.”In March, the Wisconsin Elections Commission, the six-member body that oversees elections in the state, unanimously voted to reject a complaint against the fake electors alleging they broke state law. The commission relied on an analysis from the Wisconsin Department of Justice finding that the electors didn’t run afoul of state statutes and were trying to keep their legal options open, according to WisPolitics.com. Law Forward, one of the groups behind Tuesday’s lawsuit, also backed that complaint.The Wisconsin case is the latest in a number of cases filed across the US over the last year seeking to hold people who aided efforts to overturn the election accountable. Two election workers in Georgia, for example, recently reached a settlement in a defamation suit with One America News (OAN), which falsely accused the pair of counting illegal ballots. The network said shortly after the settlement there was “no widespread voter fraud.”Dominion, the voting machine company targeted by election conspiracy theorists, has also filed a number of defamation lawsuits. Other groups have sought sanctions against Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and other lawyers who promoted Trump’s baseless conspiracies about the election.TopicsUS elections 2020WisconsinUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      9 Governor’s Races to Watch in 2022

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      This November, voters in three dozen states will elect, or re-elect, their chief executive. Even before the candidate matchups are set, the contours of the debate in many of these races are clear. The races for governor are likely to be noisy, with fights over schools, managing the economy, residual Covid debates and race and gender politics.In some of the most competitive races, the outcome has implications far beyond the governor’s mansion. With many Republican voters embracing debunked theories about former President Donald J. Trump’s loss in the 2020 election and pushing for new voting restrictions, governors in battleground states are at the front line in a fight over American democracy, determining how easy it is to vote and even whether election results will be accepted, no matter which party wins.Here are some of the races we’re watching.Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan during a news conference on crime reduction.Nick Hagen for The New York TimesMichiganGov. Gretchen Whitmer is facing voters in this swing state after angering many on the right by imposing strict Covid-19 safety measures and vetoing legislation she says perpetuates falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election results. With Democrats facing a particularly tough climate this year, a crowded field of Republican candidates has gathered to challenge her. James Craig, the former police chief of Detroit, appears to be the early front-runner among a group of 10 Republicans.Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, who is up for re-election in November, vetoed a package of Republican election measures.Andy Manis/Associated PressWisconsinLike Ms. Whitmer in Michigan, Gov. Tony Evers was elected in the Democratic wave of 2018. And also like Ms. Whitmer, he has spent much of his term doing battle with a Republican-led Legislature. Mr. Evers blocked new restrictions on abortion and voting, at times branding himself as a firewall against a conservative agenda.Wisconsin Republicans, already divided over their party’s embrace of election falsehoods, are facing a contentious primary to challenge Mr. Evers. Among the contenders is a former lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch; Kevin Nicholson, a management consultant and former Marine; Tim Michels, a former candidate for U.S. Senate; and Tim Ranthum, a state lawmaker running on a fringe attempt to “decertify” the 2020 presidential election.Gov. Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania cannot seek a third term.Noah Riffe/Centre Daily Times, via Associated PressPennsylvaniaGov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, is prohibited from seeking a third term because of term limits, and Democrats hope Josh Shapiro, the state attorney general and likely nominee, can hold the seat for them. Mr. Shapiro will face the winner of the nine-person Republican primary, which includes Bill McSwain, a former U.S. attorney whom Trump harshly criticized for not investigating his claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election. State Senators Doug Mastriano and Jake Corman, as well as David White, a former Delaware County Council member, are also running.David Perdue has the Trump endorsement in the Georgia governor’s race.Audra Melton for The New York TimesGeorgiaFormer President Donald J. Trump is trying to use the Georgia governor’s race — and other state contests — to seek revenge for his 2020 loss in the state. He endorsed former Senator David Perdue in an uphill battle against Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican incumbent who resisted Mr. Trump’s pressure to overturn the election results.That divisive primary could hobble the winning Republican as he heads into a general election fight against Stacey Abrams, the likely Democratic nominee, whose narrow loss to Mr. Kemp in 2018 helped propel her to national prominence.Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, began her race for governor with a fund-raising edge.Cassidy Araiza for The New York TimesArizonaTerm limits are creating an open race for governor in a state that has been seized by unfounded claims of election fraud since Mr. Trump’s loss in 2020. Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, started with a sizable fund-raising lead over her two primary opponents, Aaron Lieberman, a former state legislator, and former Mayor Marco López of Nogales, who worked for Customs and Border Protection in the Obama administration.Kari Lake, a former news anchor at a Fox television station in Phoenix, Ariz., who was endorsed by Mr. Trump, has had an edge in the crowded Republican field. Other Republicans include Karrin Taylor Robson, a former member of the Arizona Board of Regents, and Paola Tulliani Zen, a business owner.Gov. Laura Kelly is expected to face a close race this fall.John Hanna/Associated PressKansasGov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, was elected in this reliably red state with less than 50 percent of the vote in 2018. She is headed to another competitive race in November. The likely Republican nominee is Derek Schmidt, the state’s attorney general.Though she angered Republicans by vetoing legislation barring transgender athletes from women’s sports and raising the eligibility requirements for food stamps, Ms. Kelly’s first television ad features Mr. Trump and a bipartisan theme. Mr. Schmidt has been endorsed by Mr. Trump.Gov. J.B. Pritzker at the groundbreaking for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.Mustafa Hussain for The New York TimesIllinoisGovernor J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat and billionaire, is up for re-election in this blue state with a history of electing Republican governors. Two billionaires looking to oust him are vying in a competitive, and most likely expensive, Republican primary.That race includes State Senator Darren Bailey, who has the backing of the billionaire Richard Uihlein, and Mayor Richard Irvin of Aurora, who has the financial support of Ken Griffin, the state’s richest resident and a longtime Pritzker rival. The race also includes Jesse Sullivan, a well-funded businessman and first-time candidate.Gov. Greg Abbott has overseen a hard right turn in the Texas government.Joel Martinez/The Monitor, via Associated PressTexasGov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, is running for a third term with a fund-raising advantage over his leading Democratic rival and having overseen a hard right turn in state government. Mr. Abbott has bused migrants from the southwest border to the nation’s capital, blocked mask and vaccine mandates, and pushed for criminal investigations of parents who seek transition care for transgender youths.His rival, Beto O’Rourke, is a former three-term congressman from El Paso, who nearly ousted Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, in 2018, and ran for president in 2020. His comment that year — “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15” — may have weakened, if not doomed, his chances with voters in gun-friendly Texas.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February in Orlando.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesFloridaGov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, is widely believed to harbor presidential ambitions that are putting him on a crash course with the state’s other ambitious politician, Mr. Trump, whose endorsement helped Mr. DeSantis narrowly win the governor’s office just four years ago.Florida has transformed as Mr. DeSantis has increased and flexed his power to remarkable effect, opposing Covid-19 mandates, outlawing abortions after 15 weeks and restricting school curriculums that led to fights with Disney and the banning of math books. Mr. DeSantis has a fund-raising advantage over his likely Democratic opponent, Representative Charlie Crist, a Democrat and former Republican governor of the state, who is in a crowded primary that includes Nikki Fried, the commissioner of agriculture and consumer services.— More

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      Trump Allies Are Still Feeding the False 2020 Election Narrative

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      Fifteen months after they tried and failed to overturn the 2020 election, the same group of lawyers and associates is continuing efforts to “decertify” the vote, feeding a false narrative.A group of President Donald J. Trump’s allies and associates spent months trying to overturn the 2020 election based on his lie that he was the true winner.Now, some of the same confidants who tried and failed to invalidate the results based on a set of bogus legal theories are pushing an even wilder sequel: that by “decertifying” the 2020 vote in key states, the outcome can still be reversed.In statehouses and courtrooms across the country, as well as on right-wing news outlets, allies of Mr. Trump — including the lawyer John Eastman — are pressing for states to pass resolutions rescinding Electoral College votes for President Biden and to bring lawsuits that seek to prove baseless claims of large-scale voter fraud. Some of those allies are casting their work as a precursor to reinstating the former president.The efforts have failed to change any statewide outcomes or uncover mass election fraud. Legal experts dismiss them as preposterous, noting that there is no plausible scenario under the Constitution for returning Mr. Trump to office.But just as Mr. Eastman’s original plan to use Congress’s final count of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn the election was seen as far-fetched in the run-up to the deadly Capitol riot, the continued efforts are fueling a false narrative that has resonated with Mr. Trump’s supporters and stoked their grievances. They are keeping alive the same combustible stew of conspiracy theory and misinformation that threatens to undermine faith in democracy by nurturing the lie that the election was corrupt.The efforts have fed a cottage industry of podcasts and television appearances centered around not only false claims of widespread election fraud in 2020, but the notion that the results can still be altered after the fact — and Mr. Trump returned to power, an idea that he continues to push privately as he looks toward a probable re-election run in 2024.Democrats and some Republicans have raised deep concerns about the impact of the decertification efforts. They warn of unintended consequences, including the potential to incite violence of the sort that erupted on Jan. 6, when a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters — convinced that he could still be declared the winner of the 2020 election — stormed the Capitol. Legal experts worry that the focus on decertifying the last election could pave the way for more aggressive — and earlier — legislative intervention the next time around.“At the moment, there is no other way to say it: This is the clearest and most present danger to our democracy,” said J. Michael Luttig, a leading conservative lawyer and former appeals court judge, for whom Mr. Eastman clerked and whom President George W. Bush considered as a nominee to be the chief justice of the United States. “Trump and his supporters in Congress and in the states are preparing now to lay the groundwork to overturn the election in 2024 were Trump, or his designee, to lose the vote for the presidency.”Most of Mr. Trump’s aides would like him to stop talking about 2020 — or, if he must, to focus on changes to voting laws across the country rather than his own fate. But like he did in 2020, when many officials declined to help him upend the election results, Mr. Trump has found a group of outside allies willing to take up an outlandish argument they know he wants to see made.The efforts have been led or loudly championed by Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow; Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser; Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist; and Boris Epshteyn, an aide and associate of Mr. Trump’s.Another key player has been Mr. Eastman, the right-wing lawyer who persuaded Mr. Trump shortly after the election that Vice President Mike Pence could reject certified electoral votes for Mr. Biden when he presided over the congressional count and declare Mr. Trump the victor instead.Mr. Eastman wrote a memo and Mr. Epshteyn sent an email late last year to the main legislator pushing a decertification bill in Wisconsin, laying out a legal theory to justify the action. Mr. Eastman met last month with Robin Vos, the speaker of the State Assembly, and activists working across the country, a meeting that was reported earlier by The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.Jefferson Davis, an activist from Wisconsin, said he had asked Mr. Eastman to join the meeting after hearing about his work on behalf of Mr. Trump following the election.“If it was good enough for the president of the United States,” Mr. Davis said in an interview, “then his expertise was good enough to meet with Speaker Vos in Wisconsin on election fraud and what do we do to fix it.”Mr. Vos has maintained that the Legislature has no pathway to decertification, in line with the guidance of its own lawyers.John Eastman, left, has made clear that he has no intention of dropping his fight to show that the election was stolen.Jim Bourg/Reuters“There is no mechanism in state or federal law for the Legislature to reverse certified votes cast by the Electoral College and counted by Congress,” the lawyers wrote, adding that impeachment was the only way to remove a sitting president other than in the case of incapacity.But Mr. Eastman has made clear that he has no intention of dropping his fight to prove that the election was stolen. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has said his legal efforts to invalidate the results most likely violated the law by trying to defraud the American people. A federal judge recently agreed, calling Mr. Eastman’s actions “a coup in search of a legal theory.”Legal experts say his continued efforts could increase his criminal exposure; but if Mr. Eastman were ever to be charged with fraud, he could also point to his recent work as evidence that he truly believed the election was stolen.“There are a lot of things still percolating,” Mr. Eastman said in an interview with The New York Times last fall. He claimed that states had illegally given people the ability to cast votes in ways that should have been forbidden, corrupting the results. And he pointed to a widely debunked video from State Farm Arena in Atlanta, which he claimed showed that tabulation ballots were run through counting machines multiple times during the election.Charles Burnham, Mr. Eastman’s lawyer, said in a statement that he “was recently invited to lend his expertise to legislators and citizens in Wisconsin confronting significant evidence of election fraud and illegality. He did so in his role as a constitutional scholar and not on behalf of any client.”The fringe legal theory that Mr. Eastman and Mr. Epshteyn are promoting — which has been widely dismissed — holds that state lawmakers have the power to choose how electors are selected, and they can change them long after the Electoral College has certified votes if they find fraud and illegality sufficiently altered the outcome. The theory has surfaced in multiple states, including several that are political battlegrounds.As in Wisconsin, state legislators in Arizona drafted resolutions calling for the decertification of the 2020 election. In Georgia, a lawsuit sought to decertify the victories of the Democratic senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. And Robert Regan, a Republican favored to win a seat in the Michigan House, has said he wants to decertify the 2020 election either through a ballot petition or the courts.Mr. Bannon, Mr. Lindell and Mr. Epshteyn have repeatedly promoted decertification at the state level on Mr. Bannon’s podcast, “War Room,” since last summer, pushing it as a steady drumbeat and at times claiming that it could lead to Mr. Trump being put back into office. They have described the so-called audit movement that began in Arizona and spread to other states as part of a larger effort to decertify electoral votes.“We are on a full, full freight train to decertify,” Mr. Epshteyn said on the program in January. “That’s what we’re going to get. Everyone knows. Everyone knows this election was stolen.”Capitol Riot’s Aftermath: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Debating a criminal referral. More

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      Supreme court ruling on Wisconsin maps highlights its hostility to voting rights

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      Supreme court ruling on Wisconsin maps highlights its hostility to voting rightsIt’s no secret the court has been hostile to voting rights recently – but what has changed is the ‘velocity’ that it is acting with Hello, and Happy Thursday,In the fall of 2017, I was sitting in the cramped press area at the supreme court as a lawyer named Paul Smith urged the justices to strike down the districts for the Wisconsin state assembly. They were so distorted in favor of Republicans, he argued, that they violated the US constitution. As Smith started to lay out his case, Chief Justice John Roberts cut in and laid out what he feared would happen if the supreme court were to step in and start policing electoral maps based on partisanship.Get the latest updates on voting rights in the Guardian’s Fight to vote newsletter“We will have to decide in every case whether the Democrats win or the Republicans win. So it’s going to be a problem here across the board. And if you’re the intelligent man on the street and the court issues a decision, and let’s say the Democrats win, and that person will say: ‘Well, why did the Democrats win?” Roberts said. “It must be because the supreme court preferred the Democrats over the Republicans. And that’s going to come out one case after another as these cases are brought in every state. And that is going to cause very serious harm to the status and integrity of the decisions of this court in the eyes of the country.”The supreme court eventually upheld the Wisconsin districts on technical grounds. But in 2019, the court removed itself and the entire federal judiciary from policing partisan gerrymandering. “Partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts,” Roberts wrote. He pointed to state courts as one potential forum where litigants could bring claims. Together, those two moments underscore how wary Roberts was of getting the court entangled in redistricting cases, highly politically charged disputes that could pose a serious threat to the court’s apolitical reputation.That’s why it was so stunning to see the supreme court intervene last week over Wisconsin’s new legislative maps. Instead of staying out of a redistricting dispute, the supreme court went out of its way to insert itself into the center of a dispute in one of America’s most politically competitive states.The Wisconsin case that arrived at the supreme court this year was a bit different from the one it considered in 2017. This time around, the state’s Republican legislature was challenging the state legislative districts that the Wisconsin supreme court picked for the state. Even though Republicans would still hold their majority under the new map, lawmakers took issue with the creation of an additional Black-majority district near Milwaukee. They said there wasn’t adequate justification for creating it, and made an emergency request to the supreme court to block the maps.In a seven-page unsigned opinion, the supreme court accepted that request last week. But it went further, using the case as an opportunity to interpret the Voting Rights Act in a narrow way without full briefing or oral argument in the case. Even longtime court observers were baffled.It’s no secret that the supreme court has been extremely hostile to voting rights recently. But what has changed is the “velocity” that the court is acting with, Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, told me.“The supermajority of the conservative justices on the supreme court has become pretty emboldened. They’ve got a narrow vision of the scope of the Voting Rights Act. And they are not being shy about enforcing that as quickly as they can,” he told me. “What’s changed is how much more aggressive they’re willing to be.”That increased aggressiveness may in part be a function of the supreme court’s increased conservative majority. Back in 2017, when the court heard the first Wisconsin case, Anthony Kennedy was the swing justice on a court divided 5-4 between liberals and conservatives. Now, Kennedy is gone and conservatives have increased their majority to 6-3.Experts aren’t just alarmed by what the supreme court has been saying about voting rights, but also the way they have been going about it. The court had embraced an idea recently, called the Purcell principle, that courts should not upset the status quo when an election is near. But the justices have been inconsistent in how exactly it has applied that rule and have not really said how close an election must be before courts can’t intervene.In early February, for example, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito said it was too close to Alabama’s 24 May primary to impose a new congressional map that would have increased Black representation. But in early March, when Kavanaugh made the same argument for upholding North Carolina’s congressional districts ahead of its 17 May primary, Alito, joined by Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, said it was not too close.And in the Wisconsin case, state election officials said any ruling that came after 15 March would “increase the risk of errors” as it prepared for its primary election in August. The supreme court intervened nine days after that deadline.“It is a sign that many of the brakes have come off,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas told me. “It’s a sign that the court is increasingly willing to do whatever the court wants to do, procedural constraints and sort of awkward timing nonwithstanding.”Also worth watching …
      Anyone who isn’t in jail or prison for a felony can vote, a three-judge panel in North Carolina ruled on Monday. The decision could affect up to 56,000 people in the state, though election officials aren’t letting people with felonies register just yet.
      Arizona Republicans passed a law requiring new voters to prove their citizenship to vote in a presidential election, which is probably illegal.
      Ohio voting rights groups are fuming after Republicans did a bait-and-switch to try again and get the state supreme court to approve gerrymandered maps.
      A committee of Georgia lawmakers stopped a proposal, for now, that would have expanded the Georgia bureau of investigation’s ability to investigate voter fraud, among other measures.
      TopicsUS supreme courtFight to voteUS politicsWisconsinRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

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      US state legislatures threaten citizens’ rights. We ignore them at our peril

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      US state legislatures threaten citizens’ rights. We ignore them at our perilThe bodies have become the engines of policymaking, behind Georgia’s voting restrictions and Florida’s ‘don’t say gay’ bill Hello, and happy Thursday,Since late last year, I have been intensely focused on the frantic efforts by both major parties to put themselves in the best position to win US House races this fall.State-by-state, lawmakers are undertaking the once-a-decade task of redrawing all 435 districts in the US House. In most states, legislatures are responsible for drawing the new lines, and to no one’s surprise, both parties have jostled to draw as many districts in their favor as possible. While many, including me, expected Republicans to dominate the process, because they have control of more legislatures, Democrats have been boosted as a result of anti-gerrymandering reforms and an aggressive legal strategy.Reading lots of analysis about what’s happening at the congressional level, I started thinking that there was a much more significant redistricting story that was being largely overlooked. As they’ve been drawing congressional districts, state lawmakers have also been redrawing districts for their state legislatures (yes, they are setting the boundaries for the districts they run in).US supreme court blocks new Wisconsin voting maps in boost for RepublicansRead moreThis lack of attention is significant because state legislatures have become the engines of policymaking in the US. Take a second and think about the most controversial pieces of legislation you’ve heard about recently. Maybe it’s the sweeping new voting restrictions in Georgia. The “don’t say gay” bill in Florida. Anti-abortion bills in Texas and Oklahoma. All of these measures were passed in state legislatures, not Congress. With the federal government bogged down in gridlock, state legislatures, where one party often has control, have become the forums to pass legislation on issues such as school funding and public health that directly affect people’s lives.“The gerrymandering of the state legislative maps, it’s actually more important than even the congressional gerrymandering,” David Pepper, a former chairman of the Ohio Democratic party, told me. “We have this repeat cycle where every few weeks an outrage of some state law that passed somewhere and then we all cover the court case. But very rarely do people go back and look at: ‘What’s the cause of all this craziness in states?’”Republicans currently control 62 legislative chambers, while Democrats control 36. There are 23 states where Republicans have complete control over state government, and 14 where Democrats do.While things are slightly better for Democrats than they were a decade ago, control of state legislatures is unlikely to change over the next decade. Just 17.5% of districts are estimated to be competitive, a slight decrease from a decade ago, according to Chris Warshaw, a political science professor at George Washington University.“Most of the plans are pretty uncompetitive and most are biased in favor of one of the two parties. So I don’t think we’re likely to see many state legislatures flip control over the next decade,” he said.Letting Republicans depress the vote is ‘not in the cards’: a US governor on a race that may shape democracyRead morePerhaps no state better embodies the consequences of state legislative gerrymandering than Wisconsin. The Wisconsin state assembly, the legislature’s lower chamber, is widely understood to be one of the most gerrymandered bodies in the US. It’s so distorted that it’s virtually impossible for Republicans to lose a majority in it – even if they got a minority of the vote, they would still be able to hold a majority of the seats.Republicans have used that advantage recently to press a slew of anti-democratic policies, including a partisan review of the 2020 election that made the impossible case for how the lawmakers could “decertify” the results of the 2020 race.Earlier this month, Democrats had hoped they would get a slight boost in the legislative maps. After looking at a range of proposals, the state supreme court picked a new legislative map submitted by Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, saying it best complied with an earlier court order to make as little change as possible to the current maps.But on Wednesday, the US supreme court stepped in and threw out those maps, taking issue with the creation of additional Black-majority district in the Milwaukee area. It sent the case back to the state court for further consideration.“The will of the people is traditionally the law of the land. That is not the case at this point in time,” Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, told me last week.Also worth watching…
      I spoke with Evers about the stakes for his re-election bid and democracy.
      Listen to Pamela Moses, the Black Memphis woman sentenced to six years in prison for trying to register to vote, speak about her case.
      This redistricting cycle has blunted the political power of voters of color.
      Arizona Republicans are advancing a measure that would do away with no-excuse mail-in and early voting, which is widely used in the state.
      Ohio Republicans remain engaged in a high-stakes standoff with the state supreme court, which has refused to let GOP lawmakers enact gerrymandered electoral districts.
      TopicsUS newsFight to voteUS voting rightsUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsWisconsinfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Widely criticized Wisconsin report repeats falsehoods in argument to ‘decertify’ 2020 election

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      Widely criticized Wisconsin report repeats falsehoods in argument to ‘decertify’ 2020 electionDocument offers clear example of how Republicans are embracing efforts to overturn results of validly executed elections Get the latest updates on voting rights in the Guardian’s Fight to vote newsletter.A long anticipated and widely criticized review of Wisconsin’s 2020 election has embraced fringe conspiracy theories and argued there were grounds for the legislature to “decertify” the results of the 2020 election, something legal experts have said is impossible.A report released on Tuesday was the result of months of work by Michael Gableman, a former state supreme court justice hired by the state assembly to review the election. Gableman’s efforts, backed by $676,000 in public funds, have been widely criticized as partisan, sloppy and unnecessary.Recounts in two of Wisconsin’s largest counties affirmed Joe Biden’s victory there in 2020 and an inquiry by the non-partisan legislative audit bureau also found no evidence of widespread fraud.Nonetheless, Gableman’s 136-page report offered a litany of accusations that culminated in an argument that the legislature should consider rescinding the election results.“I believe the legislature ought to take a very hard look at the option of decertification,” Gableman said in a presentation on Tuesday morning to the state assembly. Just before Gableman began speaking, Trump encouraged supporters to tune in to Gableman’s presentation.“It is clear that the Wisconsin legislature (acting without the concurrence of the governor), could decertify the certified electors in the 2020 presidential ​​election,” he wrote in his report. “This action would not, on its own, have any other legal consequence under state or federal law. It would not, for example, change who the current president is.”The document offers one of the clearest examples to date of how Republicans across the US are embracing efforts to overturn the results of validly executed elections – a new phenomenon experts call election subversion.In addition to legislation, Republicans who have embraced the idea of a stolen election are trying to take control of key election posts that would allow them to block validly cast votes from being certified in future elections.Gableman’s report, which cycled through numerous falsehoods that have already been debunked, appears to be a clear effort to offer the legislature justification for overturning the results of the 2020 race.Wisconsin Republicans have split on the idea of decertifying the election, which is a fringe legal theory. Jim Steineke, the majority leader in the GOP-controlled state assembly, tweeted on Tuesday that decertification was a “fool’s errand” and he would do everything he could during his time in office to block such an effort from moving forward.I have ten months remaining in my last term. In my remaining time, I can guarantee that I will not be part of any effort, and will do everything possible to stop any effort, to put politicians in charge of deciding who wins or loses elections. 1/— Jim Steineke 🇺🇦 (@jimsteineke) March 1, 2022
      Gableman zeroed in on a number of election-related issues in Wisconsin that have already been scrutinized. He focused on grants given to election officials in the state from the Center for Tech and Civic Life to facilitate voting. The grants were funded by money from a donation from the Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife Priscilla Chan. Three courts and the state elections commission have rejected arguments that the grants, which were received in 39 of the state’s 72 counties, were unlawful.Gableman also attacked the state elections commission’s decision to suspend a special voting procedure in nursing homes amid the pandemic in 2020. State law requires local clerks to send special voting deputies to nursing homes to assist people with filling out their ballots.With the Covid-19 pandemic raging in 2020, the state elections commission voted on a bipartisan basis to suspend that requirement and send absentee ballots instead. A local sheriff in Racine county released an investigation last year in which family members claimed their relatives had cast votes but did not have the mental capacity to do so.During Tuesday’s hearing, Gableman played several videos of nursing home residents who were recorded as having cast ballots in 2020. Several of the people were incapacitated or appeared confused about voting. In Wisconsin, a mentally incapacitated person only loses the right to vote if a judge explicitly orders that. Gableman’s review did not make clear whether those voters were legally barred from voting by a judge.Ann Jacobs, a Democrat who chairs the state elections commission, criticized the report and factchecked it in real time.It appears that there is some confusion between a determination of a primary care MD that a person is not competent so that a POA kicks in (very common) as opposed to a full-on guardianship that removes the right to vote (rather uncommon).— Ann Jacobs (@AnnJacobsMKE) March 1, 2022
      Judges frequently allow people to retain their right to vote during a guardianship.— Ann Jacobs (@AnnJacobsMKE) March 1, 2022
      Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, a Democrat, also criticized the review.“This circus has long surpassed being a mere embarrassment for our state. From the beginning, it has never been a serious or functioning effort, it has lacked public accountability and transparency, and it has been a colossal waste of taxpayer dollars,” he said in a statement.“Enough is enough. Republicans in the legislature have always had the ability to end this effort, and I call on them to do so today.”Gableman said he would continue his work, though it is unclear if the assembly will back him. While Gableman’s initial contract expired in December, he said he believed its authority extended into 2022 and that he was negotiating new terms with the legislature.TopicsUS newsThe fight to voteWisconsinUS politicsUS elections 2020newsReuse this content More

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      Fringe Scheme to Reverse 2020 Election Splits Wisconsin G.O.P.

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      False claims that Donald J. Trump can be reinstalled in the White House are picking up steam — and spiraling further from reality as they go.MADISON, Wis. — First, Wisconsin Republicans ordered an audit of the 2020 election. Then they passed a raft of new restrictions on voting. And in June, they authorized the nation’s only special counsel investigation into 2020.Now, more than 15 months after former President Donald J. Trump lost the state by 20,682 votes, an increasingly vocal segment of the Republican Party is getting behind a new scheme: decertifying the results of the 2020 presidential election in hopes of reinstalling Mr. Trump in the White House.Wisconsin is closer to the next federal election than the last, but the Republican effort to overturn the election results here is picking up steam rather than fading away — and spiraling further from reality as it goes. The latest turn, which has been fueled by Mr. Trump, bogus legal theories and a new candidate for governor, is creating chaos in the Republican Party and threatening to undermine its push to win the contests this year for governor and the Senate.The situation in Wisconsin may be the most striking example of the struggle by Republican leaders to hold together their party when many of its most animated voters simply will not accept the reality of Mr. Trump’s loss.In Wisconsin, Robin Vos, the Assembly speaker who has allowed vague theories about fraud to spread unchecked, is now struggling to rein them in. Even Mr. Vos’s careful attempts have turned election deniers sharply against him.“This is a real issue,” said Timothy Ramthun, the Republican state representative who has turned his push to decertify the election into a nascent campaign for governor. Mr. Ramthun has asserted that if the Wisconsin Legislature decertifies the results and rescinds the state’s 10 electoral votes — an action with no basis in state or federal law — it could set off a movement that would oust President Biden from office.“We don’t wear tinfoil hats,” he said. “We’re not fringe.”Although support for the decertification campaign is difficult to measure, it wouldn’t take much to make an impact in a state where elections are regularly decided by narrow margins. Mr. Ramthun is drawing crowds, and his campaign has already revived Republicans’ divisive debate over false claims of fraud in 2020. Nearly two-thirds of Wisconsin Republicans were not confident in the state’s 2020 presidential election results, according to an October poll from the Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee.“This is just not what the Republican Party needs right now,” said Rob Swearingen, a Republican state representative from the conservative Northwoods. “We shouldn’t be fighting among ourselves about what happened, you know, a year and a half ago.”Wisconsin has the nation’s most active decertification effort. In Arizona, a Republican state legislator running for secretary of state along with candidates for Congress have called for recalling the state’s electoral votes. In September, Mr. Trump wrote a letter to Georgia officials asking them to decertify Mr. Biden’s victory there, but no organized effort materialized.In Wisconsin, the decertification push has Republican politics on its head. After more than a decade of Republican leaders marching in lock-step with their base, the party is hobbled by infighting and it’s Democrats who are aligned behind Gov. Tony Evers, who is seeking a second term in November.“Republicans now are arguing over whether we want democracy or not,” Mr. Evers said in an interview on Friday.Mr. Ramthun, a 64-year-old lawmaker who lives in a village of 2,000 people an hour northwest of Milwaukee, has ridden his decertification push to become a sudden folk hero to the party’s Trump wing. Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former adviser, has hosted Mr. Ramthun on his podcast. At party events, he shows off a 72-page presentation in which he claims, falsely, that legislators have the power to declare Wisconsin’s election results invalid and recall the state’s electoral votes.Mr. Ramthun has received bigger applause at local Republican gatherings than the leading candidates for governor, and last weekend he joined the race himself, announcing his candidacy at a campaign kickoff where he was introduced by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who has financed numerous efforts to undermine and overturn the 2020 election.Mr. Trump offered public words of encouragement.“Who in Wisconsin is leading the charge to decertify this fraudulent election?” the former president said in a statement.It did not take long before the state’s top Republicans were responding to Mr. Ramthun’s election conspiracies. Within days, both of his Republican rivals for governor released new plans to strengthen partisan control of Wisconsin’s elections.During a radio appearance on Thursday, former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, the party establishment’s preferred candidate, refused to admit that Mr. Biden won the 2020 election — something she had already conceded last September. Ms. Kleefisch declined to be interviewed.Kevin Nicholson, a former Marine with backing from the right-wing billionaire Richard Uihlein, declined in an interview to say whether the election was legitimate, but he said there was “no legal path” to decertifying the results.Mr. Vos spent nearly an hour Friday on a Milwaukee conservative talk radio show defending his opposition to decertification from skeptical callers.“It is impossible — it cannot happen,” he said. “I don’t know how many times I can say that.”A Tuesday rally at the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison drew about 250 people who called for decertifying the 2020 presidential election. Taylor Glascock for The New York TimesYet, Mr. Ramthun claims to have the grass-roots energy on his side. On Tuesday, he drew a crowd of about 250 people for a two-hour rally in the rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol.Terry Brand, the Republican Party chairman in rural Langlade County, chartered a bus for two dozen people for the three-hour ride. Mr. Brand in January oversaw the first county G.O.P. condemnation of Mr. Vos, calling for the leader’s resignation for blocking the decertification effort. At the rally, Mr. Brand stood holding a sign that said “Toss Vos.”“People are foaming at the mouth over this issue,” he said, listening intently as speakers offered both conspiracy theories and assurances to members of the crowd that they were of sound mind.“You’re not crazy,” Janel Brandtjen, the chairwoman of the Assembly’s elections committee, told the crowd.One speaker tied Mr. Vos, through a college roommate and former House Speaker Paul Ryan, to the false claims circulating in right-wing media that Hillary Clinton’s campaign spied on Mr. Trump. Another was introduced under a pseudonym, then promptly announced herself as a candidate for lieutenant governor.The rally closed with remarks from Harry Wait, an organizer of a conservative group in Racine County called HOT Government, an acronym for honest, open and transparent.“I want to remind everybody,” Mr. Wait said, “that yesterday’s conspiracies may be today’s reality.”Mr. Ramthun says he has questioned the result of every presidential election in Wisconsin since 1996. (He does not make an exception for the one Republican victory in that period: Mr. Trump’s in 2016.) He has pledged to consider ending the use of voting machines and to conduct an “independent full forensic physical cyber audit” of the 2020 election — and also of the 2022 election, regardless of how it turns out.Mr. Ramthun has adopted a biblical slogan — “Let there be light” — a reference to his claim that Mr. Vos is hiding the truth from voters. If Wisconsin pulls back its electoral votes, Mr. Ramthun said, other states may follow.(American presidents can be removed from office only by impeachment or by a vote of the cabinet.)Robin Vos, the speaker of Wisconsin State Assembly, told reporters on Tuesday that Republicans aiming to undo Mr. Trump’s loss were wrong to be angry with him.Andy Manis/Associated PressAll of this has become too much for Mr. Vos, who before the Trump era was a steady Republican foot soldier focused on taxes, spending and labor laws.Mr. Vos has often appeased his party’s election conspiracists, expressing his own doubts about who really won in Wisconsin, calling for felony charges against Wisconsin’s top election administrators and authorizing an investigation into the 2020 election, which is still underway.Now, even as he draws the line on decertification, Mr. Vos has tried to placate his base and plead for patience. He announced this week the Assembly plans to vote on a new package of voting bills. (Mr. Evers said in the interview on Friday that he would veto any new restrictions.)“It’s simply a matter of misdirected anger,” he said, of the criticism he’s facing. “They have already assumed that the Democrats are hopeless, and now they are focused on those of us who are trying to get at the truth, hoping we do more.”Other Republicans in the state are also walking a political tightrope — refusing to accept Mr. Biden’s victory while avoiding taking a position on Mr. Ramthun’s decertification effort.“Evidence might be out there, that is something other people are working on,” said Ron Tusler, who sits on the Assembly’s elections committee. “It’s too early to be sure but it’s possible we try it later.”State Senator Kathy Bernier is the only of Wisconsin’s 82 Republican state legislators who has made a public case that Mr. Trump lost the state fairly, without widespread fraud.Ms. Bernier, the chairwoman of the State Senate’s elections committee, in November asked the Wisconsin Legislature’s attorneys to weigh in on the legality of decertifying an election — it is not possible, they said. In December, she called for an end to the Assembly’s investigation into 2020. Three weeks later, she announced she won’t seek re-election this year.“I have no explanation as to why legislators want to pursue voter-fraud conspiracy theories that have not been proven,” Ms. Bernier said in an interview. “They should not do that. It’s dangerous to our democratic republic. They need to step back and only speak about things that they know and understand and can do. And outside of that, they should button it up.”Kitty Bennett contributed research. More

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      Opposition Research Goes Hyperlocal

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      The liberal group American Bridge is launching a new project to collect information for campaigns against Republicans running for state and local offices.Some of the loudest Stop the Steal voices on the right are actually far removed from the levers of America’s election machinery. When a member of Congress makes false claims about hacked voting machines or stolen ballots, he or she has little authority to do much about it.Across the United States, however, there are tens of thousands of state, county and local officials who do have that power. They will set and enforce the rules on voting, then go about counting and reporting the votes in the elections to come.To the alarm of independent experts, allies of Donald Trump have been targeting these once-anonymous offices, seeking to fill them with hard-core partisans all the way down to the level of precinct captain.Now, the Democratic organization American Bridge, known primarily for its opposition research into Republicans, has launched what it says is a $10 million campaign to influence the races for election administration in a dozen key states. The local elections project is part of a $100 million paid media campaign that American Bridge announced a year ago.The group has hired 22 researchers to scrub the records and public statements of candidates and officials running for statewide offices involved in election administration, along with the sort of races unlikely to garner attention outside of their communities: county boards of supervisors, boards of canvassers, local judges and state legislators. They plan to dig up dirt on officials and candidates to ruin their chances of getting elected or re-elected.“It’s about how do we take what we’ve already been expert at and expose the behavior of Republican candidates and officeholders and take it down ballot to these secretaries of state races, the attorneys general races, as well as on down the ballot to the county level,” said Jessica Floyd, the American Bridge president.The sheer scale of America’s decentralized election system presents a formidable challenge to anyone seeking to influence it. In Wisconsin alone, there are 1,850 municipal clerks who administer voting, with rules set by a bipartisan six-member state commission, whose members are appointed by state legislators and the governor.Rick Hasen, the author of several books about elections and democracy, said the use of such hardball political tactics in local elections was “probably a necessary evil.” He added: “Efforts to subvert elections can happen in lots of places.”The Democrats are starting from behind in this effort. There is plenty of evidence that Republicans — more than half of whom remain convinced of Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election was marred by fraud — are more motivated than Democrats by concerns about the voting system. And there has been a Republican financial advantage.In 2021, the Republican State Leadership Committee, which invests in state legislative and secretary of state races, raised $33 million, a record for a year in which most states didn’t hold state elections. The Democratic counterpart, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, took in $21 million, which it too crowed was the most ever in an off-year, but well behind the Republicans.‘You want to win these elections’Floyd, who worked for a handful of Washington’s major Democratic organizations and was an aide to Representative Gabrielle Giffords, said their tactics will help motivate base Democrats. But she added that the American Bridge researchers are in search of information that they believe voters will use to disqualify Republicans from winning local elections.In some communities, she said, that might be a commissioner who didn’t pay property taxes. Elsewhere, it might mean amplifying an untoward statement from a local radio station that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. For statewide candidates, American Bridge plans to hire “trackers” to follow them with cameras.“We’re not making an assumption that voters are going to be paying attention to how a race impacts the future of American democracy, because that’s not necessarily how people are treating the ballot box,” Floyd said. “You want to win these elections. We’re figuring out what’s the information that we have and how to disseminate that information in order to win as many elections as possible.”Kari Lake, a Republican, campaigning for governor in Florence, Ariz., last month.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesSome of what American Bridge finds will be handed to news organizations, sometimes with and sometimes without the organization’s fingerprints attached. Kari Lake, a Trump-endorsed candidate for Arizona governor, called on school districts to install cameras to monitor teachers in classrooms in a local radio interview. The group took credit for the story being reported in the Arizona Republic and other local outlets.But more and more, American Bridge has been pushing its research on its own. One of its more prolific researchers maintains a Twitter account devoted to monitoring every local radio interview and television appearance by Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Republican Senate candidates.“We should be exposing bad behavior,” Floyd said.What to read Jennifer Medina and Lisa Lerer profile Josh Mandel, a Republican Senate candidate of Ohio, and his political journey to the far right.U.S. officials are using creative methods to try to understand the thinking of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s enigmatic leader, report David E. Sanger, Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt.The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol issued a fresh batch of subpoenas, Luke Broadwater reports, including of two top Trump campaign officials and several state legislators.Charlie Savage explains a mysterious filing by John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel who has been investigating the federal probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.FrameworkJim Lamon, an Arizona Republican, starred in a gunslinging Super Bowl ad.Jim Lamon for U.S. SenatePrimary matchups at the Super BowlIt’s nothing new for politicians to use the Super Bowl to gain exposure. But on Sunday, two ads that went after the president pushed the boundaries of anti-Biden rhetoric. One repeated a phrase that has become code for a slur against President Biden, and the other showed a candidate shooting at him.The two Republicans behind the ads are running for Senate.Dave McCormick, a Pennsylvania Republican, aired an ad that repeated a crowd chanting the “Let’s Go Brandon” anti-Biden phrase for nearly the entire 30-second spot. Jim Lamon, a candidate in Arizona, aired a Wild-West-themed ad in which he shoots at Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Senator Mark Kelly, who is up for re-election this year. In the ad, the three Democrats are armed and prepared to duel, but Lamon shoots down their weapons. In what seems to be an effort at slapstick humor, the trio runs away, unscathed and disarmed. Lamon had previously aired another “Let’s Go Brandon” ad.Robert Robb, a columnist for The Arizona Republic, pointed out what was the dual audience that Lamon was speaking to — Donald Trump’s most fervent supporters and Trump himself. It’s an expensive way, in other words, to get the former president’s attention and his possible endorsement.“The people running for Senate in Arizona are all trying to win the Trump primary, not necessarily the Republican Party primary,” Robb told us.It cost the Lamon campaign $25,000 to place an ad in Tucson, Ariz., during the Super Bowl, according to AdImpact, a firm that tracks television ad spending. McCormick’s campaign spent $70,000 to place the ad in the Pittsburgh media market.Both ads employed rhetoric that appeals to a smaller segment of the electorate, the most fervent Republican primary voters, even though a much more expansive audience actually watched it.There’s a chance that ads like these end up backfiring on the Republican candidates during the general election. Both Lamon and McCormick ran in states that Biden won in 2020. And, in Arizona, the Trump presidency coincided with Republicans losing both U.S. Senate seats and only narrowly preserving their majority in the State Legislature.Trump drove record turnout in Arizona, Robb said, but it wasn’t just his supporters who came out in record numbers. His opponents turned out as well.Lamon tried to show that he’s wealthy enough to afford a Super Bowl ad to “communicate this very narrow reach message,” Robb said. “But it does alienate the majority of the Arizona electorate.”Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More