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Freedom for vs. freedom from

It’s Super Tuesday. Do you know where your polling place is?

MSNBC last night pointed to a New York Times story I’d missed, perhaps because it’s old news to me. The voter fraud fraudsters are — say it with me — doubling down:

A network of right-wing activists and allies of Donald J. Trump is quietly challenging thousands of voter registrations in critical presidential battleground states, an all-but-unnoticed effort that could have an impact in a close or contentious election.

Calling themselves election investigators, the activists have pressed local officials in Michigan, Nevada and Georgia to drop voters from the rolls en masse. They have at times targeted Democratic areas, relying on new data programs and novel legal theories to justify their push.

What began with True the Vote in Texas has spread into a nationwide network of voter fraud sleuths in places such as Michigan.

The Michigan activists are part of an expansive web of grass-roots groups that formed after Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat in 2020. The groups have made mass voter challenges a top priority this election year, spurred on by a former Trump lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and True the Vote, a vote-monitoring group with a long history of spreading misinformation.

Their mission, they say, is to maintain accurate voting records and remove voters who have moved to another jurisdiction. Democrats, they claim, use these “excess registrations” to stuff ballot boxes and steal elections.

The theory has no grounding in fact. Investigations into voter fraud have found that it is exceedingly rare and that when it occurs, it is typically isolated or even accidental. Election officials say that there is no reason to think that the systems in place for keeping voter lists up-to-date are failing.

Same as it ever was. Michigan pays data experts from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) to keep its voter rolls as up to date as the law allows. (“Federal law requires clerks to keep voters who may have moved on the rolls for two election cycles, unless they receive notice from the voter,” the Times reminds.) But ERIC, you may recall, is part of a vast, left-wing voter fraud conspiracy. It’s given side-eye by the right’s “election intergrity” shock troops since being “exposed” by Gateway Pundit in January 2022 as a “left-wing plot to add more racial minorities to the voter rolls.”

Never fear. The voter fraud Scoobies are here.

The Scoobies’ goal in 2024 is not just flagging “questionable” registrations, but intimidating local election clerks, bogging down elections staff chasing their “leads,” and laying the groundwork for a replay of 2020 election challenges when Donald “91 Counts” Trump loses in November.

In Nevada, the Pigpen Project has set out to clean the voter rolls. Two longtime conservative activists, Chuck Muth and Dan Burdish, have organized door-to-door canvassing and enlisted landlords to compare voter rolls with their leasing records. More than once, they have escorted landlords to the Clark County registrar’s office so that they can flag registrations of former tenants.

Stephanie Wheatley, a spokeswoman for Clark County, said that the evidence was not enough to remove a voter but that it was “enough for the election department to do research and investigate.”

Nevada is also an ERIC state. And like Michigan, a blue state in 2020.

For readers new to my work, I attended a 2013 “election integrity” boot camp hosted by the Voter Integrity Project of NC (VIP-NC) a True the Vote spinoff led by one Jay DeLancy. The workshop taught aspiring voter fraud Scoobies how to sniff out bad registrations, including by “driving by abandoned homes and vacant lots, taking photos to prove to the local Board of Elections that people registered there no longer live there” (Crooks & Liars, 2013):

Arguing by anecdote, DeLancy related a story about people showing up to vote with clean, never-folded power bills for ID. He flashed on the screen a copy of former Gov. Bev Perdue’s power bill and asked, how do you think I got that? He made it on his computer. Those people with the power bills? It might be voter fraud. See, because it’s possible to mass-produce fake utility bills, someone, somewhere might be forging them to commit widespread voter fraud, undetected.

“How is fraud widespread if it’s undetected?” Colin Powell asked caustically while visiting Raleigh in August.

(This Super Tuesday, North Carolina voters must for the first time produce acceptable photo IDs to vote.)

What’s both sad and pathetic about our democracy-averse neighbors is not how they’re wasting their time, but what the Scoobies are not doing with it (added emphasis):

America is headed for greater plurality that will shift the political power balance. The sad part is, such legislation and citizen “boot camps” feel like white-knuckled exercises in protecting a demographic patch of electoral turf that’s shrinking beneath supporters’ feet. State after state erects barricades to voting and retreats behind them as for a siege. Not once did any speaker this weekend suggest opening up the franchise to greater participation, registering new voters and encouraging them to go the polls to exercise their right to vote.

This is what these Real American™ paranoiacs believe about their neighbors:

Nice, decent white people wake up on Election Day, shower, dress, eat breakfast, then go the polls to do their patriotic duty by casting their votes. OTHERS — Poors numbering in the invisible millions — are not like US. They go instead to commit felonies punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense just to add a single extra vote to their team’s total.

The voter fraud Scoobies’ concept of freedom is negative, freedom from not freedom for. They are maximizing their freedom by keeping feared others from enjoying any.

From 2019:

A priest friend jokes, in America you are expected to have faith. Not faith in anything in particular, just faith. In a similar vein, politicians peddle abstractions like freedom. Not freedom for anything in particular. Just freedom.

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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.

Imagine that

Politico provides us with some data about mail in and early voting that proves Donald Trump is a total fool:

If there was any doubt Donald Trump’s vilification of early voting is only hurting the GOP, new receipts from the midterm elections show it.

Election data from a trio of states that dramatically expanded the ability to cast ballots before Election Day, either early or by mail, demonstrate that the voting methods that were decidedly uncontroversial before Trump do not clearly help either party.

Lawmakers of both parties made it easier to vote by expanding availability of mail and early voting in a politically mixed group of states: Vermont, Kentucky and Nevada.

The states had divergent results but shared a few key things in common. Making it easier to vote early or by mail did not lead to voter fraud, nor did it seem to advantage Republicans or Democrats. In Kentucky, Republicans held on to five of the state’s six congressional districts and a Senate seat. Both Vermont and Nevada saw split-ticket voters decide statewide races, by a gaping margin in Vermont and a narrow one in Nevada.

It reflects a broad lesson for other states that might consider expanding voter access or encouraging voting before Election Day: While voting methods have become deeply polarized by party, expanding access to early and mail voting does not appear to benefit one party over the other. Republicans do not do themselves any favors when they follow in Trump’s footsteps and vilify early voting: It puts more onus on their voters to cast ballots on a single day.

But there is little evidence that expanding voter access tilts elections toward Democrats, either.

“We’ve shown that it is bipartisan,” said Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams, a Republican, of his state’s new early voting window. “Both sides are comfortable using it.”

Well, duh. In fact, for many years the Republicans were the one’s pushing early and mail-in voting because it makes sense. Democrats were late to the game. Thrn Trump came along and in setting up the whining excuses he would use in case he lost in 2020 he vilified those forms of voting and trained many Republicans to believe that the only way to win was to vote on election day. And then they had the nerve to complain about long lines after years of making it harder for Black and brown people to vote by insisting they stand in long lines.

The whole thing was idiotic but when you are catering to a narcissistic cretin this is the sort of thing you should expect. But they all went along. Take, for example, Bill Barr, his Attorney General, who spread one paranoid conspiracy theory about these voting methods after another:

In an interview with a Chicago Tribune columnist published last week, Barr argued that people would pay off U.S. Postal Service workers in order to commit election fraud.

“There’s no more secret vote with mail-in vote. A secret vote prevents selling and buying votes. So now, we’re back in the business of selling and buying votes. Capricious distribution of ballots means (ballot) harvesting, undue influence, outright coercion, paying off a postman … ‘here’s a few hundred dollars, give me some of your ballots,’” the attorney general said, according to the Tribune.

This is extremely misleading. Mail ballots are not transferable votes. Election workers verify voters’ identities by matching signatures and verifying identifying information, so that a misdirected ballot — such as those sent to a wrong address — cannot be cast by just anyone.

And it’s not true that mail ballots aren’t “secret” as a rule. States use a variety of precautions to try andkeep people’s absentee votes private: 16 states require the use of secrecy sleeves by law, though other states may choose to use them, as well. Other states have privacy precautions to keep election workers from tying specific votes to the ballot envelopes that are used for verifying voters’ identities…

Claim: Foreign countries could counterfeit mail ballots

In late June, Barr suggested in an interview with NPR that foreign countries could counterfeit mail ballots – days after Trump made the same claim in a tweet.

“There’s so many occasions for fraud there that cannot be policed. I think it would be very bad. But one of the things I mentioned was the possibility of counterfeiting,” Barr said then of voting by mail, adding he didn’t have any evidence of counterfeiting, instead saying it was “obvious.”

Pressed on this claim Sept. 2 in an interview with CNN, Barr said, “I’m basing that on logic.”

Speaking with NBC News on Sept. 9, the attorney general said fraud and coercion are bigger concerns, but that “mail-in ballots do provide a vector for foreign influence.”

“It might even be cheaper for the foreign government to counterfeit ballots in some critical districts than to engage in the other kinds of activities they have,” Barr continued. “What I’m saying is foreign intelligence services are very able. They can counterfeit currency and they have a lot of capacity. And I don’t think counterfeiting a state ballot is particularly challenging for them if they wanted to do it.”

This is baseless, according to experts. As NBC News has reported previously, there are numerous safeguards that keep American elections secure. Absentee ballots are printed on a particular paper stock — by specific vendors — and are traceable, sometimes with preprinted bar codes. They are then sent to registered, eligible voters. Once voters fill them out, most states use the voter’s signature to confirm that the eligible voter cast the ballot. They’re also all paper, allowing for an audit or recount over any concerns.

Claim: We haven’t done widespread mail voting before

“We haven’t had the kind of widespread use of mail-in ballots as being proposed. We’ve had absentee ballots, from people who request them from a specific address. Now, what we’re talking about is mailing them to everyone on the voter list when everyone knows those voter lists are inaccurate,” Barr said in the Sept. 2 interview with CNN.

This is misleading. Before the pandemic, five states (Washington, Colorado, Oregon, Utah, and Hawaii) already voted entirely or almost entirely by mail. In other states, mail ballot options — often called absentee ballots — are widely used. A quarter of the electorate voted by mail in 2018, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commision’s survey of election administrators. It may not be the predominant method of voting nationwide, but in western states including California, Arizona, Washington and Colorado, mail voting is how the vast majority of people vote. What’s more, mail voting and absentee ballots are in essence the same thing. Barr’s criticism — which mirrors the president’s — has to do with election administration — whether states mail ballots to voters or make them request the ballots first…

Claim: Mail elections have found substantial fraud and coercion

“Elections that have been held with mail have found substantial fraud and coercion,” Barr told CNN on Sept. 2.

This is not the case in the U.S. Numerous studies have debunked the notion that there is substantial, widespread voter fraud in American elections, whether those elections are conducted predominantly by mail or otherwise. The five states that vote almost entirely by mail do not report higher rates of fraud or coercion than states that vote in person mostly at polling sites. When incidents of fraud do occur rarely — like a local New Jersey election in May that saw an attempted fraud operation, for example — they are prosecuted.

Weiser said the attorney general’s repeated false claims were “demoralizing” and “damaging” to both the electoral system and the rule of law. But she said she’s been heartened to see people stepping up to rally behind the election system amid a pandemic that’s challenged every facet of it…

Claim: Trump can use federal law enforcement to prevent voter fraud

Asked on Fox News on Aug. 20 if he’d use “poll watchers” to prevent voter fraud, the president said he’d be sending “sheriffs” and “law enforcement” and “hopefully, U.S. attorneys, and we’re going to have everybody and attorney generals.”

Asked about the claim, Barr backed Trump up, saying in the Sept. 2 CNN interview that “it depends on if he’s responding to a particular criminal threat” and said that such authority had been used in the past to enforce civil rights.

This is false. The president cannot legally send federal law enforcement officials to patrol polling places, and he has no authority over local officials. Federal election monitors — often attorneys — have gone to polling sites to enforce voting rights in the past, but they weren’t law enforcement officials.

“It’s actually criminal to have armed federal or military officials in polling places,” Weiser said. “If something like that happened, it would be a coup.”

Yeah well, coup plotting was definitely on the menu.

The GOP’s crusade against democracy has blown back in their faces in any number of ways. But it also degraded the system in such a way that the whole thing is much more vulnerable than it was before. Trump is primarily to blame, of course, but people like Bill Barr certainly helped.

And it’s working out quite well for them, isn’t it?

This right wing obsession with voter fraud has been going on for many, many years, long before Trump jumped on the bandwagon to soothe his wounded ego. They’ve been laying the ground work for his assault on democracy for a very long time, brainwashing their voters into believing that there is massive fraud by Democrats, usually people of color in urban areas, to deny them their rightful dominance of the government.

Much of it has always been performative, as a way to make their voters feel better about losing, which is apparently something that right wingers have an extremely hard time accepting, But mostly it’s been in service of their plot to suppress the votes of Democrats through intimidation and various forms of legal and logistical difficulties. It’s obvious.

But the reality of alleged voter fraud is something else entirely. Many studies have found that there are only small incidental examples, none of which could have been decisive. It’s simply not a problem. But that hasn’t stopped Republicans from being obsessed with the issue to such an extent that Donald Trump was able to easily convince his followers that the election had been stolen from him on a massive scale despite no evidence.

The New York Times took a look at the issue this week:

After 15 years of scrapes with the police, the last thing that 33-year-old Therris L. Conney needed was another run-in with the law. He got one anyway two years ago, after election officials held a presentation on voting rights for inmates of the county jail in Gainesville, Fla.

Apparently satisfied that he could vote, Mr. Conney registered after the session, and cast a ballot in 2020. In May, he was arrested for breaking a state law banning voting by people serving felony sentences — and he was sentenced to almost another full year in jail.

That show-no-mercy approach to voter fraud is what Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has encouraged this year during his re-election campaign. “That was against the law,” he said last month about charges against 20 other felons who voted in Florida, “and they’re going to pay a price for it.”

But many of those cases seem to already be falling apart, because, like Mr. Conney, the former felons did not intend to vote illegally. And the more typical kind of voter-fraud case in Florida has long exacted punishment at a steep discount.

Last winter, four residents of the Republican-leaning retirement community The Villages were arrested for voting twice — once in Florida, and again in other states where they had also lived.

Despite being charged with third-degree felonies, the same as Mr. Conney, two of the Villages residents who pleaded guilty escaped having a criminal record entirely by taking a 24-hour civics class. Trials are pending for the other two.

Florida is an exaggerated version of America as a whole. A review by The New York Times of some 400 voting-fraud charges filed nationwide since 2017 underscores what critics of fraud crackdowns have long said: Actual prosecutions are blue-moon events, and often netted people who didn’t realize they were breaking the law.

Punishment can be wildly inconsistent: Most violations draw wrist-slaps, while a few high-profile prosecutions produce draconian sentences. Penalties often fall heaviest on those least able to mount a defense. Those who are poor and Black are more likely to be sent to jail than comfortable retirees facing similar charges.

The high-decibel political rhetoric behind fraud prosecutions drowns out how infrequent — and sometimes how unfair — those prosecutions are, said Richard L. Hasen, an expert on election law and democracy issues at the U.C.L.A. School of Law.

“It’s hard to see felons in Gainesville getting jail terms, and then look at people in The Villages getting no time at all, and see this as a rational system,” he said.

The Times searched newspapers in all 50 states, internet accounts of fraud and online databases of cases, including one maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation, to compile a list of prosecutions in the last five years. But there is no comprehensive list of voter fraud cases, and The Times’s list is undoubtedly incomplete.

The number of individuals charged — roughly one and one-half per state per year — is infinitesimal in a country where more than 159.7 million votes were cast in the 2020 general election alone.

For all the fevered rhetoric about crackdowns on illegal voting, what’s most striking about voter fraud prosecutions is how modest the penalties for convictions tend to be.

Most fraud cases fall into one of four categories: falsely filling out absentee ballots, usually to vote in the name of a relative; voting twice, usually in two states; votes cast illegally by felons; or votes cast by noncitizens.

Edward Snodgrass, a trustee in Porter Township, Ohio, said he was trying to “execute a dying man’s wishes” when he filled out and mailed in his deceased father’s ballot in the 2020 election. He was fined $800 and sentenced to three days in jail.

Charles Eugene Cartier, 81, of Madison, N.H. and Attleboro, Mass., pleaded guilty in New Hampshire to voting in more than one state, a Class B felony, in the 2016 election. He was fined $1,000 plus a penalty assessment of $240, and had his 60-day prison sentence suspended on condition of good behavior.

At least four Oregonians cast votes in two states in 2016; none were fined more than $1,000, and felony charges were reduced to violations, akin to traffic tickets.

Two federal prosecutors in North Carolina, Matthew G.T. Martin and Robert J. Higdon, made national headlines in 2018 with a campaign to prosecute noncitizens who voted illegally. In the end, around 30 charges were brought, out of some 4.7 million votes cast in 2016. But prison sentences in those cases were few, and usually measured in months; fines, usually in the hundreds of dollars or less.

Still, there are exceptions, often apparently meant to send a message in states where politicians have tried to elevate fraud to a major issue.

Foremost is Texas, where convictions that would merit probation or fines elsewhere have drawn crushing prison sentences. Rosa Maria Ortega, a green-card holder who cast illegal votes in 2012 and 2014, was sentenced to eight years in prison for a crime she says she unknowingly committed. Crystal Mason, who cast a ballot in 2016 while on federal probation for a tax felony, drew five years for violating felon voting laws. The court has been ordered to reconsider her case.

Both prosecutions were the work of the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, perhaps the nation’s most zealous enforcer of voter-fraud laws. Mr. Paxton runs a $2.2 million-a-year election integrity squad that claims a 15-year record of prosecutions, though some of its high-profile cases, like a lengthy one against a South Texas mayor, ended in acquittals.

The cases DeSantis is bring with his “election police squad” will likely end up in acquittals if they even get that far. The state allowed the supposed criminals to register and vote despite it being its charge to stop it under the new laws that ban those voters from voting. But DeSantis got his visuals and for most of his voters, that’s what keeps them united and engaged. They appreciate the bullying.

No really, there wasn’t. There still isn’t.

There was Republican voter fraud, most notoriously by Trump’s White House Chief of Staff. But the 2020 election was legit and Republicans knew it.

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump comments on CNN’s blockbuster story about Senator Mike Lee and Rep. Chip Roy’s series of texts with Mark Meadows about Trump’s attempted coup.

What’s particularly striking about the text messages obtained by CNN sent from Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) to President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows in the weeks after the 2020 election is how ready they were to think rampant fraud had actually occurred.

For months before Election Day, Trump and his team had been warning that such fraud was imminent, elevating quickly debunked claims about impropriety and pointing at old research on mail-in balloting as evidence that the structure undergirding the vote was shaky. Trump generated an appetite for stories about ballots being found in the garbage or burned up in mail trucks or what-have-you, and the conservative media scrambled to meet the demand. But all of it was objectively unfounded — as one might have expected a senator or a representative to understand.

That Lee didn’t is explained somewhat by the news sources he shares with Meadows as he tries to help shape the White House’s post-election strategy: an article from Breitbart, one from the Washington Examiner, a tweet from a right-wing pundit. Within that bubble, the run-up to the election was a period of rampant scheming and dishonesty aimed at stealing the election.Advertisement

But then the election happened, and it very quickly became obvious that none of this had happened.

Roy and Lee each pushed for Trump and the White House to release proof of rampant fraud, in their own ways.

On the day the election was called for Joe Biden, Roy insisted to Meadows that “we need ammo. We need fraud examples. We need it this weekend.” Two days later, he demanded “a message that isn’t wild-eyed” — seemingly a tacit excoriation of Trump’s eager embrace of whatever nonsense he came across that smelled at all like fraud. And then, a few days after that, Roy inquired about where he might find a catalogue of fraud claims, something that did exist but which was filled with the sort of wild-eyed nonsense he sought to avoid.

Lee’s approach was more technical, centered on creating alternate slates of electors that — importantly — upheld the letter of state law, which Trump’s didn’t. (Lee also touted attorney Sidney Powell, an error in judgment that will haunt his dreams for decades.) But he, too, told Meadows that the White House would need “a strong evidentiary argument” to compel senators.

It’s a reminder that Trump had no such thing. That he has no such thing. That his insistences before the election that fraud would happen were simply replaced with insistences that fraud would be proved, an unending con job that continues to this day.

At the end of November 2020, three weeks after the election had been called, I wrote an article making this point as gently as possible. Trump had made a massive number of claims about fraud in speeches, in interviews and on social media and, to a one, they had been rejected upon examination. Sometimes that led to Trump simply no longer talking about them. Sometimes he ignored the reality, as with the ballots that were removed from a container in Georgia and which Trump insisted were somehow fraud despite the actual, innocent explanation being available for weeks. He raised that one in his infamous call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) — despite Raffensperger’s office having helped debunk the claim!

An uncountable number of times, Trump has claimed that evidence of fraud was coming soon. In the early days after the election, this was probably compelling. If you’re Mike Lee or Chip Roy and you’re hoping Trump won, that the Biden victory could be shown to be hollow, that’s going to be compelling. And, in fact, Roy’s texts to Meadows show that sort of enthusiasm.

On Nov. 22, 2020, he told Meadows that “[i]f we don’t get logic and reason in this before 11/30 — the GOP conference will bolt (all except the most hard core Trump guys).” Hence his excitement on Nov. 24 at this Meadows tweet:

BIG news in Nevada: a Judge has allowed NV Republicans to present findings of widespread voter fraud in a Dec. 3rd hearing. Americans will now hear evidence from those who saw firsthand what happened—a critical step for transparency and remedying illegal ballots. Stay tuned.

— Mark Meadows (@MarkMeadows) November 25, 2020

What happened in that case? The court gutted the pro-Trump challenge as baseless. Trump’s allies often claim that no court ever considered the evidence of fraud, a claim that’s often true simply because there was no credible evidence of fraud to consider. But in this case in Nevada, the court was very specific.

“In a detailed, 35-page decision, Judge James T. Russell of the Nevada District Court in Carson City vetted each claim of fraud and wrongdoing made by the Trump campaign in the state and found that none was supported by convincing proof,” The Washington Post reported at the time. “The judge dismissed the challenge with prejudice, ruling that the campaign failed to offer any basis for annulling more than 1.3 million votes cast in the state’s presidential race.”

But, of course, none of this deterred Trump himself. His investment in having people believe that his loss was not a function of his own failings preceded the election by months and has followed the election by even longer. Most Republicans have moved away from claiming that the election was stolen through fraud to instead claiming that it was “rigged” by devious things like nonprofit efforts to increase voter turnout. Trump and die-hards like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, though, keep claiming that there was also rampant fraud and that they are weeks — no, days! no, hours! — away from proving it.

In an interview with The Post’s Josh Dawsey last week, Trump said this specifically. He pledged that in the following days, new evidence of fraud would emerge, showing millions of illegal votes. Then, in the following days, such a claim did emerge. There was no evidence of millions of illegal votes cast — or, for that matter, any illegal votes. Instead what emerged was a blend of technical complexity and crime-show jargon that, at best, might have caught some people collecting and submitting legal ballots in a way that, in some states, violated the law.

It’s easy to look at the past 17 months with hindsight and recognize that Trump’s simply elevating nonsense in his effort to keep his hooks (and his fundraising siphon) embedded in his base. But it was similarly obvious on Nov. 3 that he was not being honest in his assessments of the election. He had spent so long before the election doing what he has spent the months afterward doing: saying things happened that didn’t happen and suggesting that things were nefarious which weren’t.

A member of the House and a senator should have recognized that Trump was being dishonest before the election and should have not assumed that real evidence of rampant fraud would emerge afterward. It hasn’t. By now, it’s safe to say that it won’t.

The problem is that Trump floods the email boxes of his supporters daily with lies about fraudulent ballots being turned up in Arizona and Wisconsin and thousands of hours of footage of Black people stuffing ballot boxes etc. It’s totally convoluted, impossible to decipher and it’s relentless. Trump is telling them that he has proved the case and that is all the proof they need.

This is a problem that might have be solved if the rest of the party and right wing media had come together to tell the truth, which they know, instead of going along with it. But that ship sailed. and now nearly half the country believes the last election was stolen despite the fact that it is a total lie.

There are so many. And I’m not talking about average Joe Republicans who are just ridiculously hypocritical. I’m talking about the Trumper officials who just blatantly cheated:

Matt Mowers, a former State Department official under the Trump administration who’s now running against Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH) as a GOP challenger, cast ballots in two states in the 2016 GOP presidential primaries, records obtained by the Associated Press reveal.

Mowers first voted in New Hampshire’s primary via absentee ballot when he was working for ex-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) presidential campaign.

Then Mowers re-registered with his parents’ address to vote in his home state of New Jersey during the Garden State’s GOP primary four months later, according to the AP, in the face of a federal law that prohibits double-voting.

Christie had dropped out of the race at that point.

Mowers joined then-candidate Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign in July before being brought to the new admin’s State Department after the election.

Like other pro-Trump Republicans running for office, Mowers has been trying to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the U.S. elections process by baselessly suggesting — if not loudly claiming — that elections are in danger of being corrupted by fraudsters.

For example, Mowers’ campaign lists “election integrity” as a top issue on its website and calls for sham election audits and tighter voter ID laws.

However, Mowers’ 2016 voting record is just another example of the hypocrisy of the broader Republican effort — revealing that the GOP’s purported concerns over election integrity are little more than a cover to push voting restrictions and promote Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was rigged.

Then there’s this one, which is truly stunning:

Another particularly damning revelation came last month, when the New Yorker discovered that former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows registered to vote in the 2020 election with an address of a mobile home in Scaly Mountain, North Carolina that he apparently never spent a night in.

I guess they just figure they can get away with anything. I haven’t heard much about Meadows in the mainstream media. It was a half day story at best. I guess Trump can just go around saying that Democrats are committing voter fraud on a massive level, without presenting any evidence about how they are supposedly doing it, while Trump officials personally commit voter fraud and it’s no big deal.

It’s just one more data point that proves Republicans are above the law and are not even expected to be accountable for anything they say because they commit their crimes right out in the open.

Trump said something along these lines at his rally last weekend. He mentioned GOP congressman John Fortenberry who was recently convicted of violating campaign finance laws:

Trump: In a great state Nebraska, a congressman is being put in jail over a few dollars that he possibly didn’t know anything about. A few thousand dollars… I don’t know him well.. it was over a very small amount… over a number of thousands, like 20 thousand… pic.twitter.com/Rgqx26kvFm

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 3, 2022

He only stole $20,000 so it’s ridiculous that he should go to jail.

I don’t think he would say that about a Black man caught stealing a car, do you?

I’ve got some for you right here. This piece is in the New Yorker so you can feel confident that it was thoroughly fact checked. It’s for real:

Mark Meadows, who grew up in Florida, moved to North Carolina in the nineteen-eighties and opened Aunt D’s, a sandwich shop in Highlands. He later sold the restaurant and started a real-estate company with a line in vacation properties. (He showed a few to my parents, in the nineties.) He became active in local Republican politics, and, in 2012, ran for Congress and won, going on to represent North Carolina’s Eleventh District until March, 2020, when he resigned the seat to become President Donald Trump’s chief of staff. Earlier that month, he sold his twenty-two-hundred-square-foot home in Sapphire. He and his wife, Debbie, also had a condo in Virginia, near Washington, D.C. But, as the summer passed and the election neared, Meadows had not yet purchased a new residence in what had been his home state. On September 19th, about three weeks before North Carolina’s voter-registration deadline for the general election, Meadows filed his paperwork. On a line that asked for his residential address—“where you physically live,” the form instructs—Meadows wrote down the address of a fourteen-by-sixty-two-foot mobile home in Scaly Mountain. He listed his move-in date for this address as the following day, September 20th.

Meadows does not own this property and never has. It is not clear that he has ever spent a single night there. (He did not respond to a request for comment.) The previous owner, who asked that we not use her name, now lives in Florida. “That was just a summer home,” she told me, when I called her up the other day. She seemed surprised to learn that the residence was listed on the Meadowses’ forms. The property sits in the southern Appalachian mountains, at about four thousand feet, in the bend of a quiet road above a creek in Macon County. She and her husband bought it in 1985. “We’d come up there for three to four months when my husband was living,” she said. Her husband died several years ago, and the house sat mostly unused for some time afterward, she said, because she had “nobody to go up there with anymore.”

She only rented it out twice, she told me. The first renter, she said, was Debbie Meadows, who, according to the former owner, reserved the house for two months at some point within the past few years—she couldn’t remember exactly when—but only spent one or two nights there. The Meadowses’ kids had visited the place, too, she said. The former owner was in Florida at the time, but her neighbors, the Talleys, whom she described as friends of the Meadowses’, debriefed her later. As for Mark Meadows, she said, “He did not come. He’s never spent a night in there.”

The former owner had put the mobile home on the market in the summer of 2020, but the Meadowses never expressed an interest in buying it, she said. The one other time she rented the place out, it was to someone who had: a retail manager at Lowe’s named Ken Abele, who bought the mobile home in August of the following year. Abele said that he’d heard that the Meadows family stayed there in the fall of 2020, when they were in the area for a Trump rally, because nearby hotels were scarce. The realtor who facilitated his purchase, whom I was unable to reach before we went to press, told him this, he said, and the realtor had heard it from the Talleys. It struck him as odd. “I’ve made a lot of improvements,” Abele said, of the mobile home. “But when I got it, it was not the kind of place you’d think the chief of staff of the President would be staying.” I asked him what he made of Meadows listing the property as his place of residence on his voter-registration form. “That’s weird that he would do that,” he said. “Really weird.”

Yes, it’s really weird. It’s also voter fraud.

Did Meadows potentially commit voter fraud by listing the Scaly Mountain address on his registration form? It’s a federal crime to provide false information to register to vote in a federal election. Under President Trump, the White House Web site posted a document, produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation, intended to present a “sampling” of the “long and unfortunate history of election fraud” in the U.S. Many of the cases sampled involve people who registered to vote at false addresses, including, for instance, second homes that did not serve as a person’s primary residence.

I called Melanie D. Thibault, the director of Macon County’s Board of Elections, and asked her what she made of the Meadowses’ registration forms. “I’m kind of dumbfounded, to be honest with you,” she said, after perusing them. “I looked up this Mcconnell Road, which is in Scaly Mountain, and I found out that it was a dive trailer in the middle of nowhere, which I do not see him or his wife staying in.” (It is not technically a trailer, but it is a modest dwelling.) She said that their registrations had arrived by mail and were entered into the system, and that a voter-registration card was sent to a P.O. Box they’d provided as their mailing address. “If that card makes it to the voter and it’s not sent back undeliverable, then the voter goes onto the system as a good voter,” she said. Meadows had voted absentee, by mail, in the 2020 general election, she added.

“The state board tells us we’re not the police,” she went on. “It’s up to the voter to give us the information.” A candidate or voter can challenge another voter’s address, she explained, but the burden of proof, at least at the outset, rests with the challenger. In this case, then, Meadows wouldn’t need, initially, to prove that he had listed a true place of residence—the challenger would need to prove that Meadows hadn’t. These challenges can be tough to win and are not frequently brought.

One of the authors of North Carolina’s voter-challenge statute is Gerry Cohen, who wrote it during his time as a staff attorney for the state’s General Assembly. He’s now on the Wake County Board of Elections; he teaches public policy at Duke. Cohen told me that, legally speaking, you can have more than one residence but only one domicile, and that your voter registration must be linked to the domicile. For something to qualify as such, he said, it must be a “place of abode” where you have spent at least one night and where you intend to remain indefinitely—“or at least without a present intent to establish a domicile at some other place.” (Elected officials who move—to D.C., for example—are allowed to remain registered in their home county or state as long as they don’t register to vote in the new location.)

I asked Cohen about the mobile home. “If Debra Meadows stayed there a single night, and Mark Meadows didn’t stay there, then he didn’t meet the abode test,” Cohen said. What if Meadows had stayed there, I asked? How would he establish that he intended to live there for an indefinite period of time? There isn’t a single determinative test, Cohen said, but a driver’s license, cable bill, W-2, or car registration listing the address would each suffice. “It’s a question of intent and evidence,” he added. I called the previous owner again, and asked her whether the Meadows family might have received any mail there. “It didn’t even have a mailbox,” she said. Abele has since installed one. He told me that he has never received any mail for the Meadows family at his home.

The utter gall of this Trump sycophant committing voter fraud. If you ever doubted that these people think they are above the law, this settles it.

I’ve written a lot about Meadows over the years. He’s an ignoramus so this really shouldn’t surprise anyone. But after Trump’s ongoing, years long tantrum about voter fraud to have his Chief of Staff exposed as having committed it is as rich as it gets.

This piece at the Bulwark makes a (somewhat tortured) comparison of this emerging scandal of the fraudulent electors to Watergate makes the logical case that it’s just this sort of thing that can lead from the lower levels to the top. These people committed the very crime they are accusing the Democrats of committing:

To paraphrase an old English proverb, mighty consequences from small offenses sometimes grow.

Now, an offense committed by relatively unknown people acting at the state level could grow into “Trump’s Watergate.” Of course Trump, unlike Nixon, is already out of office, but he has other worries—like protecting his fortune, keeping the door open to run again in 2024, and staying out of jail.

If state and federal law enforcement authorities convene grand juries to investigate the low-level GOP officials who signed and submitted phony electoral certificates in the 2020 election, the entire conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election could unravel.

So far, there has been no visible indication that Attorney General Merrick Garland has any appetite to launch a sweeping investigation into Team Trump’s conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Garland has said nothing about it. His silence could just be prudential—it can be unwise for a prosecutor to alert prematurely the subjects of investigations. Or he may be reluctant to pursue such a case at all, perhaps due to some combination of his cautious nature, fear that it might be perceived as partisan political retribution, the difficulty of drawing clear lines between protected speech and conspiracy, and the difficulty of proving criminal intent in the mind of a cult figure whose bizarre mental state is unfathomable.

But none of those inhibitions should apply to a routine investigation into the mundane crimes implicated by the creation, execution and submission to the government of phony electoral documents. Quite the opposite: The failure to investigate that kind of obvious election fraud would smack of political calculation.

Law enforcement officials investigating the phony documents, as distinguished from a broader conspiracy, would not have to search for a crime—they already have the smoking guns, documents that are fraudulent on their face. Nor would they need to search for the culprits. The fraudsters signed their names to the phony documents, many of them proudly recording the act on video.

This open-and-shut election fraud is a gift to Garland and his federal prosecutors. Without having to expend any political capital by opening a sweeping investigation targeting Donald Trump or those around him, prosecutors could chip away at the broader conspiracy.

The targets of the investigation would be the people who signed and transmitted the phony elector certificates, not Donald Trump.

A total of 59 individuals from five states signed the documents. We know virtually nothing about them. They are not national figures, and largely are not public figures, except perhaps in state and local circles. They seem to be a fairly representative sample of Americans with quotidian jobs, nice families, and cute pets—not hardened denizens of the criminal underworld.

Can you imagine what would happen if 59 otherwise respectable burghers were hauled before a grand jury, facing a very real prospect of going to jail? How long do you think it would take for some or all of them to seek plea deals that would keep them out of prison? How quickly will they line up to identify those who told them to do it?

In very short order, investigators would have a mountain of testimony identifying every single person who induced or aided and abetted the pseudo-electors in the planning, coordination, and execution of their fraudulent acts. And so on up the chain.

As far as it goes.

And it seems to go far:

The forged electoral certificates show coordination across seven states. Those fake certificates were key to the plan of the Eastman memo and to the Jeffrey Clark DOJ draft letter to Georgia. The conspiracy involved fraud and force. At the head of the conspiracy: Donald Trump.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) January 15, 2022

Historian Heather Cox Richardson, writing in her January 17 newsletter, lays it all out in detail, leading to the inescapable conclusion that the scheme “appears to have been a coordinated attempt by members of the Trump administration and sympathizers around the country to overturn our government by committing election fraud.”

When the last person compelled to testify has had his or her time in the barrel before a grand jury, what started as a politically impeccable investigation of a mundane crime committed by nondescript individuals—like the investigation of the five Watergate burglars—could bring down the whole edifice.

Is it too much to hope for that the simple act of investigating a mundane fraudulent act could lead to widespread accountability in Trump World? Let’s find out. All it will take is for the Department of Justice to begin an investigation—for Attorney General Garland to prosecute the obvious crime right in front of him—and then to follow the facts upward as far as they go.

This one seems like it might have some legs to me. I don’t hold out a lot of hope for federal action against Trump. But this seems impossible to ignore. There are people in jail around the country for committing much less egregious crimes of “voter fraud.” These people wre trying to overturn the whole election by defrauding the voters of their states. It sure seems clear cut to me.

Projection is so overused to describe Republicans’ “I know you are but what am I?” stances on, well, almost anything, that I cringe even typing it here. Nevertheless.

Monday night, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported via Politico that Donald Trump supporters in Michigan and Arizona forged and submitted to the National Archives documents purporting to be the official electors — Trump electors — from those two states won in 2020 by Joe Biden. This comes to three instances where this occured. Previously, another Trump group from Wisconsin tried it:

On December 14, 2020, Wisconsin’s duly certified Presidential Electors met at the State Capitol to cast the state’s ten electoral votes in the Electoral College. On the same day, ten other individuals gathered to execute a competing set of documents, purporting to cast Wisconsin’s votes for candidates that lost the statewide election (as confirmed through the recount process and multiple judicial rulings). These “fraudulent electors” acted in violation of state law, which specifies that the people of Wisconsin choose the Presidential Electors through their votes on the November ballot.

These fraudulent electors sent the false documents they created to the U.S. Congress, in an apparent effort to make sure that they would be counted as Wisconsin’s actual ten electoral votes on January 6th.

Politico’s Nicholas Wu uncovered the Michigan and Arizona frauds via a public records request to states for documents being sought separately by House Jan. 6 investigators. Wu cleverly got around the investigation’s secrecy by asking the states for the documents House investigators had requested from the states.

Politico reports:

As Trump’s team pushed its discredited voter fraud narrative, the National Archives received forged certificates of ascertainment declaring him and then-Vice President Mike Pence the winners of both Michigan and Arizona and their electors after the 2020 election. Public records requests show the secretaries of state for those states sent those certificates to the Jan. 6 panel, along with correspondence between the National Archives and state officials about the documents.

Spokespeople for the Michigan and Arizona secretaries of state declined to comment on the documents. The offices confirmed that Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, both Democrats, and their staff met with the panel in November.

“They mostly discussed election administration in Arizona, the 2020 elections, threats/harassment directed toward the office, and the Cyber Ninja’s partisan ballot review,” said Hobbs’ spokesperson C. Murphy Hebert.

Benson and her staff took questions from the committee on the 2020 election and events leading up to the Jan. 6 riot, according to Tracy Wimmer, a spokesperson for Benson.

The National Archives sent emails to the Arizona secretary of state on Dec. 11, 2020, passing along the forged certificates “for your awareness” and informing the state officials the Archives would not accept them.

Arizona then took legal action against at least one of the groups who sent in the fake documents, sending a cease and desist letter to a pro-Trump “sovereign citizen” group telling them to stop using the state seal and referring the matter to the state attorney general.

“By affixing the state seal to documents containing false and misleading information about the results of Arizona’s November 3, 2020 General Election, you undermine the confidence in our democratic institutions,” Hobbs wrote to one of the pro-Trump groups.

That group’s leader, Lori Osiecki, had told the Arizona Republic in December 2020 that she decided to send in the certificates after taking part in post-election rallies and after attending a daylong meeting in Phoenix that had included Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.

The group that forged the Michigan certification had not used the state seal, and it appears state officials there took no further action after the Archives rejected it.

"As Trump's team pushed its discredited voter fraud narrative, the National Archives received forged certificates of ascertainment declaring him and then-Vice President Mike Pence the winners of both Michigan and Arizona and their electors… "https://t.co/JkeiPVwolH

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) January 11, 2022

Maddow note similarities between the Michigan and Wisconsin documents, down to language, formatting and fonts. The Arizona forgery is different.

These groups not only “undermine the confidence in our democratic institutions,” as the Arizona secretary of state responded, but could face prosecution.

Was someone coordinating this conspiracy to upset the valid vote count? Maddow asked. “Who believes we’ll find more where this came from? Raise your hand.”

“Trump lost 25 states in 2020,” Maddowblog’s Steve Benen reminds. “How many of them included election opponents willing to send fake documents to government offices?”

When it comes to Republican accusations that it is Democrats who are trying to rig elections and cheat, projection is exactly the right word.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfsVHoFaGAg

UPDATE: Via Twitter, it seems Politico is late to the game. This story came out nearly a year ago and never got traction. And it was seven states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

More Trump voters caught voting more than once:

Three Republican residents of the hedonistic Florida retirement haven The Villages have been charged with casting multiple votes in the 2020 presidential election, according to local reports. Click Orlando identified the three as Jay Ketcik, 63, Joan Halstead, 71, and John Rider, 61. Each of them have reportedly been charged with casting more than one ballot in the election—a crime that could land them in prison for as long as five years. Ketcik allegedly voted by mail in Florida while also casting an absentee ballot in Michigan; Halstead is accused of voting in-person in Florida and as an absentee in New York; and Rider allegedly voted in Florida and an unspecified out-of-state location. Ketcik and Halstead reportedly turned themselves in to police, while Rider is said to have been arrested at a Royal Caribbean cruise-ship terminal in Port Canaveral. Orlando states that it’s not known who the trio voted for, but all three are reportedly registered as Republicans in Florida, and Facebook pages that seem to belong to Ketcik and Halstead show posts supporting Donald Trump.

Lol. I love “the hedonistic Florida retirement haven.” Oh my.

I don’t know precisely how many Trumpers voted fraudulently in the 2020 election but of the handful of people arrested for doing it I don’t think any were Biden voters. It’s all Republicans. Of course it is. Projection is their game and shamelessness is their superpower.

Happy Hollandaise, everyone:

Lol:

Speaking to a Las Vegas news station in November, Donald Kirk Hartle described being “surprised” by the possibility that someone had stolen his dead wife’s mail-in ballot and used it to vote in the 2020 election. “That is pretty sickening to me, to be honest with you,” he told KLAS-TV.

But this week, the Nevada attorney general filed two charges of voter fraud against Mr. Hartle, 55, claiming that he was the one who forged his wife’s signature to vote with her ballot.

“Voter fraud is rare, but when it happens it undercuts trust in our election system and will not be tolerated by my office,” the attorney general, Aaron D. Ford, said in a statement on Thursday. “I want to stress that our office will pursue any credible allegations of voter fraud and will work to bring any offenders to justice.”

The announcement from Mr. Ford’s office comes months after waves of Republicans, including former President Donald J. Trump, falsely asserted that the 2020 election had been tainted by widespread voter fraud, including in Nevada, a state that Mr. Trump lost.

Mr. Hartle, a registered Republican, was charged with voting using the name of another person and voting more than once in the same election, the attorney general’s office said in the statement. Each charge carries a prison sentence of up to four years and a fine of up to $5,000, the prosecutors said.

The criminal complaint did not explain how prosecutors came to the conclusion that Mr. Hartle had committed voter fraud. Questions sent to the office of Mr. Ford, a Democrat elected to the position in 2018, were not immediately responded to on Saturday.

David Chesnoff, a lawyer for Mr. Hartle, said in a statement that his client “looks forward to responding to the allegations in court.” Mr. Hartle is scheduled to appear in the Las Vegas Township Justice Court on Nov. 18.

The Nevada Republican Party had cited Mr. Hartle’s story as evidence of voting irregularities on Twitter last year, saying that Mr. Hartle “was surprised to find that his late wife Rosemarie, a Republican, cast a ballot in this years election despite having passed away” in 2017.

Since the announcement of the charges against Mr. Hartle, however, the party has not corrected the record, said Callum Ingram, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno.

“The state Republican Party has been pretty quiet certainly on this case since the narrative got flipped on its head,” Dr. Ingram said in an interview on Saturday.

Mr. Hartle is the chief financial officer and treasurer of Ahern Rentals, according to his LinkedIn profile. The business rents out construction equipment and is a part of the Ahern Family of Companies. One of its businesses, Xtreme Manufacturing, was fined $3,000 in 2020 for hosting a Trump rally that did not comply with the state’s Covid regulations at the time, said Kathleen Richards, a spokeswoman for the city of Henderson, Nev.

Nevada was one of several states in November that was dealing with dubious claims of voter fraud after the presidential election.

The Nevada secretary of state, Barbara K. Cegavske, said in a document posted in December titled “Facts vs. Myths” that there was no evidence of large-scale voter fraud in the state.

You may recall watching Trump toadies Matt Schlapp and (former acting Director of National Intelligence!!!!) Ric Grenell selling this tripe at the time. It’s just … so perfect.