772 search results for ""voter fraud""

Election expert Rick Hasen has a new book out called “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy.” The Wall St Journal provides an essay based on his thesis. It’s pretty chilling:

As the Iowa fiasco suggests, the most likely reason that your 2020 vote may not be counted isn’t fraud, suppression or hacking—it’s incompetence

Over the past decade, a familiar frame has developed in the contentious debate over voting rules: Republicans express concern about voter fraud and enact laws supposedly intended to combat it; Democrats see these laws as an attempt to suppress Democratic votes, press for measures to expand voting access and rights, and worry about cyberattacks intended to help the GOP at the polls. It is an important debate, in which I have taken part, but it misses a deeper, more urgent reality: Most American voters in 2020 are much more likely to be disenfranchised by an incompetent election administrator than by fraud, suppression or Russian hacking.

While most election officials who set the rules and count the votes do a good job, often under serious budget constraints, we cannot ignore the weakest links in the chain: those bureaucrats who increase the chances of a protracted and divisive 2020 election meltdown. Fortunately, it is not too late to take steps to try to fix the problems.

He goes on to recount the stories of two of the most notorious examples of incompetence, malfeasance and suppression in both the Democratic and Republican parties, Brenda Snipes in Florida and Brian Kemp in Georgia. This is a bipartisan problem, although the Republican administrators tend to be consciously fraudulent while the Democrats are lazy and incompetent.

Here are some of his recommendations:

If we were thinking about long-term solutions, we might take several steps—most important, following other advanced democracies such as Australia, Canada and the U.K. in having elections administered nationally by a nonpartisan agency, with universal voter registration and a national voter-identification number. Many see the highly decentralized nature of our election system as a strength against attacks (which would be isolated in one place), but it is much more of a weakness. Having different voting machines, different rules and people with widely varying levels of training conducting the same election increases the chances of a problem somewhere.

Unfortunately, our deeply divided country has no appetite right now for redesigning our electoral system or debating the proper mix of federal, state and local control over elections. Regardless of what we might do in the future, the urgency of 2020 demands that we take some steps now to remove as many weak links as possible.

It is not too late for governors or secretaries of state in some places to suspend or replace election administrators with records of incompetence. It took years of Ms. Snipes’s foul-ups before the Florida governor used his powers to attempt to remove her. (Mr. Scott tried to remove Ms. Snipes when he was governor; she resisted but ultimately made a deal with Florida’s new governor, Ron DeSantis, to resign from office in January 2019 with her “dignity and name restored.”) Governors and secretaries of state aware of election-administration problems should not wait too long next time.

Those who approve new voting equipment need to ensure that it can be operated competently by poll workers and isn’t vulnerable to hacking. Systems using hand-marked paper ballots (such as ballots filled out with pencils and put through optical scanning machines) should be considered the gold standard. Newfangled ballot-marking devices that use a bar code for tabulating votes should be studied further to make sure they are secure and reliable. At the very least, states using such machines should pass laws requiring that the human-readable names printed on the ballot, and not a bar code readable only by machine, should be dispositive in the event of a recount. This is currently up for debate in Georgia, but it shouldn’t be; No one should have to trust a computer to tell them what a ballot actually says. There must be some way to audit results to ensure that the vote totals announced by election officials match voter intent.

State officials also need to push local administrators to better train poll workers. In 2016, the vote counting in Detroit was so bad because of poll-worker error that the city couldn’t even conduct a recount of the ballots when it was requested by Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. The snafus led to cries of fraud by Republicans, even though a later investigation by the Republican Michigan secretary of state’s office found only incompetence, not intentional misconduct.

State and local election administrators must act now to assure the security of voter-registration and voting systems. Some state and localities resisted federal help in 2016, and we will see what kind of cooperation occurs in 2020. Still, given the much more substantial resources and intelligence assets of DHS and other federal agencies, now is not the time for states and localities to go it alone.

Finally, each state should have a contingency plan in place if election day is met with a cyberattack or natural disaster. One of the things that keeps me up at night is the possibility of an attack on the electrical grid in a Democratic city in a swing state—Detroit in Michigan, Milwaukee in Wisconsin—on election day. A recent article in The Journal described Russian hacks into systems that control American infrastructure, such as power grids and dams. These followed successful attacks begun in 2015 by the Russian government on Ukraine’s electrical grid, which led to a series of electrical outages.

Here in LA, we are facing a big problem in the upcoming elections. Anyone who lives here needs to pay close attention if they plan to vote in the primary.

I appear on Brad Friedman’s radio show/podcast frequently to talk about politics in general. (Tom Sullivan and I both came on this week to talk about all of it.) But Brad is an especially important voice on this issue, having sounded the alarm about election irregularities for many years. Here he is on KCBS this week talking about our potential local disaster:

More on that here.

There is always an impulse to run with conspiracies in situations like this. And it’s always possible that there is one. After all, look what we saw happen in 2016. But this is the biggest threat we have — along with the lack of trust in the system that inevitably follows.

I would have thought after 2000 that we’d deal with it. But there are people who believe they benefit from this problem who are not going to allow us to do the things we need to do to fix it.

We need to put this at the top of the reform checklist. It couldn’t be more important.

The most likely reason for the delay in the Iowa caucus results is the combination of new, untried technology with an overly complicated process and the ongoing problem of the media demanding instant results on election night. Sabotage is the least likely explanation.

Here in California, it often takes weeks to process election results and they often turn out to be different than the estimates on election night. It’s not optimal but it isn’t a conspiracy. Better to get it right than end up with what happened in Florida in 2000.

And anytime you see something like this, you should wonder cui bono?

That’s right. This plays directly into Trump’s playbook. Recall in 2016, Trump had his storyline all laid out: I lost because it was “rigged.” (It was, but in his favor as it turns out.)

US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has said the election is “absolutely rigged” by the “dishonest media” and “at many polling places”.

His comments appear to contradict his running mate Mike Pence, who told NBC Mr Trump would “absolutely” accept the election result, despite media “bias”.

Mr Trump’s adviser Rudy Giuliani has also accused Democrats of “cheating”.

Polls suggest Mr Trump is losing ground in some key battleground states against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

Mr Trump has questioned the legitimacy of the election process in a series of tweets, the latest of which said on Monday: “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day.

“Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!”

An earlier tweet said: “The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary – but also at many polling places – SAD.”

The White House candidate also tweeted: “Election is being rigged by the media, in a coordinated effort with the Clinton campaign, by putting stories that never happened into news!”

He even said that he would only accept the results if he won.

So, while it’s understandable that people are upset with the Iowa results it’s really not helpful to jump on the conspiracy bandwagon without any proof. All it does is help Trump in the end.

Obviously, it’s important to figure out what happened. But there is no reason to believe that the eventual results that are going to be reported today are not correct. Waiting a few hours to get there isn’t the end of the world and the upside is that it’s now likely that the party will get rid of the Iowa “first in the nation” caucuses once and for all.

Caucuses are a terrible way to do elections in this day and age. They should all be abolished in favor of the systems that make it possible for people to vote in the easiest way. I happen to think the secret ballot is essential for real democracy to flourish and we need all the flourishing democracy we can get right now.

I’m sorry that people are disappointed they didn’t get their big moment of victory with which to roll into New Hampshire but really, by next month this will all be as distant as uhm … the impeachment of the president of the United States and our recent brush with the possibility of WWIII. Things come at you fast these days.

Jamil Smith over at Rolling Stone closes in on one explanation for Republicans’ willingness to kowtow to their God-king that I never quite put together:

This is about Republicans maintaining the ability to manipulate elections here at home. Trump, so desperate to win his election the first time, welcomed foreign interference along with the traditional domestic voter suppression his party offered. Pandora’s Box has been opened more widely than the president and the Republicans probably ever anticipated, and now they are willing to argue that Trump has the powers of an autocrat all so that they can maintain this ability to reach out to whomever they need to in order to win elections. 

This is how reckless Republicans are with America, willing to give untold amounts of power to a man whom they still don’t fully understand in a frantic attempt to maintain their own grip on advantage in a country that has already elected a black president once and whose demographics are quickly turning against them. 

I don’t know if Republicans really expected Donald Trump to win in 2016. Hillary Clinton’s campaign surely misread the tea leaves and her campaign was overconfident. She won the popular vote, yes, just not in the right places. That, after all, is how the electoral college game is played.

Trump’s campaign of white grievance won the presidency with two percent fewer votes than Clinton. When it became clear he won with help both from foreign interference and stateside voter suppression, the jostled pinball machines in GOP strategists’ heads lit up. Trump’s election wasn’t just dumb luck. It was proof of concept.

With demographics “turning against them,” Republicans have desperately sought means by which to maintain power as a minority party. Voter fraud vigilantes have been at that effort for decades. But since the late 1990s, with Fox News and social media helping to “catapult the propaganda,” they’ve built public support for and expanded the reach of photo ID laws. A smorgasbord of other suppression tactics has made voting harder even as voting rights activists struggle to fight back and work to expand the voting pool. Computers allowed the GOP to perfect gerrymandering techniques that allowed them to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” The Trump administration has tried to rig the census to stick an even heavier thumb on the scales of democracy.

But what Trump’s ascendancy demonstrated was that his party could drop the dog whistles and campaign openly on preserving its white base’s position atop the social pecking order in a browning America. They could even request foreign help in doing it with seeming impunity. After Trump’s expected acquittal vote in the Senate today, we can strike the “seeming.”

Supposed Republican leaders dissolve into a gelatinous mass around Trump. The wannabe alpha dogs whimper and grovel in the presence of Trump’s unrefined id. I have argued for years that their vaunted principles are a mile wide and an inch deep. Their submission to Trump confirms it. To suite his need, White House counsel Pat Cipollone stood in the well of the Senate Wednesday night making up principles out of whole cloth.

What Trump offers Republicans is not a path out of the electoral wilderness, but a means to avoid exile there in the first place. That Trump’s way involves lying, stealing, and cheating matters not. That Trump’s way means setting alight our “government of laws and not of men” matters less than preserving the primacy of their shrinking fraction of the electorate. Trump’s way involves, in effect, paying protection (in immortal souls) to a local crime boss.

God Himself gave Trump’s followers this country and they mean to keep it. Or else burn it to the ground so no one else can have it. Where Jesus himself says otherwise, well, “sometimes Jesus is just plain wrong.” That’s not simply the reasoning of Trump’s evangelical base. It is the standard of argument offered by Trump’s legal defense and among his Republican defenders.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

Tricks, traps and pretexts
by Tom Sullivan

University of Texas at Austin students inquire about voting procedures, 2018. Photo via the Pew Charitable Trusts.

“Tricks and traps,” Elizabeth Warren repeated while still a law professor at Harvard University. In writing and in speeches, Warren referred to tactics credit card companies use to “ensnare families in a cycle of high-cost debt.” Today, the phrase applies to tactics Republican lawmakers across the country use to suppress Americans’ ability to vote.

The Washington Post Editorial Board takes them to task this morning for working harder to keep Americans from voting than it does to offer them policies for improving their lives.

But first, an example from close to home.

North Carolina Republicans crowed that they’d made voting easier and more uniform in 2018 by mandating early voting locations remain open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. across the state. Why, they’d actually increased the total hours early voting would be available. Then came the but: a 20 percent decrease in the number of early voting sites across the state. Increasing the length of the day meant most counties had to cut back on the number of sites open to stay within their budgets. Some of those extra hours were essentially “non-usable hours,” when election administrators knew no voting would occur.

Tricks and traps

A backer of both the hours change and a principal behind North Carolina’s infamous gerrymandering and voter ID law, Republican state Representative David Lewis told ProPublica, “The purpose of the uniformity is to make it easier and more convenient and more accessible for the voter to participate.”

Voting officials were skeptical:

“We know our county. We know when most people go to vote early. The 12-hour, 7-a.m.-to-7-p.m. requirement just ties our hands when coming up with a catered approach that fits our county best,” said Steve Stone, the Republican chair of the Robeson County Board of Elections.

[…]

“I do not see it as an isolated event, but rather a part of a larger voter suppression effort,” said Al Daniels, a Democratic member of the Bladen County Board of Elections, of the uniform-hours law. “I see it as anti-voter, period.”

Fashions that begin in California tend to filter out to the rest of the country. But when it comes to fashions in voter suppression, look to North Carolina.

The Post this morning takes Texas to task. The approach is familiar:

MOBILE POLLING places that popped up on college campuses and other population-dense areas were “the most effective program we had,” Dana DeBeauvoir, the chief elections official in Travis County, Tex., told the New York Times. That would explain why Texas Republicans shut them down.

The Times reported last week that, as Texans head to the polls, it will be substantially harder for college students to vote. A new state law required all polling places to remain open for the state’s full 12-day early-voting period. Localities could not afford to keep the pop-up sites open that long, so colleges in Austin, Brownsville, Fort Worth and elsewhere have had to close them. That guarantees lower turnout among people whom Republicans do not want voting: Democratic-leaning students.

Pretexts aplenty

Florida Republicans have worked hard at keeping students there from voting. And minorities. And paroled felons, “even after voters overwhelmingly approved the law in a referendum” that permits them:

Republicans in New Hampshire, North Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin have made voting difficult for students in various ways; Republicans often use voter identification laws to exclude student voters, rejecting forms of ID that college students are likely to have. Typically, the pretext is the need to block in-person voter fraud — a practically nonexistent problem in the United States.

There’s always a pretext, reasonable-sounding, patriotic even, something to make an alarming soundbite on the news at six. Dead voters, voter impersonation, double voters, and other “downright goofy, if not paranoid” theories about widespread illegal voting. Republicans’ proposed remedies — even if they also hurt the Republican party’s voters — always seem to erect more voting hurdles for a broad swath of honest citizens (who tend to vote Democrat) than they would stop the few cases of improper voting uncovered. Many of those cases wind up stemming from confusion over eligibility. And those cases are so few that, whether or not voters are involved, “Voter Fraud Vigilantes” feel compelled to pad out their statistics by labeling any and every form of election irregularity voter fraud.

Clickbait headlines regularly warn that Democrats have moved “too far left.” They rarely warn Republicans they have moved too far from democracy.

You don’t need a weatherman…
by Tom Sullivan

“[Y]ou don’t need to be a mental-health professional to see that something’s very seriously off with Trump,” George T. Conway III wrote this week in The Atlantic. The acting president of the United States is emotionally stunted, pathologically needy, and mentally unbalanced. That was clear from the moment Donald J. Trump announced his run for president. It is even clearer now that he is deploying federal resources around the planet trying to generate evidence to support conspiracy theories.

The New York Times last October unspooled a mountain of his father Fred Trump’s business records detailing an extensive pattern of tax evasion and under-the-table payments made to keep Donald’s floundering enterprises afloat. In its wake, sister Maryanne Trump Barry retired from her job as a federal appeals court judge. Voluntary retirement ended an ethics investigation into alleged misconduct arising from participation in the family’s efforts to evaded inheritance taxes revealed in the Times expose.

All Fred’s heir Donald knows is how to run a corrupt family business. Desperate to ensure what is buried in his taxes stays buried, he now treats the U.S. government’s executive branch as an extension of the Trump Organization. He demonstrates no ability to comprehend the duties of public service nor any interest in defending the constitution he swore a solemn oath to uphold. Every day, his every act, is about himself.

Conway examines the narcissistic personality and antisocial personality disorders ascribed to Trump by mental-health professionals. The first, for which there is a fountain of public evidence, makes it impossible for Trump to put the needs of the country before his own. His inability to act as a national fiduciary makes him unfit for office, Conway argues.

As for the second, Conway cites Lance Dodes, a former assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (emphasis mine):

In a way, Trump’s sociopathic tendencies are simply an extension of his extreme narcissism. Take the pathological lying. Extreme narcissists aren’t necessarily pathological liars, but they can be, and when they are, the lying supports the narcissism. As Lance Dodes has put it, “People like Donald Trump who have severe narcissistic disturbances can’t tolerate being criticized, so the more they are challenged in this essential way, the more out of control they become.” In particular, “They change reality to suit themselves in their own mind.” Although Trump “lies because of his sociopathic tendencies,” telling falsehoods to fool others, Dodes argues, he also lies to himself, to protect himself from narcissistic injury. And so Donald Trump has lied about his net worth, the size of the crowd at his inauguration, and supposed voter fraud in the 2016 election.

The latter kind of lying, Dodes says, “is in a way more serious,” because it can indicate “a loose grip on reality”—and it may well tell us where Trump is headed in the face of impeachment hearings. Lying to prevent narcissistic injury can metastasize to a more significant loss of touch with reality. As Craig Malkin puts it, when pathological narcissists “can’t let go of their need to be admired or recognized, they have to bend or invent a reality in which they remain special,” and they “can lose touch with reality in subtle ways that become extremely dangerous over time.” They can become “dangerously psychotic,” and “it’s just not always obvious until it’s too late.”

Trump’s repeated (and obviously false) assertion that the whistleblower complaint got “almost everything” wrong about his July 25 call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky demonstrates, as with brags about the size of his inauguration crowd, he invents his own reality. He — the President of the United States — has posted two dozen tweets since late last night in a desperate attempt to fortify the psychic bubble he’s built around himself and to wrestle back control of the national narrative.

Cabinet members and defenders on Capitol Hill have bet their careers, their reputations, their legacies (and perhaps their freedom) on defending a mad, would-be king.

Jennifer Rubin asks Republicans with a residue of self-respect:

This is why you ran for office (or joined the staff of someone who did) and what you’ll tell your kids and grandkids you did in office — vouch for a raving narcissist who betrayed our democracy? When you made the pact with the Devil, you might have imagined a Democratic president would have hurt the economy or nominated judges not to your liking (wouldn’t Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky have stopped them anyway?), but you cannot honestly say they would have tried to corrupt our democracy to the extent this president has. You cannot honestly say that a tax cut (whose effect is drying up) was worth all this.

So really, what are you doing? Trump will be impeached, and if he remains on the top of the ticket will lose, bring down the entire Republican ticket and stain the party for the foreseeable future. The only question is what you are going to do. Unless you want to be one of the lawmakers hiding from voters and reporters until 2020 and/or tagged as enabling impeachable conduct, you have three rational choices: announce you are retiring; denounce the conduct and call on the president to resign or at least refrain from running for reelection; or support impeachment.

Trump (and his accomplices) will not stop unless “the Mafia presidency” is stopped by members of Congress more committed to serving their country than in serving their careers or their party.

Late adopters? You will draw only more scorn. To borrow from John Fogerty, looks like you’re in for nasty weather.

Standard issue Wingnut xenophobia

by digby

Ainsley Earhardt pushes a white supremacist conspiracy theory: “Look at Texas. Is there a chance it could turn blue? You have a lot of illegal immigrants that are coming up there. If they get the right to vote eventually, then they could vote for the Democrats.” pic.twitter.com/aALkQST4Uw

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) September 13, 2019

This is not new. But it has gone totally mainstream in the Trump era. I’ve been writing about this for a long while. Here’s a fairly recent one from last year:

On Monday, in a courtroom in Wichita, a federal judge told Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach that he had so blatantly violated federal discovery rules in a case he argued, defending a law requiring voters to prove their citizenship, that she ordered Kobach — a former Department of Justice official under George W. Bush — to take remedial legal courses. She also ruled against the law itself, saying there was no evidence it was necessary.

Kobach is best known for writing the “show me your papers” law in Arizona that was also struck down in federal court. He also headed up the ill-fated Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which was disbanded after many states balked at Kobach’s demand that they turn over their confidential voter rolls to the federal government. He had very big plans:

Kris Kobach should learn to use folders and cover sheets. pic.twitter.com/q3sqB59wtA— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) November 21, 2016

Kobach is currently running for governor of Kansas, and the crusade to curtail immigration and voting rights will continue no matter how his checkered political career turns out. This is now a central organizing principle of the Republican party.

Donald Trump’s administration has the most extreme immigration policy in a century. Among his first acts as president was his theatrical Muslim ban. He’s beefed up the border patrol and ICE and told them all to “take off the gloves.” He put one of the most anti-immigration politicians in the country in charge of the Justice Department, and they are systematically deporting people, even those who have been here for 50 years. Trump backed out of a deal to legalize the DACA recipients at the last minute. Now they are separating children from their parents at the border and putting them into detention camps in order to “deter” Latino immigrants, even those who are seeking asylum from the rampant violence in their home countries.

It’s tempting to chalk all this up to simple Republican racism and nativism. That is certainly what fuels the emotion on this issue on the right. Conservative media pounds the message that “the illegals” are all on welfare (which isn’t true) and are ruining the culture with taco trucks on every corner. (If only.) But that isn’t the whole story:

Back in 2014, when the wave of unaccompanied minors from Central American came to the border, Laura Ingraham led the charge against those kids:

Oh no, you won’t. This is our country. . . . Our borders matter to us. Our way of life and our culture matter to us. Our jobs and our wages matter to us. No, you won’t.

She ranted day after day about these children, claiming that the government was “trafficking illegal immigrants from one part of the country to another part of the country to further erode American wages and further forward their goal of ultimate amnesty and changing the electoral and cultural landscape of the United States forever.”

Note that Ingraham said “electoral” landscape. We can see that Trump and his lieutenants see this latest border crisis as an opportunity to get their base fired up and get out to the polls in November. But movement conservatives have a long-term strategy in mind that goes way beyond the midterms and even Trump. That’s why cynical politicians and media stars have been pushing this issue so hard for the last few years.

They realized somewhere along the line that the fundamental xenophobia of the GOP base would make it very difficult to form any sort of governing majority that included Latinos, the fastest growing ethnic group in the country. So they decided their future prospects would be better served by suppressing the Latino vote with spurious accusations of voter fraud and demagoguery about foreigners more generally, in an effort to force the government to curb immigration overall. Anti-immigrant groups like VDARE have made the argument explicit, saying Democrats favor immigration because it will give them an electoral advantage.

Back in August of 2015, Rush Limbaugh endorsed Trump’s hardcore immigration position, saying that “everybody knows that [bipartisan immigration reform] is an immigration plan that is going to result in millions more registered Democrats.” He even got a shout-out from the big guy himself that same day:

Listening to @rushlimbaugh on way back to Jury Duty. Fantastic show, terrific guy!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2015

Limbaugh is a bit cagier these days, saying that he’d support DACA recipients getting a path to citizenship as long as they aren’t given the vote for 12 to 15 years.

Right-wing radio host Dennis Prager made a similar case this year in a piece laying out three reasons the left supports immigration. The first of these:

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, chain migration, sanctuary cities, and citizenship for immigrants living in the country illegally will give the Left political power. An estimated 70 to 80 percent of Latin American immigrants will vote Democratic. So with enough new voters from Latin America alone, the Democrats would essentially be assured the presidency and Congress for decades. (If you’re wondering: Reason two is because they are Marxists and reason three is that they want to feel good about themselves.)

The ruling right-wing diva of anti-immigrant fervor is of course Ann Coulter. She has been ranting even more than usual these days, telling Breitbart that nobody should believe the “actor children” at the border, citing some articles from 2011 about refugees embellishing their stories to get asylum. Coulter’s influence on the GOP on this issue can’t be overstated — her book “Adios America” was clearly a major influence on Trump’s agenda.

You may recall that Coulter called Trump’s most notorious immigration speech during the campaign “the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.” It was later revealed that she and Stephen Miller had written it. There are no limits to how low she will go in demeaning and degrading immigrants, but she too has stated clearly what the real issue is. At CPAC in 2014, she put it this way:

Amnesty goes through, and the Democrats have 30 million new voters. I just don’t think Republicans have an obligation to forgive law-breaking just because the Democrats need another 30 million voters.

The nativism we are seeing play out right now is cruel and inhumane. It’s born of an ugly strain of white nationalism that forms the core of the Republican Party under Trump. But the conservative movement is still working feverishly on their own projects, using Trump and his demagoguery to serve their long-term goals. They know that keeping Latinos from voting and shutting down immigration, both legal and illegal, is necessary to their political survival as a movement and a party.

This time they may have underestimated how the rest of America feels about seeing small children ripped away from their families for cheap political purposes. Let’s hope so, anyway.

Yes, let’s hope so …

Another toadie steps up

by digby

Again, the president is showing a video clip from last Wednesday, to back up a claim he made on Sunday.

It’s completely irrelevant but is being used to muddy the water of realty to lend credit to his inaccurate statement. https://t.co/BZBpJ0grGW

— Nathan McDermott (@natemcdermott) September 6, 2019

In case you haven’t been following the ongoing brouhaha known as “Sharpiegate” the latest is that NOAA came out and said Trump was right and Alabama’s weather service was wrong. It’s caused quite the stir among meteorologists everywhere who see this as abject BS which, of course, it is. He said what he said because he’s and idiot and he won’t admit it. He got a rear Admiral to fall on his sword and now this.

A little som’som’ about the Director of Communications of #NOAA who sent out the statement backing up President Bonkers’ hurricane forecast. pic.twitter.com/RXS2FkxXXl

— Coastal Elite (@cmkinmia) September 7, 2019

That’s right. The NOAA director is a political appointee who served on Trump’s inaugural committee. In other words, another Trump toadie.

Greg Sargent points out that government employees lying to cover Trump’s lies is an ongoing scandal:

By my count, this has happened at least seven times:

• In January 2017, after the media reported on Trump’s paltry inaugural crowd size, resulting in enraged but preposterous pushback from Trump, he dispatched then-press secretary Sean Spicer to tell multiple lies buttressing his stance. As Glenn Kessler crucially noted, some of these were part of a prepared White House statement. Trump also ordered his then-acting National Park Service chief to hunt for helpful photographic evidence. The NPS does not estimate crowd sizes, and the official was shocked, but he carried out Trump’s request, finding nothing.
• After Trump repeatedly alleged widespread fictitious voter fraud in 2016, the White House set up an official commission to “study” the issue. When it flopped, a dissenting member explicitly declared the motive was to make Trump’s lies true. Remember that this was rooted in rage at losing the popular vote.
• When Trump declared before the midterm elections that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” with migrant caravans, multiple officials tried to bolster this claim by offering an official-seeming statistic about terrorism arrests that was entirely spurious and proved nothing of the kind.
• When Trump vowed a surprise 10 percent middle class tax cut before the midterms, officials were caught off guard, but nonetheless sprang into action to try to create the impression this was a real promise by, for instance, discussing a nonbinding pledge. The tax cut never happened.
• To justify suspending the credentials of CNN’s Jim Acosta after he annoyed Trump, then-White House press secretary Sarah Sanders shared a video that experts determined had been deceptively edited to make Acosta look physically abusive toward a press aide.
• To fear-monger for his wall, Trump repeatedly told stories about traffickers tying up migrant women and silencing them with tape. After The Post flatly debunked Trump’s assertion, a top border official circulated an internal request for “any information” that would support the claim.
• To buttress Trump’s distortions of the migrant threat, the Department of Homeland Security produced a slick official presentation about the border that claimed nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists had been blocked from entering the United States. But this number had nothing whatsoever to do with efforts to cross the border, a distinction multiple officials also dishonestly fudged.

Some time ago, Dana Milbank noted that in multiple cases such as these, government officials are using “federal resources in vain attempts to turn the president’s lies into truth.”

I would add the big kahuna: Bill Barr declaring Trump innocent of Obstruction of Justice charges.

I think we are at a point at which we must acknowledge that every Trump appointee is as corrupt as he is. This is what happens when personal loyalty to the man supersedes their oath to protect the constitution.

It is quite the indictment of these people that virtually all of them are perfectly willing to do it. And sadly, the so-called “adults in the room” who did leave are still pretending that this is not a major crisis.

.

Looney on the runway

by digby

From the White House transcript of President Trump's gaggle with reporters earlier: pic.twitter.com/2N74vgeMqZ— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) August 19, 2019

I watched that whole runway gaggle yesterday and he was as looney as I’ve ever seen him.

President Donald Trump on Sunday slammed his preferred news network over recent unfavorable poll results, saying: “There’s something going on at Fox [News], I’ll tell you right now. And I’m not happy with it.”

Trump’s comments to reporters in New Jersey were in response to a question about the network’s recently released survey showing the president losing head-to-head match-ups against four of the top Democratic presidential primary candidates.

Trump said he didn’t “believe” the poll that was published, adding: “Fox has changed. My worst polls have always been from Fox.”

He also complained about how Democrats had barred the network from hosting or televising the party’s 2020 primary debates, and then signaled a warning about the the general-election cycle.

“And I think Fox is making a big mistake,” the president said when asked about the polling and the network’s leadership. “Because, you know, I’m the one that calls the shots on that — on the really big debates.”

The president’s criticisms are a continuation of a larger attack on one of his favorite targets, the news media. But Trump has increasingly lumped in Fox News, a network known for its conservative bent, in recent months for what he views as unfavorable coverage.

He has squared off with the network as it devoted time to forums with Democratic presidential candidates earlier in the year. Trump took jabs at Fox News in April over the network’s town hall with Bernie Sanders, and again in May, ahead of its town hall with Pete Buttigieg.

This time, Trump’s annoyance with an unfavorable poll led him to wrongly assert that he had control over the 2020 presidential debates.

The Commission on Presidential Debates, which is not controlled by any political party or outside organization and does not endorse, support or oppose political candidates for parties, has sponsored general-election presidential debates in every election since 1988.

He’s not going to debate is he? Not that it matters much. He trainwrecks everything …

How about this?

President Trump told reporters on Sunday that Apple CEO Tim Cook privately made a “very compelling argument” that the administration’s tariffs on Chinese-assembled goods have made an unfair impact on the California-based tech giant, because its chief rival, Samsung, has conducted most of its manufacturing in South Korea and did not have to pay the levy.

The president also issued a stern warning to China, saying there might not be an end to the trade war if the government resorts to “violence” to crush demonstrators in Hong Kong.

Trump announced last week he would delay major new tariffs on China for three months, and his latest comments hinted that more concessions may be forthcoming. The new ten-percent tariffs had been slated to go into effect Sept. 1, and would have affected Apple’s signature iPhones and iPads.

In May, Trump increased tariffs on roughly $200 billion in Chinese goods from 10 percent to 25 percent, but later nixed steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada and Mexico. In June, China hiked its retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. by more than 15 percent.

“I had a very good meeting with Tim Cook,” Trump said at an airport in New Jersey, on his way back to the White House. “I have a lot of respect for Tim Cook, and Tim was talking to me about tariffs. And, one of the things, and he made a good case, is that Samsung is their number-one competitor, and Samsung is not paying tariffs because they’re based in South Korea.”

Trump continued: “It’s tough for Apple to pay tariffs if they’re competing with a very good company that’s not. I said, ‘How good a competitor?’ He said they’re a very good competitor. … I thought he made a very compelling argument, so I’m thinking about it.”

Cook and Trump have met several times in the past year. Earlier in the day, Trump had sounded a note of optimism on China, tweeting, “We are doing very well with China, and talking!”

It never occurred to him until now that American companies might be impacted this way by his tariffs?

It sounds like he’s looking for an excuse to fold…

TRUMP: You have a lot of voter fraud. The way you stop it is voter ID.

REPORTER: But your commission on voter fraud didn't find any actual fraud.

TRUMP: Well, the commission was having a tremendous problem getting papers from California … it was just a quick commission. pic.twitter.com/SaYgaCMhkH— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 19, 2019

Trump, seemingly making it up as he goes along, says he will "probably" wait until after the upcoming Israeli election to release his Middle East peace plan. #DontHoldYourBreath pic.twitter.com/3KICLMGlHd— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 19, 2019

TRUMP: You have a lot of voter fraud. The way you stop it is voter ID.

REPORTER: But your commission on voter fraud didn't find any actual fraud.

TRUMP: Well, the commission was having a tremendous problem getting papers from California … it was just a quick commission. pic.twitter.com/SaYgaCMhkH— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 19, 2019

Trump concludes his vacation-ending media availability on a humble note pic.twitter.com/5tGHx6zoE9— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 19, 2019

.

.

Booker was right

by digby

Via Think Progress:

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) claimed during Wednesday night’s presidential debate that President Donald Trump won Michigan in 2016 because Republicans and Russians worked to suppress the votes of African Americans.

Election experts say he’s onto something.

“We lost the state of Michigan because everybody from Republicans to Russians were targeting the suppression of African American voters. We need to say that,” Booker said during the second night of the second set of debates, in Detroit.

“If the African American vote was four years earlier we would have won the state of Michigan,” he continued. “We need to have a campaign that is ready for what’s coming, an assault especially on the highest-performing voter group in our coalition, which is black women.”

Reports from former special counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee outlined how a “troll farm” called the Internet Research Agency, which has close ties to the Kremlin, made a coordinated effort on social media to suppress the black vote in 2016. African Americans tend to vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

There is reason to believe those Russian efforts worked. A new study from researchers at the University of Tennessee found that social media posts and disinformation spread by Russian troll farms influenced how Americans responded to opinion polls before the 2016 election.

Michigan voters were also hampered that year by Republican legislative maneuvers to suppress minority turnout.

Last November, Michigan voters passed sweeping voting rights laws that make it possible to vote absentee without providing a reason, allow people to register to vote on Election Day, and allow residents to automatically enroll to vote at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

However, those laws were not in place in 2016, when turnout was low among college students, African American and Latinx voters — by the hundreds of thousands — according to Sharon Dolente, a voting rights strategist for the ACLU of Michigan.

“Michigan’s entire system of voting was so arcane during 2016 that it suppressed a number of voters,” Dolente said. “Most of the changes we have now made would have significantly increased turnout beyond the margins in 2016. I don’t know how they would have voted but it would have been more than 11,000 voters. So the outcome could have been different.”

Democratic lawmakers introduced a number of bills that would have allowed no-reason absentee ballot voting before the 2016 election. However, Republicans — who took control of the state’s House, Senate, and governor’s office over an eight-year period starting in 2011, thanks in part to gerrymandering — blocked those bills from passing. Republicans argued that any reform must include a restrictive in-person voter ID requirement.

Voter ID mandates have traditionally been a pet cause of Republican lawmakers, who have at times acknowledged that such laws would give them an edge at the ballot box.
[…]
There are also lingering questions about whether the votes of many black Michiganders were actually counted in 2016. On Election Day, more than 80 voting machines in Detroit malfunctioned, raising questions about the accuracy of election results in 59% of the majority-black city’s precincts.

The ballot-box failure itself was caused by the severe underfunding of America’s election system, said Myrna Pérez, director of the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. A shortage of poll workers and voting machines prompts long voting lines and longer waits at precincts in minority communities.

Due to those shortages, elections officials often don’t recognize issues with polling machines until Election Day, Dolente said.

Also some Michigan poll workers incorrectly told voters that they needed to show identification to vote, according to another study by the Center for American Progress. It is unclear how many people lost their opportunity to vote as a result.

In addition, just weeks before the 2016 election, Trump urged his supporters to monitor polling places to ensure that voter fraud and election rigging did not occur. Dolente said that while she defends poll-watching, she and other election advocates feared Trump’s comments would stir up violence.

“There was a concern of heightened violence at the polls… I think that also could have been a very suppressing impact on people of color,” Dolente said. “That is voter suppression.”

The extent of the suppression isn’t entirely clear. But experts believe it had some impact.

“It’s really hard to say whether things like this affect the outcome of any given election,” said Jonathan Diaz, legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, a voting-rights group. “But Sen. Booker is certainly correct that voter suppression played a role in the 2016 presidential election.”

Also Michigan was one of the states for which Paul Manafort shared vter data with Konstantin Kilimnik for no apparent reason.

It’s totally fair to speculate that Trump’s tiny, tiny victory in the state benefitted from GOP vote suppression and Russian interference. Indeed, it’s almostcertain that Trump wouldn’t have won there without it.

.

President soulmate
by Tom Sullivan

“Election integrity” is the euphemism the G.O.P. trots out when launching newer, more diabolical efforts to subvert democracy in these disunited states. Erecting barriers to disfavored Americas voting under the guise of “integrity” has been a popular Republican pastime for decades. But it took the rise of conservative talk radio, Fox News, and social media to give “voter fraud” legs. Like so many conservative enthusiasms before it — conservative Democrats once supervised Jim Crow — public professions of faith in the American system are just so much Elmer Gantry cow chips cheerfully flung while humming Lee Greenwood.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell makes the case once again. When the “Grim Reaper” is not killing bills passed in the Democrat led House, the
“gravedigger of American democracy” is rubber-stamping uber-conservative Federalist Society judges and #MoscowMitch is abetting Russian efforts to hack the next election:

The phrase “Mitch McConnell is a Russian” trended on Twitter early Saturday after the Senate majority leader repeatedly blocked election security legislation in recent days.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) blocked two attempts to pass election bills this week shortly after former special counsel Robert Mueller testified before lawmakers on Capitol Hill, warning that foreign governments likely will attempt to interfere in the 2020 elections.

Hundreds took to Twitter to decry the senator for blocking the bills. Democratic activist Scott Dworkin called McConnell “a traitor” and “an accomplice to the biggest traitor in American history — Donald Trump.”

McConnell called legislation requiring paper ballots and funding for the Election Assistance Commission partisan legislation. Paul Waldman gave a brief rundown of what Republicans worry would give Democrats an edge:

• Securing our voting systems from foreign hacking
• Allowing every American to vote
• Making it as easy as possible for Americans to vote
• Ensuring that all votes count equally

Let’s not forget fiscal conservatives’ fiscal conservatism. The House last week passed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2019 that would add $300 billion to the Pentagon budget and add $1.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade. Democrats supported the measure to fund domestic spending, eliminate the “sequester,” and avoid another debt-ceiling crisis. But while opposed by a majority of Republicans in the House, their Senate colleagues will pass and the president is expected to sign the two-year budget deal.

John Cassidy writes at The New Yorker that Trump, McConnell and other prominent Republicans’ support proves “the G.O.P.’s devotion to fiscal conservatism was a sham, a cynical political strategy rather than the expression of a core philosophical principle.” When Democrats are in control, holding down the debt requires drastic measures, etc., etc. When Republicans have control, deficit-increasing tax cuts that shrink the tax base are de rigueur. Cassidy provides a thumbnail sketch of how that went down the last time Democrats held the White House. Rest assured, Republicans will be born again into fiscal conservatism when next a Democrat sits in the Oval Office. “Waste, fraud, and abuse” will rise again as a euphemism for federal money flowing into wrong-colored Americans’ pockets.

Meantime, the G.O.P. is employing every artifice at its disposal to monkey-wrench democracy and preclude results that don’t leave them in charge of seeing that doesn’t happen.

With an authoritarian con man occupying the Oval Office, the party now has a soulmate of president perfectly matched to their members’ slipperier proclivities. Old euphemisms are falling away as politically incorrect and inauthentic anyway. They’ve thrown out old rules like not wearing white after Labor Day. With Trump as president, they can display their preference for white year-round.