772 search results for ""voter fraud""

Surgical here, blunt instrument there
by Tom Sullivan

There is seemingly no limit to the lengths to which politicians will go to game the system that placed them in power. Once comfortably ensconced, erecting bulwarks against being pried loose is de rigueur.

North Carolina’s gerrymandering of districts with “surgical precision” faced another defeat in court Tuesday. Wisconsin’s “unconstitutional political gerrymander” awaits a decision by the Supreme Court on whether gerrymandering of any sort is unconstitutional.

There is also seemingly no limit to the lengths believers in the myth of widespread voter fraud will go to disenfranchising voters, reduce the voting pool, and (presumably) gain some electoral advantage from it.

On Wednesday, challenges to Ohio’s voter purging system reached the Supreme Court. Charlie Pierce explains:

At issue in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph was a state policy by which voters could be “purged” from the voter lists if they failed to vote in several consecutive elections, and then failed to respond to one notification sent out to them by the Ohio secretary of state’s office. The plaintiff was a veteran named Larry Harmon, who was purged after he didn’t vote in 2012 or in the 2014 midterms. Ultimately, this was a fight over a provision of the 1993 National Voting Rights Act, also known as the “Motor Voter” Law. Proponents of the Ohio system argued that the law permitted the kind of purge they conducted, as did the Help America Vote Act, passed in 2002, while opponents argued that the use of non-voting as a “trigger” to start the process of disenfranchisement was expressly forbidden by that same law.

Yes, states have a duty to maintain accurate voting lists, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor questioned whether Ohio’s approach wasn’t a blunt scalpel that twists laws passed to make voting easier to keep eligible voters from voting:

General, could you tell me, there’s a 24-year history of solicitor generals of both political parties under both — Presidents of both political parties who have taken a position contrary to yours. Before the amendment and after the amendment. In fact, the Federal Election Commission, when it wrote to Congress with respect to the Help America Vote Act, took the position the old solicitor generals were taking. Everybody but you today come in and say the Act before the clarification said something different. Seems quite unusual that your office would change its position so dramatically. I might accept it if you thought the Help America Vote Act, in fact, clarified something that was ambiguous, but you’re taking a very different position. You’re saying even before that Act, it was clear you could do it this way.

On the steps of the court, a disenfranchised voter confronted Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted:

Gerrymandering “with almost surgical precision” to maintain power: good.

Voter roll maintenance with a blunt instrument to maintain power: also good.

Just so we’re clear, two legs better!

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The circus on Pennsylvania Avenue
by Tom Sullivan

Buckle up.

Former White House advisor Steve Bannon tells all to author Michael Wolff in his unreleased “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.” In incendiary quotes in the Guardian, Bannon describes the Trump Tower meetings between the president’s son and top campaign officials as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic.” Of the ongoing investigation, Bannon says, “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”

Bannon adds that the Russia investigation is “all about money laundering” involving Paul Manafort, Don Jr and Jared Kushner. Says Bannon, “It’s as plain as a hair on your face.”

It is important to note, as Slate news blogger Ben Mathis-Lilley does with a flurry of links, that quotes from Michael Wolff may not have the provenance they claim:

A 2004 New Republic profile of Wolff meanwhile noted that “the scenes in his columns aren’t recreated so much as created—springing from Wolff’s imagination rather than from actual knowledge of events.” The same piece quoted an editor who worked with Wolff as saying “his great gift is the appearance of intimate access. He is adroit at making the reader think that he has spent hours and days with his subject, when in fact he may have spent no time at all.” A 1998 article about Wolff’s book Burn Rate surfaced Wednesday by writer Brad Plumer notes that several of the subjects of the book say Wolff “invented or changed quotes” that were attributed to them.

Accurate or not, Cokie’s Law applies. Jonathan Swan at Axios observes that in attacking family “Bannon touched the third rail of Trumpworld .”

Thus, reports of Bannon’s comments took the sitting president’s mind away from comparing Nuclear Button size with Kim Jong Un. In a statement too coherent for the boss, the White House responded, saying:

“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.

“Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base—he’s only in it for himself.

“Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.

“We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.”

Why, yes, America.

Washington DC is in a bit of a meltdown tonight.— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) January 3, 2018

The White House issued the statement before Trump’s attorney sent Bannon a cease and desist letter:

Trump attorney Charles J. Harder of the firm Harder Mirell & Abrams LLP, said in a statement, “This law firm represents President Donald J. Trump and Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. On behalf of our clients, legal notice was issued today to Stephen K. Bannon, that his actions of communicating with author Michael Wolff regarding an upcoming book give rise to numerous legal claims including defamation by libel and slander, and breach of his written confidentiality and non-disparagement agreement with our clients. Legal action is imminent.”

That would have to be an agreement with Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., since an NDA covering a White House employee would seem to be null and void, at least as it pertains to White House gossip.

While all that was going on, Trump found time yesterday to dissolve the voter fraud commission he set up to prove massive voter fraud had cost him the popular vote in 2016:

“It’s a s–t show,” said one White House adviser to CNN, adding that the commission went “off the rails.”

Spoken from the center of the three-ring show that opened yesterday at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. To give Trump credit, the show is a spectacular.

But amidst the growing chaos and incoherence, speculation grows that, as we say down South, “He ain’t right.”

James Hamblin at The Atlantic surveys some of the controversy surrounding the “Goldwater rule” discouraging analyzing public officials from afar. Nevertheless, Trump’s recent speech patterns indicate cognitive decline compared with past interviews. Hamblin worries:

The idea that the president should not be diagnosed from afar only underscores the point that the president needs to be evaluated up close.

If he does have dementia, a medical condition, pointing it out would be politically incorrect in more polite circles. But since the occupant of the Oval Office objects to being politically correct, which would he think worse, blasting it out in tweets, or not?

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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

He’ll never give up, never give inby digby

Roy Moore is a real ass. If they can find a way to whittle down the vote to .5 percent and get a recount they will do it. 15,000 votes aren’t easy to disappear but I’m sure they’re going to try. They’ll certainly delegitimize the vote by saying the margin was all the result of voter fraud. But you knew that:

A day after losing the Senate race in Alabama to Democrat Doug Jones, Roy Moore has issued a new statement refusing to concede the election until completion of the final count. But it wasn’t your typical post-election statement.

It was a four-minute fire-and-brimstone video about abortion, same-sex marriage, school prayer, sodomy and “the right of a man to claim to be a woman and vice versa.”

“We are indeed in a struggle to preserve our republic, our civilization and our religion and to set free a suffering humanity,” Moore said. “Today, we no longer recognize the universal truth that God is the author of our life and liberty. Abortion, sodomy and materialism have taken the place of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

In the video issued by the campaign Wednesday evening, Moore said his campaign is still waiting for the official vote count from Alabama officials. He did not say he would necessarily seek a recount, for which his campaign would have to pay unless the margin turned out to be within half a percentage point. Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill has called it “highly unlikely” that Jones would not be certified as the winner.

The silver lining in all of this is that we never have to pay even the slightest attention to conservative evangelicals again. Any claim they had to morality or decency has been blown to smithereens by their ecstatic support for Trump and Moore. They are obviously phonies who don’t care about any of the stuff they say they care about.

Update: Apparently, the SOS of Alabama says that Moore can have a recount no matter what if he pays for it. Sigh…

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Yes, they’re still convinced Obama is a Muslim
by digby

Party identification determines many beliefs. One that remains a bright line between Republicans and the rest of the country is the one championed by President Trump in the years before he ran for office: Where was President Obama born? Most American adults disbelieve the claim that the former President was born in Kenya, but nearly one in three American adults say that it is definitely or probably true that he was. More Republicans – 51% – believe that to be the case.

Their leader agrees:

In recent months, they say, Mr. Trump has used closed-door conversations to question the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He has also repeatedly claimed that he lost the popular vote last year because of widespread voter fraud, according to advisers and lawmakers.

One senator who listened as the president revived his doubts about Mr. Obama’s birth certificate chuckled on Tuesday as he recalled the conversation. The president, he said, has had a hard time letting go of his claim that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States. The senator asked not to be named to discuss private conversations.

This is crazy. 50% of Republicans believe it’s either possible or it’s true. I don’t know how we survive as a nation with that many people being brainwashed. That represents tens of millions, not just a little handful.

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The tax plan deepens a crack in the GOPby digby

I wrote about the GOP’s tax plan and the future for Salon this morning:
On the morning of the presidential election last year, The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein wrote about some long-term trends in the electorate and the possibility that the 2016 race, with its distinctive odd features of a celebrity demagogue and the first woman nominee, might just accelerate the change. His thesis was that the unfolding electoral order would see the GOP relying on “preponderantly blue-collar, white, and older Rustbelt states that have mostly favored Democrats in recent years,” while Democrats would “depend on white-collar, diverse, and younger Sunbelt states that as recently as the 1990s leaned reliably toward the GOP.” He concluded the piece with what turned out to be a stunning prophecy:

The worst-case scenario for [Hillary Clinton] is that Trump’s blue-collar blitz narrowly pushes him past her in some of the Rustbelt states she needs, while she cannot advance quite enough among minority and college-educated white voters to overcome his non-college-educated, non-urban, religiously devout coalition in Sunbelt states like North Carolina, Florida, Nevada, and Colorado, much less Arizona and Georgia. Transitioning between her party’s past and future, Hillary Clinton’s nightmare is that she might be caught awkwardly in between.

Since the election we have had a flood of postmortems blaming everything from Facebook to Russia to racism, misogyny, bad campaigning and good old James Comey. I’d guess it could be any of those things plus a dozen more. Maybe all of them in some measure led to Trump’s narrow victory in several states that won him enough votes in the Electoral College.

Trump likes to say that it was a great landslide (it wasn’t), that winning the electoral college is very difficult for Republicans (it isn’t) and that his overwhelming defeat in the popular vote was the result of voter fraud, mostly by undocumented immigrants (it wasn’t). While that historic election will undoubtedly provide fodder for political arguments for the next quarter-century at least, I’m more interested in whether or not the Trump circus and general Republican dysfunction has derailed those long-term trends Brownstein identified.

On Tuesday, Brownstein wrote a piece for CNN analyzing whether the appalling tax bill working its way through the Senate might fracture the GOP coalition. He goes some distance toward answering that question. The Republican Party has long operated on two tracks, the first of which appeals to cultural conservatives (with a strong strain of racial resentment), who include the Christian right and blue-collar and rural whites resistant to social and demographic change.

The GOP’s other track is all about big business, Wall Street and free-market capitalism. It appeals to plutocrats and wealthy heirs to large fortunes like the Trumps. Brownstein points out something that many have failed to recognize: Despite his outrageous behavior and alleged populist iconoclasm, Trump has not deviated from this dual track. He has “complicated this balance nonetheless by intensifying the pressure on each side of the fulcrum.”

We are all well aware of how Trump has pushed every button of racial resentment, apparently to the delight of his white, blue-collar base. His belated embrace of Roy Moore after the former judge was accused of assaulting underage girls has further bonded Trump with the religious right. But where Republicans in the past would produce tax cuts that merely tilted toward the rich, he’s given the green light to the GOP Congress to deliver massive tax cuts for the wealthy while actually raising taxes on everyone else to help fund them. Despite this, so far the GOP coalition has mostly held together. The defections that cost the Republicans a victory on Affordable Care Act repeal (which operated on the same logic) came mostly from representatives in suburban districts and senators whose constituents cannot stand Trump’s outrageous style.

One thing is for sure: The tax plan is tremendously unpopular, even among white-collar white voters one might expect to be enthusiastic about it. According to a recent Quinnipiac Poll, they oppose it by two to one, and largely believe that it helps the rich at the expense of the middle class. In fact, they like it a lot less than the blue-collar workers the Democrats have assumed would be open to their own populist agenda. Those voters are sticking with Trump and the Republicans, at least so far, for reasons that have nothing to do with their economic situation.

In the Virginia elections and others around the country earlier this month, college-educated whites went with the Democrats, while working-class and rural whites stayed with the Republicans. As Brownstein says, that pattern “suggests the GOP has more to fear from well-off voters who believe the Trump-era party is violating their values than from working-class voters who conclude it’s betraying their interests.”

A majority of college-educated whites have voted Republican since political scientists first started keeping track of such things, but the margin has been growing smaller over time. White, college-educated women in particular have been moving to the Democratic Party in recent years, which makes sense given that the gender gap overall between the two parties is large and growing. Donald Trump seems to be accelerating that change.

This article in The Washington Post about the Virginia elections last month focuses on suburban Chesterfield County outside Richmond, formerly a bastion of traditional Republican voters, which went for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate for the first time in 56 years. This was because of a huge jump in turnout, driven by grassroots energy and mostly organized by local women.

This phenomenon may even have an effect down in deep red Alabama, where the Trump base is defiantly sticking with Moore, despite the accusations by numerous women that he pursued or attacked them when they were teenagers. According to this article in the Post, “the percentage of women in the state who had a favorable view of Moore dropped 11 points between mid-October and mid-November, from 47 percent to 36 percent; among men, Moore dropped by just two points.” Once again it’s the suburban white GOP women who are defecting. Nobody thinks these women are likely to shift permanently to the Democratic Party. They are very conservative — only 16 percent of them voted for Barack Obama. But Roy Moore is a bridge too far.

Donald Trump’s over-the-top appeals to racism and his eagerness to rescind regulations and give tax cuts to the wealthy may be keeping the Republican coalition of blue-collar rural whites and the richest one percent happy. But that’s not enough. Without white, suburban, college-educated voters, particularly women, they will lose. Every day that Trump says something crude and obnoxious to excite his dedicated fans, he alienates more of the faction that is repulsed by that tactic. Each time Republicans in Congress try to stage giveaways to their donors at the expense of the middle class, they lose a few more.

Trump didn’t create this dilemma for the GOP. The cracks in its coalition have been growing for some time. But he has taken a sledgehammer to the party, and a huge chunk of it has fallen off all at once. Republicans hold power, for the moment. Holding onto it will be quite another story.

Or maybe he’s just batshit crazyby digby

The New York Times is reporting tonight that our president creates his own reality.And he’s been doing it since he took office. In fact he’s been doing it for years. That “you can believe me or you can believe your lyin’eyes” thing is not a strategy. He may not even know it isa lie. In case anyone’s wondering, this is very abnormal behavior:

Shortly after his victory last year, Donald J. Trump began revisiting one of his deepest public humiliations: the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape of him making vulgar comments about women.

Despite his public acknowledgment of the recording’s authenticity in the final days of the presidential campaign — and his hasty videotaped apology under pressure from his advisers — Mr. Trump as president-elect began raising the prospect with allies that it may not have been him on the tape after all.

Most of Mr. Trump’s aides ignored his changing story. But in January, shortly before his inauguration, Mr. Trump told a Republican senator that he wanted to investigate the recording that had him boasting about grabbing women’s genitals.

“We don’t think that was my voice,” Mr. Trump told the senator, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Since then, Mr. Trump has continued to suggest that the tape that nearly upended his campaign was not actually him, according to three people close to the president.

As the issue of sexual harassment has swept through the news media, politics and entertainment industries, Mr. Trump has persisted in denying allegations that he, too, made unwanted advances on multiple women in past years. In recent days, he has continued to seed doubt about his appearance on the “Access Hollywood” tape, stunning his advisers.

More generally, Mr. Trump’s views on the issue have changed depending upon the political party involved. He has praised women for coming forward after accusations were made against a Democrat, Senator Al Franken of Minnesota. But in the case of Roy S. Moore, a Republican candidate for Senate from Alabama, Mr. Trump has said he believes Mr. Moore’s denials that he behaved inappropriately with teenage girls, and he has effectively endorsed Mr. Moore’s candidacy.

Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about the “Access Hollywood” tape are part of his lifelong habit of attempting to create and sell his own version of reality. Advisers say he continues to privately harbor a handful of conspiracy theories that have no grounding in fact.

In recent months, they say, Mr. Trump has used closed-door conversations to question the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He has also repeatedly claimed that he lost the popular vote last year because of widespread voter fraud, according to advisers and lawmakers.

One senator who listened as the president revived his doubts about Mr. Obama’s birth certificate chuckled on Tuesday as recalled the conversation. The president, he said, has had a hard time letting go of his claim that Mr. Obama was not born in the United States. The senator asked not to be named to discuss private conversations.

Mr. Trump’s journeys into the realm of manufactured facts have been frequent enough that his own staff has sought to nudge friendly lawmakers to ask questions of Mr. Trump in meetings that will steer him toward safer terrain.

To the president’s critics, his conspiracy-mongering goes to the heart of why he poses a threat to the country.

“It’s dangerous to democracy; you’ve got to have shared facts,” Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, said in an interview on Tuesday. “And on so many of these, there’s empirical evidence that says no: You didn’t win the popular vote, there weren’t more people at your inauguration than ever, that was your voice on that tape, you admitted it before.”

Mr. Flake, who is not running for re-election, said in the interview that he was about to begin a series of speeches on the Senate floor outlining his concerns about Mr. Trump. The first, he said, will be dedicated to what Mr. Flake called the president’s disregard for the truth.

Many Republican lawmakers — not wanting to undermine the party’s fragile negotiations over a much-sought tax overhaul — declined to talk on the record about Mr. Trump’s pattern of plunging into what one senator called “his rabbit holes.” But the president’s success last year has also left some in his party in awe of his achievement and uneasy about angering his base of supporters.

[…]

“He’s nobody’s choir boy, but neither were people like Winston Churchill, for example,” said the senator. “This guy, I think, is a historic person of destiny at a time and place in America when we’ve got to make a right-hand turn here.” Asked if the truth still matters, Mr. Perdue said: “Oh, absolutely. Facts are what you base decisions on.”

But Mr. Trump seems to not want to fully accept those facts that are embarrassing or inconvenient.

In October 2016, when The Washington Post first emailed Mr. Trump’s aides about the dialogue from the “Access Hollywood” tape, Mr. Trump said the words described by the newspaper did not sound like things he would say, according to two people familiar with the discussions. However, when an aide played the audio after the newspaper posted it online, Mr. Trump, who had been preparing for his second presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, did not deny it.

“It’s me,” he told people in the room as he listened. Yet after The New York Times published an article last weekend revealing that the president had questioned the authenticity of the recording, White House aides refused to answer questions about whether Mr. Trump still believes it was him on the tape.

[…]

Mr. Trump’s friends did not bother denying that the president was creating an alternative version of events. One Republican lawmaker, who asked not to be identified, said that Mr. Trump’s false statements had become familiar to people over time. The president continues to boast of winning districts that he did not in fact win, the lawmaker said, and of receiving 52 percent of the women’s vote, even though exit polls show that 42 percent of women supported him.

Remember, Trump wasn’t talking to himself. Billy Bush was on that tape too. Weirdly he doesn’t share Trump’s delusion. He said:

“Obviously I’m embarrassed and ashamed. It’s no excuse, but this happened eleven years ago—I was younger, less mature, and acted foolishly in playing along. I’m very sorry.”

And:

“Looking back upon what was said on that bus, I wish I had changed the topic. [Trump] liked TV and competition. I could’ve said, ‘Can you believe the ratings on whatever?’ But I didn’t have the strength of character to do it.”

Instead, Bush characterizes his younger self, who rode that bus with the future President of the United States, as a “sycophantic” “pleaser.” Describing the nerve-wracking assignment of covering both Trump and The Apprentice at the time, Bush lays out a scenario that might sound familiar to anyone who follows the civil-war currently raging inside the White House. According to Bush, Trump “decided a lot of times from day to day, moment to moment, who he liked, who was in and who was out. And my job was to remain in. I needed to be in, or maybe I’d be out.”

He seems to accept that it was Trump he was talking to that day and that he said what we heard. It is on tape after all.

Trump isn’t doing this as a strategy. He’s doing it because he has forced people to buy into his lies simply by asserting them for years. He may even believe them after he tells them enough times. He is so narcissistic that he thinks he can alter reality itself. He is ill.

You might wonderhow this can go on. Who knows? But at least they’ll get their motherfucking tax cuts.

Update: The Washington Post has more:

President Trump has expressed certainty that the special-counsel probe into his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia will be finished by the end of the year, complete with an exoneration from Robert S. Mueller III, according to several friends who have spoken with him in recent days.

Trump has dismissed his historically low approval ratings as “fake” and boasted about what he calls the unprecedented achievements of his presidency, even while chatting behind the scenes, saying no president since Harry Truman has accomplished as much at this point.

Read on, there’s more. Good God.

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Gun-totin’, Bible-autographin’, fire-beathin’
by Tom Sullivan

Judge Roy Moore, the Bible-autographing Alabamian zealot, is “poison in the Republican bloodstream,” writes Alabama political columnist Kyle Whitmire:

The man autographs Bibles. That should have been enough for anyone to accurately measure his character.

But it wasn’t enough. Nothing it seems is enough for Alabama Republicans to say, “Enough!”

He was removed from the bench once for refusing to follow the law.

But voters put him right back so he could be removed a second time.

Did he call for homosexuals to be put to death? Did he use his charity for personal gain? That’s our Roy. Did he assault young girls, lure them into his car? Never! (Or if he did, he had a good reason.)

It’s not as if Roy Moore is anything new in these parts. “These allegations should sadden everyone but surprise no one,” writes Jonathan Merritt, senior columnist for Religion News Service. Before him there were Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, and others. Evangelicals love their sinner-preachers. The fallenness of their religious heroes excuses their own sins better than Christ on the cross.

After his stint in prison, Bakker is back at pastoring, as are the others after their sexual dalliances became public. Merritt cautions at The Week that if national Republicans expect evangelicals to shun Moore, they are going to be disappointed:

But if recent history is any indication, we should distrust those who most vehemently peddle hate. Check their closet and you just might find a skeleton.

Research conducted by Jeff Schimel, a psychology professor at the University of Alberta, adds quantitative support for such skepticism. In one study, subjects who showed high levels of anger were more likely to rate others as angry. When participants were told they were dishonest, they were more likely to see others as dishonest. Whenever people come to believe they possess an unacceptable trait, they are more likely to see these traits in others.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung famously said that “everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” For Jungians, every human possesses a “shadow side” that contains all the behaviors they feel are bad or inappropriate. When our moral frameworks lead us to hide these behaviors, rather than deal with them honestly, they can lead to a sense of self-hatred. We try to repress these emotions, but they often escape in the form of anger toward others who we believe are immoral like we are.

Who would obsess opponents might commit massive (if undetectable) voter fraud? To pick one example at random.

Merritt concludes:

In the days ahead, we will likely learn whether Roy Moore is the paragon of Christian virtue he has led us to believe (unlikely!), or if his years of hatred were born out of guilt. We should not be surprised if the latter proves true. For when one uses hatred as a window through which to view others, it often turns out to have been a mirror all along.

I’m writing this down the street from Bob Jones University, the famously ultra-conservative religious college in South Carolina. The school once sought machine gun permits for security guards who protected coeds playing tennis in ankle-length skirts in the southern heat.

But BJU is the mainstream, liberal Christian academy in town, if stories are true. Tiny Bible colleges across the South send graduates to lead churches like those in rural Alabama. According to legend, boarding students at one tiny Bible college here were prohibited from even having pictures of their mothers in their rooms. Ponder that a moment.

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Is vote suppression a problem in close elections? Why do you ask?by digbyWell look here. Ari Berman of Mother Jones, who literally wrote the book on the voter fraud fraud, has a scoop:

On election night, Anthony was shocked to see Trump carry Wisconsin by nearly 23,000 votes. The state, which ranked second in the nation in voter participation in 2008 and 2012, saw its lowest turnout since 2000. More than half the state’s decline in turnout occurred in Milwaukee, which Clinton carried by a 77-18 margin, but where almost 41,000 fewer people voted in 2016 than in 2012. Turnout fell only slightly in white middle-class areas of the city but plunged in black ones. In Anthony’s old district, where aging houses on quiet tree-lined streets are interspersed with boarded-up buildings and vacant lots, turnout dropped by 23 percent from 2012. This is where Clinton lost the state and, with it, the larger narrative about the election.
Clinton’s stunning loss in Wisconsin was blamed on her failure to campaign in the state, and the depressed turnout was attributed to a lack of enthusiasm for either candidate. “Perhaps the biggest drags on voter turnout in Milwaukee, as in the rest of the country, were the candidates themselves,” Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times wrote in a post-election dispatch that typified this line of analysis. “To some, it was like having to choose between broccoli and liver.”

A New Study Shows Just How Many Americans Were Blocked From Voting in Wisconsin Last Year
The impact of Wisconsin’s voter ID law received almost no attention. When it did, it was often dismissive. Two days after the election, Talking Points Memo ran a piece by University of California-Irvine law professor Rick Hasen under the headline “Democrats Blame ‘Voter Suppression’ for Clinton Loss at Their Peril.” Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said it was “a load of crap” to claim that the voter ID law had led to lower turnout. When Clinton, in an interview with New York magazine, said her loss was “aided and abetted by the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin,” the Washington Examiner responded, “Hillary Clinton Blames Voter Suppression for Losing a State She Didn’t Visit Once During the Election.” As the months went on, pundits on the right and left turned Clinton’s loss into a case study for her campaign’s incompetence and the Democratic Party’s broader abandonment of the white working class. Voter suppression efforts were practically ignored, when they weren’t mocked.

Stories like Anthony’s went largely unreported. An analysis by Media Matters for America found that only 8.9 percent of TV news segments on voting rights from July 2016 to June 2017 “discussed the impact voter suppression laws had on the 2016 election,” while more than 70 percent “were about Trump’s false claims of voter fraud and noncitizen voting.” During the 2016 campaign, there were 25 presidential debates but not a single question about voter suppression. The media has spent countless hours interviewing Trump voters but almost no time reporting on disenfranchised voters like Anthony.

Three years after Wisconsin passed its voter ID law in 2011, a federal judge blocked it, noting that 9 percent of all registered voters did not have the required forms of ID. Black voters were about 50 percent likelier than whites to lack these IDs because they were less likely to drive or to be able to afford the documents required to get a current ID, and more likely to have moved from out of state. There is, of course, no one thing that swung the election. Clinton’s failings, James Comey’s 11th-hour letter, Russian interference, fake news, sexism, racism, and a struggling economy in key swing states all contributed to Trump’s victory. We will never be able to assign exact proportions to all the factors at play. But a year later, interviews with voters, organizers, and election officials reveal that, in Wisconsin and beyond, voter suppression played a much larger role than is commonly understood.

And no, it’s not good enough to say that Democrats are at fault because they don’t win with a big enough margin that the other side can’t steal it. That’s not how this works. There will always be close elections and there is no reason why these malevolent wingnuts should be able to win by keeping Democrats from voting. Only suckers would blame themselves for this.

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“Basically, Russia loaded the gun. The Trump team fired.”by digbyOh look, the Trump campaign was tweeting the hell out of Russian bot twitter accounts:

Some of the Trump campaign’s most prominent names and supporters, including Trump’s campaign manager, digital director and son, pushed tweets from professional trolls paid by the Russian government in the heat of the 2016 election campaign.

The Twitter account @Ten_GOP, which called itself the “Unofficial Twitter account of Tennessee Republicans,” was operated from the Kremlin-backed “Russian troll farm,” or Internet Research Agency, a source familiar with the account confirmed with The Daily Beast.
The account’s origins in the Internet Research Agency were originally reported by the independent Russian news outlet RBC. @Ten_GOP was created on November 19, 2015, and accumulated over 100 thousand followers before Twitter shut it down. The Daily Beast independently confirmed the reasons for @Ten_GOP’s account termination.

The discovery of the now-unavailable tweets presents the first evidence that several members of the Trump campaign pushed covert Russian propaganda on social media in the run-up to the 2016 election.

A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment, “for privacy and security reasons.”

Two days before election day, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway tweeted a post by @Ten_GOP regarding Hillary Clinton’s email.

“Mother of jailed sailor: ‘Hold Hillary to same standards as my son on Classified info’ #hillarysemail #WeinerGate” the tweet reads.

Three weeks before the election, Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign’s digital director, retweeted a separate post from @Ten_GOP.

“Thousands of deplorables chanting to the media: “Tell The Truth!” RT if you are also done w/ biased Media!” the tweet read.

President Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. followed the account until its closure on August 23rd of this year. Trump Jr. retweeted the account three times, including an allegation of voter fraud in Florida one week before the election.

“BREAKING: #VoterFraud by counting tens of thousands of ineligible mail in Hillary votes being reported in Broward County, Florida Please, RT,” the tweet read.

Trump Jr. also retweeted the account on Election Day.

“This vet passed away last month before he could vote for Trump.. Here he is in his #MAGA hat.. #voted #ElectionDay,” the account wrote.

Former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn retweeted the Russian-backed troll account at least once. His son, Michael Flynn Jr., retweeted the account 34 times before it was removed from Twitter in August for its ties to Russian propaganda.

The account notably pushed for Flynn’s reappointment as Trump’s national security advisor, a job Flynn lost after press revelations that he’d lied about his telephone discussions with the Russian ambassador after the election hacks. It also repeatedly pushed Breitbart-backed talking points, including a fake news story about a gang rape in Twin Falls, Idaho that merited dozens of articles from Breitbart News.

Flynn Jr. will likely receive a Senate subpoena after he refused to be interviewed for the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation, ABC News reported on Tuesday.

Former Trump campaign advisor and longtime confidante of the president Roger Stone retweeted the account three times in 2017, twice to rail against commentators on CNN.

On the same day as the account’s permanent ban, @Ten_GOP was caughtpassing a photo of the 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers NBA Championship parade in Cleveland as a picture of the crowd gathered outside a Trump rally in Phoenix.

Last March the account was one of the most active in promoting WikiLeaks’ first big release of CIA documents, using the occasion to float the false claim that the so-called “Vault 7” documents acquitted Russia in the hack of the Democratic National Committee. “BREAKING: Obama’s CIA posed as RUSSIAN HACKERS to disguise their dirty work,” read one of the tweets. “The ‘Russian hacking’ was a false flag by the CIA. It was done to give Obama a reason to spy on Trump!,” read another.

Overt Russian propaganda outlets Sputnik and RT frequently used @Ten_GOP’s tweets in their news stories, including a story titled “Russia has no compromising info on Trump or Clinton, report is ‘total bluff’ — Kremlin.”

Far right news sites The Gateway Pundit and InfoWars quoted the account in articles several times.

Fox News cited @Ten_GOP as its sole example of a “Trump fan” in an article titled “Trump fans call for Kellogg’s boycott after brand pulls Breitbart ads” last December.

Former FBI counterterrorism agent Clint Watts, who testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Russian cyberattacks, told The Daily Beast that this is “exactly what I was talking about” in his testimony in March.

“If what you said is true, I’d say, ‘My job is done,’” said Watts. “If this account is definitely an (Internet Research Agency) account, it proved Russian Active Measures (like the 2016 propaganda campaign) works, because Americans will use it against other Americans.”

Watts said the content of these pages is “made to look organic” so that “Americans will use it against their political enemies.”

“If you take rumors, false information, plants, and just repeat them, you’re doing the job of a foreign country. They are seeding out information or narratives they know candidates or partisans will use. They were so effective, they had the very top people in the campaign using it,” said Watts.

“Basically, Russia loaded the gun. The Trump team fired.”

Just coincidence, surely.

Update: Oh look

The account Tweeted “We love you, Mr. President!” to President Donald Trump – and Trump responded in kind, sharing the Tweet with his followers and writing, “So nice, thank you!”

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There is absolutely nothing to see here

by digby

The Daily Beast had a big scoop today that got lost in all the news:

Suspected Russia propagandists on Facebook tried to organize more than a dozen pro-Trump rallies in Florida during last year’s election, The Daily Beast has learned.

The demonstrations—at least one of which was promoted online by local pro-Trump activists— brought dozens of supporters together in real life. They appear to be the first case of Russian provocateurs successfully mobilizing Americans over Facebook in direct support of Donald Trump.
The Aug. 20, 2016, events were collectively called “Florida Goes Trump!” and they were billed as a “patriotic state-wide flash mob,” unfolding simultaneously in 17 different cities and towns in the battleground state. It’s difficult to determine how many of those locations actually witnessed any turnout, in part because Facebook’s recent deletion of hundreds of Russian accounts hid much of the evidence. But videos and photos from two of the locations—Fort Lauderdale and Coral Springs—were reposted to a Facebook page run by the local Trump campaign chair, where they remain to this day.

“On August 20, we want to gather patriots on the streets of Floridian towns and cities and march to unite America and support Donald Trump!” read the Facebook event page for the demonstrations. “Our flash mob will occur in several places at the same time; more details about locations will be added later. Go Donald!”

The Florida flash mob was one of at least four pro-Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton demonstrations conceived and organized over a Facebook page called “Being Patriotic,” and a related Twitter account called “march_for_trump.” (The Daily Beast identified the accounts in a software-assisted review of politically themed social-media profiles.)

Being Patriotic had 200,000 followers and the strongest activist bent of any of the suspected Russian Facebook election pages that have so far emerged. Events promoted by the page last year included a July “Down With Hillary!” protest outside Clinton’s New York campaign headquarters, a September 11 pro-Trump demonstration in Manhattan, simultaneous “Miners for Trump” demonstrations in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in October, and a pro-Trump rally outside Trump Tower last November, after his election victory.

[…]

Watts, the former FBI agent and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, noted that “plausible deniability is built into any Russian active-measures strategy,” such as using troll farms in St. Petersburg or Macedonia to conceal influence campaigns. But compelling unsuspecting Americans to gather in the streets on behalf of Trump shows the reach and efficacy of those efforts.

The page earned such a large following, a known Macedonian fake news distributor, Nikola Tanevski, purchased BeingPatriotic.com this year, but the page is currently dormant. Tanevski runs popular, pro-Trump fake news factories USATwentyFour.com and TheAmericanBacon.com. Attempts to reach Tanevski did not receive a response.

The layers of deception went beyond Facebook posts and manufactured rallies. When it wasn’t organizing events, Being Patriotic encouraged violence against minorities in incendiary posts. “Arrest and shoot every sh*thead taking part in burning our flag! #BLM vs #USA,” Being Patriotic’s Twitter account posted in April 2016, using the hashtag for the Black Lives Matter protest movement.

The account also advertised a toll-free “Being Patriotic Hotline” to report instances of voter fraud on Election Day.
“Detected a voter fraud? Tell us about it! Call 888-486-8102 or take photo/video and send it to us,” the account wrote on Nov. 8. Being Patriotic’s sister account, @March_for_Trump, plugged the same phone number, as well as a hotline for the “Trump Lawyer Team.” The number is now disconnected.

When asked for comment, the White House referred The Daily Beast to the Trump campaign, which, in turn, did not respond to emailed questions. But Susie Wiles, who served as Trump’s campaign manager in Florida, told The Daily Beast that the Broward County portion of the flash mob “was not an official campaign event.”

That’s despite the fact that the event was promoted on “Official Donald J. Trump for President Campaign Facebook Page for Broward County, Florida.” Photos and videos of the demonstration were posted there afterward.

When emailed the link to the Facebook posting, Wiles told The Daily Beast: “There are groups such as this across the state—and maybe other places, too. Groups of people get together and establish a presence such as this but it is unaffiliated with the campaign, per se. The photos ring no bells with me.”

Wiles also said that the Trump campaign’s purported Broward County Facebook page, which markets itself as being “official,” was not set up by the campaign.

“The Donald Trump campaign did not set these Facebook pages up,” she told The Daily Beast. “Rather, supporters (like the lady registered as the contact) set them up to support the campaign and subsequently the president.”

The “lady” registered as the contact is Dolly Trevino Rump, the Trump campaign’s chairwoman for Broward County who, until this April, was also the secretary of the local Republican Party. The Miami Herald described her as “perhaps Broward’s most famous Donald Trump fan.” Rump did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast. Neither did the chairman of the Broward County Republican Party.

The Being Patriotic event listings for its Florida flashmobs included the names and phone numbers of people listed as local volunteer coordinators. When contacted by The Daily Beast, two of those coordinators vaguely recalled the events taking place, but not much else.
Betty Triguera, who was listed as a coordinator for a gathering in Sarasota, Florida, told The Daily Beast that she recalled but didn’t attend the event.

“We got the information from it on Twitter but I didn’t go,” Triguera said unable to remember other details.
Jim Frische, who was listed as a coordinator for an event in Clearwater, Florida, told The Daily Beast that he was called about organizing an event and put one together.

He said he was unsure if it was organized by the campaign.

“I don’t recall the group’s name,” Frische said. “I know somebody called and said would you organize something so I put together a group. “I remember doing it and I think we had a dozen or so people out on the street corner. I remember afterward hearing it had happened all over the state.”

I don’t suppose his cult will ever admit they were manipulated by a foreign government’s propaganda. But it’s clear they were. And I’m going to guess it won’t be too hard to do it again. Whether they decide it shoud be on Trump’s behalf or someone else is the big question. Right now, the Republicans seem to be very sure that this will continue to benefit them in the future. I wonder why?

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