772 search results for ""voter fraud""

Conspiracy a-go-go

by digby

Increasingly I feel as if I’m living a country full of people wearing tin-foil hats. This NY Times article explores the reasons for the conspiracy mongering we see in the Trump campaign:

The political scientists Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent, who wrote the book “American Conspiracy Theories,” say that those on the left and the right believe in conspiracies roughly equally. But education can matter: “Forty-two percent of those without a high school diploma are high in conspiratorial predispositions, compared with 23 percent with postgraduate degrees.”

One of the highest correlations for Trump support is being white without a high school diploma. People with postgraduate degrees are increasingly leaning to the left.

Mr. Uscinski and Mr. Parent found that high-stress situations like job uncertainty “prompt people to concoct, embrace and repeat conspiracy theories.” Other research shows that conspiracy theories can be a coping mechanism for uncertainty and powerlessness. (Another predictor of strong Trump by county is a high proportion of working-age adults who aren’t working.)

One study found that conservatives who believe in conspiracy theories know more about politics than conservatives who don’t. This correlation was not found for liberals. Presumably, these politically engaged conservatives would be more likely to vote in primaries.

Last week, Public Policy Polling revisited Mr. Trump’s attraction to conspiracy theories. Among voters who viewed him favorably, PPP found that 65 percent think President Obama is a Muslim; 59 percent think he was not born in the United States; 27 percent think vaccines cause autism; 24 percent think Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered; and 7 percent think Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy. (We should probably allow for the possibility that some survey-takers wanted to poke or provoke with their responses.)

A big source of conspiracy theories is elections. Many Americans believe they’re often decided by cheating. In The Los Angeles Times in 2014, Mr. Uscinski and Mr. Parent wrote:

“Near equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats (between 40 percent and 50 percent) said fraud would be very or somewhat likely. Each side believes that if they lose, cheating is to blame, and they believe it about equally. Nobody likes losing, but it appears hard for about half the country to accept that they lost fair and square.”

The birther movement, which essentially gave life to Mr. Trump’s political career, is an example; it argues that President Obama did not actually win his elections because he was ineligible to be president.

That way of thinking suggests a possible out for Mr. Trump if he loses in November: accusations of cheating by the other side. Those wishing for him to be humbled may be disappointed. Could he really lose if he never accepts the loss?

I think some of this is a matter of temperament as well. For the same reasons I don’t buy into a lot of superstitions or supernatural stuff, I tend not to buy most conspiracy theories. And with the decentralized, totally idiosyncratic local nature of our election system, the idea of massive voter fraud in favor of a particular candidate in one election is ludicrous.

I suppose this thinking has been around forever but it does seem to me that we’re seeing an uptick in people believing that there are puppet masters conspiring behind the scenes when I think our problems with corruption stem from much more abstract concepts like systemic incentives. I tend to believe that most people have many different motivations and usually believe they’re righteously ethical in their behavior. But that’s just me.

Millions of people will never believe that Trump lost legitimately in November, if in fact he does. And the conservative movement will continue to profit from this lie as they have been doing forever. And yes, the same phenomenon now exists on the Democratic side. Good times.

I wrote about this before, here. And it applies to what happened in Nevada over the week-end. If you don’t like Nevada’s byzantine delegate selection process there’s a legitimate way to fix it besides doxing local officials. Go to the meetings and volunteer for the committees that do all the work of local and state party elections. The woman who received death threats isn’t an elite member of the oligarchy,  she’s the day manager at a local restaurant — which was also inundated with threats. The people who make these rules are mostly volunteers doing their civic duty which consists of years and years of boring, tedious meetings in their off hours. It’s open to anyone. All you have to do is join the party. There aren’t even any dues.

Party electoral processes are something everyone is empowered to change right there in their local communities. It’s not sexy but it’s very doable.  If you start now, by the next presidential election you could have made a real difference.

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Transparently crafty
by Tom Sullivan

It boggles the mind to watch voter ID proponents stand before the cameras with their hands over their hearts and their flys unzipped and announce how they truly are defending democracy by designing ways to make it harder for minorities, students, and the elderly to vote. As if false earnestness can mask what they are really up to. Everybody’s wise to Eddie except Eddie.

Talking Points Memo reports on testimony in a case challenging Wisconsin’s voter ID law:

The former staffer to a Wisconsin state Republican senator who went public last month with accusations that the state’s voter ID law was passed by GOPers looking for a political advantage elaborated on the claims in federal court Monday and identified the previously unnamed legislators he said were gleeful over the law.

Todd Allbaugh, testifying in a case challenging the law, named then-Sens. Mary Lazich, Glenn Grothman, Leah Vukmir and Randy Hopper as being “giddy” in a 2011 private caucus meeting about passing the bill, the Journal Sentinel reported. Allbaugh previously confirmed to TPM that Grothman, now a U.S. congressman, was among the state legislators who cheered the political implications of the voter ID requirement — which opponents say disenfranchise minorities and lower income people — after Grothman told a local TV station it would help Republicans win the state in 2016.

According to Allbaugh’s testimony Monday, Grothman said at the 2011 meeting, “‘What I’m concerned about here is winning and that’s what really matters here. … We better get this done quickly while we have the opportunity.”

“They were talking about impeding peoples’ constitutional rights, and they were happy about it,” Allbaugh testified Monday. Other Republicans in the room were “ashen-faced” over the discussion, according to Allbaugh.

In testimony, Allbaugh said Grothman contacted him after he went public to correct the former staffer’s memory on the meeting, WisPolitics.com reports. “Here’s the thing. I fundamentally believe that Democrats cheat, and I don’t believe our side does, and that’s why we need this bill.”

A lot of people fundamentally believe a lot of things. That has now become an acceptable basis for public policy.

Jay DeLancy, leader of North Carolina’s Voter Integrity Project, committed a Kinsley gaffe during recent comments on North Carolina’s ID law, carolinacoastonline.com reports:

DeLancy, in an interview on Viewpoints, a call-in show on WTKF-FM, which is owned by Carteret Publishing, Tideland News’ parent company, discussed the ruling upholding HB 589. He advised proponents to be vigilant, even in the face of success. DeLancy acknowledged that challenges would continue and that if North Carolina were not careful, it could end up like Virginia, “a blue state,” he said, meaning, if people are allowed to vote, Democrats would win. Host Lockwood Phillips quickly questioned DeLancy on the comment. DeLancy backtracked, claiming the Voter Integrity Project is “nonpartisan,” but he also said that he believed it is Democrats who are behind cases of voter fraud.

It’s fundamental: the only plausible explanation for Republicans losing elections is their opponents must have cheated.

Who do you think you’re fooling?
by Tom Sullivan

Not that long ago, campaigns here fretted that black voters did not take advantage of early voting. With the exception of Sunday voting (souls to the polls), seeing neighbors at the polls on Election Day was a kind of communal celebration. Responding in the New York Times to Monday’s federal court ruling upholding North Carolina’s 2013 voting restrictions, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, president of the North Carolina N.A.A.C.P., notes how dramatically that changed:

The law eliminated voting rules that had enabled North Carolina to have the fourth best per capita voter turnout in the country. In 2012, 70 percent of black voters used early voting — and cast ballots at a slightly higher percentage than whites. Although black voters made up about 20 percent of the electorate, they made up 41 percent of voters who used same-day registration.

The North Carolina Legislature set out to change those figures and suppress minority votes. Its many impediments to voting all disproportionately affect African-American and Latino voters. None of their attacks would have survived pre-clearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. A Republican official defended the law this way: “If it hurts a bunch of lazy blacks that want the government to give them everything, so be it.”

Passed in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Shelby decision, the North Carolina “voter ID” law did all of that and more, Barber writes. The bill also “reduces the early voting period and eliminates same-day registration. It expands the ability to challenge voters at the polls. It eliminates a successful preregistration program for high school students.”

Election “integrity”? Who do you think you’re fooling?

As Barber argues, there was never evidence for voter impersonation to justify the ID requirement. In a 2013 post on North Carolina’s Voter Intergrity Project (an offshoot of True the Vote), I wrote about a friend investigated for double voting:

As it happens, I know someone to whom that happened last fall, one of VIP-NC’s double-voters. After he voted, Herbert (not his real name) was informed that his vote was contested because records showed he had voted twice. It might be voter fraud.

Here’s what happened. Herbert’s son, Herbert Jr. (same address), voted earlier at a different Early Voting site, signed the log, and the elections clerk mistakenly crossed off Herbert’s name in the voting register. Because this was the Early Voting period, Herbert had time to clear up the mess with the Board of Elections before Election Day. His old ballot was voided and Herbert got to re-vote.

ID cards would have prevented the clerk’s error how?

Herbert is black. Early voting protected his vote. The GOP-led legislature slashed the early voting period by a week.

Barber continues:

Since the Shelby decision, many states have been emboldened to implement laws like North Carolina’s. Republican-controlled election boards have greatly reduced the number of polling places. Wisconsin recently passed a bill creating major hurdles to voter registration campaigns. Alabama closed driver’s license offices in several counties with high percentages of black voters. But after an outcry, it sent part-time license examiners to those counties.

Who do you think you’re fooling?

Two years ago, I wrote this after registration challenges in my county:

Their panic over alleged double voting, suspected voter impersonation (as elusive as space aliens), dead voters and messy voter rolls is because demographic trends show that the numerical edge to which many white Americans feel entitled will evaporate by 2043. They avoided looking at that fact square on for years.

No longer. Our half-black president embodies the trend Time and National Geographic predict will literally change the face of the nation, reducing white America to just another minority in this melting-pot country.

The fear behind the allegations is not about election integrity or race, but power. Who has it and who fears sharing it. (Hint: not Millennials. ) The GOP base knows how minorities are treated in America. For centuries, our European forebears did most of the treating.

Republican supporters and the Voter Integrity Project could register voters and invest more in get-out-the-vote efforts. But with weak faith in their own ideas, they throw smoke bombs into newsrooms and yell “Voter fraud!” loudly and often to create the perception that where there are smoke bombs there must be fire.

Who do you think you’re fooling?

Back to the voting booth
by Tom Sullivan

Well, that didn’t go as hoped. This morning’s headline in the Charlotte Observer online reads, “Federal judge who backed limits on early ballots upholds voter ID requirement.” Slate summarizes:

A federal judge on Monday upheld a 2013 North Carolina voter ID law that increased the requirements a voter must meet to cast a ballot, a move that critics say is an effort to discourage black and Hispanic voters from political participation. The suit was brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, as well as a group of North Carolina voters, and claimed the new measure, one of the strictest in the country, violated the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution. U.S. District Judge Thomas Schroeder, however, disagreed and in his 485-page opinion wrote “North Carolina has provided legitimate state interests for its voter ID requirement and electoral system.”

Critics condemned the ruling, which they will likely appeal to the 4th Circuit:

“This is just one step in a legal battle that is going to continue in the courts,” said Penda Hair, an attorney representing the NAACP. The law “targets the provisions that once made North Carolina among the states with the highest turnout in the nation. This progress was especially clear among African-American and Latino voters, who came to rely on measures like early voting, same-day registration and out-of-precinct provisional ballots to ensure their voices were heard.”

The New York Times explains what was on the table:

The opinion, by Judge Thomas D. Schroeder of Federal District Court in Winston-Salem, upheld the repeal of a provision that allowed people to register and vote on the same day. It also upheld a seven-day reduction in the early-voting period; the end of preregistration, which allowed some people to sign up before their 18th birthdays; and the repeal of a provision that allowed for the counting of ballots cast outside voters’ home precinct.

It also left intact North Carolina’s voter identification requirement, which legislators softened last year to permit residents to cast ballots, even if they lack the required documentation, if they submit affidavits.

Just weeks ahead of a hearing last July, Republicans in the legislature swapped out some of the barricades to voting for hoops.

Rick Hasen at Election Law Blog has additional analysis of the opinion, including these observations on the original impetus behind the bill:

5. On the need for the voter id law to prevent voter fraud, the court says first that it is hard to find impersonation fraud without an id requirement, but more importantly the Supreme Court in the Crawford case said there need not be evidence of impersonation fraud to justify the law. So while the plaintiffs have to present tons of evidence of burden, the state can get by with no evidence of a need. (This seems perverse to me.)

So plaintiffs provided insufficient proof of a burden and the state provided no justification for the law. Let’s call it even.

6. The court also finds that the state did not act with discriminatory intent, citing (without an appreciation for irony) at p. 387 the testimony of Hans von Spakovsky to the legislature on the need for this restrictive law. Whether or not his testimony was true, the court says, the legislature could have believed it true, thereby negating possibility of discriminatory intent.

Spakovsky, the Professor Harold Hill of voter fraud, testified that the “potential for abuse exists.” And windmills might be giants. Sufficient enough reason to pass a law restricting them.

It’s back to the voting booth, people, if voters expect to stop them from stopping voters.

Cokie’s Law: Beyond the Beltway
by Tom Sullivan

Digby long ago dubbed it Cokie’s Law after newswoman/commentator Cokie Roberts: “It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s out there.” That’s all the justification the press needs to keep reporting a falsehood until “unsubstantiated gossip masquerading as news” becomes something “everyone knows.” But the press is late to the game. This has been the M.O. of the right regarding voting for decades.

Cokie’s Law is the essential justification for big gummint haters requiring voters to present state-issued identity cards before they can exercise formal power in this country. Because “everyone knows” voter fraud is a problem. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it’s out there. I’ve been writing about this technique for some time:

Gaming election results through precision gerrymandering and repressive voting laws aimed at the poor and minorities is political Viagra® for the flagging demographic potency of the Republican base. Voter data matching exercises are not meant to uncover crimes, punish criminals, or even amass credible evidence. They are the pretext for a party suffering a lack of electoral confidence to throw smoke bombs into newsrooms and yell, “Voter fraud!” By the time the smoke clears and no evidence is found — again — of a “massive” problem, all viewers remember is that they saw smoke and heard cries of fraud. And where there’s smoke there must be a fire, right?

Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Does ACORN ring a bell?

Based on creating the public perception of a problem for which there is scant evidence other than “it’s out there,” Republicans have erected barrier after barrier to voting for groups who tend to support their opponents. Case in point, Arizona, where get-out-the-vote organizers have for years offered to take sealed ballots to polling stations for voters:

In the sprawling urban jungle that is Phoenix, the state’s major population center, many poorer voters without a car struggle to get to the polls and are grateful for the help. For some down-ballot races – when teachers and parents are out lobbying for a bond or special tax to help local schools, say – it’s common for voters to place their completed ballots in a box on their street and for an organizer to pick up and deliver them.

Now, however, this perfectly routine practice has been branded “ballot harvesting” and outlawed under a draconian new voting law passed by Arizona’s Republican-dominated state legislature last month.

House Bill (HB) 2023 wasn’t in force for the 22 March primary but it will be, barring a court injunction, for November’s general election. Anyone caught helping a voter deliver an absentee ballot, with certain exceptions for the infirm, could now face a $150,000 fine and up to a year in prison.

The reason? According to the bill’s sponsors, it is to stamp out the possibility of fraud or voter coercion. “People show up with boxes and boxes of ballots that they have collected somehow,” said Arizona party official Tim Sifert. “The chain of custody is very suspicious. It’s rife with opportunity for mischief.”

Yet the Republicans have been unable to produce a single proven instance of actual fraud – raising the wide-spread suspicion that the real motive is to suppress turnout in a state with a long and inglorious history of voter suppression and, in particular, to suppress the votes of Latinos, African Americans and Native Americans, all of whom lean Democrat.

“There’s no proof of voter fraud in ballot collection,” charged Stacey Morley, a lobbyist for the Arizona Education Association, who argued against HB 2023 at a state house election committee hearing in January. “None of the witnesses who came forward for the other side had seen anything themselves. It was all, ‘I know a guy … ’ I mean, seriously?”

Yes, seriously. Because, ya know, it’s out there.

The Democratic National Committee and the Clinton and Sanders presidential campaigns have filed a lawsuit against the state of Arizona alleging systematic suppression of minority votes via HB 2023 and other tactics:

The Democrats cite the long lines from last month’s presidential preference election as emblematic of voter disenfranchisement in Maricopa County. But their complaints, outlined in a lawsuit filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Phoenix, don’t stop there. They argue Arizona’s disparate treatment of provisional ballots, as well as a recently passed law that bars people from returning another voter’s mail-in ballot, are further examples of other election practices that disenfranchise voters, especially minorities.

“Republicans are using every tool, every legal loophole and every fear tactic they can think of to take aim at voting rights wherever they can,” Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.

Ari Berman has been dogged on reporting voter suppression. This week he reported on Eddie Holloway of Milwaukee who presented three forms of government-issued ID (according to in 2013 lawsuit) and was still unable to obtain an acceptable photo ID to vote:

He brought his expired Illinois photo ID, birth certificate, and Social Security card to get a photo ID for voting, but the DMV in Milwaukee rejected his application because the name on his birth certificate read “Eddie Junior Holloway,” the result of a clerical error when it was issued.

Holloway, who worked as a cook in Illinois but is now unemployed and disabled, living with his family in Milwaukee, got a ride downtown to the Vital Records System to try to fix his birth certificate. Vital Records said it would cost between $400 and $600, which Holloway could not afford.

Charlie Pierce addressed the matter on Thursday, writing:

The Wisconsin law is functioning exactly the way it was designed to function. The purpose of these laws is not to ban certain people from voting; that would be illegal, even now that John Roberts has declared the Day Of Jubilee. The purpose is to make voting so difficult that people go broke, give up trying, or both.

When is the meme going to catch hold that these laws are a massive con perpetrated against democracy itself by people who have no use for it unless it serves the “right” people? That should be out there too.

“Frontiers of wrongness”
by Tom Sullivan

Puzzling over how the next few months are going to shake out, it is easy to sympathize with Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir. He writes about a conference call this week in which strategist Tad Devine explained how the Bernie Sanders campaign means to whittle away at Hillary Clinton’s delegate lead:

One reason the thought-leaders of media groupthink listened so eagerly to Devine’s Gandalfian pronouncements is that we’ve been wrong about damn near everything in 2016 — wrong about Sanders, wrong about Trump, wrong about the enduring power of the “Republican establishment” and wrong about the stability of the two-party system. Who is to say we’re not wrong this time too? Who can imagine what new frontiers of wrongness lie ahead?

“Frontiers of wrongness” brought to mind the flat-earthers’ maps. Perhaps the most tantalizing aspect of their wrongness is the notion that beyond Antarctica lie uncharted lands still left to explore. Perhaps Donald Trump will build a resort/casino there? Perhaps North Carolina can send its unwanted gay and transgender people there?

Frank Bruni comments on both the wrongness and the shortsightedness of Republican’s anti-gay agenda, a provincial and retrograde attempt to stand athwart history as it bends towards equality and justice. Plus, sponsors are getting nervous about particpating in the RNC convention, what with the “brew of misogyny, racism and xenophobia stirred up by Trump.” Bruni writes:

THE party’s anti-gay efforts not only undermine its pro-business stance but also contradict conservatives’ exaltation of local decision making. The North Carolina law was drafted and passed expressly to undo and override an ordinance in the state’s most populous city, Charlotte, that extended L.G.B.T. protections against discrimination to transgender people who want to use bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity. The law went so far as to forbid any municipality from instituting its own anti-discrimination protections, lest they contradict the state’s.

Apparently conservatives love the concept of local control when the locality being given control tilts right, but they have a different view when it leans left. Rural sensibilities must be defended while cosmopolitan ones are dismissed.

And don’t miss the Trojan Horse provisions in that NC law that significantly indemnify discrimination by employers.

Charlie Pierce is in Madison, Wisconsin to cover the primary on Tuesday and has a few choice words on the wrongness of Gov. Scott Walker’s voter ID legislation. Bernie Sanders had more biting ones:

“It has never occurred to me and I think to most candidates that the way you try to win an election is to make it harder for people who might vote against you to participate in the election,” Sanders said. “That is political cowardice.”

The room erupted in cheers — including one man who yelled “Go get ‘em, Bernie!” — as he accused Walker and other Republican governors who support laws requiring a government-issued photo ID to vote of trying to deny people of color, poor people and the elderly their right to vote.

“If you don’t have the guts to participate in a free, open and fair election, get another job. Get outta politics,” Sanders said.

But getting back to O’Hehir’s frontiers of wrongness, where will Sanders supporters go this fall should he not win the Democratic nomination? Furthermore, where will Trump’s go if he wins the nomination and loses badly in the fall? Michael Bourne wonders:

For a generation, gun advocates have defended the right to bear arms as a check against tyranny, and for just as long liberals have dismissed this as a melodramatic talking point. But what if we take them at their word, and accept that it is possible we are witnessing the opening phase of a still-inchoate violent uprising by a broad class of Americans, who, ignored politically, bypassed economically, and dismissed socially, are beginning to take matters into their own hands?

What if, in other words, Donald Trump isn’t an aberration created by the miscalculations of a party elite, but the political expression of a much deeper, and more dangerous, frustration among a very large, well-armed segment of our population? What if Trump isn’t a proto-Mussolini, but rather a regrettably short finger in the dike holding back a flood of white violence and anger this country hasn’t seen since the long economic boom of the 1950s and ’60s helped put an end to the Jim Crow era?

What is most worrisome about the uncertainty ahead is the sense that on both the left and the right many people have convinced themselves that the republic is beyond repair. Decades of right-wing “voter fraud” propaganda have done their work, to where even the left believes, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren reminds us, “the game is rigged.” She may be speaking primarily (and accurately) about the economy, but the rigged meme is widespread, with even lefty activists quick to see conspiracies first and ask sober questions later.

There is a kind of Nero impulse afoot. Susan Sarandon’s comments captured the mood well. And if there are those on the left prepared to see the republic restored in cleansing fire, Bourne’s concerns about the right may be well-founded. The question is whether all the talk of revolution isn’t more Trumpian-style bluster. The thing about bringing down purifying fire is that innocent villagers tend to get sprayed with napalm.

Can you feel the integrity?
by Tom Sullivan

Can you feel the election integrity? By now, you’ve heard of the mess in Arizona during primary voting this week. Or rather specifically, in Maricopa County. The Arizona Republic diagnosed the problem succinctly:

Polling sites were overwhelmed for Tuesday’s Presidential Preference Election after county officials reduced the number sites to save money.

Most counties surveyed by The Arizona Republic had enough polling places to average 2,500 or fewer eligible voters per polling site. Maricopa County had only one site per every 21,000 voters.

Lines out the doors for Arizona primary voting. Media reports officials having a hard time keeping up with crowds. pic.twitter.com/1tXEOyrdMr— John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) March 22, 2016

Ari Berman blames the Supreme Court’s gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013 for allowing Arizona free rein to make these kinds of voting changes in a county with a 40 percent minority population. The decision has certainly fueled a certain, shall we say, attitude about certain kinds of people exercising the franchise. Paul Waldman assembled for the Washington Post a short list of the hurdles erected in Republican-controlled states to voting since the court ruling:

In that 2013 decision, the Supreme Court conservatives said that key parts of the Voting Rights Act are no longer needed because discrimination in voting is a thing of the past. As soon as the decision came down, Republican state legislatures moved swiftly to pass new voting hurdles that previously would have required Justice Department approval before. Here’s a summary of the Republican voting program:

1. Impose voter ID requirements
2. Shorten early voting periods
3. Eliminate early voting on Sundays, when many African-American churches organize “souls to the polls” voting drives after services
4. Eliminate same-day registration
5. Restrict the ability of citizen groups to conduct voter registration drives
6. Reduce the number of polling places

To Waldman’s short list throw in surgical (and illegal) gerrymandering, voting roll purges, registration challenges, eliminating out-of-precinct voting, and the kitchen sink. A map of the states that have added restrictions since 2010 is here.

I wrote in 2014:

Gaming election results through precision gerrymandering and repressive voting laws aimed at the poor and minorities is political Viagra® for the flagging demographic potency of the Republican base. Voter data matching exercises are not meant to uncover crimes, punish criminals, or even amass credible evidence. They are the pretext for a party suffering a lack of electoral confidence to throw smoke bombs into newsrooms and yell, “Voter fraud!” By the time the smoke clears and no evidence is found — again — of a “massive” problem, all viewers remember is that they saw smoke and heard cries of fraud. And where there’s smoke there must be a fire, right?

All this to combat the “existential threat” of “massive” fraud that for all the hue and cry remains all but immeasurable. All this to restore integrity to a voting system the designers of these voting hurdles have spent decades undermining. To paraphrase Matt Hooper from Jaws, this was not a voting accident.

While thousands stood in line in Maricopa County this week, election officials in North Carolina were still grappling with how many of the over 40,000 provisional ballots cast in its March 15 primary would count. That is nearly twice the 23,000 cast in the 2012 primary. Voters stood in lines until 11 p.m. in Durham County which, like Maricopa, also has a 40 percent minority population, just a different mix.

How many of the elusive fraudsters would wait in line for five hours to commit a felony that adds a single extra vote to their candidate’s tally? How many uncounted provisional ballots cast by minorities and students to restore white America’s confidence? Whose definition of integrity is at work here?

Crisis of confidence
by Tom Sullivan

The loss of confidence in this country for its institutions and distrust among citizens for each other has really reached toxic levels. Enter Donald Trump and supporters who seem bent on making the country great again by burning the place to the ground. But those levels of distrust are present now across party and ideological lines. In this primary season especially, everyone seems hypervigilant for the stab in the back from allies and quick to read the worst intentions into any statements or government actions. Not without some priming.

After Ronald Reagan declared that government is the problem, his fans worked assiduously at proving it. With success. For thirty years or more, Republicans have worked at undermining confidence in American elections by promoting the idea that widespread fraud is at work undetected. Since 1982, the RNC has been under a consent decree prohibiting it from implementing its own voter fraud prevention measures — or voter suppression, if you see them through jaundiced eyes. In 2012, the last time (of which I am aware) that the Republican Party tried to get the 1982 consent decree voided, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit essentially laughed them out of court. Again. So they have turned after years of such rejection to state legislatures to accomplish the same thing through voter ID. Through relentless propagandizing, they convinced a large swath of the country that the threat from the elusive zombie voter is real and justifies such restrictive measures.

On Tuesday, there were some lines at the polls here in North Carolina and other issues with the new voter ID law. It will be worse in November.

In a story on America’s longing for something lost, the Washington Post cites New Hampshire students’ reactions to the primary and debates. A 19 year-old Bernie Sanders volunteer commented on the perception of corruption and mistrust:

“If you look at Republicans or Democrats, you are looking at 10 years of things people don’t trust,” Brown said. “Before, we could trust our government, but then we had the NSA wiretapping, and while the world is getting bigger, our politics are getting so much smaller and more corrupt.”

That perception is nonpartisan. After brisk turnout caused an early voting site here to run out of Democratic sample ballots, locals took to radio and social media to speculate that it was because the fix was in somehow. Against somebody. By someone. On Primary Day, the slightest problem set off alarm bells. There were problems, but now people are seeing random errors as evidence of dark conspiracies.

I mentioned to an out-of-state volunteer that the conspiracy meme seemed to be spreading and was itself becoming itself an issue. The Board of Elections was excellent and doing its best under the state’s confusing new rules. By the way, I bragged, with John McCain up by 3,000 votes in North Carolina on Election Night 2008, our county had delivered the final 17,000 votes that put Obama over the top and turned the state blue. We were late reporting because a data transfer glitch had delayed uploading the votes to Raleigh.

The young woman sitting nearby looked up and made air quotes, “Right. ‘Glitch’.”

Head : desk.

I love a challenge
by Tom Sullivan

Photo by Tom Hagerty via Creative Commons

They say write what you know. So let’s do that. I love a challenge.

It’s primary day in North Carolina. Except for congressional candidates. Oh, and supreme court justice candidates. Court actions have postponed those contests until June 7. State Republican leaders are on a losing streak where election changes are concerned. Turnout in early voting has been high.

Confusion abounds here about primaries and court-ordered redistricting. In 2010, I was in one western NC congressional district. In 2011, I got drawn into the next district east. After courts last month forced Republicans to redraw two racially gerrymandered districts downstate, the remapping cascaded down to the state’s other 11 congressional districts. The new map showed me back in the district where I started. Unless the court rejects the new map and makes Republicans draw it again. Don’t get me started on judicial retention elections.

Of course, by the time the courts ruled in February, the state had already printed ballots for the March 15 primary. So if there is a congressional primary in the district you were in (but might not still be in), that race will be on your ballot and you can vote in it today. Of course, those races have been postponed and your vote in those particular races won’t count. Not to worry. You’ll get to vote in them again on June 7, but maybe for a different set of congressional candidates in a different district than you are in. Or were in. This is your state on T-party.

Are you with me so far?

Let’s move on to voter ID:

A strict voter ID law will be in effect for the first time in Tuesday’s primary in North Carolina, where an estimated 218,000 registered voters don’t have the identification they’ll need to vote. Two other presidential battleground states, Florida and Ohio, also vote Tuesday and have restrictions in place.

There have already been voting problems in North Carolina, especially in student-heavy areas, according to reports. Student IDs aren’t accepted under the law, and neither are out-of-state driver’s licenses. One senior at UNC Chapel-Hill who voted in the 2012 presidential election said he showed his Pennsylvania license and was forced to cast a provisional ballot, which may not be counted. His was one of numerous anecdotes to emerge in recent days of North Carolinians prevented from voting.

Not just students. Richard Burr, senior Republican United States Senator from North Carolina, is up for reelection this fall. When Burr, senior Republican United States Senator from North Carolina, went to early vote last week, he discovered he lost his ID. (Had the dog eaten it?) Thanks to the state’s strict voter ID law passed through the Republican legislature in 2013 with the aid of Burr’s freshman Senate colleague, Thom Tillis, Burr was forced to cast a provisional ballot. But don’t worry, Dick. All you need to do for your vote to count is:

(1) fill out a form to explain a “reasonable impediment” for why you don’t have an acceptable ID; and
(2) write in your birth date and last 4 digits of your Social Security number; or show a registration card, current utility bill, pay stub, bank statement, or any government document with your name and address.

Hint: Your U.S. Senate lapel pin doesn’t count.

This whole thing sounds mighty suspicious, right? An open invitation for the dead to vote. Someone had better alert Hans von Spakovsky and the voter fraud squads to be on the alert for scores of shuffling zombies presenting themselves at the polls as Richard Burr-AINS!

BTW, there is also a presidential primary here today. Unless North Carolina goes the way of Michigan, Hillary Clinton is expected to win today.

They can’t win with only white votes


by digby

I wrote about why immigration reform is such a huge issue for the GOP at Salon today:

It must strike many average Americans as odd that the Republicans are so vehement about immigration right now, since undocumented labor is actually dramatically down from former years. Of course there have always been nativist impulses in America that wax and wane in intensity. And certainly the undercurrent of conservative unrest over Latino workers has been growing for some time as undocumented laborers migrated to areas within the U.S. to which they had not traditionally traveled.