198 search results for ""election integrity""

Speaking of the midterms here’s a good primer from Ed Kilgore about what (and what not) to look for. Whether you obsessively refresh the 538 website or look away the minute the word “poll” appears on your screens, here are some things to keep in mind:

But there are some things we don’t quite know just yet that could wind up being as important as what we know (or at least think we know). Here are a few political suspense stories whose endings might shock or comfort us when it’s all said and done.

Early-Voting Patterns

By my rough calculation, early voting is underway in 31 states. Though polls can sometimes give a sense of how voting by mail is proceeding (along with harder data on mail-ballot requests and returns), the numbers you always here about shortly before any election involve in-person early voting, which is a bigger deal in some parts of the country (notably the South) than in others.

Sometimes the chatter is about overall early-voting levels as a sign of high or low overall turnout levels, as in a CNN report earlier this week:

Three weeks from Election Day, nearly 2.5 million Americans have already cast their ballots in the midterm elections, according to data from election officials, Edison Research and Catalist. In 30 states where Catalist has data for 2018 and 2022, pre-election voting is on par with this point four years ago — which was the highest turnout for a midterm election in decades.

In states with party registration, it’s often possible to discern which party’s voters are turning out early. And even without such data, some southern states collect racial data on early voters as part of a Voting Rights Act reporting requirement (one of the few features of the VRA still in place).

There’s been some excitement this week about very high initial early-voting numbers in Georgia, a state with highly competitive Senate and gubernatorial races. The data also show an especially high percentage of that vote has been cast by Black voters (39 percent, whereas Black voters only make up 29 percent of registered voters in the state).

Is that good news for Democrats, who really need high youth and minority turnout to over-perform expectations this year? Maybe, but we don’t know, as Sean Trende pointed out two years ago when there was even more excitement about early-voting numbers:

Unless you somehow know what is going to happen on Election Day, this argument is useless. To take an extreme example: Democrats could turn out every one of their voters early, and Republicans could still win the election by turning out more on Election Day.

Obviously, that isn’t going to happen. But we exist somewhere along that spectrum. Most, if not the overwhelming majority, of these early voters are people who would otherwise vote on Election Day. The fact that they decide to cast ballots early just isn’t all that interesting.

We don’t know in these states what share of Republicans, Democrats, or independents are voting for Republicans or Democrats, and we don’t know how many voters for any party are going to end up voting on [Election Day]. This is all speculation dressed up as news.

Understanding early voting in this particular cycle is additionally difficult because we don’t know if the early-voting habits many Democrats cultivated during the COVID-19 pandemic will stick, and how many Republicans are still averse to anything other than Election Day voting after Trump told them that’s what they should do in 2020. So it’s best to wait and see.

Potential Polling Errors

There was a lot of anxiety over polling errors in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, mostly involving under-sampling of non-college-educated white voters, which in turn led to underestimation of Trump’s vote. That could mean polls may be similarly off-kilter in the same direction again (even though most pollsters have tried to adjust methodologies to reduce under-sampling). But on the other hand, polls in the last midterm election were quite accurate. Then, as now, Donald Trump is not on the ballot anywhere. So what’s the appropriate precedent?

We probably won’t know that until the results are in. But there are some signs that polls with reputations of being more or less favorable to the two parties are beginning to converge as this particular election approaches. In Pennsylvania’s Senate race, for example, six of the last seven public polls, from a variety of outlets, showed John Fetterman two to four points ahead of Mehmet Oz. Similarly, in Nevada’s Senate race, the last ten polls have shown at most a five-point variation in a race narrowly favoring Republican Adam Laxalt. And in Arizona’s tense gubernatorial race, there’s only a four-point variation in nine polls dating back to mid-September, with most showing Republican Kari Lake with a slight advantage. If either candidate won narrowly in any of these races, no pollster is going to be completely humiliated, and there probably won’t be much discussion of polling errors.

That could all change, of course, before Election Day, and polls showing dramatic last-minute trends in key races will be hyped to the stratosphere by the campaigns and parties that appear to benefit. Until then the best bet remains looking at polling averages and not at individual polls. There’s enough confusion now over “best practices” in polling methodology that cherry-picking “better” pollsters is perilous.

Youth Turnout

Back as recently as 2014, you could confidently predict that any party depending on young voters was in trouble during midterm elections, because The Kidz did not vote much in non-presidential elections, for a variety of reasons mostly having to do with personal mobility and complicated lives and work schedules. But something remarkable happened in 2018: Youth turnout more than doubled. Combined with high voting preferences for Democratic candidates, this youth-turnout boom helped Democrats win back the U.S. House and win some key governorships that year. Youth turnout remained high and solidly Democratic in the presidential year of 2020, too.

If the large and diverse millennial and Gen-Z cohorts show up similarly on November 8, they could save a lot of Democratic bacon. Objective indicators of youth engagement with voting this year are high. But there’s significant disgruntlement with Joe Biden among young voters, who are also very much cross-pressured by economic concerns they feel acutely, and a liberalism on cultural issues like abortion on which they feel strongly.

Even fairly small variations in youth turnout and voting preferences could be crucial in close races. And young voters obviously aren’t the only demographic category that should be watched closely. Republicans are counting on maintaining and if possible increasing the inroads they made in 2020 among Latino and certain Black voters.

Contested Elections

Given the extraordinary number of Republican candidates this year who have bought into Donald Trump’s stolen-election fables from 2020, there are obviously reasons to fear that some of these election-deniers may deny their own defeats and cast the results in doubt. A survey by the Washington Post identified 12 Republican candidates in high-profile statewide races who would not affirm they would accept the results, win or lose. So barring a GOP sweep, we can expect some contested elections in the courts, in the court of public opinion, or unfortunately even in the streets.

Democrats might have some issues of their own given the wave of restrictive voting laws Republicans have enacted in many states, along with the voter intimidation efforts of MAGA “poll watchers” that will appear across the country.

BREAKING: @mcsoaz tells @abc15 they are looking into several individuals watching a voter drop box in Mesa, AZ.

I’m told they have magazine clips, dressed in tactical gear, fully disguised. @Garrett_Archer

Video: pic.twitter.com/NEfYdweNlY

— Nicole Grigg (@NicoleSGrigg) October 22, 2022

With control of the the U.S. House and Senate, and many key state positions at stake this year, you can expect post-election contests over close elections to become larger and more divisive than ever. With one of our two major parties more or less completely subscribing to doubts about “election integrity,” it’s only going to get worse.

The Wave Factor

Some of the talk about “waves” and “winds” and “breezes” in this election represents a meteorological metaphor for perceived momentum and predictions of the results. But as Amy Walter recently pointed out, there is a tendency in most elections for close contest to break in one direction or the other:

[S]ome of the races that many are expecting to go in different directions — like Pennsylvania toward Democrats and Nevada toward Republicans — may not turn out to be the case. Instead, we shouldn’t be surprised to see Pennsylvania not as an outlier but part of a trend. For example, if Republicans are winning Pennsylvania on Election Night, we should expect to see the lion’s share of those other Toss Up seats go that way. A Democratic win in Pennsylvania would suggest that Democrats are going to win a disproportionate share of the closest contests and hold onto the majority. 

“Waves” are more predictable in House races where national trends frequently dwarf whatever individual candidates are doing. But we’ve seen Senate waves too: Democrats won eight of ten toss-up Senate elections (using the Cook Political Report’s authoritative ratings) in the otherwise very close 2012 cycle. Republicans won eight of nine toss-up Senate races in 2014. And I’m old enough to remember the elections of 1980, when Republicans netted 12 Senate seats — winning virtually every competitive race — and took control of the upper chamber for the first time since the Eisenhower administration.

Late trends can move a lot of elections, in other words, particularly at a time when partisan polarization has made all elections more or less national.

Another Overtime in Georgia

Lastly, one other imponderable is the possibility that Senate control could come down for the second cycle in a row to a post-November runoff in Georgia. That state eccentrically requires majorities for general-election victories, and the Raphael Warnock–Herschel Walker Senate race looks close enough to make the expected 3 to 4 percent minor-party vote an off-ramp to a December 6 runoff. The two combatants might even be joined by bitter gubernatorial rivals Stacey Abrams and Brian Kemp. It could be lit.

Politics are not predictable these days. Polls are unreliable and voters are closely divided in enough states that any one election can mark a huge shift in power. It’s not just the fact that the right has gone batshit crazy, the volatility of it all makes it even more stressful.

Here’s hoping that Dems have a huge turnout. It’s all we’ve got.

Donald Trump planned the coup for months. As usual, he failed to execute it. Then he incited the insurrection.

The Jan. 6 committee’s final public hearing before the midterm election ended with a bang, not a whimper. At the conclusion of the hearing the committee’s nine members voted unanimously to subpoena former President Donald Trump to testify. After their two-and-a-half hour presentation, it’s hard to imagine how they ever could have contemplated doing otherwise. They presented a meticulously documented case which showed that Trump had a premeditated plan of many months to deny losing the election, plotted a coup to overturn the results if he did, incited a violent insurrection when that was thwarted, and then refused for hours to respond to the violence as he watched it unfold on television. Whether he will respond to the subpoena remains to be seen, but either way it’s another black mark on his uniquely corrupt and dishonest political career.

For most of us who closely followed events in real time, both on Jan. 6 and through the subsequent investigations and revelations, much of this was not news. But it’s been a while since we focused on some of these details, and to see it presented in narrative form, with so much video and documentary evidence, is still powerful. For instance, the fact that Trump had planned to contest the election if he lost was no secret. Indeed, he had signaled back in 2016 that he would never concede defeat, famously declaring in the days before that election, “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election — if I win.” For years after that victory he insisted that he’d actually won the popular vote but had been victimized by millions of immigrants illegally voting in California. He even convened something called the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to try to prove that case. Even his hand-picked hacks couldn’t turn up any evidence, and the “commission” was quietly disbanded without even issuing a report.

As 2020 approached with Trump down in the polls and the pandemic wreaking havoc around world, he began to lay the groundwork for denying his loss once again. For months he railed against mail-in ballots — which were being instituted in many states in response to the pandemic — setting up a narrative that they were inherently fraudulent. He threatened to withhold federal funds from states that used mail-in voting and accused California of setting up massive fraud by sending out ballots to all registered voters. Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, Bill Stepien, told the committee that he couldn’t be talked out of his irrational opposition to voting by mail, even though there were numerous states where it would likely benefit him and Republicans in general.

Outside advisers and surrogates like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone publicly discussed the plan to claim victory regardless of the actual vote count. Most strikingly, the committee dug up a draft speech sent to Trump by right-wing activist Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch — now among his most influential advisers in the Mar-a-Lago documents case — proposing that Trump should declare victory on election night and declare that all votes not yet counted were illegitimate. Which is almost exactly what he did.

So he clearly planned to say the election was rigged long before the first votes were cast, and the coup plot in which Trump and his legal lackeys contested the results in numerous states was also planned well in advance. But those cases got thrown out of courts across the country, by Republican and Democratic judges alike, and as Thursday’s hearing revealed, this made Trump furious. Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that after the Supreme Court refused to hear the crackpot lawsuit meant to overturn the results in several battleground states (which of course Trump saw as a personal betrayal), she ran into the president in a hallway where he was “raging” about the decision. Trump told chief of staff Mark Meadows, according to Hutchinson, that he didn’t want people to know they had lost the case, tasking Meadows with making sure they didn’t find out. That’s nuts, of course, but it’s also highly revealing.

Hutchinson also testified that during Trump’s diatribe to Meadows, he asked, “Why didn’t we make more calls?” That’s a curious thing to say, and raises the unanswered question of exactly who they were calling as the Supreme Court was considering the case. Is that how things work with the court’s conservative majority?

Since the committee finally got its hands on a considerable number of emails and other Jan. 6-related documents from the Secret Service — although not the missing and apparently erased text messages — there was some disturbing new information about what the agency knew ahead of time about the threats of violence. Something is deeply wrong with the Secret Service, it seems, and it doesn’t stop with them. Law enforcement in general appears to have ignored a mountain of incoming intelligence telegraphing the fact that pro-Trump extremists were highly agitated and violence was possible or even likely.

Something is deeply wrong with the Secret Service, and it doesn’t stop there. Law enforcement ignored a mountain of incoming intelligence indicating that pro-Trump extremists were highly agitated and violence was likely.

Trump knew that too. Jason Miller, the Trump campaign’s senior communications adviser, forwarded to Mark Meadows a link to a startling social media page that included such comments as “Gallows don’t require electricity” and “our lawmakers in Congress can leave one of two ways; one, in a body bag, two, after rightfully certifying Trump the winner.” Miller didn’t express alarm or concern; he boasted: “I got the base fired up.” (Miller claimed after the fact that he didn’t know about the more extreme comments.) 

As a result of law enforcement’s failure to prepare for Jan. 6, Congress was left vulnerable after Trump gave his big speech on the Ellipse, urging his rabid followers to march to the Capitol. (Some of them, in fact, were already there.) He wanted to go there too but his Secret Service detail refused to take him, leading to the purported fight between Trump and his agents in the presidential SUV. What he planned to do there we can only imagine — but now we know what the leaders of the House and Senate were doing during that time: responding to the crisis, which Trump refused to do.

While the president was sitting in the Oval Office dining room reveling in the images of his mob storming the Capitol and threatening to kill Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, congressional leaders had been taken to a secure location where they were working hard to get police and National Guard troops to the Capitol to put down the insurrection. As it happens, a documentary crew was on hand that day to record the historic vote and they captured Speaker Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer (then the minority leader) taking charge, calmly reaching out to various government officials and trying to get Cabinet members, including the acting attorney general and acting defense secretary, to persuade Trump to call off the mob. It’s an impressive display of leadership, considering they knew they were being hunted like animals as it was happening.

The cumulative effect of all the Jan. 6 hearings, culminating in Thursday’s wrap-up of the central narrative, has made clear that Donald Trump set up the coup before the election, was personally involved in the various attempts to execute it, understood that violence was possible on Jan. 6, and incited the crowd to storm the Capitol and refused to take any action to stop them. Everything that happened came at his direction and was done in his name. 

Beyond that, Trump has turned the country upside down for two years and built an anti-democratic movement dedicated to destroying the right to vote and sabotaging elections, entirely in service to his injured ego and his refusal to admit that he could ever possibly lose. He is a damaged, destructive narcissist, beyond all help. But the really disturbing question now is why so many people are eager to believe his dangerous fantasies.

It doesn’t seem to be hurting her in the polls

🚨 BREAKING 🚨

Katie Hobbs hoped no one would find this out…

She wants to purge the Pledge, Anthem & Constitution from our schools

Let’s purge @katiehobbs from Arizona Politics on November 8th.

SHARE & RT! pic.twitter.com/35rL30HhyT

— Kari Lake (@KariLake) September 20, 2022

I don’t know if this woman is just a monumentally cynical opportunist or dangerously delusional but whatever she is, I fervently hope the people of Arizona don’t elect her to be their Governor:

Kari Lake, Arizona’s GOP gubernatorial nominee, is facing criticism after promising a jaw-dropping revelation about her Democratic opponent that fell flat.

Lake had hyped up the alleged dirt she had on Katie Hobbs, claiming it would shock voters about Hobbs’s past and future intentions if she is elected in November.

In the video posted on Tuesday, Lake claims, “In Hobbs’s Arizona, your kindergartner wouldn’t learn the Pledge of Allegiance. As a legislator, Hobbs actually voted to block the Pledge of Allegiance, our national anthem, our Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and even the Mayflower Compact from being taught to the next generation of Americans right here in Arizona.”

If true, it might have swayed some voters still on the fence in the increasingly tight race between the two candidates.

But the problem was Lake’s complete misreading of the bill in question and the changes made to it.

“Voting against this bill would not be voting against the national anthem,” Wes Gullett, former chief of staff to ex-GOP Gov. Fife Symington, told the Arizona Republic. He added that the bill Lake is referring to would have only added the words “Ditat Deus,” which means “God Enriches,” as well as the phrase “In God We Trust” to things that could be taught, read, and posted in classrooms. What the bill didn’t do is prevent any of the things Lake listed in her video from being taught and posted in Arizona schools.

The mistake has undoubtedly caused a headache for Team Lake, which has had to repeatedly defend Lake’s lack of government experience from even those in her own party.

[…]

The former news anchor nonetheless refused to admit she was wrong and erroneously pointed to two other bills she said supported her argument. Those bills also did not refer to the Pledge of Allegiance being taught in classrooms.

“It demonstrated how unserious of a candidate Kari Lake is,” Hobbs spokesman Joe Wolf told the Arizona Republic. “She can’t read the bill. She can’t read the bill. if you’re governor, you’re probably going to have to end up reading a few of the bills you’re signing.”

GOP strategist Chuck Coughlin also weighed in, calling Lake, who had claimed she “triple-checked” her facts, “disappointing.”

Lake is currently on her “Ask Me Anything” tour of Arizona.

She has run a full Trumpist campaign and has been among the most vocal candidates on alleged election fraud theories. Election integrity will be her top priority if elected, she told the Washington Examiner in July.

She has also tried to appeal to former President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” base in Arizona.

During a speech in a church, she referenced some of Trump’s most controversial claims about the porous U.S.-Mexico border, 372.5 miles of which is in Arizona.

“The media might have a field day with this one, but I’m just going to repeat something President Trump said a long time ago, and it got him into a lot of trouble,” Lake said from behind the pulpit. Immigrants from Mexico, she asserted, “are bringing drugs. They are bringing crime. And they are rapists, and that’s who’s coming across our border. That’s a fact.”

Earlier this month, Lake’s campaign tweeted a clip of her saying at a campaign rally, “We are truly fighting pure evil right now. It is evil what we’re dealing with in this world. It’s coming from the Left, it’s coming from their spokespeople in the media — we all know it.”

I wonder if Arizona Republicans even care that she blatantly lied about this? Honestly, I think that rank and file GOPers now believe that lying is a sign of intelligence and competence. They want to be lied to. It makes them feel as if their leaders are serious about delivering. They will stop at nothing.

I think I would be a little more sanguine about all this if it weren’t for the fact that far right loons like her are being elected all over Europe. I’m afraid she could end up being the face of the Republican party.

GOP chucks that “liberty and justice for all” stuff 

Election integrity is like that old saying about teen boys who brag about their sexual “conquests”: Those who talk about it the most do it the least.

And, brother, do Republicans talk a lot. Like patriotism and freedom that way.

We’ve written plenty here over the years about the GOP’s obsession with election integrity and alleged rampant voter fraud believers can never seem to document. Trump’s Big Lie is just the most successful. Nurturing the impression that there are “so many problems” in elections is the point: to create public demand for solutions to an all-but-nonexistent problem. Barriers to voting operate like a one-way ratchet. Each new restriction passed means to shrink small-D democratic participation incrementally.

Greg Sargent summarizes the lie powering the Republican fervor for election integrity:

Here’s what’s really ugly about this saga: These Republicans aren’t just urging rule-breaking at the polls. They’re also justifying it by claiming in advance that Democrats are the real cheaters, per CNN, thus prefabricating a phony rationale for their own chicanery.

This self-justifying ruse — Democrats will inevitably cheat, so pretty much anything goes to set things right — is absolutely foundational to right-wing efforts to corrupt democracy across the board, including laying the groundwork to steal future elections.

After decades of Republicans promoting the narrative, “Democrats cheat” has become one of those “everyone knows” bits of mental flotsam conservatives take as given. No proof needed. Like “the Earth is flat.”

Sargent recounts efforts by the GOP in Michgan to undermine election rules, all justified by the “reverse-justification” that Democrats cheat, so their cheating is just tit-for-tat:

The 2020 results were confirmed by dozens of court cases and numerous audits. But no matter: The myth of a fraud-riddled 2020 will forever continue justifying whatever means Republicans decide are necessary at any given point.

Republicans are just trying to restore the integrity of our elections, you see.

[…]

For instance, Politico reported that the Republican National Committee recruited prominent Trumpist election deniers— including lawyer Cleta Mitchell — to train poll workers battleground states. This, too, is being done in the name of “election integrity.”

Multiple GOP state-level candidates promise in the name of election integrity to overturn 2022 election results that do not fall Republicans’ way. The very opposite of integrity. Then again, those who talk about it the most….

There is a corollary in right-wing media and in education policy, Sargent notes:

As Nick Catoggio writes at the Dispatch, the presumption of corrupt mainstream media bias runs so deep that it has morphed into an automatic justifier of deceit by right-wing media, no matter how debased. Writer Jennifer Berkshire has located a similar dynamic in right-wing assaults on public education.

Conservatives are forever victims in a diverse world hostile to recognizing their God-given right to minority rule. If they lose, someone must have cheated. Must have. No proof needed. (See post below.)

When that happens, Sargent writes, “anything goes, and it’s all just a power struggle all the way down.”

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.

Someone was bound to catch on

Lauren Windsor of The Undercurrent for years has visited public events to question Republicans about controversial stances they and/or their party have taken. Since the MAGA movement emerged, she’s turned “a hidden camera, a Tennessee drawl and a knack for disarming her targets with words of sympathetic conservatism into a loaded political weapon,” the New York Times reported last October:

Posing as a true believer — in Mr. Trump or a stolen 2020 election — Ms. Windsor approaches Republican leaders at party gatherings and tries to coax them into revealing things that they might wish to keep in the G.O.P. family.

Responding to her “sweet, young thing” persona, Republicans “mansplain” public policy positions and their beliefs. Often, with embarrassing frankness. The clips end up on the internet.

Someone was bound to catch on. Last night in Wisconsin, a Republican staffer “made” her:

---

LIVE THREAD: I’ve been caught in the act at an election denier dinner in Appleton, Wisconsin! 1/

One of the staffers here recognized me and I could see them huddling. They didn’t approach- so I tried not to be paranoid. 2/

But they just had the emcee — Regular Joe — name check me during his opening speech 🫠 3/

I’m still here recording their speeches— they invited me up on stage! I’m minding my p’s and q’s listening to Michael Gableman— the guy who got fired by Robin Vos for spending over $1 million in Wisconsin’s bs election audit — and Gableman addressed me too 4/

He’s saying that Mark Zuckerberg stole the election for Biden and railing against ballot drop boxes. Crying fraud, says that no one has challenged his report 5/ 

I just raised my hand to ask Gableman a question and they invited me on stage… why he didn’t produce documents from his investigation to the WI judge who held him in contempt… 6/

Gableman wanted me to leave stage, but I insisted on taking a seat since they invited me… 7/

Hands shaking, trying to suppress his rage, Gableman mocked me and evaded the question. He cut our convo short dismissing my inquiries bc I didn’t read his George Soros-Zuckerberg election denying conspiracy report. 8/ 

WI Assembly Elections Chair Janel Brandtjen was just on calling on all the election deniers in the room to get involved to protect “election integrity”… you should be terrified 9/

Election denier gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels decries “banana republics” and promises WI will lead on “election integrity.” He also promises to transform education in the state through universal school choice. 10/

I left after Michels, but they blocked me from talking to him. I went outside, a couple of attendees yelled at me asking why I came to stir up shit. I replied that did not- that they had in fact called me out and invited me onstage and I merely accepted the invite to engage. 11/ 

The fellow yelling at me calmed down then and we had a lovely debate, where we actually found common ground about Big Corporate $$ govt corruption. I invited Rocky to drinks if he’s ever in DC. And now I’m driving home.

🇺🇸✊ #democracy /end 

---

While Windsor’s work may bear a superficial resemblance to the that of James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, she reaches targets at public events without costumes or phony resumes.

“In some ways, Ms. Windsor’s stings echo those of perhaps the leading practitioner of stunts meant to deceive Republicans, the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, who targeted figures including Mr. Pence and Rudolph W. Giuliani for his 2020 movie “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” the Times suggests.  

.@lawindsor on her reporting featuring #Trump lawyer John Eastman caught on tape discussing the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. #TheReidOut #reiders pic.twitter.com/3SIuTVX0r8

— The ReidOut (@thereidout) October 28, 2021

The Undercurrent is sponsored by American Family Voices, a small nonprofit founded in 2000 by my friend Mike Lux “to take on projects that needed doing, but that more traditional DC groups weren’t able or willing to take on.” Inside the Beltway, pretty much anything edgy fits into that category.

Windsor is nothing if not edgy.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Republicans are playing defense. Keep them there.

Thanks to Donald Trump’s caches of stolen classified documents, his role in planning a coup on Jan. 6, 2021, Federalist Supreme Court justices’ decision to rescind 50 years of women’s reproductive rights, Trump quislings’ efforts to keep American women barefoot and pregnant with their rapists’ children, and their efforts to thwart voters’ will in the name of election integrity, “threats to democracy” has overtaken inflation as a key concern for 2022 voters.

Democrats are leaning into all that, writes E.J. Dionne:

This week, President Biden is signaling that the Democrats’ strategy for this fall’s elections is moving sharply toward the attack. With a speech Tuesday about law enforcement and public safety, he challenged Republicans on ground the GOP thought it owned. And in a prime-time address Thursday, he plans to bring the survival of democracy itself to the center of the 2022 campaign.

“Don’t tell me you support law enforcement if you won’t condemn what happened on the sixth,” Biden told the rally in Pennsylvania. “For God’s sake, whose side are you on?” Biden shouted.

Dionnes emphasizes how the role of the Jan. 6 insurrection and Trump’s stolen documents has cut the knees out from under Trump’s cult … er, party.

Trump’s lawless possession of those documents, along with his party’s efforts to minimize it, is making a hash of the GOP’s law-and-order slogans. And the former president’s omnipresence in the news has short-circuited Republican hopes of making Biden’s unpopularity the centerpiece of the 2022 midterm campaign. That will become even harder if Biden’s ratings stay on the upswing.

For the faithful, Trump is still Dear Leader. But for many other Republicans he has become an albatross. Republican candidates are scrubbing their websites of prior anti-abortion rhetoric as well as references to Trump.

Dionne notes that going hard at Republican perfidy won’t sit well with Democratic Party strategists whose strategy is always to play it safe and stick to bread-and-butter issues.

Of course, economics always matter in elections. But partly because of the flow of news, the topic of democracy is now in the ascendancy, bolstered by a recent NBC News poll showing “threats to democracy” surpassing inflation as the top 2022 issue. An analysis conducted by Hart Research at my request found that 42 percent of voters supporting Democratic congressional candidates listed threats to democracy as one of their top two issues, compared with only 20 percent of those backing Republicans.

Biden has clearly moved in this direction himself. “The president truly sees this as an inflection point and feels that, as the leader of the country, he needs to clearly articulate the nature of the threat to democracy, especially increased threats of violence for political purposes,” one adviser told me. “This is a time when the dominant wing of the Republican Party refuses to commit to free and fair elections, and refuses to commit to respecting them in the future.”

This was supposed to be a year of Republican triumph, as off-year elections often are for the party not in the White House. Republicans hammered away at inflation concerns until the televised Jan. 6 hearings refocused attention on Trump. And Trump, a junkie for publicity who could not bear not being the center of attention, insisted on injecting himself between Republicans and their attempt to make 2022 a referendum on President Joe Biden. Instead, Trump may make Republicans’ 2022 more like 2018.

With more Jan. 6 hearings coming in September, and with national security documents Trump stole displayed on front pages and TV sets across the globe, Trump is now the center of attention again. Republicans are knocked back on their heels. Biden, if not Democratic consultants, means to keep them there.

Keep punching and work the eye, Joe.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.

A rare moment of self-awareness

Loons:

With primary season heating up ahead of the 2022 midterms, The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper traveled to Waukesha, Wisconsin this week for a “good old cheese and brat-fueled” Trump rally to interview a series of MAGA die-hards. And he quickly discovered that they are becoming even more unhinged as Donald Trump gets closer to announcing his re-election campaign.

The comedian tracked down voters who claim to believe in “election integrity” while at the same time supporting Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) who offered to bring a slate of fake electors to Mike Pence in an attempt to overturn the 2020 results—without any recognition of that cognitive dissonance.

“I’m not going to be a conspiracist or anything like that,” one woman insisted before using the fictional plot of the Robin Williams movie Man of the Year to prove that “they had election fraud back then.”

“Are there any lessons we can take from Mork & Mindy?” Klepper asked in response.

Then there was the man in the full Abraham Lincoln mask and stovepipe hat who thinks Trump is running the military from “behind the scenes” and said he tries to avoid consuming “the media” because it’s all a bunch of “theatrics.” That one was a layup for Klepper who replied, “And you’re not someone who gives in to theatrics.”

Later, Klepper received warnings from Trumpers about the “normalization” of pedophilia through pizza-related symbols online and agreement on Trump’s assertion that America has never “gotten to the bottom” of 9/11.

But no one could quite top the woman in the star-spangled flower crown who used the Gematria calculator on her phone to assign numerical meaning to everything from Trump to JFK Jr. to “Let’s Go Brandon.”

“So the Wisconsin MAGA-ites were turning the conspiracy talk up to letter K, which is 11,” Klepper said before ordering a slice of pizza that had “nothing to do with pedophilia.”

It’s not just the militia types. It’s our friends and neighbors.

This is outrageous:

Energy has been high around elections for several years alongside escalating political polarization nationwide. Despite this, Gillespie County has been a mostly peaceful political climate. But the 2020 presidential race brought election integrity to the forefront of many American minds. With passions ignited, the political climate around elections has been a blazing fire for some election officials.

Nobody knows this more than Anissa Herrera, elections administrator for Gillespie County since 2019. She is resigning from her position as administrator largely due to the heightened, and even dangerous circumstances surrounding the voting process.

“After the 2020 (election), I was threatened, I’ve been stalked, I’ve been called out on social media,” said Herrera. “And it’s just dangerous misinformation.”

Herrera is an inaugural member of the elections office for the county and has worked for Gillespie County for nine-and-a-half years. Prior to her role as elections administrator, she worked as the elections clerk under the county clerk’s office.What had been an enjoyable job for Herrera took a different turn following the most recent presidential election.

“The year 2020 was when I got the death threats,” said Herrera. “It was enough that I reached out to our county attorney, and it was suggested that I forward it to FPD (Fredericksburg Police Department) and the sheriff’s office.”

Other resignations have occurred in the Elections Department for similar reasons. The dangers were dire enough that some members of the department hired off-duty law enforcement officers and security guards. Herrera expressed that her responsibilities in the position often required long hours while being understaffed.

The wave of resignations in the Elections Department has left county officials wondering how to successfully conduct upcoming elections. “We have some people who are pretty fanatical and radical about things,” said Gillespie County Judge Mark Stroeher. “Unfortunately, they have driven out our elections administrator, and not just her, but the staff. Everybody has resigned.”

Stroeher was sympathetic to Herrera’s frustrations in the position.“The job had been made much more difficult than probably it should be because of some individuals who are continuing to question how they are doing things,” said Stroeher. Herrera mentioned that, following the 2020 elections, Texas legislature had passed approximately 300 new laws regulating the voting process. This made her oversight overwhelming to manage. Herrera feels confident about the integrity of the county’s voting process. “Texas is very safe and secure,” said Herrera.

With Herrera’s resignation and those of other members of the department, the voting process in Gillespie County is uncertain, and those who feared a fragile election system may have inspired real difficulties. “It’s unfortunate because we have candidates that need to be elected, and we have voters who want their voices to be heard by the ballots,” said Stroeher. “I don’t know how we’re going to hold an election when everybody in the election department has resigned.”

Stroeher plans to contact the office of the Secretary of State for Texas for guidance on holding the upcoming November elections.“Elections are getting so nasty and it’s getting dangerous,” said Stroeher.

Herrera’s last day as elections administrator will be Aug. 16. She is currently uncertain what her future holds.

She said she’s been understaffed for years which speaks to another aspect of their ongoing vote suppression. It also plays into their “vote fraud” screeching because there are bound to be delays and mistakes when there isn’t enough staff which they can then point to and wail about fraud if the election doesn’t go their way.

A bunch of nuts harassing and threatening elections officials is an outrageous tactic that we’re seeing all over the country. Herrera said about her decision, “sometimes you just have to take care of yourself” and you can’t blame her. But that’s exactly what they want. They seek to make the officials’ lives miserable so they will quit and they can put Trumpists into office to “make sure” their people don’t lose.

They’d rather sabotage the republic

People rock-solidly committed to their principles often refuse to participate in activities that violate them. Like people who refuse to eat beef out of concern for climate change. Or people who boycott a hated company’s products or services.

One would think people opposed to democracy who vigorously promote the idea elections are a sham would refuse to particpate. If they had principles. Which they do not. So they do.

In the name of “election integrity,” Republican operatives are recruiting and training thousands of election workers in how to intimidate fellow election workers and voters. Sugar in the gas tank. Sand in the gears.

Politico obtained recordings from training summits this spring that reveal sabotage is the goal. RNC National Election Integrity Director Josh Findlay identifies Cleta Mitchell, an attorney central to former President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, as a key player:

Publicly, the RNC has insisted its goal is to ensure there are enough trained poll workers to protect the electoral process and ensure partisan parity at polling centers. The recordings, however, indicated that the RNC is relying heavily on people who have spread false or unproven claims of irregularities and conspiracies. The recordings feature Findlay speaking at a number of Mitchell’s “Election Integrity Network” summits, which her group has hosted in battleground states including Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The RNC is just “part of the team,” he told a Florida summit the same month.

While Republicans have said the aim of their “election integrity” effort is to ensure there are well-trained poll workers during the next election, the recordings also feature Mitchell speaking openly about the need to challenge efforts by nonprofit groups aligned with Democrats to create a “new American majority” of young voters, people of color and unmarried women.

“It’s a place the left sees as a great target of opportunity, and we have to make sure that doesn’t happen,” she said, referring to Democratic efforts to register voters from traditionally underrepresented voting blocs.

[…]

At an April 5 Arizona summit, Mitchell spoke mostly about an emerging “new American majority” of people of color, young people and unmarried women that could make conservatives “obsolete.” Her private comments are significant because Democrats have long insisted it is these fears of displacement — and not legitimate election administration concerns — behind the GOP drive to tighten access to voting for certain groups, including through mail.

A party committed to the democratic process might work to expand its appeal to a wider national audience rather than to make the process more exclusive. Democrats do that (for the most part). The GOP, not so much. Instead of boycotting elections, the GOP works at once to undermine them and to elect members who will.

The lunatic fringe is now the establishment in the Republican Party. See Mark Fincham who, after Tuesday’s primary, would as the GOP’s nominee for secretary of state in Arizona, administer elections there in 2024. Fincham attended the Jan. 6 insurrection, believes the Covid pandemic was a hoax, played a part in Trump’s fake electors scheme, and wants to empower the state’s legislature to overrule the will of the people. Among other things.

“With Arizona’s Republican primary voters nominating a full slate of election saboteurs, it cannot be denied that democracy is on the ballot in November,” writes Dana Milbank:

And this isn’t just happening in Arizona. Even before Tuesday’s primaries, six election deniers had already prevailed in gubernatorial primaries this year, according to a tally by the States United Democracy Center. (This includes Doug Mastriano, GOP gubernatorial nominee in Pennsylvania, who crossed police barricades at the Capitol on Jan. 6.) Another five election deniers won primaries for attorney general, and five have advanced to general elections for secretary of state. Those numbers will grow as the primary season advances.

The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Wednesday to spotlight threats to election workers. Democrats called election officials to describe the challenge to their work from the flood of MAGA threats and intimidation since 2020. Rather than address the subject and implicate their base, Republicans invited witnesses to minimize those threats by promoting a narrative of rising crime in general.

If their policies and opinions are so unpopular that they cannot win elections freely and fairly, Republicans with integrity might moderate them, or else just take their ball and go home. But no. They’ll wrap sabotage in the flag of the republic for which they no longer stand.

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Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.