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American civic knowledge is abominable

Published by digby on October 3, 2022

Depressing …

How does the public govern itself if it doesn’t know the rules?

After two years of considerable improvement, Americans’ knowledge of some basic facts about their government has fallen to earlier levels, with less than half of those surveyed able to name the three branches of government for the 2022 Annenberg Constitution Day Civics Survey.

The Annenberg Public Policy Center’s annual, nationally representative survey showed notable increases in 2020 and 2021 after tumultuous years that put the role of government and the three branches under a media spotlight. In those two years, the survey was run amid a pandemic and government health restrictions, two impeachment inquiries, a presidential election, an attempt to disrupt congressional certification of the electoral vote, criminal trials of the individuals charged in the assault on the U.S. Capitol, and waves of social justice protests, among other events.

The current survey, released for Constitution Day (Sept. 17), found the first drop in six years among those who could identify all three branches of government, and declines among those who could name the First Amendment rights, though knowledge remained high on some other questions. Additional findings on the Supreme Court will be released next month.

“When it comes to civics, knowledge is power,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s troubling that so few know what rights we’re guaranteed by the First Amendment. We are unlikely to cherish, protect, and exercise rights if we don’t know that we have them.”

Highlights:

Less than half of U.S. adults (47%) could name all three branches of government, down from 56% in 2021 and the first decline on this question since 2016.

The number of respondents who could, unprompted, name each of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment also declined, sharply in some cases. For example, less than 1 in 4 people (24%) could name freedom of religion, down from 56% in 2021.

Over half of Americans (51%) continue to assert incorrectly that Facebook is required to let all Americans express themselves freely on its platform under the First Amendment.

But large numbers recognize other rights in the Bill of Rights and the veto process.

Our democracy is in peril not because of this, of course. I doubt people have ever been particularly knowledgeable about the workings of government. But I don’t think we’ve generally had cretinous ignoramuses at the elite levels of right wing politics. This combination seems lethal.

SOS on the SOS’s

Published by digby on September 29, 2022

The secretary of state races are vitally important this time

The excellent Bolts Magazine breaks down all the Secretary of State elections coming up in November. Normally nobody pays any attention to these races outside the state (and often not inside the state either) but now that a bunch of Big Liars are running for these seats that have jurisdiction over elections, it’s important to pay attention. The difference this could make in 2024 is profound:

In the weeks after his loss in the 2020 election, Donald Trump called the Georgia secretary of state and badgered him to “find” him more votes. Less than two years later, Trump’s infamous plea has morphed into a platform for a slate of Republican secretary of state candidates, who are vowing to bend and break the rules to influence future elections.

If they win in November, Trump-endorsed election deniers like Arizona’s Mark Finchem and Michigan’s Kristina Kamaro could seize the reins of election administration in key swing states on agendas built on disproven fraud claims and destabilizing changes like eliminating mail-in voting. But these high-profile candidates are just the tip of the iceberg: 17 Republicans are running for secretary of state—or for governor in states where the governor appoints the secretary—after denying the results of the 2020 election, seeking to overturn them, or refusing to affirm the outcome. A handful of additional Republicans haven’t outright questioned Biden’s win but have still amplified Trump’s false statements about widespread fraud.

Trump’s Big Lie, then, is defining the political stakes in most of the 35 states where the secretary of state’s office is on the line, directly or indirectly, in November. 

But beyond the threats of election subversion, secretaries of state affect voting rights in many more subtle ways. Long before Trump, they already featured heated debates around how states run their elections—and how easy or difficult it is for people to register and cast ballots. Secretaries of state may decide the scope of voter roll purges, instruct counties on how many ballot drop boxes to set up, or implement major policies like automatic voter registration. And their word carries great clout in legislative debates over voting. The Big Lie is overshadowing those functions, but in many places these broader issues remain at the forefront. 

This new Bolts guide walks through all of those 35 states, plus Washington, D.C., one by one. Voters are electing their secretary of state directly in 27 states; in another eight, the secretary of state will be selected after the election by public officials—the governor, or lawmakers—who are on the Nov. 8 ballot. (The 15 other states and Puerto Rico will either select theirs after the 2024 cycle or, in a few cases, don’t have a secretary of state at all.)

The stakes are highest in the presidential swing states that election deniers may capture, namely Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania (via the governor’s race). But many other states feature such candidates, from Alabama to Maryland; in Wyoming, a Trump-endorsed election denier is the only candidate on the ballot.

And other pressing voting concerns are also shaping these battles. In Ohio, for instance, voting rights groups have repeatedly clashed with the sitting secretary of state on voting access in jails or the availability of ballot drop boxes. In Georgia, the midterms are unfolding in the shadow of new restrictions adopted last year, with the incumbent’s support. In Vermont, the likely next secretary of state says she wants to support local experiments to expand voter eligibility. 

Not all secretaries of state handle election administration; in a few states such as Illinois and South Carolina, they have nothing at all to do with it. Even where secretaries of state oversee some aspects of the election system, the scope of their role can vary greatly. Arizona’s secretary of state, for instance, must certify election results; Michigan’s secretary, by contrast, plays no role in the certification process (that role is reserved to a board of canvassers) but does oversee and guide municipal officials on how to run their elections. 

To clarify this confusing landscape, Bolts published two databases this year. The first details, state by state, which state offices prepare and administer an election (Who Runs our Elections?). The second details, state by state, which state offices handle the counting, canvassing, and certification stages (Who Counts Our Elections?). 

For further reading, also dive into Louis Jacobson’s electoral assessment of all secretary of state races, and the FiveThirtyEight analysis of how each state’s Republican nominee is responding to questions about the 2020 elections.

Click over to Bolts read the full breakdown. There are some real nuts running for these important offices. God help us if they win.

Republicans get up with fleas

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 29, 2022

MAGA primaries produce less-viable candidates for November

David Corn’s “American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy” tracks GOP candidates’ reflex for appealing to the party’s extremist fringe during primaries. But the party’s center of gravity has moved off the right end of the scale. Candidates find it difficult to move back to the middle in the general election to attract non-zealots.

Greg Sargent confirms how extremist positioning backed by tech billionaire Peter Thiel has hurt GOP Senate candidate J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters, the Republican Senate candidate from Arizona (Washington Post):

To activate the Trumpist core, Masters ran lurid ads featuring machine gun fire at the border, swarthy hordes invading the country, and absurdly hyperbolic warnings that the country is sliding into cultural and demographic armageddon, in no small part because, he said, the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

Though this sort of rhetoric has long been standard GOP fare, the Masters-Vance-Thiel approach laces it with overtly authoritarian appeals. As Vanity Fair’s James Pogue reports, Masters and Thiel belong to a New Right movement that believes the United States is already sliding into cultural and demographic catastrophe and our institutions are corrupted beyond repair, requiring the robust use of state power as a corrective against enemies who are engineering U.S. decline.

This bleak view does not sell with mainstream voters whose support Republicans need in November.

“I don’t think that necessarily flies with a lot of normal people,” Joshua Tait, a scholar of conservatism, tells Sargent.

Die-hard believers are “absolutely convinced of their own apocalyptic rhetoric,” Tait continued, but “are we right at the verge of a collapse? I don’t know if that resonates.”

Masters is struggling with independents, the Times report suggests, in part because he plunged down a rabbit hole of deranged apocalypticism — that perpetual hunt for leftist enemies everywhere — and is now furiously trying to pretty it all up. But once you go down that rabbit hole, it’s hard to find your way out again.

Masters has scrubbed the darkest material from his website and backed off the catastrophism. But voters just see him as “inauthentic, slippery on the issues and not truly dedicated to Arizona” (New York Times):

“I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him,” said Thomas Budinger, 26, an assistant manager at a store in a Tucson mall. A few other independents scrunched their noses or rolled their eyes at the mention of the candidate’s name.

Masters trails by 15 points with independents. A new Suffolk University poll shows Democrat incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly “leading Masters by 49 percent to 42 percent among likely voters,” Sargent writes.

“The Putin-allied right here and around the world is a perpetual negative sentiment machine. Everything is horrible all the time,” tweets New Democrat Network president Simon Rosenberg. “They want people in the West/US to feel terrible about our project so we abandon it.”

Republicans supporting gun shop owner Tedd Budd for Senate in North Carolina are running attack ads against Democrat Cheri Beasley that are flush with deranged apocalypticism. The first Black woman to serve as chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court has never been a legislator. Yet laughably hair-on-fire GOP ads attack Beasley for supporting legislation she’s never voted on. And lying about those.

Budd is an election denier, the Charlotte Observer’s Editorial Board concludes, after Budd’s refusal to say whether he’ll accept the election results if he loses. Another GOP candidate is also having trouble moving to the center after going hard right in his primary:

Budd’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Editorial Board. Representatives for Bo Hines, another Trump-backed election denier running in North Carolina’s competitive 13th Congressional District, also did not respond when asked if Hines would support the upcoming election’s results. Hines recently scrubbed Trump’s name and endorsement from his website and hung up on a New York Times reporter who asked whether he planned to appear at Trump’s rally in Wilmington this weekend.

The GOP’s radical stances, Democrats hope, will hurt Budd with independents, now the largest tranche of voters in the state. Democrats’ problem is that my analysis shows that only 42 percent of unaffiliated voters in North Carolina cast ballots for Joe Biden in 2020. Beasley will need to improve on that this November.

Once considered on Joe Biden’s list of Supreme Court candidates, Beasley is unaccustomed to running aggressive, partisan campaigns. And while the Dobbs decision has given her an issue in her wheelhouse (and it’s helped her find her voice), she’s not exactly setting state Democrats on fire with her low-key style.

“The judge is clearly betting that her calm, reserved demeanor will be the ticket to victory in November,” reports Politico.

It will not help Republicans that their own base, especially MAGA extremists, are unhappy with them, writes the Washington Post’s David Byler. The part is at war with itself. Republican primary voters voted against sitting senators from their own party. Extremists’ upset with politicians they see as not far-right enough has led them to nominate inexperienced candidates more mainstream voters see as whack jobs. “And they’re struggling,” Byler reports:

Pennsylvania and Arizona stand out. Both are purple states — and, in a close election like 2022, they should be more competitive. But Blake Masters, the Arizona candidate for U.S. Senate, has struggled to raise funds, and Mehmet Oz, a celebrity doctor running for the same office in Pennsylvania, can’t sustain an attack on Democrat John Fetterman. More skilled candidates would overcome these problems.

And if Herschel Walker — a former NFL star plagued by personal scandal — is within striking distance of Democratic Sen. Raphael G. Warnock in Georgia, a more experienced campaigner might enjoy a comfortable lead by now (as Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a conventional politician, does in his 2022 reelection bid). In New Hampshire, Republican Don Bolduc trails as he tries to walk back the conspiracy theories that won him the nomination.

Lay down with dogs, the expression goes.

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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

Tucker’s latest propaganda

Published by digby on September 28, 2022

It’s a doozy

That’s just nuts:

Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s long-running quest to blame the Biden administration for the war in Ukraine hasn’t borne much fruit, despite his prominent perch on the most-watched cable news channel.

But it’s not for lack of trying. And on Tuesday night, Carlson broke out his latest shoddily constructed theory: He strongly suggested the United States is responsible for explosions that damaged the Nord Stream pipelines — and, at times, seemed to more explicitly blame the United States.

We know very little about what happened to the pipelines, which carry natural gas from Russia to Europe, or who was responsible if the explosions were sabotage, which authorities say is likely. Anything seems possible at this point.

But Carlson’s supposed evidence for this being a U.S. operation is decidedly weak.

Carlson began his monologue by seeking to knock down the idea that Russia itself could have been responsible, which is the theory favored by some Western leaders. (Russia has denied responsibility.) He argued that cutting off its ability to supply energy to Europe would deprive it of leverage. “If you are Vladimir Putin, you would have to be a suicidal moron to blow up your own energy pipeline,” Carlson argued. “That’s the one thing you would never do.”

Nonetheless, Carlson continued, that’s where some people are pointing. “The Washington Post got right to it,” Carlson said. “Putin, they declared, is now weaponizing the Nord Stream pipelines.”

In fact, the piece he cited was an analysis from Bloomberg News, which The Post also ran on its website. And the piece didn’t outright say Putin had done this; it only raised the possibility. “Is Putin Fully Weaponizing the Nord Stream Pipelines?” the headline reads. That is a question, not an assertion of fact.

But it wasn’t the only source for Carlson’s theory that wasn’t entitled to nuance.

Perhaps the most prominent quote Carlson used was from President Biden in February: Biden had said that, if Russia invades Ukraine, “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

Carlson treated this as no less than a smoking gun. He cast Biden’s comments as the president’s saying “that he might take out these pipelines.” Despite often casting Biden as a doddering old fool, Carlson assured that, in this instance, the president must have chosen his words carefully: “He said there won’t be a Nord Stream 2. We’ll put an end to it. We will take it out. We will blow it up.”

You begin to see the rhetorical trick here. Biden did not say we would “blow it up,” unless you’re using that phrase metaphorically. (At the time, construction of the pipeline had been completed, but it was not operational and was awaiting approval from Germany and the European Union; a few weeks later, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Berlin would stop the pipeline’s certification.) But Carlson’s aim is clearly to make people think about it literally.

Carlson then turned to another Biden administration official who he suggested publicly previewed just such a potential strike. It was top State Department official Victoria Nuland, who said in January, “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

Carlson highlighted the “one way or another” as being a potential threat to use sabotage — similar to Biden’s “bring an end to it.”

But there is a very readily available, alternative explanation for these veiled and unspecific promises to halt Nord Stream 2: The fact that it wasn’t at all clear how the United States could actually achieve its goal of shutting it down if Russia invaded. After all, Europe would be giving up a key energy source, and the decision largely rested with Germany.

Indeed, we wrote about exactly that just a day after Biden’s February comments. The administration kept saying it would halt Nord Stream 2, but Germany was publicly noncommittal. Harder commitments might have been made behind closed doors, but this was sensitive diplomacy that made it difficult for the Biden administration to say exactly how it would make good on its promise (which it ultimately did).

Beyond that, there are many reasons to be skeptical of the notion of the United States conducting sabotage. High on that list is that such an action would strain relations with European allies who would like to have access to that pipeline at some future date, even as they’re currently forgoing Russian energy in solidarity with Ukraine. (A U.S. official told The Post’s John Hudson that the idea of American involvement in the attack on the pipeline is “preposterous.”)

The last source Carlson cited was not a U.S. politician, but a European one. Radek Sikorski is a member of European Parliament representing Poland and is a former defense and foreign minister of the country. His Twitter account on Tuesday featured a photo of gas bubbling up to the surface of the Baltic Sea, with the brief message: “Thank you, USA.”

Some reports cast Sikorski’s comments as explicitly accusing the United States of sabotage, and some Polish politicians suggested Sikorski was furthering Russian propaganda efforts. Prominent Russian officials promoted Sikorski’s tweet, but Sikorski is not known as a pro-Russian politician.

But his meaning wasn’t entirely clear; it seems possible he was crediting the United States with rendering the pipelines moot by pressuring Europe not to take Russian natural gas. In later tweets, he seemed actually to point to Russian sabotage, citing a supposed Russian “special maintenance operation” on the pipelines.

(The Post attempted to contact Sikorski through the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he holds a nonresident position, but has not received comment from him.)

This is effectively the totality of the supposed hard evidence Carlson had for his theory. Beyond that, it was rank speculation and evaluating the various motives involved — motives that Carlson has long claimed that on the Biden administration’s side include exacerbating the war in Ukraine.

He repeatedly qualified his comments by saying things like, “We don’t know for sure.” But, ultimately, he delivered his speculationas if it were fact and invited his viewers to do the same.

“What will be the effect of this? Every action has a reaction, equal and opposite. Blow up the Nord Stream pipelines? Okay, we’ve entered a new phase, one in which the United States is directly at war with the largest nuclear power in the world,” Carlson said. “It doesn’t mean it will go nuclear immediately, but it does suggest there could be consequences.”

He added: “Have the people behind this — the geniuses like Toria Nuland — considered the effects? Maybe they have. Maybe that was the point.”

Carlson then invited his guest, former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), to join in the speculation. But despite Gabbard’s record of more sympathetic comments toward Russia than your average U.S. politician and her skepticism of U.S. foreign policy, she wasn’t going there.

“I don’t have the evidence of who was responsible for this,” Gabbard said before proceeding to speak more generally about the dangers of the situation.

Apparently even she wasn’t swayed by Carlson’s presentation.

It will be an article of faith on the right that the US did this act of sabotage to hurt the good and godly Russian government as it battles for his sovereignty against the Nazi Ukrainians. This is how they think now. It’s enough to make your head explode.

By the way, he went on to advise the Russian government on what it might do to retaliate:

Update:

He who counts the votes…

Published by digby on September 23, 2022

Here’s an informative rundown of what will happen if these election deniers win in November. Yikes…

Midterm ballots in nearly every state include candidates who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent or “stolen.”

That leaves American election systems at a pivotal moment: If people who deny Joe Biden won the presidency win their own elections on Nov. 8, could they really execute their plans and dismantle the machinery that keeps American democracy running?

Elections expert Sylvia Albert of Common Cause predicted the scenario is inevitable: “We will see somebody who denies the 2020 election win office. We will.”

The candidates’ ideas for reform are varied, but radical. Some want to end voting by mail or early voting. Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano floated the idea of requiring voters to re-register if he’s elected governor. Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake proclaimed her primary victory and posed with a sledgehammer she said was intended to be used on electronic voting machines (the same kinds of machines that were used to tabulate her victory).

Could hand-counted ballots and in-person-only voting really be the future?

Trey Grayson, a former Kentucky secretary of state, said election experts need to raise the alarm about how these proposed changes could alter U.S. elections. But individual officials are not all-powerful.

“Just because a denier is elected to an office, doesn’t mean that the denier has free rein to create chaos or subvert the will” of the voters, said Grayson, a Republican.

Many voting rights, such as the right to a mail ballot, are established in state law and cannot be changed unilaterally by one governor or one secretary of state. That said, there are ways in which some of these candidates could use their offices to significantly impact some mainstays of American voting systems.

How might that look? We delved into these campaign ideas to see just how far people who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election results could go if elected.

State officials can’t unilaterally ban voting by mail, but they could limit it

President Donald Trump showered the 2020 campaign trail with false claims about what he described as the fraudulent nature of voting by mail.

Fraud by mail ballot is statistically rare — and there is no evidence fraud contributed to Biden’s win — but the mail-in ballot still serves as a popular talking point for candidates seeking favor with the pro-Trump electorate.

A multi-state coalition of candidates has been vocal in its opposition to widespread mail voting.

That position comes with inherent contradictions.

Take Nevada secretary of state candidate Jim Marchant, leader of the America First Secretary of State Coalition. He opposes most mail voting but accepted that he won the Republican primary in August through an election where more than half of Nevada’s voters cast mail ballots.

Another member, Arizona secretary of state candidate Mark Finchem, was a state lawmaker who traveled to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to protest the congressional certification of the 2020 election. During a July campaign speech, Finchem said, “I don’t believe in mail in ballots at all. That’s where the fraud happens.”

Many of these candidates indicate they oppose a system that allows anyone to get a ballot ahead of Election Day. But they said they are willing to make exceptions for the military, for example.

Finchem’s path to undo mail voting would be difficult — a 30-year-old state law allows any voter to cast a ballot by mail. And about 75% of Arizona voters right now are on a recurring list to get a mail ballot.

Similarly, in Michigan, the right to vote by mail has been constitutionally protected since 2018, when voters there approved a constitutional amendment providing all voters access to absentee ballots for any reason.

That means any wholesale changes to the law would require the support of state legislators — people who won their own offices under a system that allows mail balloting.

But there are some ways Finchem and other statewide officials could add barriers to voting by mail without legislation.

One: They could change some states’ election procedure manuals.

Arizona’s manual is drafted by the secretary of state for approval by the attorney general and governor. An official could write a manual with onerous requirements for verifying signatures on ballots, for example.

Any sweeping changes to rules or laws would likely face legal challenges. But election deniers in office will have the power of their voice.

“They have an official megaphone to amplify election conspiracy theories and continue to sow doubt about the election system and that makes a crisis much more likely,” said Ben Berwick, counsel at Protect Democracy, a nonprofit founded in late 2016 that says its mission is to prevent the U.S. from “declining into a more authoritarian form of government.”

In Michigan, drop boxes are on the ballot in more ways than one

Ballot drop boxes are another point of contention for some of these candidates. Dinesh D’Souza falsely singled them out in his “2000 Mules” film as being a means of corruption. There’s no evidence of that; they’re often more secure than standalone mailboxes.

In Michigan, Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon said that if she wins against Democrat incumbent Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, she would ban these receptacles from being used for ballot collection.

That would require legislation, said Christopher Thomas, a fellow with the Bipartisan Policy Center and former election director for secretaries of state of both parties in Michigan. “If she had a Republican legislature, she might be able to pull that off,” Thomas said.

That’s not out of the question.

Republicans have control of Michigan’s House and Senate. Newly drawn voting districts offer Democrats a better-than-before chance of wresting control from the GOP, but everything rests on Election Day.

Michiganders’ November ballots also include a measure to expand drop box access. Proposal 2 would require that the state provide at least one drop box for every 15,000 voters in a municipality. It would also establish at least nine days of early voting and require the state to pay postage for absentee applications and ballots.

Any efforts to block election certification would likely face litigation

Some candidates said they would have refused to certify the 2020 election, Nevada’s Marchant and Arizona’s Finchem among them.

This raises concerns that, if elected, they would use their power to try to manipulate results in 2024.

Any efforts to refuse certification of results would face legal challenges, just as they did in 2020. In New Mexico, Otero County refused to certify the 2022 primary results as commissioners said they didn’t trust the machines. In June, the state’s Supreme Court ordered the county to certify results.

Pennsylvania’s Mastriano vowed to decertify election machines he believes were rigged. Mastriano is also aligned with the America First Secretary of State Coalition and was outside at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. His campaign funded buses for people to travel to the rally that occurred before the attack.

If Mastriano won against Democrat Josh Shapiro, he would have the power to appoint the person who could decertify machines, which would mean that those machines could no longer be used. Unlike most states where the secretary of state is elected to oversee elections, Pennsylvania’s chief elections officer is appointed by the governor through a position known as the secretary of the commonwealth.

As a state senator, Mastriano in 2020 sought to delay certifying the election results and pushed to give the General Assembly control of which electors to send to Washington, rather than follow the will of the voters. State Republican leaders rejected that idea. Such a move, along with his suggestion to “restart” voter registration, would face litigation.

Attorney Kevin Greenberg represents the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. He is unapologetically opposed to Mastriano’s proposals on grounds they would violate state and federal laws.

If Mastriano as governor “does even a fraction of what he said he is going to do on voter registration lists and voting machines, we will have chaos, attempted voter suppression and years of litigation,” Greenberg said. “It will make the litigation of 2020 and even 2022 seem like child’s play.”

Federal law could prohibit wiping voter rolls, but one official could make changes

The America First coalition calls for “aggressive voter roll clean up.” Mastriano was more specific when he said that as governor he would have the authority to “restart” voter registration.

Wiping the voter rolls would violate the purpose of the National Voter Registration Act, Eliza Sweren-Becker, a lawyer for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, previously told PolitiFact. The law sought to increase voter registration, and maintaining voter rolls without requiring everyone to actively re-register prior to a specific election ensures greater access.

But Marchant has vowed that as secretary of state he would remove Nevada from a consortium known as the Electronic Registration Information Center. More than half of the states, including Republican-led Florida and Alabama, belong to the consortium in part because it provides an efficient means of sharing data about voters who have moved or died.

Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, a Republican, said that his state uses the database to “preserve a clean and accurate voter list.” Since 2016, the state has used it to remove tens of thousands of voters who died, moved or had duplicate registrations.

As secretary of state, Marchant would need only to provide written notice in order to withdraw. Marchant falsely claimed the consortium is linked to liberal billionaire George Soros.

The dangers of officials replacing machines with hand counts

After Trump lost in 2020, voting machines became fodder for meritless conspiracy theories that machines “flipped” results or deleted Trump votes.

The Bipartisan Policy Center found that machines lead to faster, more accurate results. Electronic tabulators are used by about 90% of jurisdictions nationwide.

Lake and Finchem filed a lawsuit to get rid of Arizona’s longtime use of election machines, but a judge dismissed it, in part due to lack of standing. In his ruling, the judge wrote that officials take steps to ensure security of election machines including “testing by independent, neutral experts.”

The Arizona state legislature authorized the use of electronic voting systems in 1966; but state law does not require them. Arizona’s secretary of state has the power to decertify the machines, meaning they can eliminate them. So if Finchem wins that seat, it’s possible he could decertify machines and refuse to certify new equipment.

But any effort to eliminate voting machines could face significant hurdles — not the least of which would be adapting to the alternative: hand counting.

Counting millions of ballots statewide by hand would pose a series of logistical challenges, and could drag on for months. That could run afoul of state laws that require official results by a certain date in order to meet certification deadlines.

When contractors hired by Arizona Republicans counted the presidential and Senate races on Maricopa County ballots, they started in April 2021 and it took until September for them to release their findings (which confirmed Biden won).

In Nye County, Nevada, longtime Republican election clerk Sam Merlino retired earlier than planned in protest over a change to count ballots both by hand and electronically. His replacement is a Marchant ally, Mark Kampf, who told PolitiFact he is working to recruit up to 40 volunteers to help with the hand count.

“We have so many checks and balances it seems like we are going backwards,” said Merlino. “I’ve been doing it for 20 years, and I trust the system.”

Sadmira Ramic, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, predicts problems.

“A hand count will not only possibly lead to inaccurate results, but people who are possibly election deniers are counting the votes, which opens up the possibility of tampering,” she said.

There’s no doubt about it. We’ve already seenGOP election workers tampering with machines, some of them even under indictment for doing so. Their living god, Donald Trump, is on tape asking a Secretary of State to “find” enough votes for him to win. Of course, they will cheat. And they will justify it by pretending that they are only reciprocating for the non-existent Democratic cheating. They will not accept losing.

Tightening the screws

Published by digby on September 12, 2022

The DOJ is serving many Trumpers with subpoenas

From the NY Times this afternoon:

The Justice Department has issued about 40 subpoenas over the past week seeking information about the actions of former President Donald J. Trump and his associates related to the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, according to people familiar with the situation.

Two top Trump advisers, Boris Epshteyn and Mike Roman, had their phones seized as evidence, those people said.

The department’s actions represent a substantial escalation of a slow-simmer investigation two months before the midterm elections, coinciding with a separate inquiry into Mr. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive documents at his residence in Florida, Mar-a-Lago.

Among those the department has contacted since Wednesday are people who are close to the former president and have played significant roles in his post-White House life.

Those receiving the subpoenas included Dan Scavino, Mr. Trump’s former social media director who rose from working at a Trump-owned golf course to one of his most loyal aides and has remained an adviser since Mr. Trump left office. Stanley Woodward, one of Mr. Scavino’s lawyers, declined to comment.

The Justice Department also executed search warrants to seize electronic devices from people involved in the so-called fake electors effort in swing states, including Mr. Epshteyn, a longtime Trump adviser, and Mr. Roman, a campaign strategist, according to people familiar with the events. Federal agents made the seizures last week, the people said.

Mr. Epshteyn and Mr. Roman did not respond to requests for comment.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

Bernard Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner who promoted baseless claims of voter fraud alongside his friend Rudolph W. Giuliani, was issued a subpoena by prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, his lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, said on Monday. Mr. Parlatore said his client had initially offered to grant an interview voluntarily.

The subpoenas seek information in connection with the plan to submit slates of electors pledged to Mr. Trump from swing states that were won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the 2020 election. Mr. Trump and his allies promoted the idea that competing slates of electors would justify blocking or delaying certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.

In a new line of inquiry, some of the subpoenas also seek information into the activities of the Save America political action committee, the main political fund-raising conduit for Mr. Trump since he left office.

For months, associates of Mr. Trump have received subpoenas related to other aspects of the investigations into his efforts to cling to power. But the fact that the Justice Department is now seeking information related to fund-raising comes as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has raised questions about money Mr. Trump solicited under the premise of fighting election fraud.

The new subpoenas were issued for a wide variety of people around Mr. Trump, from low-level aides to his most senior advisers.

The Justice Department has spent more than a year focused on investigating hundreds of rioters who were on the ground at the Capitol on Jan. 6. But this spring, they started issuing grand jury subpoenas to people like Ali Alexander, a prominent organizer with the pro-Trump Stop the Steal group, who helped plan the march to the Capitol after Mr. Trump gave a speech that day at the Ellipse near the White House.

While it remains unclear how many subpoenas had been issued in that early round, the information they sought was broad.

According to one subpoena obtained by The New York Times, they asked for any records or communications from people who organized, spoke at or provided security for Mr. Trump’s rally at the Ellipse. They also requested information about any members of the executive and legislative branches who may have taken part in planning or executing the rally, or tried to “obstruct, influence, impede or delay” the certification of the presidential election.

By early summer, the grand jury investigation had taken another turn as several subpoenas were issued to state lawmakers and state Republican officials allied with Mr. Trump who took part in a plan to create fake slates of pro-Trump electors in several key swing states that were actually won by Mr. Biden.

Something’s happening with the January 6 investigation and the “Stop the Steal” grift but I don’t think we know exactly what it is. A whole lot of people have been subpoenaed that’s for sure.

If I didn’t know better I’d think it was serious enough (along with the Mar-a-lago stolen docs case) that Trump felt compelled to call a meeting of the five families today:

From the “you cannot make this up” file

Published by digby on August 31, 2022

Michigan goes fully F….atuous

You think these people aren’t enemies of democracy?

A citizen-initiative ballot measure seeking to enshrine abortion rights in the Michigan state constitution was blocked Wednesday from being certified for the November ballot.

The Michigan Board of State Canvassers on Wednesday deadlocked on a party line 2-2 vote whether to certify the Reproductive Freedom for All ballot initiative to the November ballot, throwing its future into uncertainty. The measure won’t appear on the ballot for now, but the campaign behind the initiative said it plans to bring the issue before the state Supreme Court.

“(Reproductive Freedom for All) is heading to the Michigan Supreme Court to ask that the Board of State Canvassers do their jobs. The State Bureau of Elections recommended the board certify our signatures, noting it had no standing to act on the language,” the campaign said on Twitter.

“The board is disenfranchising hundreds of voters who want to restore Roe and keep in place the reproductive rights we’ve had in Michigan for the last 50 years,” it argued.

The Michigan Bureau of Elections had last week recommended to the board that it approve certification of the petition.

Reproductive Freedom for All submitted more than 750,000 signatures to the Secretary of State’s office in July. In its staff report the Bureau of Elections estimated the petition had 596,379 valid signatures — about 146,000 more than the minimum signatures required.

So what excuse did they come up with? You will not believe it:

Opponents, however, challenged the proposed amendment over the petition’s lack of spacing between words...

In its staff report, the Bureau noted that Michigan election law is “silent on the amount of space that must be between letters and words in a petition.”

It doesn’t get stupider than that.

The Board of State Canvassers’ two Democrats voted to certify the petition while the board’s two Republicans, including the chair, voted against certification, agreeing with opponents’ objections to the amendment’s formatting. The RFFA plans to file a request for judicial intervention to the state Supreme Court “expeditiously,” spokeswoman Darci McConnell said.

Watch the Supreme Court say they can’t make the decision this close to the election.

Think about this. The rabid right which has been lobbying for decades to outlaw abortion is now ducking putting it on the ballot because they are afraid that pro-choicers will come out to vote and it will benefit the Democratic Party. So they’re relying on ridiculous rationales like the “spacing between the words” on the ballot initiative were sloppy. It just doesn’t get any more pathetic than that. Even more pathetic, it may very well work.

It’d be funny if it wasn’t insane

Published by Tom Sullivan on August 31, 2022

Trump played “hide the Top Secrets” with the F.B.I.

Photo from Donald Trump’s office (Department of Justice) Details explained here.

Someday someone will make a satirical movie about the debacle of the Trump presidency. Only the debacle won’t end with his presidency. It spills over into his post-presidency. Fitting all the episodic Trumpish lunacy into a three-act structure will be as challenging as knowing what to leave out. Presuming the Trumpish dictator then controlling the White House permits it.

As today’s episode unfolds, we find that the still-president-claimant has been hiding national security documents from the F.B.I. in his office at Mar-a-Lago. The Department of Justice photo of them strewn across his carpet is all over the internet. The court filing released on Tuesday indicates that Trump’s attorneys are citing court cases that apply to sitting presidents as if they apply to Trump now. And why not? Trump thinks he is rightfully still president.

Washington Post:

Former president Donald Trump and his advisers repeatedly failed to turn over highly classified government documents even after receiving a subpoena and pledging a “diligent search” had been conducted, leading to an FBI raid of his Florida home that found more than 100 additional classified items, according to a blistering court filing by federal prosecutors late Tuesday.

The filing traces the extraordinary saga of government officials’ repeated efforts to recover sensitive national security papers from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club, centered on a storage room where prosecutors came to suspect that “government records were likely concealed and removed … and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the government’s investigation.”

Trump obstruct justice? The hell, you say!

When law enforcement authorities returned to Ma-a-Lago with a search warrant earlier this month, they found more documents Citizen Trump had no business possessing. Not to mention the non-secure manmner in which he kept them. This included in his desk drawer along with “two official passports, one of which was expired, and one personal passport, which was expired.”

Note:

Among the most incriminating details in the government filing is a photograph, showing a number of files labeled “Top Secret” with bright red or yellow cover sheets, spread out over a carpet. Those files were found inside a container in Trump’s office, according to the court filing. A close examination of one of the cover sheets in the photo shows a marking for “HCS,” a government acronym for systems used to protect intelligence gathered from secret human sources.

The 36-page filing also reveals, for the first time, the text of a written assurance given to the Justice Department by Trump’s “custodian of records”on June 3. It says Trump’s team had done a thorough search for any classified material in response to a subpoena and had turned over any relevant documents.

That would be, in layman’s parlance, a lie.

Prosecutors’ court filing puts it more delicately. That the August search turned up 100 additional national security documents, prosecutors say, “calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter.” The list of statutes Trump has violated grows by the day.

Marcy Wheeler has a lengthy thread on what’s contained in the filing. There is a lot there.

Trump, the man at the center of this investigation, used his Truth Social feed Tuesday morning to repost dozens of QAnon conspiracy theories before deleting them and posting more unsubstantiated allegations.

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1564617652471054338?s=20&t=G7xRb85a8NI7E9AMn1yf5Q

Americans gave that man, Donald Trump, access to the nuclear football. That man, Donald Trump, took classified materials from the White House and stored them in his office closet and desk drawer at his resort. Next to his framed Time magzine covers. And he demands reinstatement as president or a do-over election.

Update: Added link in photo caption to Washington Post explanation.

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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.

The legal case against Trump is clear

Published by digby on August 18, 2022

He did it, we know it, but will they take any action against him?

Three former prosecutors write about the January 6th legal case against Donald Trump:

After seven hearings held by the January 6 committee thus far this summer, doubts as to who is responsible have been resolved. The evidence is now overwhelming that Donald Trump was the driving force behind a massive criminal conspiracy to interfere with the official January 6 congressional proceeding and to defraud the United States of a fair election outcome.

The evidence is clearer and more robust than we as former federal prosecutors—two of us as Department of Justice officials in Republican administrations—thought possible before the hearings began. Trump was not just a willing beneficiary of a complex plot in which others played most of the primary roles. While in office, he himself was the principal actor in nearly all of its phases, personally executing key parts of most of its elements and aware of or involved in its worst features, including the use of violence on Capitol Hill. Most remarkably, he did so over vehement objections raised at every turn, even by his sycophantic and loyal handpicked team. This was Trump’s project all along.

Everyone knew before the hearings began that we were dealing with perhaps the gravest imaginable offense against the nation short of secession—a serious nationwide effort pursued at multiple levels to overturn the unambiguous outcome of a national election. We all knew as well that efforts were and are unfolding nationwide to change laws and undermine electoral processes with the specific objective of succeeding at the same project in 2024 and after. But each hearing has sharpened our understanding that Donald Trump himself is the one who made it happen.

As former prosecutors, we recognize the legitimacy of concerns that electoral winners prosecuting their defeated opponents may look like something out of a banana republic rather than the United States of America; that doing so might be viewed as opening the door to prosecutorial retaliation by future presidential winners; and that, in the case of this former president, it might lead to civil unrest.

But given the record now before us, all of these considerations must give way to the urgency of achieving a public reckoning for Donald Trump. The damage to America’s future that would be inflicted by giving him a pass far outweighs the risks of prosecuting him.

They lay out the case, first showing that Trump clearly knew he had lost the election and second that his involvement in trying to overturn it anyway was “systematic, expansive, and extraordinarily personal” — his phone calls, the witness tampering, the attempt to corrupt the DOJ, the pressure campaign on Mike Pence etc. Third, is Trump’s advance knowledge of violence on January 6th and finally his refusal to step in to stop the insurrection once it started. The article provides all the details to back up those conclusions and they are damning.

Their analysis:

On the first point, it is hard to imagine an offense that would more urgently call for criminal accountability by federal prosecution than a concerted and nearly successful effort to overthrow the result of a presidential election. It is an offense against the entire nation, by which Trump sought to reverse a 235-year-old constitutional tradition of presidential power transferring lawfully and peacefully.

The fact that a related state grand-jury investigation is proceeding in Fulton County, Georgia, relating to the part of the plot aimed at the Georgia vote count and certification process does not alter or lessen the urgency of this federal interest. Separate state and federal prosecutions can and should proceed when federal interests are as strong or stronger than the local interest.

Nor can there be any doubt about the crucial need to deter future attempts to overthrow the government. For the past 18 months, and presently, Trump himself and his supporters have been engaged in concerted efforts across the country to prepare for a similar, but better-planned, effort to overcome the minority status of Trump’s support and put him back in the White House. Moreover, if the efforts of the former president and his supporters garner a pass from the federal authorities, even in the face of such overwhelming evidence, Trump will not be the only one ready to play this game for another round.

As many have pointed out, deterrence requires that the quest for accountability succeed in achieving a conviction before a jury—here most likely made up of citizens of the District of Columbia. And the Department’s regulations make the odds of the prosecution’s success an important consideration in determining whether to go forward. In the case of a person who has made a career out of escaping the consequences of his misconduct, this is no small issue for the attorney general to take into account.

But as former prosecutors, we have faith that the evidence of personal culpability is so overwhelming that the case can be made to the satisfaction of such a jury. One of us—Gerson—has tried many difficult cases before D.C. juries with success. As a defendant, Donald Trump would open the door to all sorts of things that wouldn’t come into a normal trial, and the prosecutor could have a field day in argument about how this would-be tyrant tried to overthrow the government that has kept our nation free for two and a quarter centuries. Bottom line: Given what is at stake, even with the risk of a hung jury—leaving room for a second trial—there is no realistic alternative but to go forward.

Any argument that Donald Trump lacked provable criminal intent is contradicted by the facts elicited by the January 6 committee. And the tradition of not prosecuting a former president must yield to the manifest need to protect our constitutional form of government and to assure that the violent effort to overthrow it is never repeated.

 Donald Ayer served as United States attorney and principal deputy solicitor general in the Reagan administration and as deputy attorney general under George H. W. Bush. Stuart M. Gerson served as assistant attorney general for the Civil Division of the Department of Justice from 1989 to 1993 and as acting attorney General in 1993. He is a member of the firm at Epstein Becker Green. Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor and former Chief Assistant City Attorney in San Francisco, currently Of Counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy.

All of this sounds very convincing to me. But what do I know? I do have to say that the DOJ’s decision not to charge Meadows and Scavino with contempt of congress strikes me as a bad sign. Even if they both had a claim to executive privilege, which is very debatable, they should have been required to appear and answer questions that did not relate to executive privilege and assert their claim on a case by case basis. But there is such a thing as prosecutorial discretion and I have to hope their reasons for making that decision aren’t because they are being unnecessarily cautious.

But, you know, tick-tock…

The ongoing coup

Published by digby on August 16, 2022

They’re still at it

After Trump failed to order the military to seize the voting machines, they just did it themselves:

A team of computer experts directed by lawyers allied with President Donald Trump copied sensitive data from election systems in Georgia as part of a secretive, multistate effort to access voting equipment that was broader, more organized and more successful than previously reported, according to emails and other records obtained by The Washington Post.

As they worked to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat, the lawyers asked a forensic data firm to access county election systems in at least three battleground states, according to the documents and interviews. The firm charged an upfront retainer fee for each job, which in one case was $26,000.

Attorney Sidney Powell sent the team to Michigan to copy a rural county’s election data and later helped arrange for it to do the same in the Detroit area, according to the records. A Trump campaign attorney engaged the team to travel to Nevada. And the day after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol the team was in southern Georgia, copying data from a Dominion voting system in rural Coffee County.

The emails and other records were collected through a subpoena issued to the forensics firm, Atlanta-based SullivanStrickler, by plaintiffs in a long-running lawsuit in federal court over the security of Georgia’s voting systems. The documents provide the first confirmation that data from Georgia’s election system was copied. Indications of a breach there were first raised by plaintiffs in the case in February, and state officials have said they are investigating.

“The breach is way beyond what we thought,” said David D. Cross, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, who include voting-security activists and Georgia voters. “The scope of it is mind-blowing.”

A drumbeat of revelations about alleged security breaches in local elections offices has grown louder during the nearly two years since the 2020 election. There is growing concern among experts that officials sympathetic to Trump’s claims of vote-rigging could undermine election security in the name of protecting it.

The federal government classifies voting systems as “critical infrastructure,” important to national security, and access to their software and other components is tightly regulated. In several instances since 2020, officials have taken machines out of service after their chains of custody were disrupted.

It’s still happening:

Eight months after the 2020 presidential election, Robin Hawthorne did not expect anyone to ask for her township’s voting machines.

The election had gone smoothly,she said,just as others had that she had overseen for 17 years as the Rutland Charter Township clerk in rural western Michigan. But now a sheriff’s deputy and investigator were in her office, asking her about her township’s three vote tabulators, suggesting that they somehow had been programmed witha microchip to shift votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden and asking her to hand one over for inspection.

“What the heck is going on?” she recalled thinking. The surprise visit may have been an “out-of-the-blue thing,” as Hawthorne described it, but it was one element of a much broader effort by figures who deny the outcome of the 2020 vote to access voting machines in a bid to prove fraud that experts say does not exist.

In states across the country, including Colorado, Pennsylvania and Georgia, attempts to inappropriately access voting machines have spurred investigations. They have also sparked concern among election authorities that, while voting systems are broadly secure, breaches by those looking for evidence of fraud could themselves compromise the integrity of the process and undermine confidence in the vote.

In Michigan, the efforts to access the machines jumped into public view this month when the state attorney general, Dana Nessel (D), requested a special prosecutor be assigned to look into a group that includes her likely Republican opponent, Matthew DePerno.

The expected Republican nominee, Nessel’s office wrote in a petition filed Aug. 5 based on the findings of a state police investigation, was “one of the prime instigators” of a conspiracy to persuade Michigan clerks to allow unauthorized access to voting machines. Others involved, according to the filing, included a state representative and Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf.

Although Hawthorne rebuffed the request by investigatorsto examine one of her machines, a clerk in nearby Irving Township handed one over to the pair despite state and federal laws that limit who can access them. About 150 miles north of Hawthorne’s township, three clerks in two other Michigan counties turned over voting machines and other equipment to third parties, public records show.

The petition says tabulators were taken to hotel rooms and Airbnb rentals in Oakland County, where a group of four men “broke into” the tabulators and performed “tests” on them. The petition says that DePerno was present in a hotel room during some of the testing.

Officials got the tabulators back weeks or months later, in one instance at a meeting in a carpool parking lot. DePerno has denied any wrongdoing, as has Leaf,the Barry County sheriff. The DePerno campaign issued a statement calling the petition for a special prosecutor “an incoherent liberal fever dream of lies.”

Once election officials lose control of voting machines, the machines can no longer be used because of the risk of hacking. Moreover, voters can lose faith in the country’s electoral infrastructure when they hear about machines that have not been adequately protected, election experts warn.

Until recently, said Tammy Patrick, who works with election officials around the country as a senior adviser at the nonprofit Democracy Fund, “it seemed far-fetched that election networks could be exposed” in the way they were in Michigan. “Unfortunately, we have a number of instances in the last year or so where this sort of thing has happened around the country,” she said. “It is deeply troubling.”

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said in an interview with The Washington Post that efforts to “twist the arm of election officials to get them to turn over secure information” are illegal. She said it is important for law enforcement to act “not just to hold accountable those who have been trying to interfere with the process, but to look at the connectivity to see if there is a broader connection, not just in our state, but beyond Michigan to Georgia and Ohio and other states where you see this happening.”

Although the exact nature of connections between efforts in different states to breach machines remains unclear, the situation in Michigan is similar to ones elsewhere in which allegedly unofficial and unauthorized investigators sought evidence of fraud by gaining access to voting equipment. Some of those named in the Michigan case have been connected to cases elsewhere.

In Colorado, the Mesa County clerk, Tina Peters, was indicted in March on charges stemming from her effort to allow allegedly unauthorized people to copy the hard drives of voting machines in her county. Peters has denied wrongdoing. In Coffee County, Ga., a cybersecurity executive named in the Michigan case, Benjamin Cotton, said in court filings that he gained access to the county’s voting system information. In Pennsylvania, the secretary of state ordered the decertification of machines in Fulton County after she said they were improperly accessed by individuals seeking to investigate the 2020 election.

Election experts are worried that in some of these intrusions, voting tabulators may have been compromised or the exposure of serial numbers and other details about voting systems could make them more vulnerable to fraud. More broadly, they said, these instances undermine trust in voting.

Yeah, no kidding.

This mass delusion that Trump unleashed on tens of millions of our fellow Americans isn’t going away. It’s getting worse. And powerful people are taking advantage of the fact that Republicans are brainwashed and bold, believing that anything goes because their idol Donald Trump has been victimized. His lies have now fundamentally changed the country.

I’m growing increasingly concerned that this is going to end very badly.

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