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welcome to reality ~ triva
election news and items of interest
june 20, 2018
Noam chomsky: “Voting should not be viewed as a form of personal self-expression or moral judgement directed in retaliation towards major party candidates who fail to reflect our values, or of a corrupt system designed to limit choices to those acceptable to corporate elites,”
what kind of democracy condones vote suppression?
The Informed American Voter
headlines
*Kansas secretary of state defies court order, won’t register eligible voters
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Ohio’s Junk Mail Trick Led the Supreme Court to Approve Jim Crow Voter Purge
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Virginia Republicans Just Nominated a Confederate Apologist for Senate
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The Supreme Court Just Upheld Ohio's Aggressive Process For Purging Voters From The Rolls(ARTICLE BELOW)
*NATIVE AMERICAN CANDIDATE CLOSE TO MAKING HISTORY AFTER BIG PRIMARY VICTORY
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*'No offense, but I never vote.' Stunning apathy at in the heart of California's Trump resistance(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Ballot measures in Southern states would further restrict abortion rights
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*No longer ‘voiceless,’ Louisiana felons regain the right to vote
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Feds Indict Brothers for Scam PACs That Bilked Over $50 Million from Gullible Republican Donors(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Inside the Pro-Trump Effort to Keep Black Voters From the Polls
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Stacey Abrams becomes first black female nominee for governor
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Florida Election Official Illegally Destroyed Ballots in Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s Heated 2016 Primary Race(ARTICLE BELOW)
*A Lesson From The Primaries: Money Is No Guarantee
(ARTICLE BELOW)
MAP OF THE HYPOCRITES!!!
THE DAILY KOS ELECTIONS GUIDE TO THE NATION'S RELIGIOUS POPULATIONS, BY CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT(ARTICLE BELOW)
funnies(at the end)
*MAP PORN: IF "DID NOT VOTE" WAS A CANDIDATE...( article below)
The Political Punchline
Putting the Mock in Democracy
Kansas secretary of state defies court order, won’t register eligible voters
“I think ‘immediately’ is kind of open to interpretation,” his office said.
KIRA LERNER - thinkprogress
JUN 20, 2018, 4:38 PM
Two days after a federal judge overturned his documentary proof-of-citizenship law and ordered him to register eligible voters, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is openly defying the court’s order.
According to the Topeka Capital Journal, Kobach’s elections director instructed county clerks to continue demanding proof-of-citizenship from anyone registering to vote until they receive written instruction otherwise. A spokeswoman for Kobach said his office is still reviewing the 118-page ruling, which clearly finds the law unconstitutional and orders Kobach to attend six hours of legal classes for violating rules of civil procedure.
Danedri Herbert, the spokesperson for Kobach, said the judge was not clear when she instructed the secretary of state to accept voter registration applications without a document like a passport or birth certificate.
“I think ‘immediately’ is kind of open to interpretation,” Herbert said.
Dale Ho, the lead attorney for the ACLU, said Kobach’s defiance of the order did not appear to warrant emergency legal action.
“We are still reviewing and confirming the facts,” he told ThinkProgress. “To me, it looks like there are still some compliance problems but they do not appear to be emergency issues. We’ll continue reviewing.”
Ho also told the Capital Journal that Kobach’s decision to continue enforcing the law is “outrageous.”
In April, Judge Julie Robinson found Kobach in contempt of court for disobeying court orders “when he failed to ensure that voter registration applications covered by the preliminary injunction order became fully registered.”
Kobach, an experienced attorney, has repeatedly violated the law throughout the trial. Robinson sanctioned him on multiple occasions for violating rules of evidence. At trial, she had to explain to him and his staff attorneys basic rules of civil procedure.
“I’m not going to allow anybody to testify to a document that’s not in evidence,” she said at one point. “Evidence 101. I’m not going to do it.”
In Monday’s order, she took that discipline to a new level when she ordered him to attend additional continuing legal education classes.
According to the Topeka Capital Journal, Kobach’s elections director instructed county clerks to continue demanding proof-of-citizenship from anyone registering to vote until they receive written instruction otherwise. A spokeswoman for Kobach said his office is still reviewing the 118-page ruling, which clearly finds the law unconstitutional and orders Kobach to attend six hours of legal classes for violating rules of civil procedure.
Danedri Herbert, the spokesperson for Kobach, said the judge was not clear when she instructed the secretary of state to accept voter registration applications without a document like a passport or birth certificate.
“I think ‘immediately’ is kind of open to interpretation,” Herbert said.
Dale Ho, the lead attorney for the ACLU, said Kobach’s defiance of the order did not appear to warrant emergency legal action.
“We are still reviewing and confirming the facts,” he told ThinkProgress. “To me, it looks like there are still some compliance problems but they do not appear to be emergency issues. We’ll continue reviewing.”
Ho also told the Capital Journal that Kobach’s decision to continue enforcing the law is “outrageous.”
In April, Judge Julie Robinson found Kobach in contempt of court for disobeying court orders “when he failed to ensure that voter registration applications covered by the preliminary injunction order became fully registered.”
Kobach, an experienced attorney, has repeatedly violated the law throughout the trial. Robinson sanctioned him on multiple occasions for violating rules of evidence. At trial, she had to explain to him and his staff attorneys basic rules of civil procedure.
“I’m not going to allow anybody to testify to a document that’s not in evidence,” she said at one point. “Evidence 101. I’m not going to do it.”
In Monday’s order, she took that discipline to a new level when she ordered him to attend additional continuing legal education classes.
Ohio’s Junk Mail Trick Led the Supreme Court to Approve Jim Crow Voter Purge
Greg Palast Truthout
PUBLISHED June 14, 2018
Monday’s Supreme Court decision blessing Ohio’s removal of half a million voters was ultimately decided on the issue of a postcard.
Now that little postcard threatens the voting rights of millions--but it can be reversed.
The instant-news media, working from press releases, not the Supreme Court’s decision itself, said that Husted, Ohio Secretary of State v. A. Philip Randolph Institute was about whether Ohio has the right to remove voters who failed to cast ballots in two federal election cycles.
Nope.
Even the Court’s right-wing majority concedes that federal law strictly forbids removing voters because they skipped some elections. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 states that a voter purge program “shall not result in the removal of the name of any person … by reason of the person’s failure to vote.”
But here’s the trick: In 2002, the George W. Bush administration ginned up the Help America Vote Act. When a Bush tells you he’s going to “help” you vote, look out. Yet, naïve Democrats passed the act into law. The Help America Vote Act is filled with buried land mines that are still exploding.
Monday’s decision is one of those land mines. The Help America Vote Act, the Court concluded, blew open a giant loophole in the National Voter Registration Act’s protections. The trick is that Ohio does not remove voters simply because they missed a few elections. According to the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito:
Ohio uses a registrant’s failure to vote [only] to identify that registrant as a person whose address has likely changed.
The Court takes note that Ohio claims it had evidence that, in 2012, a whopping 1.5 million voters — an astronomical 20 percent of its total voter base — had moved their residence out of Ohio or moved from their county voting area. The 1.5 million voters were sent postcards asking them to confirm their mailing address.
It was a voter’s failure to return the postcard that cost them their right to vote. The Court majority said that the Help America Vote Act trumps the National Voter Registration Act, arguing that the act passed under George W. Bush “specifies that ‘nothing in [the National Voter Registration Act prohibition] may be construed to prohibit a State from using the procedures’ — [such as] sending a return card.”
The Justices ruled that a voter’s failure to return a postcard (which asks the voter to confirm their address) constitutes solid proof that the voter had left Ohio or moved to another voting district.
The plaintiffs, a coalition of voting rights groups, were gob-smacked. Plaintiffs argued that there are many reasons folks did not return the postcard, most likely that they threw it away as junk mail or never received it in the first place. But the Court majority found that, without specific evidence, the plaintiffs’ claim that voters just threw away the cards was speculative and “dubious.”
Jim Crow Is in the Cards
Writing for the four dissenters, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the effect of the Court’s decision was to disproportionately wipe out the rights of “minority, low-income, disabled, homeless, and veteran voters.” Sotomayor went on to cite an investigation revealing that Ohio’s purge operation had knocked out the registrations of 10 percent of African American-majority neighborhoods in downtown Cincinnati compared to only 4 percent of voters in a nearby suburban, majority-white neighborhood.
But that’s the point, Madame Justice.
But how? The Jim Crow result is in the cards.
I first discovered “purge-by-postcard” in 2014 while investigating mass attacks on voter rolls by GOP officials in a dozen states for Al Jazeera. I turned to direct mail experts, including Michael Wychocki, a Chicago-based adviser on mailing for Amazon and other companies that live or die by mail.
He directed me to the US Census Bureau’s massive study of mail return rates. Dig this:
And crucially, according to the Census study, 12 percent of mailings simply go astray—especially, says Wychocki, in poor, urban communities, where the tenants hop between apartments in the same neighborhood. And let’s not even discuss students and the homeless.
Designed to Be Thrown Away?
And that’s the Census Bureau, which designs mailings to get the highest response possible. Not so for the purge-by-postcard programs used by Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted.
I showed Ohio voting rights attorney Robert Fitrakis a postcard on which one’s voting rights hang, and he gave, word for word, the same response I got from another direct mail expert, Mark Swedlund (whose clientele include eBay and AT&T): “Looks like junk mail, you’d throw it in the garbage.”
Indeed, Wychocki inspected the cards, which are filled with blocks of small print with no images. He explained that the design violates every cardinal rule of direct mail solicitation. While Wychocki would not speculate on the designer’s motives, he said it looked as if the postcard was by someone who did not want the voter to respond.
And one such someone is Kris Kobach. According to documents obtained by the ACLU, Kobach provided Husted (and other GOP voting officials) a sample postcard to send to voters targeted for purge.
Why? There are two groups of voters in the 500,000 that Ohio purged based on “evidence” the voter has moved. Hundreds of thousands were purged who landed on the suspect list because they missed elections. Second, there were those who supposedly have registered in another state. Names of those identified as moving to another state were taken from the infamous Interstate Crosscheck list given Husted by Kobach, according to documents from Kobach’s office.
For example, in 2015, leading up to the presidential election, Kobach, secretary of state in Kansas, gave Husted the Crosscheck list of 423,484 names of Ohio citizens who supposedly had registered in another state, according to Kansas records obtained by an investigative team I was working with at Rolling Stone magazine. Kobach and Husted had originally sold the Crosscheck program to the public as a method of finding criminal “double voters” – those actually voting in two states.
But Kobach himself told me in 2016—when I confronted him at a GOP fundraiser in Wichita while working for Rolling Stone—that the primary use of his Crosscheck lists is to identify voters who have moved and registered in another state. Kobach’s office directs the national program to remove voters who fail to respond to a postcard, taking advantage of the nifty Help America Vote Act-shaped hole in the National Voter Registration Act.
That Kris Kobach led the way with the purge-by-postcard scheme is not surprising, given his long history of scams to disenfranchise voters of color, closely reported on by Truthout.
History of Vote Suppression
Which brings us to Sotomayor’s outrage that the majority “entirely ignores the history of voter suppression against which the [National Voter Registration Act] was enacted and upholds a program that appears to further the very disenfranchisement of minority and low-income voters that Congress set out to eradicate.”
We don’t need to look at all of US history. Husted’s own long record of purging, blocking and not counting voters of color is a history lesson in disenfranchisement all by itself.
In 2012 and 2016, I filmed the single early voting station in Dayton, Ohio, where Black voters lined up for five hours to vote. I also filmed the lines in a white Toledo suburb. Well, actually, there were no lines: white voters had a gigantic field of machines to choose from—plus cookies and coffee served.
The long lines for Black voters resulted from Husted’s order closing all but one single early voting station in each county. That meant one polling station for the 13,000 residents and cows in Vinton County and one polling station for 1.3 million residents of Franklin County (Columbus).
Ohio attorney Robert Fitrakis says, bluntly, that Husted is purging voters of color to “make Ohio winnable [for Republicans] in the only way he knows how — by stealing American citizens’ votes. And he’s counting on bigotry to get away with it.”
What Can Be Done?
The implications of the Supreme Court decision are unimaginably horrid, as states come up with spurious “evidence” that a voter has moved — “proven” by a failure to respond to a piece of junk mail.
The purge could be massive: A half-million in Ohio will undoubtedly lead to millions nationwide.
Normally, a Supreme Court verdict is the final word, the last rodeo.
But there is hope. On Wednesday, I spoke by phone with renowned class-action attorney Jeanne Mirer of New York. She explained that the civil rights groups lost on a matter of law: States may assume a voter has moved residence if they don’t return a postcard.
But what if the facts say otherwise?
Just the Facts, Ma’am
It’s really simple to find out if failure to return a postcard is evidence you’ve moved: ask the voter. Call them up, knock on their door: Mr. Webster, have you moved to Virginia?
If Mr. Webster and others say, “No, here I am, I haven’t moved” … well, then, the Court’s factual assumption goes poof! Because the National Voter Registration Act says that removal methods must be “reasonable.”
So, the way to challenge the Court’s decision is to prove that purge-by-postcard is unreasonable and bogus.
To get to these purged voters, we need their names. But Husted has steadfastly refused to give up his list of the damned. He knows that the release of the names of those purged will blow his case to smithereens.
So, this week, this reporter is filing a demand on Husted for the list of the purged. And I thank Mirer’s firm for taking on this enormous task, because in all, we are filing in 25 states where mass purges are conducted. (And her firm is working pro bono.)
Husted has so far stonewalled our polite requests for the information, but this new demand comes with a 90-day notice of a lawsuit.
And in Kansas, where these methods, postcards and Crosscheck lists are conceived, I am joined in my demand on Kris Kobach for his purge lists by the Kansas ACLU.
Strategically, we’re beginning by demanding that segment of the purge list that Kobach gave to Ohio and other states.
Through investigation, we have already obtained small parts of these purge lists — including the one targeting Donald Alexander Webster Sr., a 70-year-old Black voter in Dayton, Ohio. He is listed as allegedly moving from Ohio to Virginia because there’s a Virginia voter registered as Donald Eugene Webster Jr.
Webster has not moved from Ohio. I met with him in his Dayton home. And he swears he’s never been a “Eugene” or a “Junior.” He insists, “I vote every election and every primary, every one.”
Channeling Justice Sotomayor, he told me, “I remember the Civil Rights Act, I remember all of those things. Almost all gone.” He added, with a deep sadness in his voice, “Somebody dropped the ball. Maybe it was us, our age group, that we thought we didn’t have to fight anymore.”
Well, Mr. Webster, the fight is beginning. Again.
Now that little postcard threatens the voting rights of millions--but it can be reversed.
The instant-news media, working from press releases, not the Supreme Court’s decision itself, said that Husted, Ohio Secretary of State v. A. Philip Randolph Institute was about whether Ohio has the right to remove voters who failed to cast ballots in two federal election cycles.
Nope.
Even the Court’s right-wing majority concedes that federal law strictly forbids removing voters because they skipped some elections. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 states that a voter purge program “shall not result in the removal of the name of any person … by reason of the person’s failure to vote.”
But here’s the trick: In 2002, the George W. Bush administration ginned up the Help America Vote Act. When a Bush tells you he’s going to “help” you vote, look out. Yet, naïve Democrats passed the act into law. The Help America Vote Act is filled with buried land mines that are still exploding.
Monday’s decision is one of those land mines. The Help America Vote Act, the Court concluded, blew open a giant loophole in the National Voter Registration Act’s protections. The trick is that Ohio does not remove voters simply because they missed a few elections. According to the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito:
Ohio uses a registrant’s failure to vote [only] to identify that registrant as a person whose address has likely changed.
The Court takes note that Ohio claims it had evidence that, in 2012, a whopping 1.5 million voters — an astronomical 20 percent of its total voter base — had moved their residence out of Ohio or moved from their county voting area. The 1.5 million voters were sent postcards asking them to confirm their mailing address.
It was a voter’s failure to return the postcard that cost them their right to vote. The Court majority said that the Help America Vote Act trumps the National Voter Registration Act, arguing that the act passed under George W. Bush “specifies that ‘nothing in [the National Voter Registration Act prohibition] may be construed to prohibit a State from using the procedures’ — [such as] sending a return card.”
The Justices ruled that a voter’s failure to return a postcard (which asks the voter to confirm their address) constitutes solid proof that the voter had left Ohio or moved to another voting district.
The plaintiffs, a coalition of voting rights groups, were gob-smacked. Plaintiffs argued that there are many reasons folks did not return the postcard, most likely that they threw it away as junk mail or never received it in the first place. But the Court majority found that, without specific evidence, the plaintiffs’ claim that voters just threw away the cards was speculative and “dubious.”
Jim Crow Is in the Cards
Writing for the four dissenters, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the effect of the Court’s decision was to disproportionately wipe out the rights of “minority, low-income, disabled, homeless, and veteran voters.” Sotomayor went on to cite an investigation revealing that Ohio’s purge operation had knocked out the registrations of 10 percent of African American-majority neighborhoods in downtown Cincinnati compared to only 4 percent of voters in a nearby suburban, majority-white neighborhood.
But that’s the point, Madame Justice.
But how? The Jim Crow result is in the cards.
I first discovered “purge-by-postcard” in 2014 while investigating mass attacks on voter rolls by GOP officials in a dozen states for Al Jazeera. I turned to direct mail experts, including Michael Wychocki, a Chicago-based adviser on mailing for Amazon and other companies that live or die by mail.
He directed me to the US Census Bureau’s massive study of mail return rates. Dig this:
- While 90 percent of those 65 years of age and older return the Census form, only 55.4 percent of those 18 to 24 reply.
- Homeowners are 32 percent more likely than renters to return forms.
- Only 65 percent of Latino voters mailed back an initial Census form, as did 70 percent of Black voters—versus over 80 percent of “non-Hispanic whites.”
And crucially, according to the Census study, 12 percent of mailings simply go astray—especially, says Wychocki, in poor, urban communities, where the tenants hop between apartments in the same neighborhood. And let’s not even discuss students and the homeless.
Designed to Be Thrown Away?
And that’s the Census Bureau, which designs mailings to get the highest response possible. Not so for the purge-by-postcard programs used by Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted.
I showed Ohio voting rights attorney Robert Fitrakis a postcard on which one’s voting rights hang, and he gave, word for word, the same response I got from another direct mail expert, Mark Swedlund (whose clientele include eBay and AT&T): “Looks like junk mail, you’d throw it in the garbage.”
Indeed, Wychocki inspected the cards, which are filled with blocks of small print with no images. He explained that the design violates every cardinal rule of direct mail solicitation. While Wychocki would not speculate on the designer’s motives, he said it looked as if the postcard was by someone who did not want the voter to respond.
And one such someone is Kris Kobach. According to documents obtained by the ACLU, Kobach provided Husted (and other GOP voting officials) a sample postcard to send to voters targeted for purge.
Why? There are two groups of voters in the 500,000 that Ohio purged based on “evidence” the voter has moved. Hundreds of thousands were purged who landed on the suspect list because they missed elections. Second, there were those who supposedly have registered in another state. Names of those identified as moving to another state were taken from the infamous Interstate Crosscheck list given Husted by Kobach, according to documents from Kobach’s office.
For example, in 2015, leading up to the presidential election, Kobach, secretary of state in Kansas, gave Husted the Crosscheck list of 423,484 names of Ohio citizens who supposedly had registered in another state, according to Kansas records obtained by an investigative team I was working with at Rolling Stone magazine. Kobach and Husted had originally sold the Crosscheck program to the public as a method of finding criminal “double voters” – those actually voting in two states.
But Kobach himself told me in 2016—when I confronted him at a GOP fundraiser in Wichita while working for Rolling Stone—that the primary use of his Crosscheck lists is to identify voters who have moved and registered in another state. Kobach’s office directs the national program to remove voters who fail to respond to a postcard, taking advantage of the nifty Help America Vote Act-shaped hole in the National Voter Registration Act.
That Kris Kobach led the way with the purge-by-postcard scheme is not surprising, given his long history of scams to disenfranchise voters of color, closely reported on by Truthout.
History of Vote Suppression
Which brings us to Sotomayor’s outrage that the majority “entirely ignores the history of voter suppression against which the [National Voter Registration Act] was enacted and upholds a program that appears to further the very disenfranchisement of minority and low-income voters that Congress set out to eradicate.”
We don’t need to look at all of US history. Husted’s own long record of purging, blocking and not counting voters of color is a history lesson in disenfranchisement all by itself.
In 2012 and 2016, I filmed the single early voting station in Dayton, Ohio, where Black voters lined up for five hours to vote. I also filmed the lines in a white Toledo suburb. Well, actually, there were no lines: white voters had a gigantic field of machines to choose from—plus cookies and coffee served.
The long lines for Black voters resulted from Husted’s order closing all but one single early voting station in each county. That meant one polling station for the 13,000 residents and cows in Vinton County and one polling station for 1.3 million residents of Franklin County (Columbus).
Ohio attorney Robert Fitrakis says, bluntly, that Husted is purging voters of color to “make Ohio winnable [for Republicans] in the only way he knows how — by stealing American citizens’ votes. And he’s counting on bigotry to get away with it.”
What Can Be Done?
The implications of the Supreme Court decision are unimaginably horrid, as states come up with spurious “evidence” that a voter has moved — “proven” by a failure to respond to a piece of junk mail.
The purge could be massive: A half-million in Ohio will undoubtedly lead to millions nationwide.
Normally, a Supreme Court verdict is the final word, the last rodeo.
But there is hope. On Wednesday, I spoke by phone with renowned class-action attorney Jeanne Mirer of New York. She explained that the civil rights groups lost on a matter of law: States may assume a voter has moved residence if they don’t return a postcard.
But what if the facts say otherwise?
Just the Facts, Ma’am
It’s really simple to find out if failure to return a postcard is evidence you’ve moved: ask the voter. Call them up, knock on their door: Mr. Webster, have you moved to Virginia?
If Mr. Webster and others say, “No, here I am, I haven’t moved” … well, then, the Court’s factual assumption goes poof! Because the National Voter Registration Act says that removal methods must be “reasonable.”
So, the way to challenge the Court’s decision is to prove that purge-by-postcard is unreasonable and bogus.
To get to these purged voters, we need their names. But Husted has steadfastly refused to give up his list of the damned. He knows that the release of the names of those purged will blow his case to smithereens.
So, this week, this reporter is filing a demand on Husted for the list of the purged. And I thank Mirer’s firm for taking on this enormous task, because in all, we are filing in 25 states where mass purges are conducted. (And her firm is working pro bono.)
Husted has so far stonewalled our polite requests for the information, but this new demand comes with a 90-day notice of a lawsuit.
And in Kansas, where these methods, postcards and Crosscheck lists are conceived, I am joined in my demand on Kris Kobach for his purge lists by the Kansas ACLU.
Strategically, we’re beginning by demanding that segment of the purge list that Kobach gave to Ohio and other states.
Through investigation, we have already obtained small parts of these purge lists — including the one targeting Donald Alexander Webster Sr., a 70-year-old Black voter in Dayton, Ohio. He is listed as allegedly moving from Ohio to Virginia because there’s a Virginia voter registered as Donald Eugene Webster Jr.
Webster has not moved from Ohio. I met with him in his Dayton home. And he swears he’s never been a “Eugene” or a “Junior.” He insists, “I vote every election and every primary, every one.”
Channeling Justice Sotomayor, he told me, “I remember the Civil Rights Act, I remember all of those things. Almost all gone.” He added, with a deep sadness in his voice, “Somebody dropped the ball. Maybe it was us, our age group, that we thought we didn’t have to fight anymore.”
Well, Mr. Webster, the fight is beginning. Again.
just another racist!!!
Virginia Republicans Just Nominated a Confederate Apologist for Senate
He’s from Minnesota.
KARA VOGHT - mother jones
JUN. 13, 2018 12:55 PM
Republicans on Tuesday nominated their most controversial Senate candidate yet—a far-right Trump supporter who has built his political career around his defense of Confederate monuments. Corey Stewart, the chairman-at-large of the Prince William County board of supervisors, narrowly defeated Virginia House of Delegates member Nick Freitas in the GOP primary to take on Sen. Tim Kaine (D).
Stewart rose to national prominence last year during Virginia’s Republican primary for governor, when the Minnesota native spent the campaigndefending Southern “heritage,” vowing to preserve Confederate statues. Over the course of the race, he equated politicians who had advocated for removing Confederate monuments with ISIS.
Stewart made several appearances in early 2017 with Jason Kessler. Later that year, Kessler organized of the Charlottesville, Virginia, “Unite the Right” rally, in which white supremacists joined other far-right protesters to oppose the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee while chanting, among other things, “Jews will not replace us” and “white lives matter.” After a white supremacist killed a counter-protester, President Donald Trump blamed “both sides” for the violence. Stewart echoed that view, blaming “half the violence” on the counter-protesters.
Stewart’s run for Senate mirrored much of the rhetoric of his gubernatorial run. As Mother Jones‘ Tim Murphy reported from a Stewart campaign event last fall, Stewart gave a speech in which he said Democrats “fall into four basic categories: criminals, communists, crackheads, and weirdos.” He attempted to equate Antifa, the left-leaning anti-fascism movement whose members have sometimes engaged in street violence:
Stewart, whose own monuments cause has been embraced by white supremacists, cast Antifa as a wing of the Democratic Party. He accused Antifa of attempting to bomb a Confederate reenactment in Winchester in October—an investigation into a reported pipe bomb is ongoing but no motive or suspects have been identified—and then blasted Northam and Fairfax for failing to denounce the plot.
It was part of a general lawlessness within the Democratic Party, he said. “They absolutely love criminals,” he said, warning that Northam would turn Virginia into a sanctuary state (an idea Northam has rejected outright) and, in Trump fashion, recounting a years-old murder in Virginia Beach in which the criminal had been undocumented. “And did you know that this criminal alien scumbag has still never been brought to justice?”
At one point, someone shouted out that Democrats were “neo-fascists,” and Stewart agreed. “The neo-fascists, by the way, are the Democrats!” Stewart said. “They really are.”
At his victory party at a riverside bar in Prince William County Tuesday night, Stewart returned to these familiar themes. When he mentioned “Hillary Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine,” the audience erupted with a “Lock her up!” chant and cries of “Antifa Kaine.”
Stewart also described an America under siege from undocumented immigrants, faulting them for “suppressing wages, taking jobs, [and] committing crimes.” He offered a defense of Trump’s characterization of the international gang MS-13 from earlier this year, telling the crowd, “By the way, they are animals.” His supporters evidently agreed; they chanted, “Build the wall!”
Rhetoric along these lines sparked controversy throughout the race, leading Freitas to characterize Stewart and his supporters as “hate mongers” during the final days of the campaign. The Virginia GOP had initially sought an alternative to Stewart after last year’s sweeping losses in the governor and statehouse races. But this month, the party came to Stewart’s defense, with state chairman John Whitbeck saying, “If there were firm evidence of white nationalist sympathies, I would publicly ask any such candidate or official to resign.”
Despite the state party’s defense of Stewart, his nomination could cause headaches for Republicans facing hotly contested races in November. As of Wednesday morning, the National Republican Senatorial Committee had yet to congratulate Stewart on his primary win, even though it had done so for Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) and Rep. Kevin Cramer, who will challenge North Dakota’s Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp.
Stewart rose to national prominence last year during Virginia’s Republican primary for governor, when the Minnesota native spent the campaigndefending Southern “heritage,” vowing to preserve Confederate statues. Over the course of the race, he equated politicians who had advocated for removing Confederate monuments with ISIS.
Stewart made several appearances in early 2017 with Jason Kessler. Later that year, Kessler organized of the Charlottesville, Virginia, “Unite the Right” rally, in which white supremacists joined other far-right protesters to oppose the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee while chanting, among other things, “Jews will not replace us” and “white lives matter.” After a white supremacist killed a counter-protester, President Donald Trump blamed “both sides” for the violence. Stewart echoed that view, blaming “half the violence” on the counter-protesters.
Stewart’s run for Senate mirrored much of the rhetoric of his gubernatorial run. As Mother Jones‘ Tim Murphy reported from a Stewart campaign event last fall, Stewart gave a speech in which he said Democrats “fall into four basic categories: criminals, communists, crackheads, and weirdos.” He attempted to equate Antifa, the left-leaning anti-fascism movement whose members have sometimes engaged in street violence:
Stewart, whose own monuments cause has been embraced by white supremacists, cast Antifa as a wing of the Democratic Party. He accused Antifa of attempting to bomb a Confederate reenactment in Winchester in October—an investigation into a reported pipe bomb is ongoing but no motive or suspects have been identified—and then blasted Northam and Fairfax for failing to denounce the plot.
It was part of a general lawlessness within the Democratic Party, he said. “They absolutely love criminals,” he said, warning that Northam would turn Virginia into a sanctuary state (an idea Northam has rejected outright) and, in Trump fashion, recounting a years-old murder in Virginia Beach in which the criminal had been undocumented. “And did you know that this criminal alien scumbag has still never been brought to justice?”
At one point, someone shouted out that Democrats were “neo-fascists,” and Stewart agreed. “The neo-fascists, by the way, are the Democrats!” Stewart said. “They really are.”
At his victory party at a riverside bar in Prince William County Tuesday night, Stewart returned to these familiar themes. When he mentioned “Hillary Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine,” the audience erupted with a “Lock her up!” chant and cries of “Antifa Kaine.”
Stewart also described an America under siege from undocumented immigrants, faulting them for “suppressing wages, taking jobs, [and] committing crimes.” He offered a defense of Trump’s characterization of the international gang MS-13 from earlier this year, telling the crowd, “By the way, they are animals.” His supporters evidently agreed; they chanted, “Build the wall!”
Rhetoric along these lines sparked controversy throughout the race, leading Freitas to characterize Stewart and his supporters as “hate mongers” during the final days of the campaign. The Virginia GOP had initially sought an alternative to Stewart after last year’s sweeping losses in the governor and statehouse races. But this month, the party came to Stewart’s defense, with state chairman John Whitbeck saying, “If there were firm evidence of white nationalist sympathies, I would publicly ask any such candidate or official to resign.”
Despite the state party’s defense of Stewart, his nomination could cause headaches for Republicans facing hotly contested races in November. As of Wednesday morning, the National Republican Senatorial Committee had yet to congratulate Stewart on his primary win, even though it had done so for Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) and Rep. Kevin Cramer, who will challenge North Dakota’s Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp.
The Supreme Court Just Upheld Ohio's Aggressive Process For Purging Voters From The Rolls
The court split 5-4 on ideological grounds.
June 11, 2018, at 8:10 a.m.
Chris Geidner
BuzzFeed News Supreme Court Correspondent
The Supreme Court upheld Ohio's system for purging inactive voters from the rolls — a decision that could lead other states to implement its aggressive procedure that can be triggered after a person fails to vote in one federal election.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote Monday's 5-4 decision for the court, which was split along ideological lines.
Under Ohio's system, voters who do not vote in a two-year period are sent a notice from the state. If they do not return the notice and then fail to vote for the next four years, their voter registration is canceled.
The Supreme Court held that the state's process did not violate federal law.
Ohio had argued that its process was based on a provision of the National Voter Registration Act that allows states to remove people from voting rolls based on the grounds that they moved.
The A. Philip Randolph Institute, which sued the state, argued that the state, in fact, violated a different provision — which says that a person cannot be removed from voter rolls simply for failing to vote.
The court ruled that the state only uses the failure to vote "as a rough way of identifying voters who may have moved," but that it actually begins the removal process by sending "a preaddressed, postage prepaid card to these individuals asking them to verify that they still reside at the same address."
The court rejected the challengers' argument that Ohio's system violates the "Failure-to-Vote Clause." The clause, Alito wrote, "simply forbids the use of nonvoting as the sole criterion for removing a registrant, and Ohio does not use it that way."
Justice Stephen Breyer summed up the the dissenting justices' view that Monday's decision was an exercise in circular reasoning.
"Ohio, of course, says that it has a ground for believing that those persons they remove from the rolls have, in fact, changed their address, but the ground is the fact that the person did not vote—the very thing that the Failure- to-Vote Clause forbids Ohio to use as a basis for removing a registered voter from the registration roll," Breyer wrote on behalf of all four dissenting justices.
RELATED: 'Setback for Voting Rights': Supreme Court Upholds Ohio's Voter-Purge Process
The ruling, Justice Sotomayor writes in dissent, "entirely ignores the history of voter suppression against which the NVRA was enacted."
Justice Samuel Alito wrote Monday's 5-4 decision for the court, which was split along ideological lines.
Under Ohio's system, voters who do not vote in a two-year period are sent a notice from the state. If they do not return the notice and then fail to vote for the next four years, their voter registration is canceled.
The Supreme Court held that the state's process did not violate federal law.
Ohio had argued that its process was based on a provision of the National Voter Registration Act that allows states to remove people from voting rolls based on the grounds that they moved.
The A. Philip Randolph Institute, which sued the state, argued that the state, in fact, violated a different provision — which says that a person cannot be removed from voter rolls simply for failing to vote.
The court ruled that the state only uses the failure to vote "as a rough way of identifying voters who may have moved," but that it actually begins the removal process by sending "a preaddressed, postage prepaid card to these individuals asking them to verify that they still reside at the same address."
The court rejected the challengers' argument that Ohio's system violates the "Failure-to-Vote Clause." The clause, Alito wrote, "simply forbids the use of nonvoting as the sole criterion for removing a registrant, and Ohio does not use it that way."
Justice Stephen Breyer summed up the the dissenting justices' view that Monday's decision was an exercise in circular reasoning.
"Ohio, of course, says that it has a ground for believing that those persons they remove from the rolls have, in fact, changed their address, but the ground is the fact that the person did not vote—the very thing that the Failure- to-Vote Clause forbids Ohio to use as a basis for removing a registered voter from the registration roll," Breyer wrote on behalf of all four dissenting justices.
RELATED: 'Setback for Voting Rights': Supreme Court Upholds Ohio's Voter-Purge Process
The ruling, Justice Sotomayor writes in dissent, "entirely ignores the history of voter suppression against which the NVRA was enacted."
Native American candidate close to making history after big primary victory
Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, won her Democratic primary in New Mexico.
KIRA LERNER - thinkprogress
JUN 6, 2018, 8:38 AM
Deb Haaland, an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, won the Democratic primary Tuesday for a New Mexico district that has been held by Democrats for almost a decade. If she wins the general election in November, she will be the first Native American woman in Congress.
Haaland, a former chair of the state’s Democratic Party, won with a wide margin, getting almost 40 percent of the vote in a field with six candidates.
In an interview with ThinkProgress in March, Haaland credited New Mexico’s elected officials and progressive voting laws for allowing people like her to run for office.
“Here in New Mexico, we’re very fortunate,” Haaland said. “Our elected officials, our state legislators, and for the most part the administrations have worked very hard — we have good relationships with our tribes and pueblos.”
“I may not even be running for Congress right now if my state wasn’t that way,” she added.
Native Americans make up a little over 10 percent of the state’s population, and Albuquerque, in District 1, has the largest urban Native population. Haaland served as Barack Obama’s Native American vote director in 2012 and said she knows how important it is to engage Native people in politics and to encourage them to participate in elections.
“There have been elections in New Mexico where the Native population has actually made a huge difference in who got elected,” she said.
As a lawmaker, Haaland said she would fight to make Congress look more like the people it represents.
“If I win, I will wholeheartedly put as much effort as I can toward helping to get other women of color elected,” she said.
Haaland is joined by a number of other Native women also vying for seats in Congress this year, from both sides of the aisle. Democrat Sharice Davids, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation is also running for Congress in Kansas, three others are running for governors and, according to the New York Times, another 31 are vying for seats in state legislatures.
Haaland, a former chair of the state’s Democratic Party, won with a wide margin, getting almost 40 percent of the vote in a field with six candidates.
In an interview with ThinkProgress in March, Haaland credited New Mexico’s elected officials and progressive voting laws for allowing people like her to run for office.
“Here in New Mexico, we’re very fortunate,” Haaland said. “Our elected officials, our state legislators, and for the most part the administrations have worked very hard — we have good relationships with our tribes and pueblos.”
“I may not even be running for Congress right now if my state wasn’t that way,” she added.
Native Americans make up a little over 10 percent of the state’s population, and Albuquerque, in District 1, has the largest urban Native population. Haaland served as Barack Obama’s Native American vote director in 2012 and said she knows how important it is to engage Native people in politics and to encourage them to participate in elections.
“There have been elections in New Mexico where the Native population has actually made a huge difference in who got elected,” she said.
As a lawmaker, Haaland said she would fight to make Congress look more like the people it represents.
“If I win, I will wholeheartedly put as much effort as I can toward helping to get other women of color elected,” she said.
Haaland is joined by a number of other Native women also vying for seats in Congress this year, from both sides of the aisle. Democrat Sharice Davids, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation is also running for Congress in Kansas, three others are running for governors and, according to the New York Times, another 31 are vying for seats in state legislatures.
'No offense, but I never vote.' Stunning apathy at in the heart of California's Trump resistance
By Steve Lopez - la times
Jun 06, 2018 | 8:30 AM
Sure, it’s just a primary.
And the general election is five months away.
But is that reason enough, in a state that has screamed its political resistance loud and clear, to sleep through an election?
The answer, my fellow Californians, is yes.
Andrew Hernandez, 30, told me he had not voted but he had the materials at home and might still cast a ballot, though he’s registered in Sacramento and not Los Angeles.
I asked who was running for governor.
He thought for a moment, as if the answer might bubble up, but there was no fizz.
“I couldn’t tell you,” he said.
U.S. senator?
Hernandez shook his head.
About a third of the people I spoke to did vote, or intended to, and did know what was what. So my random and unscientific sampling, of about 20 people, matched some expert predictions that roughly 2 out of 3 registered voters would take a voting vacation Tuesday.
Early numbers indicate that in-person voter turnout, not including mail-in ballots, was nearly 13% in Los Angeles County. In Orange County, the turnout was 13%, a figure that includes mail-in ballots reported by Tuesday evening.
Voter apathy is nothing new in California. L.A. has picked a mayor with 4 out of 5 eligible voters blowing off the election. School board elections have drawn even fewer voters.
But this is the era of President Trump and the California resistance. We are in the middle of a national shouting match about the direction of the country, and there are no good excuses for making excuses about not voting.
“No offense,” a 63-year-old man told me, “but I never vote.”
And why is that?
“I don’t believe in the system,” he said, refusing to give me his name.
“I like Trump,” he said, “but let me tell you something: America’s never going to be great again.”
We have a little bit of everything in California, don’t we?
A young woman named Nina said she intended to vote, and thought she had registered, but discovered on election day that she’s not eligible yet.
Could she name a candidate for governor?
No.
For U.S. Senate?
Negative.
“Actually, I was thinking about voting,” said Kia Zomorrodi, 25. “But I didn’t do the research, and it would probably be better if I didn’t vote uninformed.”
He may be right. Zomorrodi couldn’t name any candidates on the ballot. Nor could his friend, who said he was registered but did not intend to vote, saying that California leans too far to the left for him.
Fair enough, but I saw quite a few Republicans on my ballot, and several U.S. congressional seats were contested, with Republicans trying to fend off Democrats and maintain control of the U.S. House. And on ballot measures, a vote by a Republican counts just as much as a vote by a Democrat, last I checked.
Look, I can understand why Californians were not expected to rush to their polling places in droves.
The wording of ballot measures can leave you in a fog, mouth open, eyes glazed.
Then you’ve got all the candidates for judge. Dozens of people you never heard of and hope to never meet want to administer justice. And choosing who among them are best qualified is left to laypeople whose only qualification is having seen a few episodes of “Law & Order.”
But let me remind you of the stakes in 2018 and beyond.
Two years ago, a candidate who insisted the first black president was African, mocked women for their looks, boasted about grabbing their privates, belittled his adversaries and was incapable of telling the truth got elected president of the United States. Whether you love Trump or can’t believe your eyes and ears, why aren’t you voting early and often at every opportunity?
California is home not just to the anti-Trump revolution but also to a growing Latino population at a time when race and immigration are at the center of state and national policy debates. And yet Kevin de León, who has shaken a fist at Trump, doesn’t appear to have rallied the troops against incumbent U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
Meanwhile, former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has gone from shooting for first place in his run for governor to hoping he isn’t humiliated by a third-place finish behind Democrat Gavin Newsom and Republican John Cox.
What happened to the emerging Latino vote?
The angry and energized youth vote?
To a top-two primary system that was supposed to jazz candidates and voters from all political parties?
And to the hand-over-heart sense of civic duty?
Was the weather just too nice Tuesday for anyone to be bothered?
“Generally speaking, people are not paying as much attention during primaries, and there’s less media attention during primaries,” said Mindy Romero, director of the UC Davis Civic Engagement Project.
Romero, who predicted a fairly normal turnout for this primary, said there’s been more political engagement because of the last presidential election and riveting issues such as mass shootings.
But she said that doesn’t necessarily translate into more voters, especially in a warm-up election with lots of candidates on the ballot.
“It’s potentially hard to cut through all of that clutter,” Romero said. “And on top of that, knowing it’s not the final decision makes it less motivating for voters.”
Romero said a lot of young people who got politically engaged through social media campaigns after mass shootings aren’t necessarily inclined to transfer all that passion into participation in a distrusted electoral process.
“Even habitual voters have trouble seeing the impact of their vote,” Romero said. “To me, that isn’t apathy. I think people care…. They care about their communities and their kids’ lives, and they want good elected officials making good choices. But they feel disconnected from the political process and don’t believe the system is there for them.”
Andrew Hernandez, the young man who told me he had his voting materials at home but hadn’t reviewed them, made that same point.
“I’m not uneducated,” he said, nor is he disinterested in politics.
But he is turned off by televised campaign ads that exaggerate and distort or that “prey on people’s fears.” He’s also a little disillusioned after voting for Hillary Clinton and watching Trump drive her to defeat.
“It goes back to feeling let down and to see a guy in office who doesn’t give a [rhymes with wit] and isn’t a diplomat,” said Hernandez, who expects to be more politically engaged once he gets over his malaise. “I think a lot of kids my age are angry. I can go out and protest, and kids are still going to get shot in schools.”
I understand, but are those reasons to walk away or to storm the gates?
The polls are open for 13 hours on election day, and if it’s too much trouble to squeeze half an hour out of your busy schedule, you can always mail in a ballot.
“I just voted,” Sutton Dewey, 29, told me. He said he had made a statement against the two-party system by voting for third-party candidates.
I asked why he bothered to take the time.
“I felt I wouldn’t have the right to complain if I didn’t vote,” Dewey said.
That’s the spirit.
A middle-aged woman from West Hollywood told me she had already voted and wouldn’t have missed this election.
“I voted for Republicans,” she said, and she hoped Newsom doesn’t become the next governor. “I don’t want to live in a sanctuary state.”
Adam Fratto of South Pasadena told me he understands the lament that it can be hard to make a difference with a single vote. He quoted a Chinese proverb:
“Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.”
Meaning what?
“There are so many layers between us and the people who make the decisions,” Fratto said.
But he voted, and he put a lot of thought into it.
He wants Newsom to win, so he voted for Villaraigosa.
What?
If two Democrats make it to the general, Fratto said, Republicans might be less inclined to go to the polls in November.
California, love it or leave it.
But as long as you’re here, quit making excuses and vote.
[Update: With more than 97% of the precincts reporting, less than 21% of registered voters had cast ballots.]
And the general election is five months away.
But is that reason enough, in a state that has screamed its political resistance loud and clear, to sleep through an election?
The answer, my fellow Californians, is yes.
Andrew Hernandez, 30, told me he had not voted but he had the materials at home and might still cast a ballot, though he’s registered in Sacramento and not Los Angeles.
I asked who was running for governor.
He thought for a moment, as if the answer might bubble up, but there was no fizz.
“I couldn’t tell you,” he said.
U.S. senator?
Hernandez shook his head.
About a third of the people I spoke to did vote, or intended to, and did know what was what. So my random and unscientific sampling, of about 20 people, matched some expert predictions that roughly 2 out of 3 registered voters would take a voting vacation Tuesday.
Early numbers indicate that in-person voter turnout, not including mail-in ballots, was nearly 13% in Los Angeles County. In Orange County, the turnout was 13%, a figure that includes mail-in ballots reported by Tuesday evening.
Voter apathy is nothing new in California. L.A. has picked a mayor with 4 out of 5 eligible voters blowing off the election. School board elections have drawn even fewer voters.
But this is the era of President Trump and the California resistance. We are in the middle of a national shouting match about the direction of the country, and there are no good excuses for making excuses about not voting.
“No offense,” a 63-year-old man told me, “but I never vote.”
And why is that?
“I don’t believe in the system,” he said, refusing to give me his name.
“I like Trump,” he said, “but let me tell you something: America’s never going to be great again.”
We have a little bit of everything in California, don’t we?
A young woman named Nina said she intended to vote, and thought she had registered, but discovered on election day that she’s not eligible yet.
Could she name a candidate for governor?
No.
For U.S. Senate?
Negative.
“Actually, I was thinking about voting,” said Kia Zomorrodi, 25. “But I didn’t do the research, and it would probably be better if I didn’t vote uninformed.”
He may be right. Zomorrodi couldn’t name any candidates on the ballot. Nor could his friend, who said he was registered but did not intend to vote, saying that California leans too far to the left for him.
Fair enough, but I saw quite a few Republicans on my ballot, and several U.S. congressional seats were contested, with Republicans trying to fend off Democrats and maintain control of the U.S. House. And on ballot measures, a vote by a Republican counts just as much as a vote by a Democrat, last I checked.
Look, I can understand why Californians were not expected to rush to their polling places in droves.
The wording of ballot measures can leave you in a fog, mouth open, eyes glazed.
Then you’ve got all the candidates for judge. Dozens of people you never heard of and hope to never meet want to administer justice. And choosing who among them are best qualified is left to laypeople whose only qualification is having seen a few episodes of “Law & Order.”
But let me remind you of the stakes in 2018 and beyond.
Two years ago, a candidate who insisted the first black president was African, mocked women for their looks, boasted about grabbing their privates, belittled his adversaries and was incapable of telling the truth got elected president of the United States. Whether you love Trump or can’t believe your eyes and ears, why aren’t you voting early and often at every opportunity?
California is home not just to the anti-Trump revolution but also to a growing Latino population at a time when race and immigration are at the center of state and national policy debates. And yet Kevin de León, who has shaken a fist at Trump, doesn’t appear to have rallied the troops against incumbent U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
Meanwhile, former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has gone from shooting for first place in his run for governor to hoping he isn’t humiliated by a third-place finish behind Democrat Gavin Newsom and Republican John Cox.
What happened to the emerging Latino vote?
The angry and energized youth vote?
To a top-two primary system that was supposed to jazz candidates and voters from all political parties?
And to the hand-over-heart sense of civic duty?
Was the weather just too nice Tuesday for anyone to be bothered?
“Generally speaking, people are not paying as much attention during primaries, and there’s less media attention during primaries,” said Mindy Romero, director of the UC Davis Civic Engagement Project.
Romero, who predicted a fairly normal turnout for this primary, said there’s been more political engagement because of the last presidential election and riveting issues such as mass shootings.
But she said that doesn’t necessarily translate into more voters, especially in a warm-up election with lots of candidates on the ballot.
“It’s potentially hard to cut through all of that clutter,” Romero said. “And on top of that, knowing it’s not the final decision makes it less motivating for voters.”
Romero said a lot of young people who got politically engaged through social media campaigns after mass shootings aren’t necessarily inclined to transfer all that passion into participation in a distrusted electoral process.
“Even habitual voters have trouble seeing the impact of their vote,” Romero said. “To me, that isn’t apathy. I think people care…. They care about their communities and their kids’ lives, and they want good elected officials making good choices. But they feel disconnected from the political process and don’t believe the system is there for them.”
Andrew Hernandez, the young man who told me he had his voting materials at home but hadn’t reviewed them, made that same point.
“I’m not uneducated,” he said, nor is he disinterested in politics.
But he is turned off by televised campaign ads that exaggerate and distort or that “prey on people’s fears.” He’s also a little disillusioned after voting for Hillary Clinton and watching Trump drive her to defeat.
“It goes back to feeling let down and to see a guy in office who doesn’t give a [rhymes with wit] and isn’t a diplomat,” said Hernandez, who expects to be more politically engaged once he gets over his malaise. “I think a lot of kids my age are angry. I can go out and protest, and kids are still going to get shot in schools.”
I understand, but are those reasons to walk away or to storm the gates?
The polls are open for 13 hours on election day, and if it’s too much trouble to squeeze half an hour out of your busy schedule, you can always mail in a ballot.
“I just voted,” Sutton Dewey, 29, told me. He said he had made a statement against the two-party system by voting for third-party candidates.
I asked why he bothered to take the time.
“I felt I wouldn’t have the right to complain if I didn’t vote,” Dewey said.
That’s the spirit.
A middle-aged woman from West Hollywood told me she had already voted and wouldn’t have missed this election.
“I voted for Republicans,” she said, and she hoped Newsom doesn’t become the next governor. “I don’t want to live in a sanctuary state.”
Adam Fratto of South Pasadena told me he understands the lament that it can be hard to make a difference with a single vote. He quoted a Chinese proverb:
“Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.”
Meaning what?
“There are so many layers between us and the people who make the decisions,” Fratto said.
But he voted, and he put a lot of thought into it.
He wants Newsom to win, so he voted for Villaraigosa.
What?
If two Democrats make it to the general, Fratto said, Republicans might be less inclined to go to the polls in November.
California, love it or leave it.
But as long as you’re here, quit making excuses and vote.
[Update: With more than 97% of the precincts reporting, less than 21% of registered voters had cast ballots.]
Ballot measures in Southern states would further restrict abortion rights
By Sue Sturgis - facing south
June 1, 2018
In a widely watched referendum held on May 25, the citizens of Ireland voted by a 2-to-1 margin to repeal an amendment to their constitution that effectively outlawed abortion. That country's abortion laws are currently among the most restrictive in Europe, with Irish women forced to travel abroad to obtain an abortion or to resort to clandestine and potentially dangerous procedures. Research has shown that laws restricting abortions don't lower rates but make them less safe.
But while Ireland is joining most of Europe in making abortion legal, at least in the early stages of pregnancy, the United States — and the Southern states in particular — are moving in the other direction. And this November, voters in two Southern states, Alabama and West Virginia, will weigh in on ballot measures that would add anti-abortion provisions to their state constitutions.
The measures, both placed on the ballot by the legislatures, come amid a state-level attack on abortion rights that intensified with the 2010 elections when anti-abortion conservatives took power in capitals across the South and the rest of the nation. Over one-third of all abortion restrictions enacted since the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion were enacted between 2010 and 2017, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research and policy organization.
And states aren't limiting access to abortion only: They are also restricting the availability of family planning services by blocking funds to providers that offer abortions. The campaign to do so has intensified since an anti-abortion group released deceptively edited videos in 2015 seeking to discredit Planned Parenthood. Last year alone, for example, four states including South Carolina and Texas limited certain family planning providers' eligibility for Medicaid, the joint federal-state health insurance program for low-income people and those with disabilities.
Opponents of the upcoming anti-abortion ballot measures say Republicans are putting largely symbolic questions on the ballot in a critical election year to try to drive conservative turnout. But conservatives say that if Roe is overturned — which President Trump aims to achieve through his judicial appointments — they want to ensure state constitutions have no provisions protecting abortion rights.
'A total ban' in Alabama
The Alabama measure is one of four questions that will be on the state's ballot in November. Another one would allow the display of the Bible's Ten Commandments in public spaces — the campaign for which is being led by the former chief strategist for former state Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, a Republican who lost his 2017 run for the U.S. Senate amid allegations of sexual misconduct involving teenage girls.
Alabama's anti-abortion ballot measure would make it state policy to "recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, including the right to life," and to state that no provisions of the constitution provide a right to an abortion or require funding of abortions.
The measure was sponsored by Republican state Rep. Matt Fridy, an attorney from Shelby County, and was overwhelmingly approved for the ballot by the legislature. Fridy has said he wants to ensure that "the Alabama Constitution cannot be used as a mechanism by which to claim that there is a right to abortion."
First elected in 2014, Fridy is up for re-election this year and faces fellow Republican Stephen Bryant in the June 5 primary. The winner will face Democrat Jack Jacobs, an attorney who has no primary opposition, in the November general election. As of late May, no committees to support or oppose the Alabama ballot measure had registered in the state, according to Ballotpedia.
Planned Parenthood representatives have referred to the Alabama proposal as a "trigger law" aimed at quickly blocking abortion access in the state should Roe be overturned. "The net impact is that it would completely outlaw abortion access in the state of Alabama regardless of the situation," Katie Glenn, the Alabama director of Planned Parenthood Southeast, told the Tuscaloosa News. "It is [a] total ban."
Alabama already prohibits abortions after 20 weeks except in cases where the woman's life or health would be endangered by continuing the pregnancy. It also limits public funding of abortion to cases involving rape or incest or those where the woman's life is endangered by the pregnancy. And it imposes a 48-hour waiting period for a woman seeking an abortion and requires minors to obtain parental consent.
West Virginia's 'right to restrict'
The anti-abortion measure that will go before West Virginia voters is one of two ballot questions they'll consider this November, with the other related to the legislature's authority to budget for the state judiciary.
Amendment 1 would add language to the West Virginia constitution stating that "nothing in this Constitution secures or protects a right to abortion or requires the funding of abortion." The proposal had 15 sponsors in the legislature — all of them Republicans and 12 of them men. It passed the state Senate by a vote of 25-9 and the House by a vote of 73-26.
Leading the campaign in support of the measure is West Virginians for Life, which had raised over $7,500 and spent over $4,100 as of late May. Though Ballotpedia reports that no committee has yet registered to oppose the measure, the reproductive rights advocacy group WV FREE and the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia have said they plan public-education campaigns against it.
Here's how the Charleston Gazette-Mail described the impetus behind the measure:
In 1993, the West Virginia Supreme Court overturned a state law that prohibited Medicaid coverage for abortions, except to save the life of the mother or in cases of rape, incest or fetal anomalies. Justices found that the law discriminated against poor women. Medicaid now pays for abortions found to be "medically-necessary," meaning for a woman's well-being.
Supporters of the resolution have said they want to undo that Supreme Court decision; they also said they want to make clear that state lawmakers have the right to restrict abortion.
West Virginia now prohibits abortions after 20 weeks except in cases where the pregnancy is a threat to the woman's health, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The state also mandates counseling on the potential negative psychological effects of abortion (despite science that calls such alleged effects into question), imposes a 24-hour waiting period for a woman seeking an abortion, and requires that the parents of a minor seeking an abortion be notified.
Last year for the first time, West Virginia joined the group of states that the Guttmacher Institute rates as "hostile" to abortion rights. Only one other Southern state — Georgia — is in that group. The 11 other Southern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia — are rated as "extremely hostile."
But while Ireland is joining most of Europe in making abortion legal, at least in the early stages of pregnancy, the United States — and the Southern states in particular — are moving in the other direction. And this November, voters in two Southern states, Alabama and West Virginia, will weigh in on ballot measures that would add anti-abortion provisions to their state constitutions.
The measures, both placed on the ballot by the legislatures, come amid a state-level attack on abortion rights that intensified with the 2010 elections when anti-abortion conservatives took power in capitals across the South and the rest of the nation. Over one-third of all abortion restrictions enacted since the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion were enacted between 2010 and 2017, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research and policy organization.
And states aren't limiting access to abortion only: They are also restricting the availability of family planning services by blocking funds to providers that offer abortions. The campaign to do so has intensified since an anti-abortion group released deceptively edited videos in 2015 seeking to discredit Planned Parenthood. Last year alone, for example, four states including South Carolina and Texas limited certain family planning providers' eligibility for Medicaid, the joint federal-state health insurance program for low-income people and those with disabilities.
Opponents of the upcoming anti-abortion ballot measures say Republicans are putting largely symbolic questions on the ballot in a critical election year to try to drive conservative turnout. But conservatives say that if Roe is overturned — which President Trump aims to achieve through his judicial appointments — they want to ensure state constitutions have no provisions protecting abortion rights.
'A total ban' in Alabama
The Alabama measure is one of four questions that will be on the state's ballot in November. Another one would allow the display of the Bible's Ten Commandments in public spaces — the campaign for which is being led by the former chief strategist for former state Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, a Republican who lost his 2017 run for the U.S. Senate amid allegations of sexual misconduct involving teenage girls.
Alabama's anti-abortion ballot measure would make it state policy to "recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, including the right to life," and to state that no provisions of the constitution provide a right to an abortion or require funding of abortions.
The measure was sponsored by Republican state Rep. Matt Fridy, an attorney from Shelby County, and was overwhelmingly approved for the ballot by the legislature. Fridy has said he wants to ensure that "the Alabama Constitution cannot be used as a mechanism by which to claim that there is a right to abortion."
First elected in 2014, Fridy is up for re-election this year and faces fellow Republican Stephen Bryant in the June 5 primary. The winner will face Democrat Jack Jacobs, an attorney who has no primary opposition, in the November general election. As of late May, no committees to support or oppose the Alabama ballot measure had registered in the state, according to Ballotpedia.
Planned Parenthood representatives have referred to the Alabama proposal as a "trigger law" aimed at quickly blocking abortion access in the state should Roe be overturned. "The net impact is that it would completely outlaw abortion access in the state of Alabama regardless of the situation," Katie Glenn, the Alabama director of Planned Parenthood Southeast, told the Tuscaloosa News. "It is [a] total ban."
Alabama already prohibits abortions after 20 weeks except in cases where the woman's life or health would be endangered by continuing the pregnancy. It also limits public funding of abortion to cases involving rape or incest or those where the woman's life is endangered by the pregnancy. And it imposes a 48-hour waiting period for a woman seeking an abortion and requires minors to obtain parental consent.
West Virginia's 'right to restrict'
The anti-abortion measure that will go before West Virginia voters is one of two ballot questions they'll consider this November, with the other related to the legislature's authority to budget for the state judiciary.
Amendment 1 would add language to the West Virginia constitution stating that "nothing in this Constitution secures or protects a right to abortion or requires the funding of abortion." The proposal had 15 sponsors in the legislature — all of them Republicans and 12 of them men. It passed the state Senate by a vote of 25-9 and the House by a vote of 73-26.
Leading the campaign in support of the measure is West Virginians for Life, which had raised over $7,500 and spent over $4,100 as of late May. Though Ballotpedia reports that no committee has yet registered to oppose the measure, the reproductive rights advocacy group WV FREE and the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia have said they plan public-education campaigns against it.
Here's how the Charleston Gazette-Mail described the impetus behind the measure:
In 1993, the West Virginia Supreme Court overturned a state law that prohibited Medicaid coverage for abortions, except to save the life of the mother or in cases of rape, incest or fetal anomalies. Justices found that the law discriminated against poor women. Medicaid now pays for abortions found to be "medically-necessary," meaning for a woman's well-being.
Supporters of the resolution have said they want to undo that Supreme Court decision; they also said they want to make clear that state lawmakers have the right to restrict abortion.
West Virginia now prohibits abortions after 20 weeks except in cases where the pregnancy is a threat to the woman's health, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The state also mandates counseling on the potential negative psychological effects of abortion (despite science that calls such alleged effects into question), imposes a 24-hour waiting period for a woman seeking an abortion, and requires that the parents of a minor seeking an abortion be notified.
Last year for the first time, West Virginia joined the group of states that the Guttmacher Institute rates as "hostile" to abortion rights. Only one other Southern state — Georgia — is in that group. The 11 other Southern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia — are rated as "extremely hostile."
No longer ‘voiceless,’ Louisiana felons regain the right to vote
Many, like Kiana Calloway, will cast their first ballots next year.
KIRA LERNER - thinkprogress
JUN 1, 2018, 1:49 PM
Forty-year-old Kiana Calloway doesn’t know what it feels like to cast a ballot.
He does know, however, what it’s like to be wrongfully convicted of first-degree murder at 16 years old, to be tried as an adult, and to serve 17 years in prison. He also knows what it feels like to live under strict parole for seven years, with a decade still to go. And as of Thursday, he knows what it feels like to stand in the Louisiana State Capitol besides dozens of people with criminal records as the governor signed a bill restoring voting rights to thousands of people like him.
“The energy was crazy,” Calloway told ThinkProgress. “When he introduced the bill, the whole room just roared. It was actually like a Pelicans playoff game.”
On Thursday, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) signed into law a bill that will restore voting rights to people with felony records who are on probation or parole, as long as they have been out of prison for five years. Both chambers of the state’s GOP-controlled legislature passed House Bill 265 with bipartisan support in May.
Roughly 70,000 Louisiana citizens are currently on probation or parole for felony crimes. According to the Department of Corrections, roughly 2,200 of them will be affected by this legislation when it takes effect March 1, 2019. Over the next few years, potentially tens of thousands additional offenders could also see their rights restored.
Edwards, a Democrat leading the deep red state, held a ceremony on Thursday as he signed the bill, flanked by returning citizens with felony convictions and their families and supporters.
“I had a camera and I was getting footage of everything,” Calloway said. “That was definitely historical and needed to be documented.”
Calloway says he feels fortunate to be out in the world to experience that moment. In 1996, he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms without the possibility of probation or parole. Two years earlier, New Orleans had had the highest murder rate in the country, and he said he was framed by Jefferson Parish prosecutors who were desperate to secure convictions. But Calloway maintained his innocence and in 1999, “by the grace of God,” he said a judge reduced his sentence to 34 years for manslaughter.
After he served half that sentence and was released from prison in 2011, he had to figure out how to make a life in New Orleans as an adult on parole. A few years later, he found Voices of the Experienced (VOTE), the advocacy group that pushed for the voting rights legislation, and began working as the director of the housing justice campaign.
“When I was inside, I prayed that there were people such as myself and the people affiliated with VOTE to fight for me,” he said. “Now I have that chance to be the voice for the voiceless.”
Still, despite his advocacy and involvement planning candidate forums in local elections, he couldn’t vote.
“I felt kind of extracted from the whole process, by me not being able to vote,” he said. “I was dedicating so much energy and knew who I thought would be a good fit for a position or seat, but I couldn’t voice my opinion or cast my vote. That kind of discouraged me.”
Advocates with VOTE, like deputy director Bruce O’Reilly, recognized that a successful voting rights bill in Louisiana would require support from Republicans. Lawmakers recognized that disenfranchisement affects people in all districts — not just in cities — and that everyone deserves forgiveness.
“The question for me and you is: Is five years enough to earn the right to vote after the parole board says you can go out there?” asked Republican state Sen. Dan Claitor during debate over the bill on May 16. “I think it’s a reasonable thing to do.”
Next spring, Calloway will get a chance to vote for the first time in the May 2019 general election. By then, a lawsuit brought by VOTE over the state’s felon disenfranchisement will likely have been heard by the Louisiana Supreme Court, and even more people with felony convictions could have their rights restored. Roughly 1.5 million people in nearby Florida may also gain the right to vote if a ballot measure, the Voting Rights Restoration Amendment, is approved in November. Similar progress could be made in Mississippi, where there’s also ongoing litigation.
Calloway said while he knows what it feels like to watch critical elections pass without having his voice heard, he can’t predict how it will feel to cast a ballot for the first time.
“I have to wait until I actually pull back the curtains.”
He does know, however, what it’s like to be wrongfully convicted of first-degree murder at 16 years old, to be tried as an adult, and to serve 17 years in prison. He also knows what it feels like to live under strict parole for seven years, with a decade still to go. And as of Thursday, he knows what it feels like to stand in the Louisiana State Capitol besides dozens of people with criminal records as the governor signed a bill restoring voting rights to thousands of people like him.
“The energy was crazy,” Calloway told ThinkProgress. “When he introduced the bill, the whole room just roared. It was actually like a Pelicans playoff game.”
On Thursday, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) signed into law a bill that will restore voting rights to people with felony records who are on probation or parole, as long as they have been out of prison for five years. Both chambers of the state’s GOP-controlled legislature passed House Bill 265 with bipartisan support in May.
Roughly 70,000 Louisiana citizens are currently on probation or parole for felony crimes. According to the Department of Corrections, roughly 2,200 of them will be affected by this legislation when it takes effect March 1, 2019. Over the next few years, potentially tens of thousands additional offenders could also see their rights restored.
Edwards, a Democrat leading the deep red state, held a ceremony on Thursday as he signed the bill, flanked by returning citizens with felony convictions and their families and supporters.
“I had a camera and I was getting footage of everything,” Calloway said. “That was definitely historical and needed to be documented.”
Calloway says he feels fortunate to be out in the world to experience that moment. In 1996, he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms without the possibility of probation or parole. Two years earlier, New Orleans had had the highest murder rate in the country, and he said he was framed by Jefferson Parish prosecutors who were desperate to secure convictions. But Calloway maintained his innocence and in 1999, “by the grace of God,” he said a judge reduced his sentence to 34 years for manslaughter.
After he served half that sentence and was released from prison in 2011, he had to figure out how to make a life in New Orleans as an adult on parole. A few years later, he found Voices of the Experienced (VOTE), the advocacy group that pushed for the voting rights legislation, and began working as the director of the housing justice campaign.
“When I was inside, I prayed that there were people such as myself and the people affiliated with VOTE to fight for me,” he said. “Now I have that chance to be the voice for the voiceless.”
Still, despite his advocacy and involvement planning candidate forums in local elections, he couldn’t vote.
“I felt kind of extracted from the whole process, by me not being able to vote,” he said. “I was dedicating so much energy and knew who I thought would be a good fit for a position or seat, but I couldn’t voice my opinion or cast my vote. That kind of discouraged me.”
Advocates with VOTE, like deputy director Bruce O’Reilly, recognized that a successful voting rights bill in Louisiana would require support from Republicans. Lawmakers recognized that disenfranchisement affects people in all districts — not just in cities — and that everyone deserves forgiveness.
“The question for me and you is: Is five years enough to earn the right to vote after the parole board says you can go out there?” asked Republican state Sen. Dan Claitor during debate over the bill on May 16. “I think it’s a reasonable thing to do.”
Next spring, Calloway will get a chance to vote for the first time in the May 2019 general election. By then, a lawsuit brought by VOTE over the state’s felon disenfranchisement will likely have been heard by the Louisiana Supreme Court, and even more people with felony convictions could have their rights restored. Roughly 1.5 million people in nearby Florida may also gain the right to vote if a ballot measure, the Voting Rights Restoration Amendment, is approved in November. Similar progress could be made in Mississippi, where there’s also ongoing litigation.
Calloway said while he knows what it feels like to watch critical elections pass without having his voice heard, he can’t predict how it will feel to cast a ballot for the first time.
“I have to wait until I actually pull back the curtains.”
scamming the suckers!!!
Feds Indict Brothers for Scam PACs That Bilked Over $50 Million from Gullible Republican Donors
Scam PACs make pitches across the political spectrum, evading regulators.
By Steven Rosenfeld / Independent Media Institute - alternet
May 30, 2018, 9:29 AM GMT
Federal prosecutors have charged two brothers with bilking Republicans across the country of “more than $50 million” in a giant scam where they posed as conservative political action committees (PACs) dedicated to furthering right-wing causes like supporting law enforcement and opposing reproductive rights.
“These nine PACS—which collectively raised more than $23 million between 2014 and 2017, and more than $50 million the last 10 years—were scams, operated to enrich the defendants and their co-conspirators,” the federal indictment said. “The PACs targeted victims across the country, including in the Southern District of New York, raising funds on the fraudulent basis that donations would support education regarding, and the political campaigns of those who supported, ‘autism awareness,’ ‘law enforcement appreciation,’ and pro-life causes.”
“In truth and fact, virtually all of the money raised was paid to the scheme participants or else used to perpetuate the fraud through additional telemarketing and fundraising expenditures,” the indictment continued. “Less than 1 percent of all donor money to the PACs was spent on political contributions during the relevant time period.”
The men charged, William Tierney, who went by the name Bill Johnson, and his brother, Robert Tierney, were based in Arizona. They were caught after filing falsified campaign finance papers with the U.S. Federal Election Commission, the indictment said. The scam PACs were: Grassroots Awareness PAC, Americans for Law Enforcement PAC, National Campaign PAC, Voter Education PAC, Action Coalition PAC, and Protect our Future PAC. They also “managed, operated or influenced” the Life and Liberty PAC, Republican Majority Campaign PAC, and RightMarch.com PAC, the indictment said.
“The scam PACS purposely solicited and received almost entirely small donations, below the $200 threshold for FEC itemized disclosure requirements,” the indictment said, noting the Tierneys and others “undertook efforts to avoid press coverage of the scam PACs, despite the PACs claims of national advocacy and awareness campaigns. William Tierney also monitored media articles about fraudulent PACS, including in connection with evaluating whether to increase their de minimis political donations to avoid the suspicion of journalists.”
Federal prosecutors said they were looking at other scam PAC schemes, leading to much speculation in the trade press for political campaign operatives about whether the Tierneys were, as some professional Republican fundraisers said, “a bad apple,” or part of a larger trend where conniving individuals pose as political committees to bilk a naïve public.
“This has a lot less to do with the political fundraising industry [than] some particularly bad actors, and unfortunately those people exist in every profession,” Dan Backer, a campaign law attorney who has represented PACs, told CampaignAndElections.com.
“Still, Backer noted there’s an ongoing grand jury investigation in Virginia into Conservative StrikeForce, the alleged scam PAC that was linked to Strategic Campaign Group. The Maryland-based firm was raided by the FBI last May.”
The arrests will hurt right-wing fundraising efforts, Rob Carter, a Republican fundraising consultant, told the website. “The short-term ramifications for conservative causes are negative because donors, conservative donors and donors in general, naturally will be more skeptical about giving to anything—at least for a while,” he said. “It looks like [the feds] think they have built an airtight case here or they wouldn’t have moved on it.”
Carter told the trade journal that the scam operation was “only the tip of the iceberg,” which was echoed by Ann Ravel, a former Federal Election Commissioner and Democrat appointed by President Obama. She said that many PACs follow a similar business model where they maintain “at least a patina” of apparent legitimacy by doing some political spending—while their organizers pocket six-figure salaries. That slightly less greedy combination makes them harder to prosecute because they engage in some political activities, even though those actions are fronts concealing a self-dealing scheme.
The scam PACs are not confined to conservative causes, according to an investigation by Politico.com earlier this spring. It wrote:
“The new PACs have feel-good names like Cops and Kids Together and Americans for the Cure of Breast Cancer. They have succeeded in raising millions of dollars from small donors in a matter of months—and spent most of it just as quickly, without supporting political candidates or making a mark on a policy issue. Their activities highlight an unpleasant truth: Political groups often receive less oversight and get more leeway than charities, even though they have to disclose more details about their donations and spending. Indeed, the Federal Election Commission has said it is all but powerless to crack down on scam PACs. ‘A lot of money can be collected without a lot of regulation,’ said FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub. ‘It’s like when they asked Willie Sutton, “Why do you rob banks?” He said, “Because that’s where the money is.” ’ ”
It’s an open question if the indictments, coming amid the busy 2018 primary season, will dent the mass communications that shadow anyone who follows politics. If anything, the scripts, telemarketing and other messaging used by the Tierneys and their associates are predictable and stereotypical, according to the descriptions in the indictments.
The “Autism Awareness” pitches “claimed to educate our community about autism spectrum disorder, and mobilize political support for autism research and services to help children with autism and their families.” Americans for Law Enforcement PAC called itself “an urgent effort to raise up the voices of everyday Americans in support of our nation’s police and sheriff’s deputies as they battle crime and keep our communities safe.” The anti-abortion National Campaign PAC said its mission was “to change hearts, change leaders, and change laws until the day arrives when every child is welcomed into life and protected by law.” The PAC’s mailer said, “We want to invest every penny we can in the big races to come, and make sure your donations to us are money well spent.”
The indictment said, “They did not ‘advocate on behalf of,’ or ‘educate [the] community’ about the issues to which they are purportedly dedicated. They were not ‘out there every day, persuading people and changing minds.’ And they did not, for example, ‘provide strong political support to our police officers and sheriff’s deputies’; work on ‘changing leaders and changing laws’ or with ‘allies in churches’ for a pro-life agenda; or ‘work to elect conservative Republicans’ or ‘invest every penny… in the big races to come.’”
Despite the federal indictments, the “Autism Awareness” website, a project of the scam Grassroots Awareness PAC, was still live, soliciting donations and petition signatures, on Wednesday.
“These nine PACS—which collectively raised more than $23 million between 2014 and 2017, and more than $50 million the last 10 years—were scams, operated to enrich the defendants and their co-conspirators,” the federal indictment said. “The PACs targeted victims across the country, including in the Southern District of New York, raising funds on the fraudulent basis that donations would support education regarding, and the political campaigns of those who supported, ‘autism awareness,’ ‘law enforcement appreciation,’ and pro-life causes.”
“In truth and fact, virtually all of the money raised was paid to the scheme participants or else used to perpetuate the fraud through additional telemarketing and fundraising expenditures,” the indictment continued. “Less than 1 percent of all donor money to the PACs was spent on political contributions during the relevant time period.”
The men charged, William Tierney, who went by the name Bill Johnson, and his brother, Robert Tierney, were based in Arizona. They were caught after filing falsified campaign finance papers with the U.S. Federal Election Commission, the indictment said. The scam PACs were: Grassroots Awareness PAC, Americans for Law Enforcement PAC, National Campaign PAC, Voter Education PAC, Action Coalition PAC, and Protect our Future PAC. They also “managed, operated or influenced” the Life and Liberty PAC, Republican Majority Campaign PAC, and RightMarch.com PAC, the indictment said.
“The scam PACS purposely solicited and received almost entirely small donations, below the $200 threshold for FEC itemized disclosure requirements,” the indictment said, noting the Tierneys and others “undertook efforts to avoid press coverage of the scam PACs, despite the PACs claims of national advocacy and awareness campaigns. William Tierney also monitored media articles about fraudulent PACS, including in connection with evaluating whether to increase their de minimis political donations to avoid the suspicion of journalists.”
Federal prosecutors said they were looking at other scam PAC schemes, leading to much speculation in the trade press for political campaign operatives about whether the Tierneys were, as some professional Republican fundraisers said, “a bad apple,” or part of a larger trend where conniving individuals pose as political committees to bilk a naïve public.
“This has a lot less to do with the political fundraising industry [than] some particularly bad actors, and unfortunately those people exist in every profession,” Dan Backer, a campaign law attorney who has represented PACs, told CampaignAndElections.com.
“Still, Backer noted there’s an ongoing grand jury investigation in Virginia into Conservative StrikeForce, the alleged scam PAC that was linked to Strategic Campaign Group. The Maryland-based firm was raided by the FBI last May.”
The arrests will hurt right-wing fundraising efforts, Rob Carter, a Republican fundraising consultant, told the website. “The short-term ramifications for conservative causes are negative because donors, conservative donors and donors in general, naturally will be more skeptical about giving to anything—at least for a while,” he said. “It looks like [the feds] think they have built an airtight case here or they wouldn’t have moved on it.”
Carter told the trade journal that the scam operation was “only the tip of the iceberg,” which was echoed by Ann Ravel, a former Federal Election Commissioner and Democrat appointed by President Obama. She said that many PACs follow a similar business model where they maintain “at least a patina” of apparent legitimacy by doing some political spending—while their organizers pocket six-figure salaries. That slightly less greedy combination makes them harder to prosecute because they engage in some political activities, even though those actions are fronts concealing a self-dealing scheme.
The scam PACs are not confined to conservative causes, according to an investigation by Politico.com earlier this spring. It wrote:
“The new PACs have feel-good names like Cops and Kids Together and Americans for the Cure of Breast Cancer. They have succeeded in raising millions of dollars from small donors in a matter of months—and spent most of it just as quickly, without supporting political candidates or making a mark on a policy issue. Their activities highlight an unpleasant truth: Political groups often receive less oversight and get more leeway than charities, even though they have to disclose more details about their donations and spending. Indeed, the Federal Election Commission has said it is all but powerless to crack down on scam PACs. ‘A lot of money can be collected without a lot of regulation,’ said FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub. ‘It’s like when they asked Willie Sutton, “Why do you rob banks?” He said, “Because that’s where the money is.” ’ ”
It’s an open question if the indictments, coming amid the busy 2018 primary season, will dent the mass communications that shadow anyone who follows politics. If anything, the scripts, telemarketing and other messaging used by the Tierneys and their associates are predictable and stereotypical, according to the descriptions in the indictments.
The “Autism Awareness” pitches “claimed to educate our community about autism spectrum disorder, and mobilize political support for autism research and services to help children with autism and their families.” Americans for Law Enforcement PAC called itself “an urgent effort to raise up the voices of everyday Americans in support of our nation’s police and sheriff’s deputies as they battle crime and keep our communities safe.” The anti-abortion National Campaign PAC said its mission was “to change hearts, change leaders, and change laws until the day arrives when every child is welcomed into life and protected by law.” The PAC’s mailer said, “We want to invest every penny we can in the big races to come, and make sure your donations to us are money well spent.”
The indictment said, “They did not ‘advocate on behalf of,’ or ‘educate [the] community’ about the issues to which they are purportedly dedicated. They were not ‘out there every day, persuading people and changing minds.’ And they did not, for example, ‘provide strong political support to our police officers and sheriff’s deputies’; work on ‘changing leaders and changing laws’ or with ‘allies in churches’ for a pro-life agenda; or ‘work to elect conservative Republicans’ or ‘invest every penny… in the big races to come.’”
Despite the federal indictments, the “Autism Awareness” website, a project of the scam Grassroots Awareness PAC, was still live, soliciting donations and petition signatures, on Wednesday.
Inside the Pro-Trump Effort to Keep Black Voters From the Polls
Breitbart staffer recruited Sanders activist Bruce Carter to get African Americans to support the Republican—or stay home.
By lauren etter and michael riley - bloomberg
5/29/18
Breitbart News landed an election scoop that went viral in August 2016: “Exclusive: ‘Black Men for Bernie’ Founder to End Democrat ‘Political Slavery’ of Minority Voters… by Campaigning for Trump.”
If the splashy, counterintuitive story, which circulated on such conservative websites as Truthfeed and Infowars, wasn't exactly fake news, it was carefully orchestrated.
The story’s writer—an employee of the conservative website run by Steve Bannon before he took over Donald Trump’s campaign—spent weeks courting activist Bruce Carter to join Trump’s cause. He approached Carter under the guise of interviewing him. The writer eventually dropped the pretense altogether, signing Carter up for a 10-week blitz aimed at convincing black voters in key states to support the Republican real estate mogul, or simply sit out the election. Trump’s narrow path to victory tightened further if Hillary Clinton could attract a Barack Obama-level turnout.
Bannon’s deployment of the psychological-operations firm Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 campaign drew fresh attention this month, when a former Cambridge employee told a U.S. Senate panel that Bannon tried to use the company to suppress the black vote in key states. Carter’s story shows for the first time how an employee at Bannon’s former news site worked as an off-the-books political operative in the service of a similar goal.
Carter’s recollections and correspondence, which he shared after a falling-out with his fellow Trump supporters, provide a rare look inside the no-holds-barred nature of the Republican’s campaign and how it explored new ways to achieve an age-old political aim: getting the right voters to the polls—and keeping the wrong ones away.
“If you can’t stomach Trump, just don’t vote for the other people and don’t vote at all,” Carter, 47, recalls telling black voters. It’s the message he says the Trump campaign wanted him to deliver. “That’s what they wanted, that’s what they got.”
The work Carter says he did, and the funds he was given to do it, also raise questions as to whether campaign finance laws were broken.
The group Carter founded, Trump for Urban Communities, never disclosed its spending to the Federal Election Commission—a possible violation of election law. In hindsight, Carter says, he believed he was working for the campaign so he wouldn’t have been responsible for reporting the spending.
His descriptions of the operation suggest possible coordination between Trump’s campaign and his nominally independent efforts. If there was coordination, election law dictates that any contributions to groups such as his must fall within individual limits: no more than $2,700 for a candidate. One supporter far exceeded that cap, giving about $100,000 to Carter’s efforts.
Another potential issue is whether the unusual role played by the Breitbart reporter amounted to an in-kind contribution.
“There are some real problems here,” says Lawrence Noble, who served as general counsel at the FEC during Republican and Democratic administrations and is now senior director and general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan advocacy organization. “I would think this is more than enough evidence for the FEC to open an investigation.”
The Trump campaign and the White House didn't respond to repeated requests for comment. Bannon dismissed allegations that he sought to suppress the black vote, blaming their lower turnout on Clinton. “When you ask them why they didn’t vote for her or why they didn’t turn up, it’s because they didn’t like her policies,” he told Bloomberg in an interview last week. Bannon didn't respond to separate requests to explain his involvement with Carter.
Carter’s work on Trump’s behalf ended badly, despite the campaign’s victory in November 2016. A little more than a week after the election, Carter’s financial supporters backed away from plans to work with him on ambitious urban-restoration efforts. In an email, one of them cited a background check on Carter but didn’t specify its findings. Carter acknowledges that he spent 18 months in federal prison nearly two decades ago after a felony gun-possession conviction.
While it’s impossible to precisely measure Carter’s effectiveness, Trump performed particularly well in the areas Carter targeted, says Dustin Stockton, the Breitbart reporter who recruited him. In Philadelphia, where Carter spent much of his time, Clinton won about 35,000 fewer votes than Obama did in 2012, and that drop was primarily in majority-black wards. Those ballots alone could have cut Trump’s victory margin in Pennsylvania by more than half. Nationwide, Trump garnered a higher-than-expected share of black voters, while Clinton won significantly fewer than Obama did four years earlier.
“Trump vastly outperformed the projection models in the 12 areas Bruce was targeting” in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida, Stockton says. “I never like telling people not to vote. But from a tactical and strategic position, we looked at it: If you could get them to vote for Trump, that was a plus two.” It was a “plus one,” he says, if they simply didn’t vote at all.
Carter’s unlikely conversion to cheerleader for Trump started in mid-summer 2016 with a call from Stockton. Broad-chested and 6 feet, 2 inches tall, Carter had become something of a B-list celebrity on the campaign trail, showing up at Sanders’s events in a tour bus emblazoned with the Vermont senator’s photo and yelling through a bullhorn to rally anybody who would listen. He spent months on the road for Sanders, with three of his teenage daughters accompanying him, selling T-shirts and other merchandise to help fund their tour.
Carter says his initial conversations with Stockton seemed more like a chat than an interview. At some point, the Breitbart reporter asked if he had ever considered backing Trump. “I said, I’m not going there,” recalls Carter, a registered Democrat who twice voted for Obama. But Carter had been so angry with how the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee had been treating Sanders that he wasn’t opposed to Trump winning. His anger crystallized when a mention of Carter’s views appeared in the DNC emails released by Wikileaks. So when Stockton asked if they could meet at the Democrats’ national convention in Philadelphia, Carter agreed.
They spent hours at the convention, hanging out. In retrospect, Carter says it felt like a courtship, if at times an aggressive one. Stockton showed Carter a movie called Clinton Cash, which Breitbart was screening in Philadelphia for disaffected Sanders supporters. He discussed Clinton’s shortcomings and the fresh start Trump could offer. “We just kind of struck up a friendship,” says Stockton. “We wanted to make him aware of some of the research that Breitbart was pushing at the time.”
The two chatted regularly after the convention by phone. On Aug. 17, Bannon, then Breitbart’s executive chairman, was named chief of the campaign. The announcement coincided with a push by Stockton to formalize Carter’s role. He says Stockton dangled an intriguing promise—a chance to engage with Bannon. That pushed him over the top: He endorsed Trump.
Stockton and Carter sketched out plans for him to travel to swing states. Carter created a website and launched a GoFundMe campaign that raised about $7,000. On Aug. 26, about 10 weeks before the November 2016 elections, Breitbart published Stockton’s exclusive about Carter.
Not long after, Carter replaced his “Black Men for Bernie” T-shirt with one that sported a black-and-red logo depicting “Trump for Urban Communities,” and he hit the road. Across battleground states, he visited churches, street corners, and storefronts. About that time, Carter says, Stockton introduced him to Bannon.
Carter sent an email to Bannon on Sept. 2 seeking money to sustain the effort. He asked that it be funded by “either Trump personally (best case), the RNC, another donor or the Trump campaign,” according to the email. Five days later, Carter received an email from Bannon, introducing Karen Giorno, a senior Trump campaign adviser. Later that day, Carter replied to Bannon and Giorno: “Per my conversation with Steve: ‘Florida, Philadelphia and North Carolina are the three initial markets we will target. Our goal and mission is simple to inform Urban Communities as to why Donald Trump is the only option if they want their communities RESTORED.’”
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At each stop, Carter argued that Trump’s business experience would enable him to revive urban neighborhoods in ways Democrats had failed to do. He targeted such places as a barber shop in DeSoto, Tex., a town whose population is 70 percent black.
“So here’s why I’m here,” he begins, according to one video. “Everybody here is voting for Hillary … but let me give you a little history on Hillary. If you understood and saw that Hillary saw young black men as super-predators, would that affect you?” One patron nods his head, acknowledging one of Clinton’s more infamous remarks during her husband’s administration.
The message wasn’t always easy to deliver. People threw rocks at Carter’s Trump van as he steered through low-income housing projects. At one stop in Philadelphia, an elderly man threatened to beat him with a cane. Often, it was impossible to persuade black voters to support a candidate who had strong backing from white nationalist groups. In those cases, he urged them to simply stay home on Election Day.
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In the final weeks of October, Carter’s operation announced a “Don’t Vote Early” campaign designed to convince black voters not to take advantage of early voting, which tended to build up banks of votes for Democrats. Days before the election, Carter and his team made jabs at Clinton for appearing at rallies alongside stars such as Jay-Z and Beyoncé. “We said Hillary Clinton thinks all black people like rap and like to shake their booties,” he recalls. “It’s an insult.”
As the campaign drew to a close, Carter says, he genuinely believed Trump had big plans for urban neighborhoods. Carter outlined to Blanton in an email a daily strategy for the final days of the campaign. It included the cities he would canvass and an announcement he would make about a Trump-backed public-private partnership that was supposed to raise $1 billion over the administration’s first 24 months to invest in urban communities.
Alexandra Preate, a spokeswoman for Bannon, Breitbart News, and Mercer who runs a New York-based public relations firm called CapitalHQ, circulated a draft press release touting Carter’s efforts. It was sent to Blanton and Iadonisi, among others. The release promised that Trump would create a forgiveness program for non-violent offenders, staff a panel of single mothers to discuss the difficulties of unwanted pregnancies, and establish an Urban Community Commissioner and a Director of Community Justice to investigate police-involved shootings.
On Oct. 26, Trump gave what his campaign billed as a major policy speech in Charlotte. He laid out a “new deal for Black America” grounded in safe communities, better education, and higher-paying jobs.
Shortly after Election Day, Carter’s backers cut ties with him. In an email that Carter provided, Pillsbury cited a background check performed by Blanton that “prevented the campaign and Darren from being able to go any further with you.” Carter says he has never tried to hide his past. He thought it was odd if Blanton did a background check only after the election and Trump had won.
Carter’s work on Trump’s behalf exacted a personal price, leaving deep and lasting divisions in his family. Some of Carter’s children were horrified that their father had backed Trump. In one instance, a month after Pillsbury and Blanton severed their relationship with Carter, an alleged physical altercation over his support for the president-elect led his former girlfriend to obtain a protective order against him.
In early April, Carter got another cold call, this time from somebody who suggested he meet Mark Burns, a black Republican pastor and vocal Trump supporter from South Carolina who’s running to fill a House seat. On April 11, the two appeared together at a news conference in Greenville, where they announced an effort to register 75,000 voters.
Carter is also working on a new political movement that he calls the People’s Ticket—a coalition of single mothers, felons, hospitality workers, and those who owe child support—to “hold accountable” Republicans and Democrats at the polls in 2018 and ensure they deliver on promises for urban communities.
“I did everything that I said I would do,” Carter says, “and I did it in good faith.”
If the splashy, counterintuitive story, which circulated on such conservative websites as Truthfeed and Infowars, wasn't exactly fake news, it was carefully orchestrated.
The story’s writer—an employee of the conservative website run by Steve Bannon before he took over Donald Trump’s campaign—spent weeks courting activist Bruce Carter to join Trump’s cause. He approached Carter under the guise of interviewing him. The writer eventually dropped the pretense altogether, signing Carter up for a 10-week blitz aimed at convincing black voters in key states to support the Republican real estate mogul, or simply sit out the election. Trump’s narrow path to victory tightened further if Hillary Clinton could attract a Barack Obama-level turnout.
Bannon’s deployment of the psychological-operations firm Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 campaign drew fresh attention this month, when a former Cambridge employee told a U.S. Senate panel that Bannon tried to use the company to suppress the black vote in key states. Carter’s story shows for the first time how an employee at Bannon’s former news site worked as an off-the-books political operative in the service of a similar goal.
Carter’s recollections and correspondence, which he shared after a falling-out with his fellow Trump supporters, provide a rare look inside the no-holds-barred nature of the Republican’s campaign and how it explored new ways to achieve an age-old political aim: getting the right voters to the polls—and keeping the wrong ones away.
“If you can’t stomach Trump, just don’t vote for the other people and don’t vote at all,” Carter, 47, recalls telling black voters. It’s the message he says the Trump campaign wanted him to deliver. “That’s what they wanted, that’s what they got.”
The work Carter says he did, and the funds he was given to do it, also raise questions as to whether campaign finance laws were broken.
The group Carter founded, Trump for Urban Communities, never disclosed its spending to the Federal Election Commission—a possible violation of election law. In hindsight, Carter says, he believed he was working for the campaign so he wouldn’t have been responsible for reporting the spending.
His descriptions of the operation suggest possible coordination between Trump’s campaign and his nominally independent efforts. If there was coordination, election law dictates that any contributions to groups such as his must fall within individual limits: no more than $2,700 for a candidate. One supporter far exceeded that cap, giving about $100,000 to Carter’s efforts.
Another potential issue is whether the unusual role played by the Breitbart reporter amounted to an in-kind contribution.
“There are some real problems here,” says Lawrence Noble, who served as general counsel at the FEC during Republican and Democratic administrations and is now senior director and general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan advocacy organization. “I would think this is more than enough evidence for the FEC to open an investigation.”
The Trump campaign and the White House didn't respond to repeated requests for comment. Bannon dismissed allegations that he sought to suppress the black vote, blaming their lower turnout on Clinton. “When you ask them why they didn’t vote for her or why they didn’t turn up, it’s because they didn’t like her policies,” he told Bloomberg in an interview last week. Bannon didn't respond to separate requests to explain his involvement with Carter.
Carter’s work on Trump’s behalf ended badly, despite the campaign’s victory in November 2016. A little more than a week after the election, Carter’s financial supporters backed away from plans to work with him on ambitious urban-restoration efforts. In an email, one of them cited a background check on Carter but didn’t specify its findings. Carter acknowledges that he spent 18 months in federal prison nearly two decades ago after a felony gun-possession conviction.
While it’s impossible to precisely measure Carter’s effectiveness, Trump performed particularly well in the areas Carter targeted, says Dustin Stockton, the Breitbart reporter who recruited him. In Philadelphia, where Carter spent much of his time, Clinton won about 35,000 fewer votes than Obama did in 2012, and that drop was primarily in majority-black wards. Those ballots alone could have cut Trump’s victory margin in Pennsylvania by more than half. Nationwide, Trump garnered a higher-than-expected share of black voters, while Clinton won significantly fewer than Obama did four years earlier.
“Trump vastly outperformed the projection models in the 12 areas Bruce was targeting” in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida, Stockton says. “I never like telling people not to vote. But from a tactical and strategic position, we looked at it: If you could get them to vote for Trump, that was a plus two.” It was a “plus one,” he says, if they simply didn’t vote at all.
Carter’s unlikely conversion to cheerleader for Trump started in mid-summer 2016 with a call from Stockton. Broad-chested and 6 feet, 2 inches tall, Carter had become something of a B-list celebrity on the campaign trail, showing up at Sanders’s events in a tour bus emblazoned with the Vermont senator’s photo and yelling through a bullhorn to rally anybody who would listen. He spent months on the road for Sanders, with three of his teenage daughters accompanying him, selling T-shirts and other merchandise to help fund their tour.
Carter says his initial conversations with Stockton seemed more like a chat than an interview. At some point, the Breitbart reporter asked if he had ever considered backing Trump. “I said, I’m not going there,” recalls Carter, a registered Democrat who twice voted for Obama. But Carter had been so angry with how the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee had been treating Sanders that he wasn’t opposed to Trump winning. His anger crystallized when a mention of Carter’s views appeared in the DNC emails released by Wikileaks. So when Stockton asked if they could meet at the Democrats’ national convention in Philadelphia, Carter agreed.
They spent hours at the convention, hanging out. In retrospect, Carter says it felt like a courtship, if at times an aggressive one. Stockton showed Carter a movie called Clinton Cash, which Breitbart was screening in Philadelphia for disaffected Sanders supporters. He discussed Clinton’s shortcomings and the fresh start Trump could offer. “We just kind of struck up a friendship,” says Stockton. “We wanted to make him aware of some of the research that Breitbart was pushing at the time.”
The two chatted regularly after the convention by phone. On Aug. 17, Bannon, then Breitbart’s executive chairman, was named chief of the campaign. The announcement coincided with a push by Stockton to formalize Carter’s role. He says Stockton dangled an intriguing promise—a chance to engage with Bannon. That pushed him over the top: He endorsed Trump.
Stockton and Carter sketched out plans for him to travel to swing states. Carter created a website and launched a GoFundMe campaign that raised about $7,000. On Aug. 26, about 10 weeks before the November 2016 elections, Breitbart published Stockton’s exclusive about Carter.
Not long after, Carter replaced his “Black Men for Bernie” T-shirt with one that sported a black-and-red logo depicting “Trump for Urban Communities,” and he hit the road. Across battleground states, he visited churches, street corners, and storefronts. About that time, Carter says, Stockton introduced him to Bannon.
Carter sent an email to Bannon on Sept. 2 seeking money to sustain the effort. He asked that it be funded by “either Trump personally (best case), the RNC, another donor or the Trump campaign,” according to the email. Five days later, Carter received an email from Bannon, introducing Karen Giorno, a senior Trump campaign adviser. Later that day, Carter replied to Bannon and Giorno: “Per my conversation with Steve: ‘Florida, Philadelphia and North Carolina are the three initial markets we will target. Our goal and mission is simple to inform Urban Communities as to why Donald Trump is the only option if they want their communities RESTORED.’”
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At each stop, Carter argued that Trump’s business experience would enable him to revive urban neighborhoods in ways Democrats had failed to do. He targeted such places as a barber shop in DeSoto, Tex., a town whose population is 70 percent black.
“So here’s why I’m here,” he begins, according to one video. “Everybody here is voting for Hillary … but let me give you a little history on Hillary. If you understood and saw that Hillary saw young black men as super-predators, would that affect you?” One patron nods his head, acknowledging one of Clinton’s more infamous remarks during her husband’s administration.
The message wasn’t always easy to deliver. People threw rocks at Carter’s Trump van as he steered through low-income housing projects. At one stop in Philadelphia, an elderly man threatened to beat him with a cane. Often, it was impossible to persuade black voters to support a candidate who had strong backing from white nationalist groups. In those cases, he urged them to simply stay home on Election Day.
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In the final weeks of October, Carter’s operation announced a “Don’t Vote Early” campaign designed to convince black voters not to take advantage of early voting, which tended to build up banks of votes for Democrats. Days before the election, Carter and his team made jabs at Clinton for appearing at rallies alongside stars such as Jay-Z and Beyoncé. “We said Hillary Clinton thinks all black people like rap and like to shake their booties,” he recalls. “It’s an insult.”
As the campaign drew to a close, Carter says, he genuinely believed Trump had big plans for urban neighborhoods. Carter outlined to Blanton in an email a daily strategy for the final days of the campaign. It included the cities he would canvass and an announcement he would make about a Trump-backed public-private partnership that was supposed to raise $1 billion over the administration’s first 24 months to invest in urban communities.
Alexandra Preate, a spokeswoman for Bannon, Breitbart News, and Mercer who runs a New York-based public relations firm called CapitalHQ, circulated a draft press release touting Carter’s efforts. It was sent to Blanton and Iadonisi, among others. The release promised that Trump would create a forgiveness program for non-violent offenders, staff a panel of single mothers to discuss the difficulties of unwanted pregnancies, and establish an Urban Community Commissioner and a Director of Community Justice to investigate police-involved shootings.
On Oct. 26, Trump gave what his campaign billed as a major policy speech in Charlotte. He laid out a “new deal for Black America” grounded in safe communities, better education, and higher-paying jobs.
Shortly after Election Day, Carter’s backers cut ties with him. In an email that Carter provided, Pillsbury cited a background check performed by Blanton that “prevented the campaign and Darren from being able to go any further with you.” Carter says he has never tried to hide his past. He thought it was odd if Blanton did a background check only after the election and Trump had won.
Carter’s work on Trump’s behalf exacted a personal price, leaving deep and lasting divisions in his family. Some of Carter’s children were horrified that their father had backed Trump. In one instance, a month after Pillsbury and Blanton severed their relationship with Carter, an alleged physical altercation over his support for the president-elect led his former girlfriend to obtain a protective order against him.
In early April, Carter got another cold call, this time from somebody who suggested he meet Mark Burns, a black Republican pastor and vocal Trump supporter from South Carolina who’s running to fill a House seat. On April 11, the two appeared together at a news conference in Greenville, where they announced an effort to register 75,000 voters.
Carter is also working on a new political movement that he calls the People’s Ticket—a coalition of single mothers, felons, hospitality workers, and those who owe child support—to “hold accountable” Republicans and Democrats at the polls in 2018 and ensure they deliver on promises for urban communities.
“I did everything that I said I would do,” Carter says, “and I did it in good faith.”
Stacey Abrams becomes first black female nominee for governor
Victory in Georgia’s Democratic primary is among most consequential in series of triumphs by female candidates ahead of midterm elections
Sabrina Siddiqui in Washington
the guardian
Wed 23 May 2018 00.10 EDT
For the first time in the US, voters have chosen a black woman as nominee for state governor after Stacey Abrams declared victory in Georgia’s Democratic primary.
Abrams – a former state House minority leader and progressive who earned support from both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders – beat Stacey Evans, also a former state representative. The result was among the most consequential in a series of primaries that brought successes for female candidates across the country ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.
Abrams will attempt to make history as both America’s first black female governor and the first woman to hold the position in Georgia. The Republican primary, which was largely contested among a group of white men, looked headed for a run-off as neither of the candidates secured a majority of the vote.
Abrams’s victory came hours after Amy McGrath, a retired Marine fighter pilot, defeated the Democratic party’s establishment candidate in the primary race for a House seat in Kentucky.
McGrath, who fashioned herself as part of a younger generation seeking to challenge the old guard in Washington, beat the Lexington mayor, Jim Gray, a millionaire who had been backed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Primaries were also held in Arkansas, where the state’s governor, Asa Hutchinson, comfortably held off a primary challenge from the right.
Although Arkansas boasts of an entirely Republican delegation in Congress, Democrats are eyeing the state’s 2nd congressional district. In a sign of the state’s conservative climate, Democrats rallied behind moderate state representative Clarke Tucker over more liberal contenders.
Democrats need to flip 23 seats to take control of the House of Representatives in November.
The party has seen a sharp rise in progressive candidates since Donald Trump’s election, but has faced lingering internal divisions over how to navigate the reliably red terrain of the American south. National Democratic groups have continued to struggle with whether the focus should be placed on the populist left or appealing to independents with more centrist candidates.
A contentious congressional primary in Texas drew unusually widespread attention as a microcosm of the debate, as national Democrats sought to undermine activist Laura Moser from securing the party’s nomination and ultimately prevailed on Tuesday. Moser lost to attorney Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, who was not formally endorsed by the DCCC but its preferred candidate and will now endeavor to unseat Republican Representative John Culberson in November.
The victories of Abrams and McGrath were nonetheless held up as evidence of successful efforts in inspiring the party’s base.
Abrams was bolstered in particular by African American voters and invested heavily in mobilizing Democrats who do not typically turn up at the polls. Trump carried Georgia by just five percentage points in the 2016 election, which some political analysts attributed to the state’s changing demographics — namely the rise in communities of color.
Abrams enjoyed support from a bevy of progressive organizations, including Democracy for America, the Working Families Party, MoveOn, EMILY’s List and NARAL Pro-Choice America. Abrams’s victory was touted on Tuesday not simply for its historical significance and potential, but what the pro-women group Emily’s List declared as “a clear sign that Georgia voters are ready for the next generation of progressive leadership”.
“Stacey Abrams’ victory tonight is an incredibly important win for the grassroots movement that rose up behind her in this primary and a Democratic Party that is, in many ways, still searching for a way forward after the crushing losses of 2016 and the outdated, Republican-lite playbook that caused them,” said Jim Dean, the chair of Democracy for America.
“We eagerly backed Stacey Abrams because she was committed to running a race that would definitively prove that when Democrats run a bold, progressive, people-powered campaign around our shared values, we can expand the electorate, restore faith in our democracy, and win.”
History was also made in the Democratic runoff for governor in Texas with the victory of Lupe Valdez. A former Dallas county sheriff, Valdez became the first Hispanic woman and first openly gay person to win a major party’s gubernatorial nomination in the state.
Valdez will now embark on an uphill battle to unseat Texas governor Greg Abbott in November. Abbott is favored to win re-election in the state, which has not elected a Democrat as governor since 1990.
RELATED: Massive Democratic turnout in rural Kentucky propels progressive Amy McGrath to upset victory
RELATED: This Kentucky math teacher just beat the House Republican leader who cut his pension
Abrams – a former state House minority leader and progressive who earned support from both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders – beat Stacey Evans, also a former state representative. The result was among the most consequential in a series of primaries that brought successes for female candidates across the country ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.
Abrams will attempt to make history as both America’s first black female governor and the first woman to hold the position in Georgia. The Republican primary, which was largely contested among a group of white men, looked headed for a run-off as neither of the candidates secured a majority of the vote.
Abrams’s victory came hours after Amy McGrath, a retired Marine fighter pilot, defeated the Democratic party’s establishment candidate in the primary race for a House seat in Kentucky.
McGrath, who fashioned herself as part of a younger generation seeking to challenge the old guard in Washington, beat the Lexington mayor, Jim Gray, a millionaire who had been backed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Primaries were also held in Arkansas, where the state’s governor, Asa Hutchinson, comfortably held off a primary challenge from the right.
Although Arkansas boasts of an entirely Republican delegation in Congress, Democrats are eyeing the state’s 2nd congressional district. In a sign of the state’s conservative climate, Democrats rallied behind moderate state representative Clarke Tucker over more liberal contenders.
Democrats need to flip 23 seats to take control of the House of Representatives in November.
The party has seen a sharp rise in progressive candidates since Donald Trump’s election, but has faced lingering internal divisions over how to navigate the reliably red terrain of the American south. National Democratic groups have continued to struggle with whether the focus should be placed on the populist left or appealing to independents with more centrist candidates.
A contentious congressional primary in Texas drew unusually widespread attention as a microcosm of the debate, as national Democrats sought to undermine activist Laura Moser from securing the party’s nomination and ultimately prevailed on Tuesday. Moser lost to attorney Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, who was not formally endorsed by the DCCC but its preferred candidate and will now endeavor to unseat Republican Representative John Culberson in November.
The victories of Abrams and McGrath were nonetheless held up as evidence of successful efforts in inspiring the party’s base.
Abrams was bolstered in particular by African American voters and invested heavily in mobilizing Democrats who do not typically turn up at the polls. Trump carried Georgia by just five percentage points in the 2016 election, which some political analysts attributed to the state’s changing demographics — namely the rise in communities of color.
Abrams enjoyed support from a bevy of progressive organizations, including Democracy for America, the Working Families Party, MoveOn, EMILY’s List and NARAL Pro-Choice America. Abrams’s victory was touted on Tuesday not simply for its historical significance and potential, but what the pro-women group Emily’s List declared as “a clear sign that Georgia voters are ready for the next generation of progressive leadership”.
“Stacey Abrams’ victory tonight is an incredibly important win for the grassroots movement that rose up behind her in this primary and a Democratic Party that is, in many ways, still searching for a way forward after the crushing losses of 2016 and the outdated, Republican-lite playbook that caused them,” said Jim Dean, the chair of Democracy for America.
“We eagerly backed Stacey Abrams because she was committed to running a race that would definitively prove that when Democrats run a bold, progressive, people-powered campaign around our shared values, we can expand the electorate, restore faith in our democracy, and win.”
History was also made in the Democratic runoff for governor in Texas with the victory of Lupe Valdez. A former Dallas county sheriff, Valdez became the first Hispanic woman and first openly gay person to win a major party’s gubernatorial nomination in the state.
Valdez will now embark on an uphill battle to unseat Texas governor Greg Abbott in November. Abbott is favored to win re-election in the state, which has not elected a Democrat as governor since 1990.
RELATED: Massive Democratic turnout in rural Kentucky propels progressive Amy McGrath to upset victory
RELATED: This Kentucky math teacher just beat the House Republican leader who cut his pension
Florida Election Official Illegally Destroyed Ballots in Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s Heated 2016 Primary Race
Judge sides with progressive challenger Tim Canova and activists.
By Steven Rosenfeld / Independent Media Institute - alternet
May 18, 2018, 8:23 AM GMT
The Florida county election supervisor overseeing one of 2016’s most bitter primary races, pitting the just-resigned Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz against progressive law professor Tim Canova, unlawfully broke federal and state laws by prematurely destroying that election’s ballots.
A ruling by Broward County Circuit Court Judge Raag Singhal found Broward County Election Supervisor Brenda Snipes violated the state’s open record laws and federal law when she destroyed the ballots a year after the August 2016 primary, where Wasserman Schultz beat Tim Canova by 6,775 votes, according to the certified results.
Canova, assisted by election transparency activists, wanted to verify the vote count. But Snipes repeatedly rebuffed their efforts, even telling a documentary filmmaker she would have to pay nearly $72,000 before the election office in Florida’s second most populous county would produce the primary’s ballots.
“It is undisputed that the original paper ballots cast during primary elections are public records,” Judge Singhal wrote. “Had the ballots not been destroyed, the Court would have been required to enforce the Public Records Act and order Defendant [Snipes] to produce the records for inspection and copying ‘while in the custody of the supervisor of elections… at any reasonable time, under reasonable conditions.’”
Singhal went further and chastised Snipes for stonewalling a candidate and the media.
“The [Florida] Constitution grants every person the fundamental right to inspect or copy public records. Whether the public chooses to inspect or copy is not the choice of the governmental agency which has custody of the records,” the ruling said.
“The Court finds Defendant’s violation is two-fold: (1) violation of state and federal retention requirements and (2) violation of affirmative responsibility to preserve evidence… Here, Plaintiff [Canova] filed suit to compel the production of the records but the records were destroyed while this case was pending before this Court.”
Singhal ordered Broward County to repay Canova’s court fees. The County election office and its attorneys have not been commenting to the press. But Politico reported that Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s administration has said it would send an observer for the upcoming 2018 primary and fall general election.
Canova, who is again challenging Wasserman Schultz in 2018—as an Independent—said Scott should remove Snipes and federal officials should open an investigation. Canova said his attorneys have told him that Broward County is likely to appeal the decision.
“So far, our legal fees are $250,000,” Canova said, adding the prospective appeal could end up costing the county’s taxpayers $1 million, after lawyers on both sides are paid.
What Was Broward County Hiding?
In 2016’s primary, Wasserman Schultz reportedly received 28,298 votes, compared to 21,504 votes for Canova. That primary came weeks after she resigned as DNC chair because her staff had been caught plotting against Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic nomination. Emails from her staff had been hacked by Russian agents, according to U.S. intelligence officials, and ended up on Wikileaks.
That backdrop, pitting Canova, a Berniecrat progressive, against one of Hillary Clinton’s most ardent supporters and a centrist, attracted national attention. However, Canova lost by 13 points and initially did not seek a recount. After he was contacted by documentary filmmaker Lulu Friesdat, whose team had done a statistical analysis of the race, he began to question the count’s accuracy, he said this week.
The county did provide some data in response to the public records request. With that data, Friesdat's team was able to compare the number of ballots cast to the number of votes awarded, revealed widespread discrepancies. In some precincts, there were 20 more votes awarded than ballots cast, for a total of 1,000 in the election as a whole. In the article she originally published on the subject, Friesdat quotes multiple election experts who said the discrepancies were alarming, showing "massive incompetence" or that the county was "grossly negligent."
Canova's campaign had also done polling that made him believe the actual results were much closer than the officially certified total, prompting the ensuing open records request, court filings in response to the county's stonewallling, subsequent litigation and the Florida Circuit Court ruling in his favor.
“In this matter, it is undisputed that the original paper ballots were destroyed,” Judge Singhal wrote. “As such, the only remedy available to the Plaintiff is for this Court to grant summary judgment and award attorney’s fees.”
While Canova and election transparency activists hailed the ruling, Canova said there was tremendous pressure from election officials and Democratic Party to drop the matter and not verify the vote. Until Singhal’s ruling, he was treated as an unwelcome gadfly citing federal law that said election records had to be saved for 22 months and Florida law saying they had to be made available for inspection and copying.
“I think what prevents people [from verifying the vote] is this culture of shaming,” he said. “Candidates are told, ‘Don’t be sore losers. You’ll never have another chance to run.’”
A ruling by Broward County Circuit Court Judge Raag Singhal found Broward County Election Supervisor Brenda Snipes violated the state’s open record laws and federal law when she destroyed the ballots a year after the August 2016 primary, where Wasserman Schultz beat Tim Canova by 6,775 votes, according to the certified results.
Canova, assisted by election transparency activists, wanted to verify the vote count. But Snipes repeatedly rebuffed their efforts, even telling a documentary filmmaker she would have to pay nearly $72,000 before the election office in Florida’s second most populous county would produce the primary’s ballots.
“It is undisputed that the original paper ballots cast during primary elections are public records,” Judge Singhal wrote. “Had the ballots not been destroyed, the Court would have been required to enforce the Public Records Act and order Defendant [Snipes] to produce the records for inspection and copying ‘while in the custody of the supervisor of elections… at any reasonable time, under reasonable conditions.’”
Singhal went further and chastised Snipes for stonewalling a candidate and the media.
“The [Florida] Constitution grants every person the fundamental right to inspect or copy public records. Whether the public chooses to inspect or copy is not the choice of the governmental agency which has custody of the records,” the ruling said.
“The Court finds Defendant’s violation is two-fold: (1) violation of state and federal retention requirements and (2) violation of affirmative responsibility to preserve evidence… Here, Plaintiff [Canova] filed suit to compel the production of the records but the records were destroyed while this case was pending before this Court.”
Singhal ordered Broward County to repay Canova’s court fees. The County election office and its attorneys have not been commenting to the press. But Politico reported that Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s administration has said it would send an observer for the upcoming 2018 primary and fall general election.
Canova, who is again challenging Wasserman Schultz in 2018—as an Independent—said Scott should remove Snipes and federal officials should open an investigation. Canova said his attorneys have told him that Broward County is likely to appeal the decision.
“So far, our legal fees are $250,000,” Canova said, adding the prospective appeal could end up costing the county’s taxpayers $1 million, after lawyers on both sides are paid.
What Was Broward County Hiding?
In 2016’s primary, Wasserman Schultz reportedly received 28,298 votes, compared to 21,504 votes for Canova. That primary came weeks after she resigned as DNC chair because her staff had been caught plotting against Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic nomination. Emails from her staff had been hacked by Russian agents, according to U.S. intelligence officials, and ended up on Wikileaks.
That backdrop, pitting Canova, a Berniecrat progressive, against one of Hillary Clinton’s most ardent supporters and a centrist, attracted national attention. However, Canova lost by 13 points and initially did not seek a recount. After he was contacted by documentary filmmaker Lulu Friesdat, whose team had done a statistical analysis of the race, he began to question the count’s accuracy, he said this week.
The county did provide some data in response to the public records request. With that data, Friesdat's team was able to compare the number of ballots cast to the number of votes awarded, revealed widespread discrepancies. In some precincts, there were 20 more votes awarded than ballots cast, for a total of 1,000 in the election as a whole. In the article she originally published on the subject, Friesdat quotes multiple election experts who said the discrepancies were alarming, showing "massive incompetence" or that the county was "grossly negligent."
Canova's campaign had also done polling that made him believe the actual results were much closer than the officially certified total, prompting the ensuing open records request, court filings in response to the county's stonewallling, subsequent litigation and the Florida Circuit Court ruling in his favor.
“In this matter, it is undisputed that the original paper ballots were destroyed,” Judge Singhal wrote. “As such, the only remedy available to the Plaintiff is for this Court to grant summary judgment and award attorney’s fees.”
While Canova and election transparency activists hailed the ruling, Canova said there was tremendous pressure from election officials and Democratic Party to drop the matter and not verify the vote. Until Singhal’s ruling, he was treated as an unwelcome gadfly citing federal law that said election records had to be saved for 22 months and Florida law saying they had to be made available for inspection and copying.
“I think what prevents people [from verifying the vote] is this culture of shaming,” he said. “Candidates are told, ‘Don’t be sore losers. You’ll never have another chance to run.’”
A Lesson From The Primaries: Money Is No Guarantee
Big Spenders Come Up Short
By Jillian S. Ambroz - dc report
5/14/18
Republican candidates in Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio and West Virginia learned some costly lessons last Tuesday, mainly that money won’t get you elected. Some candidates spent a whopping $105 per vote and walked away losers, while others spent $2 per vote to head to the election in November. And in the open-seat Congressional races, Republicans outspent Democrats by $27 a vote.
In the Senate races in the three states—North Carolina has no Senate seats on the ballot—candidates boosted by outside spending groups spent roughly $14 per vote or $1.8 million apiece only to get trounced by candidates with no PAC support.
Indiana’s primary race was the most expensive, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Rep. Todd Rokita (R) had the support of super PAC America Values First, which spent $17,500 supporting the congressman’s run for senator and poured an additional $35,000 opposing candidates Mike Braun and Rep. Luke Messer (R). In the end, Braun, a business executive with no outside spending help, took the primary. He raised and spent $4.5 million, or $21 per vote, to Rokita’s $18 per vote, according to Federal Elections Commission (FEC) data.
Ohio’s candidates spent just under $3 million, or a third of what was spent on the Indiana race. Banker Mike Gibbons has the distinction of being the only Senate candidate thus far to outspend his opponents and lose. He raised and spent a little over $2 million, or $9 per vote, with the help of $183,079 in outside spending. Winner Rep. Jim Renacci (R) raised and spent $836,974 or $2 per vote, according to FEC data.
The biggest spender in all three Republican Senate primaries was controversial candidate and coal magnate Don Blankenship, running as a Libertarian in West Virginia. He spent $2.8 million—or $105 per vote—to lose to state Attorney General Patrick Morrissey (R) who spent $1.1 million or $41 per vote. Morrissey’s cost per vote is still outrageous and he had the backing of nearly $1 million in outside spending. Rep. Evan Jenkins (L) also threw a lot of money behind each vote at $34 apiece. He raised and spent $1.4 million, based on FEC data.
Super PAC, Duty & Country PAC, a Democrat-aligned spending group, spent almost $2 million against Jenkins and Morrissey hoping Blankenship would end up on the ballot in November.
And a super PAC linked to the GOP establishment, Mountain Families PAC, spent more than $1.3 million trying to achieve the opposite results—keeping Blankenship off the November ballot.
Meanwhile, the open-seat House primaries on Tuesday in Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia – North Carolina has no open House seats—were also expensive, with mixed results of money spent and winning. But a big takeaway is the comparison of how much money the Republican winners outspent Democrats per vote. Republicans and their aligned outside spending groups spent on average about $31 per vote to land on the ballot come November. Democrats? Less than a Starbucks large latté—or less than $4 per vote.
Too Little, Too Late
Despite the $380 million in funds Congress has earmarked to protect our vulnerable election system from cyberattacks in the November midterms, it will likely be too little, too late. Most states that have not already replaced outmoded voting equipment will not have time to upgrade before votes are cast, according to a Bloomberg article.
The most vulnerable voting machines are paperless ones, and 11 states still use them. Right now, Pennsylvania is scrambling ahead of its congressional primary on Tuesday, May 15, to upgrade its election systems. The state is expected to receive $14 million from the federal funds though state officials estimate the real cost of replacing outmoded systems is closer to $150 million.
Pennsylvanians got a harsh schooling on the importance of a verifiable vote count when Conor Lamb (D) won a special election in the 18th Congressional District by just 800 votes ahead of state Rep. Rick Saccone (R). The lack of a paper record left officials with no way to verify the count. A court-ordered redistricting has put Lamb and Saccone in different districts and both are running again for the midterms.
Pennsylvania’s state government will upgrade all machines with a verifiable paper record, but not until 2019.
Other states facing expensive upgrades with insufficient federal assistance include Georgia, South Carolina and Louisiana, which is slated to receive $6 million but needs $60 million.
In the 2016 elections, Russians targeted voter registration databases in 21 states, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
In the Senate races in the three states—North Carolina has no Senate seats on the ballot—candidates boosted by outside spending groups spent roughly $14 per vote or $1.8 million apiece only to get trounced by candidates with no PAC support.
Indiana’s primary race was the most expensive, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Rep. Todd Rokita (R) had the support of super PAC America Values First, which spent $17,500 supporting the congressman’s run for senator and poured an additional $35,000 opposing candidates Mike Braun and Rep. Luke Messer (R). In the end, Braun, a business executive with no outside spending help, took the primary. He raised and spent $4.5 million, or $21 per vote, to Rokita’s $18 per vote, according to Federal Elections Commission (FEC) data.
Ohio’s candidates spent just under $3 million, or a third of what was spent on the Indiana race. Banker Mike Gibbons has the distinction of being the only Senate candidate thus far to outspend his opponents and lose. He raised and spent a little over $2 million, or $9 per vote, with the help of $183,079 in outside spending. Winner Rep. Jim Renacci (R) raised and spent $836,974 or $2 per vote, according to FEC data.
The biggest spender in all three Republican Senate primaries was controversial candidate and coal magnate Don Blankenship, running as a Libertarian in West Virginia. He spent $2.8 million—or $105 per vote—to lose to state Attorney General Patrick Morrissey (R) who spent $1.1 million or $41 per vote. Morrissey’s cost per vote is still outrageous and he had the backing of nearly $1 million in outside spending. Rep. Evan Jenkins (L) also threw a lot of money behind each vote at $34 apiece. He raised and spent $1.4 million, based on FEC data.
Super PAC, Duty & Country PAC, a Democrat-aligned spending group, spent almost $2 million against Jenkins and Morrissey hoping Blankenship would end up on the ballot in November.
And a super PAC linked to the GOP establishment, Mountain Families PAC, spent more than $1.3 million trying to achieve the opposite results—keeping Blankenship off the November ballot.
Meanwhile, the open-seat House primaries on Tuesday in Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia – North Carolina has no open House seats—were also expensive, with mixed results of money spent and winning. But a big takeaway is the comparison of how much money the Republican winners outspent Democrats per vote. Republicans and their aligned outside spending groups spent on average about $31 per vote to land on the ballot come November. Democrats? Less than a Starbucks large latté—or less than $4 per vote.
Too Little, Too Late
Despite the $380 million in funds Congress has earmarked to protect our vulnerable election system from cyberattacks in the November midterms, it will likely be too little, too late. Most states that have not already replaced outmoded voting equipment will not have time to upgrade before votes are cast, according to a Bloomberg article.
The most vulnerable voting machines are paperless ones, and 11 states still use them. Right now, Pennsylvania is scrambling ahead of its congressional primary on Tuesday, May 15, to upgrade its election systems. The state is expected to receive $14 million from the federal funds though state officials estimate the real cost of replacing outmoded systems is closer to $150 million.
Pennsylvanians got a harsh schooling on the importance of a verifiable vote count when Conor Lamb (D) won a special election in the 18th Congressional District by just 800 votes ahead of state Rep. Rick Saccone (R). The lack of a paper record left officials with no way to verify the count. A court-ordered redistricting has put Lamb and Saccone in different districts and both are running again for the midterms.
Pennsylvania’s state government will upgrade all machines with a verifiable paper record, but not until 2019.
Other states facing expensive upgrades with insufficient federal assistance include Georgia, South Carolina and Louisiana, which is slated to receive $6 million but needs $60 million.
In the 2016 elections, Russians targeted voter registration databases in 21 states, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
map of the hypocrites!!!
The Daily Kos Elections guide to the nation's religious populations, by congressional district
By David Jarman
Sunday Jan 07, 2018 · 5:15 PM PST
Religion is one of the driving forces in American culture; it always has been, and continues to do so even as American religiosity, in general, has declined. It tends not to loom as large as race in the American consciousness, but it’s still one of the main ways that Americans tend to identify themselves, and to divide themselves along “us” and “them” boundaries.
More specifically, religion is something that tends to correlate with, and be predictive of, one’s politics. This is especially the case in an era where cultural issues supplant economic issues in many people’s ideological framework. If you genuinely believe, for instance, that abortion means killing people, that often creates a moral imperative against which, say, your marginal tax rate pales in comparison.
You probably have a vague idea of which parts of the country are more religiously active, and where religion is more suffused into local politics (usually taking it in a more conservative direction), versus which parts of the country are more laissez-faire about religion and about social issues in general. You may also have a general sense of, say, which parts of the country are more likely to be Southern Baptist or Catholic or Lutheran; you may have even seen state or even county-level maps that depict this. What I’m doing in this article that hasn’t been done before, though, is to quantitatively show those differences at the level of congressional districts, where much of our politics actually happens, so we can get a better sense of how religiosity corresponds with people’s electoral choices.
I’ve put together a spreadsheet that covers every CD, and what percentage of each CD’s residents belong to which religious tradition and denomination. One additional advantage of using district-level data is that it, as seen above, it lets us use the Daily Kos Elections 435-CD cartogram map, which breaks out the nation’s metropolitan areas into proper focus, and de-emphasizes the nation’s empty spaces (which has the effect of not making the country seem more evangelical, or more Mormon, than it actually is). As we continue, we’ll talk more about the methods and limitations behind these maps, and then zoom in on some additional data for certain denominations. Read More
More specifically, religion is something that tends to correlate with, and be predictive of, one’s politics. This is especially the case in an era where cultural issues supplant economic issues in many people’s ideological framework. If you genuinely believe, for instance, that abortion means killing people, that often creates a moral imperative against which, say, your marginal tax rate pales in comparison.
You probably have a vague idea of which parts of the country are more religiously active, and where religion is more suffused into local politics (usually taking it in a more conservative direction), versus which parts of the country are more laissez-faire about religion and about social issues in general. You may also have a general sense of, say, which parts of the country are more likely to be Southern Baptist or Catholic or Lutheran; you may have even seen state or even county-level maps that depict this. What I’m doing in this article that hasn’t been done before, though, is to quantitatively show those differences at the level of congressional districts, where much of our politics actually happens, so we can get a better sense of how religiosity corresponds with people’s electoral choices.
I’ve put together a spreadsheet that covers every CD, and what percentage of each CD’s residents belong to which religious tradition and denomination. One additional advantage of using district-level data is that it, as seen above, it lets us use the Daily Kos Elections 435-CD cartogram map, which breaks out the nation’s metropolitan areas into proper focus, and de-emphasizes the nation’s empty spaces (which has the effect of not making the country seem more evangelical, or more Mormon, than it actually is). As we continue, we’ll talk more about the methods and limitations behind these maps, and then zoom in on some additional data for certain denominations. Read More
election funnies, etc
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Map Porn: If "Did Not Vote" Was a Candidate...
NeoGreen
From Demo. Underground: ... posted in response to all those who want to blame their friends and neighbors who did their civic duty and opted to vote:
what stupid americans voted for
*destruction of medicare, social security, obamacare, abolition of women's rights
*keystone pipeline renewed
*dapl will be finished and destroy indian burial grounds and missouri river
*lower taxes for rich, death of social safety net
*destruction of public schools
*high probability of middle east war
*more racism, discrimination, and injustice
*thieves and conmen running the federal government
*no minimum wage hikes
*cut in food stamps, more starving poor children and families
elections do matter
when you allow a piece of shit to win office, don't be surprised when your state starts to smell
*gop plans in the house: The entire rest of the party is committed to gigantic cuts to welfare, as shown by the budget formulated by House Republicans. Their most recent plan would slash $5.3 trillion in spending over a decade, 69 percent of which would come from programs for the needy.
"THE ARKANSAS TRAVELLER" 1840
AN ELITE POLITICIAN CANVASSING IN THE BACKCOUNTRY ASKS A SQUATTER FOR REFRESHMENTS. THE SQUATTER, SEATED ON A WHISKEY BARREL BEFORE HIS RUN-DOWN CABIN, IGNORES THE MAN'S REQUEST. FOR A BRIEF INTERLUDE(BECAUSE IT WAS ELECTION SEASON), THE POLITICIAN WAS OBLIGED TO BRING HIMSELF DOWN TO THE LEVEL OF THE COMMON MAN. TO GET HIS DRINK AND THE SQUATTER'S VOTE, THE POLITICIAN, HAD TO DISMOUNT HIS HORSE, GRAB THE SQUATTER'S FIDDLE, AND SHOW THAT HE COULD PLAY HIS KIND OF MUSIC. ONCE THE POLITICIAN RETURNED TO HIS MANSION, HOWEVER, NOTHING CHANGED IN THE LIFE OF THE SQUATTER, NOR FOR HIS DRUDGE OF A WIFE AND HIS BROOD OF DIRTY, SHOELESS BRATS.
Henry A. Giroux
Trump is simply the most visible and vocal member of a fractured party made up of frightened Americans, religious fundamentalists, and self-serving economic extremists who believe that the market should arbitrate and dominate all aspects of government and society. Trump represents a new form of social disorder -- intolerant, authoritarian, and violent -- that sees preventable inequality as part of the natural order of things. Guns, walls, laws, surveillance, prisons, media, and wars are there to serve the interest of the wealthy winners, and to keep the rest of the population in check. Bankers who commit theft, fraud, and acts of economic mass destruction never feel the cold steel of handcuffs tighten on their wrists. Corporate suspects never get shot down accidently in the streets, as do unarmed Blacks, by white cops who feel threatened by skin color. Trump's rise reinforces these injustices and gives anxious whites a boastful businessman and TV celebrity to rule as their strongman.
The State Of America’s Voting Rights, In One Map
Power has shifted.
by Ian Millhiserby
From Think Progress: The Supreme Court announced on Wednesday that it would not reinstate North Carolina’s comprehensive voter suppression law, and the big headlines out of this announcement rightly touted this decision as good news for voting rights. Just below the surface, however, this order has ominous news for many Americans.
In 2016, a voter’s right to the franchise — even when that right is protected by the Constitution itself — may not amount to much if they do not live in the right state...
...Below is a map of the federal appellate circuits, the level of federal court below the Supreme Court, which predicts how these courts are likely to vote in voting rights cases. Dark blue circuits are dominated by left-of-center judges and are likely to be strong supporters of voting rights, while dark red circuits are the opposite. Lighter colored circuits still lean to the left or to the right on voting rights, but are more ideologically mixed.
In 2016, a voter’s right to the franchise — even when that right is protected by the Constitution itself — may not amount to much if they do not live in the right state...
...Below is a map of the federal appellate circuits, the level of federal court below the Supreme Court, which predicts how these courts are likely to vote in voting rights cases. Dark blue circuits are dominated by left-of-center judges and are likely to be strong supporters of voting rights, while dark red circuits are the opposite. Lighter colored circuits still lean to the left or to the right on voting rights, but are more ideologically mixed.
In coloring this map, I made several judgment calls. The Seventh Circuit, for example, is colored white because, although a majority of its judges were appointed by Republicans, two of its GOP-appointed members have broken with their more conservative colleagues in at least one major voting rights case. The Eleventh Circuit is colored light blue, despite the fact that Democratic appointees enjoy a significant advantage, because several of the judges on this court were appointed due to a compromise between a Democratic president and Republican senators — and at least one of these appointees is very conservative. The Fifth Circuit is coded light red because, although Republican appointees dominate this court, the full court recently held that Texas’s voter ID law violates the Voting Rights Act.[...]