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welcome to reality ~ triva
election news and items of interest
June 2019
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
*Leaked voting machine passwords add to North Carolina's growing tally of election security woes
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Did software firm's flaws expose North Carolina to election hacking?
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*LAWSUIT CALLS MISSISSIPPI'S WAY OF CHOOSING GOVERNORS RACIST
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*WHITE WOMEN ARE HELPING STATES PASS ABORTION RESTRICTIONS
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*Republican Keller wins Pennsylvania special election
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*How Gerrymandering and Voter Suppression Paved the Way for Abortion Bans
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*THEY DID THEIR TIME. THEY REGAINED THE VOTE. FLORIDA IS TAKING IT AWAY AGAIN.
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*Michigan’s new law is getting the most reluctant voting group to the polls
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*AFTER THE 2018 BLUE WAVE, REPUBLICANS ARE MAKING IT HARDER TO VOTE
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*Are centrist candidates really the most "electable"? It may be the opposite
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*This Plan for Fixing Our Elections Is Simple, Sensible, and Will Never Happen in This Political Moment
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*Florida QAnon believer running unopposed in GOP primary for House seat
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*Shunning Corporate PACs Won’t End Corporate Influence in Elections
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*As 2020 Nears, Pressure Grows to Replace Voting Machines
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*Hundreds of Declarations Detail Alleged Issues, ‘Gross Mismanagement’ of Georgia’s Voting System
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*Texas County Failed To Give Any Contact Info In Voter Purge Notices
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*Georgia's 127,000 Missing Votes--Disproportionate Vote Loss in African American Neighborhoods
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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
Leaked voting machine passwords add to North Carolina's growing tally of election security woes
DocDawg
Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)
Sunday June 09, 2019 · 6:02 AM PDT
When it comes to election irregularities, North Carolina is the new Florida.
First there was the mini-disaster on Election Day 2016, in North Carolina’s bluest county by far, Durham. E-pollbook computers used by poll workers to check voters’ status as they arrive at the polls mysteriously malfunctioned in five Durham precincts, wrongly indicating either that they had already voted or that they were not registered. The story gained national attention when The Intercept later broke news of top-secret NSA documents suggesting that the e-pollbooks’ vendor, Florida’s VR Systems, had been hacked by Russian military operatives earlier that year. The story grew shadier still, early last week, with Politico’s revelation that just days before the election VR Systems technicians used remote-access software to log into Durham County election computers, potentially opening a digital barn door wide enough for a herd of those same Russian hackers to gallop into the county’s election system.
Then, of course, there’s the now famed story of Republican-funded election fraud(absentee ballot harvesting) in the state’s 9th Congressional district in 2018, requiring a costly do-over election to be held later this summer.
Now comes the state’s latest in a dizzying series of electoral embarrassments. Yesterday cybersecurity investigator Chris Vickery revealed on Twitter his discovery of an unsecured (that is, publicly accessible) online file in an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket belonging to the North Carolina State Board of Elections, containing what seemed to be election-related administrative passwords.
---
The ES&S iVotronic is a popular touchscreen voting machine currently used in 24 of North Carolina’s 100 counties, including the state’s largest, Mecklenburg (the rest use hand-marked paper ballots).
To be entirely fair, it isn’t at all clear that the exposed passwords would have provided malign hackers with any ability to interfere in the 2018 election. First, as the instructions above make clear, one needs to physically insert a properly programmed “master PEB” and “supervisor PEB” (essentially programmable card-keys) into an iVotronic unit in order to access the administrative menus these passwords unlock. Second, Vickery’s tweets seem to suggest that the password file he found was a backup file. We don’t know how old that backup was, or whether the passwords it exposed were still current during the 2018 election. And finally, 2018’s midterm election was North Carolina Democrats’ best showing in nearly a decade, with Dems winning every statewide race and breaking the state House of Representatives’ GOP supermajority. If GOP-sympathizing Russians meddled in that election they certainly didn’t do a very good job.
Still, this leak reveals a disturbingly lax cybersecurity culture at the State Board. Any IT professional careless enough to expose highly sensitive election-related passwords in plaintext on the internet is probably careless enough to make other, even more consequential, mistakes. This affair also reveals important weaknesses in the Department of Homeland Security’s election cybersecurity assessments, since it seems that DHS didn’t spot this tyro snafu hiding in plain sight.
The good news is that there’s a new sheriff in town at the North Carolina State Board of Elections. A highly experienced elections staffer, Karen Brinson Bell, has just been chosen by the new majority-Democrat Board of Elections to replace its recently fired executive director, Kim Strach, on whose watch all of these fusterclucks and many more occurred. Strach’s spouse, Phil Strach, is the GOP-controlled state legislature’s go-to attorney in lawsuits defending the state’s voter suppression laws.
“Our top priorities will be promoting voter confidence in elections and assisting the 100 county boards, the boots on the ground in every election,” Brinson Bell has stated. How she manages the Board’s response to this latest election scandal will be her first trial by fire in this new role. North Carolina voting rights activists will be watching hopefully.
First there was the mini-disaster on Election Day 2016, in North Carolina’s bluest county by far, Durham. E-pollbook computers used by poll workers to check voters’ status as they arrive at the polls mysteriously malfunctioned in five Durham precincts, wrongly indicating either that they had already voted or that they were not registered. The story gained national attention when The Intercept later broke news of top-secret NSA documents suggesting that the e-pollbooks’ vendor, Florida’s VR Systems, had been hacked by Russian military operatives earlier that year. The story grew shadier still, early last week, with Politico’s revelation that just days before the election VR Systems technicians used remote-access software to log into Durham County election computers, potentially opening a digital barn door wide enough for a herd of those same Russian hackers to gallop into the county’s election system.
Then, of course, there’s the now famed story of Republican-funded election fraud(absentee ballot harvesting) in the state’s 9th Congressional district in 2018, requiring a costly do-over election to be held later this summer.
Now comes the state’s latest in a dizzying series of electoral embarrassments. Yesterday cybersecurity investigator Chris Vickery revealed on Twitter his discovery of an unsecured (that is, publicly accessible) online file in an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket belonging to the North Carolina State Board of Elections, containing what seemed to be election-related administrative passwords.
---
The ES&S iVotronic is a popular touchscreen voting machine currently used in 24 of North Carolina’s 100 counties, including the state’s largest, Mecklenburg (the rest use hand-marked paper ballots).
To be entirely fair, it isn’t at all clear that the exposed passwords would have provided malign hackers with any ability to interfere in the 2018 election. First, as the instructions above make clear, one needs to physically insert a properly programmed “master PEB” and “supervisor PEB” (essentially programmable card-keys) into an iVotronic unit in order to access the administrative menus these passwords unlock. Second, Vickery’s tweets seem to suggest that the password file he found was a backup file. We don’t know how old that backup was, or whether the passwords it exposed were still current during the 2018 election. And finally, 2018’s midterm election was North Carolina Democrats’ best showing in nearly a decade, with Dems winning every statewide race and breaking the state House of Representatives’ GOP supermajority. If GOP-sympathizing Russians meddled in that election they certainly didn’t do a very good job.
Still, this leak reveals a disturbingly lax cybersecurity culture at the State Board. Any IT professional careless enough to expose highly sensitive election-related passwords in plaintext on the internet is probably careless enough to make other, even more consequential, mistakes. This affair also reveals important weaknesses in the Department of Homeland Security’s election cybersecurity assessments, since it seems that DHS didn’t spot this tyro snafu hiding in plain sight.
The good news is that there’s a new sheriff in town at the North Carolina State Board of Elections. A highly experienced elections staffer, Karen Brinson Bell, has just been chosen by the new majority-Democrat Board of Elections to replace its recently fired executive director, Kim Strach, on whose watch all of these fusterclucks and many more occurred. Strach’s spouse, Phil Strach, is the GOP-controlled state legislature’s go-to attorney in lawsuits defending the state’s voter suppression laws.
“Our top priorities will be promoting voter confidence in elections and assisting the 100 county boards, the boots on the ground in every election,” Brinson Bell has stated. How she manages the Board’s response to this latest election scandal will be her first trial by fire in this new role. North Carolina voting rights activists will be watching hopefully.
Corporate Incompetence Strikes Again!!!
Did software firm's flaws expose North Carolina to election hacking?
Three years after election systems failed in one North Carolina county, DHS agrees to investigate possible hack
IGOR DERYSH - Salon
JUNE 6, 2019 10:00AM (UTC)
The Department of Homeland Security has finally agreed to examine election equipment used in North Carolina, nearly three years after voters reported malfunctions on Election Day in 2016, Politico reports.
In April, special counsel Robert Mueller wrote in his report that Russian military hackers had penetrated a voting software firm and “installed malware on the company network” of an unidentified election vendor. That vendor appears to be VR Systems, a Florida-based firm that Politico reports used remote access software to access a central computer in Durham County, North Carolina. DHS has agreed to send investigators to see whether the firm exposed that central computer to the hackers.
Hackers would not have been able to alter vote tallies, but could potentially have prevented people from voting in the key swing state. Computers used to check in voters in Durham County malfunctioned on Election Day 2016, telling voters that they had already voted even though they had not, NPR reported.
“Vulnerabilities in voting machines get most of the attention, but the security and availability of poll books is as critical to the integrity of elections as voting machines themselves,” election security expert Matt Blaze told Politico. “If poll books are compromised, this can selectively disenfranchise voters, create long lines at polling places, and cast doubt on the legitimacy of election results.”
The county switched to using paper poll books after numerous reports of malfunctions but officials never identified what had caused the issues in 2016, finally leading DHS to agree to review the computers nearly three years later.
Homeland Security officials told the Washington Post they plan to conduct a forensic analysis on the laptops used in Durham County. Josh Lawson, former general counsel of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, told the Post that his agency had requested a DHS review more than 18 months ago.
The DHS announcement came just weeks after the FBI came under fire for not sharing information with Florida officials about another alleged hack. After Mueller’s report revealed that Russian hackers accessed “the network of at least one Florida county government in 2016,” the FBI finally told Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that two Florida counties had been hacked, but asked him not to disclose which ones.
The Post reported last month that one of the counties was Washington County in the Florida panhandle, which is rural and sparsely populated.
VR Systems admitted to the Post that “we think we are the company referenced” in the Mueller report but denied that its network was breached or that its software had failed in Durham County.
But according to a leaked report by the National Security Agency, Russian hackers mounted a spearphishing campaign targeting the firm before using VR Systems credentials to send malicious emails to roughly 120 local government offices.
More than 60 Florida counties used VR Systems in 2016, as did counties in North Carolina, California, New York, Illinois, Indiana, Virginia and West Virginia.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told Politico that VR Systems had served up “our democracy on a silver platter to foreign hackers” by remotely accessing voting systems the day before Election Day.
“No company that plays such a critical role in our elections should be taking such a reckless shortcut with the cybersecurity of its state and local customers,” he said. "The fact that we’re just learning about this practice two years after the election, and after any evidence of hacking has likely been destroyed, is inexcusable. Americans need to know if VR Systems still has remote access to election computers in other states, and how often this occurred.”
In April, special counsel Robert Mueller wrote in his report that Russian military hackers had penetrated a voting software firm and “installed malware on the company network” of an unidentified election vendor. That vendor appears to be VR Systems, a Florida-based firm that Politico reports used remote access software to access a central computer in Durham County, North Carolina. DHS has agreed to send investigators to see whether the firm exposed that central computer to the hackers.
Hackers would not have been able to alter vote tallies, but could potentially have prevented people from voting in the key swing state. Computers used to check in voters in Durham County malfunctioned on Election Day 2016, telling voters that they had already voted even though they had not, NPR reported.
“Vulnerabilities in voting machines get most of the attention, but the security and availability of poll books is as critical to the integrity of elections as voting machines themselves,” election security expert Matt Blaze told Politico. “If poll books are compromised, this can selectively disenfranchise voters, create long lines at polling places, and cast doubt on the legitimacy of election results.”
The county switched to using paper poll books after numerous reports of malfunctions but officials never identified what had caused the issues in 2016, finally leading DHS to agree to review the computers nearly three years later.
Homeland Security officials told the Washington Post they plan to conduct a forensic analysis on the laptops used in Durham County. Josh Lawson, former general counsel of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, told the Post that his agency had requested a DHS review more than 18 months ago.
The DHS announcement came just weeks after the FBI came under fire for not sharing information with Florida officials about another alleged hack. After Mueller’s report revealed that Russian hackers accessed “the network of at least one Florida county government in 2016,” the FBI finally told Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that two Florida counties had been hacked, but asked him not to disclose which ones.
The Post reported last month that one of the counties was Washington County in the Florida panhandle, which is rural and sparsely populated.
VR Systems admitted to the Post that “we think we are the company referenced” in the Mueller report but denied that its network was breached or that its software had failed in Durham County.
But according to a leaked report by the National Security Agency, Russian hackers mounted a spearphishing campaign targeting the firm before using VR Systems credentials to send malicious emails to roughly 120 local government offices.
More than 60 Florida counties used VR Systems in 2016, as did counties in North Carolina, California, New York, Illinois, Indiana, Virginia and West Virginia.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told Politico that VR Systems had served up “our democracy on a silver platter to foreign hackers” by remotely accessing voting systems the day before Election Day.
“No company that plays such a critical role in our elections should be taking such a reckless shortcut with the cybersecurity of its state and local customers,” he said. "The fact that we’re just learning about this practice two years after the election, and after any evidence of hacking has likely been destroyed, is inexcusable. Americans need to know if VR Systems still has remote access to election computers in other states, and how often this occurred.”
Lawsuit calls Mississippi's way of choosing governors racist
Emily Wagster Pettus and David A. Lieb, Associated Press
Updated 12:47 pm CDT, Thursday, May 30, 2019
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — In 1890, as white politicians across the South cracked down on the black population with Jim Crow laws, Mississippi inserted into its constitution an unusually high bar for getting elected governor or winning any other state office.
The provision, which remains in force to this day, says candidates must win not only a majority of the popular vote — that is, more than 50% — but also a majority of the state's 122 House districts.
On Thursday, more than a century later, four black Mississippians sued in federal court to put an end to what they say is a racially discriminatory system, unique in the U.S. and deliberately aimed at thwarting the election of African Africans.
"The scheme has its basis in racism — an 1890 post-Reconstruction attempt to keep African Americans out of statewide office," said former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, the first black person to hold that position. He added: "In the 21st century, it's finally time to say that this provision should be struck down."
Holder is chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, whose affiliated foundation is providing financial and legal backing for the lawsuit.
Under the Mississippi provision, if no candidate wins the required majorities, the election is decided by the Mississippi House.
It's not one of those dusty segregation-era provisions that have remained on the books, forgotten and unused: It was invoked in 1999, when the House chose between two whites who were the top vote-getters in a four-person race for governor.
"This is not a theoretical thing," Holder said. "We have seen no statewide African American elected to office since this was enacted, in spite of the fact that Mississippi has the highest percentage of African Americans of any state in the country."
The lawsuit asks a judge to prohibit Mississippi from using the procedure in this year's elections. It does not suggest an alternative way, but Holder said Mississippi could simply be ordered to do what most states do — "count all the votes and the person who gets the greatest number of votes wins."
Mississippi Republican House Speaker Philip Gunn, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, declined to comment.
The longtime chairman of the Mississippi House Elections Committee, Republican Rep. Bill Denny, said that during his 32 years in office, there has been no serious effort to change Mississippi's method of electing statewide officials.
"I'm comfortable with it," Denny said of the current system.
It was put in place as white politicians sought to suppress black voting power that emerged during Reconstruction and propelled some black candidates to statewide office.
The lawsuit cites comments at the time by the president of Mississippi's constitutional convention, who asserted that black control of government "meant economic and moral ruin" and that the state had an "over generous" number of black voters.
The case is part of an effort by Holder's organization to influence the election of the politicians who will oversee congressional redistricting in Mississippi after the 2020 census. Some African American candidates are running for governor and other statewide offices this year.
The lawsuit notes that black voters are highly concentrated in some Mississippi House districts, holding a majority of the voting-age population in 42 of them. Mississippi's white residents overwhelmingly vote Republican, while its black residents overwhelmingly cast their ballots for Democrats. About 38% of the state is black.
Because of the racially polarized and concentrated voting, a candidate preferred by white voters could win a majority of the House districts without winning the statewide vote, the lawsuit says.
To date, no Mississippi candidate who won the most votes for a statewide office has been prevented from taking office because of the other requirements.
African American candidates have faced other hurdles in Mississippi politics over the years. After Reconstruction, extremely few blacks were registered to vote until the mid-1960s because of poll taxes and deadly violence.
The lawsuit says only four states — Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi and Vermont — require a candidate for governor to win a majority of the popular vote. Arizona and Georgia have runoffs if needed, while in Vermont, the state House and Senate decide the winner.
The four plaintiffs in the lawsuit include two retired political science professors.
The provision, which remains in force to this day, says candidates must win not only a majority of the popular vote — that is, more than 50% — but also a majority of the state's 122 House districts.
On Thursday, more than a century later, four black Mississippians sued in federal court to put an end to what they say is a racially discriminatory system, unique in the U.S. and deliberately aimed at thwarting the election of African Africans.
"The scheme has its basis in racism — an 1890 post-Reconstruction attempt to keep African Americans out of statewide office," said former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, the first black person to hold that position. He added: "In the 21st century, it's finally time to say that this provision should be struck down."
Holder is chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, whose affiliated foundation is providing financial and legal backing for the lawsuit.
Under the Mississippi provision, if no candidate wins the required majorities, the election is decided by the Mississippi House.
It's not one of those dusty segregation-era provisions that have remained on the books, forgotten and unused: It was invoked in 1999, when the House chose between two whites who were the top vote-getters in a four-person race for governor.
"This is not a theoretical thing," Holder said. "We have seen no statewide African American elected to office since this was enacted, in spite of the fact that Mississippi has the highest percentage of African Americans of any state in the country."
The lawsuit asks a judge to prohibit Mississippi from using the procedure in this year's elections. It does not suggest an alternative way, but Holder said Mississippi could simply be ordered to do what most states do — "count all the votes and the person who gets the greatest number of votes wins."
Mississippi Republican House Speaker Philip Gunn, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, declined to comment.
The longtime chairman of the Mississippi House Elections Committee, Republican Rep. Bill Denny, said that during his 32 years in office, there has been no serious effort to change Mississippi's method of electing statewide officials.
"I'm comfortable with it," Denny said of the current system.
It was put in place as white politicians sought to suppress black voting power that emerged during Reconstruction and propelled some black candidates to statewide office.
The lawsuit cites comments at the time by the president of Mississippi's constitutional convention, who asserted that black control of government "meant economic and moral ruin" and that the state had an "over generous" number of black voters.
The case is part of an effort by Holder's organization to influence the election of the politicians who will oversee congressional redistricting in Mississippi after the 2020 census. Some African American candidates are running for governor and other statewide offices this year.
The lawsuit notes that black voters are highly concentrated in some Mississippi House districts, holding a majority of the voting-age population in 42 of them. Mississippi's white residents overwhelmingly vote Republican, while its black residents overwhelmingly cast their ballots for Democrats. About 38% of the state is black.
Because of the racially polarized and concentrated voting, a candidate preferred by white voters could win a majority of the House districts without winning the statewide vote, the lawsuit says.
To date, no Mississippi candidate who won the most votes for a statewide office has been prevented from taking office because of the other requirements.
African American candidates have faced other hurdles in Mississippi politics over the years. After Reconstruction, extremely few blacks were registered to vote until the mid-1960s because of poll taxes and deadly violence.
The lawsuit says only four states — Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi and Vermont — require a candidate for governor to win a majority of the popular vote. Arizona and Georgia have runoffs if needed, while in Vermont, the state House and Senate decide the winner.
The four plaintiffs in the lawsuit include two retired political science professors.
White Women Are Helping States Pass Abortion Restrictions
Their support for Republican officials has been key to the GOP’s strength in the South.
RONALD BROWNSTEIN - the atlantic
12:23 PM ET
It’s common for critics of the new wave of state laws severely limiting access to abortion to say the measures are part of a Republican “war on women.”
But strong support from most white women, especially those who identify as evangelical Christians, has helped Republicans dominate local government in the states passing the most restrictive measures, from Alabama and Georgia to Kentucky and Missouri. In some of those states, polling shows that opposition to legal abortion is higher among white women than among white men.
These attitudes underscore why it’s too simplistic to forecast that the renewed push against abortion will uniformly drive women away from the GOP. There’s no question that abortion-rights supporters everywhere are mobilizing in opposition to the highly restrictive new laws, which range from bans starting at six weeks of pregnancy to total prohibition. Activists held some 500 events in all 50 states on Tuesday to protest the new laws—a preview, they say, of the energy the measures will ignite in the 2020 presidential and congressional elections, particularly among the roughly 60 percent majority of women who support legalized abortion. “We will power this movement into 2020,” NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue insisted in a conference call on Wednesday. “There will be political consequences.”
But it’s much less clear that abortion-rights supporters can exact political consequences in the states actually approving these laws, which are explicitly designed to prompt the Supreme Court to reconsider the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing nationwide access to the procedure. Their success will depend on whether the restrictions dislodge meaningful numbers of white women in these states from their respective Republican coalitions. And that is far from certain, particularly in the southern and border states advancing most of the laws.
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster who works extensively across the South, says that white women, “particularly suburban white women … have been absolutely critical” to the GOP’s strength in states approving the abortion bans. Election Day exit polls showed that most white women in these areas joined big majorities of white men to provide insuperable leads for Republican candidates.
In 2018, for instance, exit polls conducted by Edison Research found that fully three-fourths of white women supported the Republican Brian Kemp over the Democrat Stacey Abrams in the Georgia governor’s race. That same year, just 16 percent of white women picked the Democrat Mike Espy for Mississippi’s Senate seat. In the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama, 63 percent of white women backed the Republican Roy Moore, who faced multiple allegations that he had dated teenage girls as an adult, over the Democrat Doug Jones (who narrowly triumphed anyway).
In all of these races, southern white women’s preferences diverged sharply from those of African American women, who gave 97 percent of their votes to Abrams, 98 percent to Jones, and 93 percent to Espy.
In most southern states, white women express at least as much opposition to legal abortion as white men, and in some cases more. The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) examined state-by-state attitudes on abortion in 2014. It found that just over three-fifths of white women in Alabama and Mississippi said that abortion should be illegal in most or all circumstances, almost exactly the same percentage as white men in those states. About three-fifths of white women in Kentucky and a narrow majority in Georgia said that abortion should be mostly illegal; in both cases, that was a higher share than among the state’s white men. Only in Missouri did a 51 percent majority of white women say that abortion should mostly remain legal.
Across the South, the core of female opposition to abortion—and of support for the GOP—is women who identify as evangelical Christians. These women now consistently support Republicans in overwhelming numbers. Fully 80 percent of southern white evangelical women backed Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, according to previously unpublished exit-poll results provided to me by Edison. Three-fourths of white evangelical women in Alabama backed Moore over Jones in 2017, and an even more emphatic 88 percent of them in Georgia backed Kemp over Abrams in last year’s governor’s race. Across the South overall, three-fourths of white evangelical women said they approved of Trump’s performance in the 2018 exit poll, according to Edison, and just 20 percent of white evangelical women backed Democratic House candidates that year.
Robert P. Jones, the CEO of PRRI and the author of The End of White Christian America, says that for evangelicals and other culturally conservative Americans, abortion has become a crucial symbol of attitudes toward the larger demographic, cultural, and even economic changes reshaping the nation.
In PRRI polling, Americans who oppose abortion expressed much more negative views on a broad array of social changes than those who support legal access, according to a new analysis it conducted at my request. Looking back at its 2016 Annual Values Survey, the group found that abortion opponents and supporters provided mirror-image responses to a core question: whether “American culture and way of life” has changed mostly for the better or for the worse since the 1950s. Two-thirds of abortion opponents picked worse, while two-thirds of supporters picked better. Similarly, while 60 percent of abortion opponents said the growing ranks of immigrants “threaten American customs and values,” a matching 60 percent of abortion supporters said having more immigrants “strengthens American society.” Women who opposed abortion were as likely as male opponents to express conservative views on those other social changes.(READ MORE)
But strong support from most white women, especially those who identify as evangelical Christians, has helped Republicans dominate local government in the states passing the most restrictive measures, from Alabama and Georgia to Kentucky and Missouri. In some of those states, polling shows that opposition to legal abortion is higher among white women than among white men.
These attitudes underscore why it’s too simplistic to forecast that the renewed push against abortion will uniformly drive women away from the GOP. There’s no question that abortion-rights supporters everywhere are mobilizing in opposition to the highly restrictive new laws, which range from bans starting at six weeks of pregnancy to total prohibition. Activists held some 500 events in all 50 states on Tuesday to protest the new laws—a preview, they say, of the energy the measures will ignite in the 2020 presidential and congressional elections, particularly among the roughly 60 percent majority of women who support legalized abortion. “We will power this movement into 2020,” NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue insisted in a conference call on Wednesday. “There will be political consequences.”
But it’s much less clear that abortion-rights supporters can exact political consequences in the states actually approving these laws, which are explicitly designed to prompt the Supreme Court to reconsider the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing nationwide access to the procedure. Their success will depend on whether the restrictions dislodge meaningful numbers of white women in these states from their respective Republican coalitions. And that is far from certain, particularly in the southern and border states advancing most of the laws.
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster who works extensively across the South, says that white women, “particularly suburban white women … have been absolutely critical” to the GOP’s strength in states approving the abortion bans. Election Day exit polls showed that most white women in these areas joined big majorities of white men to provide insuperable leads for Republican candidates.
In 2018, for instance, exit polls conducted by Edison Research found that fully three-fourths of white women supported the Republican Brian Kemp over the Democrat Stacey Abrams in the Georgia governor’s race. That same year, just 16 percent of white women picked the Democrat Mike Espy for Mississippi’s Senate seat. In the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama, 63 percent of white women backed the Republican Roy Moore, who faced multiple allegations that he had dated teenage girls as an adult, over the Democrat Doug Jones (who narrowly triumphed anyway).
In all of these races, southern white women’s preferences diverged sharply from those of African American women, who gave 97 percent of their votes to Abrams, 98 percent to Jones, and 93 percent to Espy.
In most southern states, white women express at least as much opposition to legal abortion as white men, and in some cases more. The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) examined state-by-state attitudes on abortion in 2014. It found that just over three-fifths of white women in Alabama and Mississippi said that abortion should be illegal in most or all circumstances, almost exactly the same percentage as white men in those states. About three-fifths of white women in Kentucky and a narrow majority in Georgia said that abortion should be mostly illegal; in both cases, that was a higher share than among the state’s white men. Only in Missouri did a 51 percent majority of white women say that abortion should mostly remain legal.
Across the South, the core of female opposition to abortion—and of support for the GOP—is women who identify as evangelical Christians. These women now consistently support Republicans in overwhelming numbers. Fully 80 percent of southern white evangelical women backed Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, according to previously unpublished exit-poll results provided to me by Edison. Three-fourths of white evangelical women in Alabama backed Moore over Jones in 2017, and an even more emphatic 88 percent of them in Georgia backed Kemp over Abrams in last year’s governor’s race. Across the South overall, three-fourths of white evangelical women said they approved of Trump’s performance in the 2018 exit poll, according to Edison, and just 20 percent of white evangelical women backed Democratic House candidates that year.
Robert P. Jones, the CEO of PRRI and the author of The End of White Christian America, says that for evangelicals and other culturally conservative Americans, abortion has become a crucial symbol of attitudes toward the larger demographic, cultural, and even economic changes reshaping the nation.
In PRRI polling, Americans who oppose abortion expressed much more negative views on a broad array of social changes than those who support legal access, according to a new analysis it conducted at my request. Looking back at its 2016 Annual Values Survey, the group found that abortion opponents and supporters provided mirror-image responses to a core question: whether “American culture and way of life” has changed mostly for the better or for the worse since the 1950s. Two-thirds of abortion opponents picked worse, while two-thirds of supporters picked better. Similarly, while 60 percent of abortion opponents said the growing ranks of immigrants “threaten American customs and values,” a matching 60 percent of abortion supporters said having more immigrants “strengthens American society.” Women who opposed abortion were as likely as male opponents to express conservative views on those other social changes.(READ MORE)
proof that the stupid never learn!!!
Republican Keller wins Pennsylvania special election
By LAURA BARRÓN-LÓPEZ - politico
05/21/2019 10:02 PM EDT
Republican Fred Keller won a special election on Tuesday to fill a vacant congressional seat in Pennsylvania.
Keller, a state representative backed by President Donald Trump, easily defeated Democrat Marc Friedenberg, a Penn State professor, to win in the solidly Republican district.
Former GOP Rep. Tom Marino resigned from Congress in January, just weeks into his term and after he won reelection last November by 32 percentage points. The district, which covers northeastern and central parts of the state, voted for Trump overwhelmingly in the 2016 election, 66 percent to 30 percent, over Hillary Clinton.
The race drew little attention from national Democrats, but Trump traveled to the district on Monday for a campaign rally that also reinforced the president's reelection message in a critical Electoral College battleground.
“Our support for you was as strong today as it ever was,” Keller said standing alongside Trump in Montoursville. “In 2016, Pennsylvania put Donald Trump over the top. And in 2020, we’re going to do it again.”
Trump tweeted his support of Keller, who was long expected to win, as voters went to the polls Tuesday. “Fred is Strong on Crime, Second Amendment, Military, Vets, and Healthcare. He has my Complete and Total Endorsement!” Trump tweeted.
Trump also made a last-minute push for Keller by recording a robocall.
Keller’s win fills one of the three vacant seats in the House. The other two are in North Carolina, which will fill both the 3rd and 9th district seats in elections on Sept. 10.
Keller, a state representative backed by President Donald Trump, easily defeated Democrat Marc Friedenberg, a Penn State professor, to win in the solidly Republican district.
Former GOP Rep. Tom Marino resigned from Congress in January, just weeks into his term and after he won reelection last November by 32 percentage points. The district, which covers northeastern and central parts of the state, voted for Trump overwhelmingly in the 2016 election, 66 percent to 30 percent, over Hillary Clinton.
The race drew little attention from national Democrats, but Trump traveled to the district on Monday for a campaign rally that also reinforced the president's reelection message in a critical Electoral College battleground.
“Our support for you was as strong today as it ever was,” Keller said standing alongside Trump in Montoursville. “In 2016, Pennsylvania put Donald Trump over the top. And in 2020, we’re going to do it again.”
Trump tweeted his support of Keller, who was long expected to win, as voters went to the polls Tuesday. “Fred is Strong on Crime, Second Amendment, Military, Vets, and Healthcare. He has my Complete and Total Endorsement!” Trump tweeted.
Trump also made a last-minute push for Keller by recording a robocall.
Keller’s win fills one of the three vacant seats in the House. The other two are in North Carolina, which will fill both the 3rd and 9th district seats in elections on Sept. 10.
How Gerrymandering and Voter Suppression Paved the Way for Abortion Bans
Attacks on democracy have turned into attacks on reproductive freedom.
ARI BERMAN, Senior Reporter - mother jones
5/17/19
In recent days, Republican-dominated legislatures in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, and Missouri have passed some of the harshest abortion restrictions in decades. But aside from their collective assault on reproductive freedoms, these states have something else in common: a systematic effort to distort the democratic process through voter suppression and gerrymandering. These tactics have greased the way for near-total bans on abortion and for other extreme right-wing policies.
Georgia is a perfect example. The state’s 2018 governor’s race became the epicenter of Republican voter suppression efforts. As secretary of state, Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp essentially oversaw his own election and instituted a series of policies that hurt his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams. On Kemp’s watch, Georgia purged 1.4 million people from the voter rolls from 2012 to 2016; put the registrations of 53,000 people, 80 percent of whom were voters of color, on hold before the election; and closed 214 polling places in six years. On Election Day, there were four-hour lines in heavily black precincts. All this helped Kemp win the election, and last week he signed into to law a measure prohibiting abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
“Bad policies like the forced pregnancy bill are a direct result of voter suppression,” Abrams tweeted last week. “If leaders can silence Georgians’ voices at the ballot box, they can ignore Georgians’ voices when in office.”
Meanwhile, extreme partisan gerrymandering has helped Republicans establish strangleholds on state legislatures around the country. After winning control of the redistricting process following the 2010 election, Georgia Republicans concentrated black voters into as few districts as possible in order to maximize the number of safe, heavily white Republican seats. In 2018, Kemp narrowly won with 50.2 percent of the vote, but Republicans held nearly 60 percent of state’s legislative seats. There are few swing districts left in the state—in 2018, an incumbent was elected with no opposition in 112 of 180 House districts in the state.
This set-up helps insulate GOP lawmakers from any public backlash over their votes. Georgians oppose the new anti-abortion law 49 percent to 44 percent, according to a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll. Yet the bill easily cleared the GOP-dominated state legislature, with nearly all Republicans, and just one Democrat, voting yes.
Alabama Republicans have pursued a similar gerrymandering strategy, segregating black voters to boost conservative white Republicans. In his successful campaign for the US Senate in 2017, Democrat Doug Jones won 50 percent of the vote but carried just one of Alabama’s seven congressional districts—a sign of just how lopsided the state’s political map has become. That same year, a federal court ruled that 12 of Alabama’s legislative districts were illegally racially gerrymandered. The Republican State Leadership Committee—which funded the GOP’s takeover of numerous state legislatures in 2010 and then coordinated the drawing of new, gerrymandered maps—spent $1.5 million to flip Alabama red for the first time since Reconstruction.
Gerrymandering has similarly boosted Republicans in Missouri and Ohio, two other states where lawmakers have moved forward with near-total abortion bans. Republicans barely surpassed 50 percent of the vote in Ohio’s state legislative elections in 2018, but they won control of 63 percent of the seats in the Ohio House of Representatives. Republicans won 57 percent of the statewide vote for the Missouri House of Representatives, but they control 71 percent of the seats in the chamber—giving them 13 more seats than they would have under a neutral map, according to an Associated Press analysis.
Forty-five percent of Missourians support abortion rights in all or most cases, compared to 50 percent who oppose them in all or most cases, according to a 2014 Pew study. But that state’s bill—which outlaws abortion after eight weeks, even in cases of rape—sailed through the Senate Thursday with the backing of more than 70 percent of its lawmakers, all of them Republicans.
A 2016 analysis by Rewire News found that 22 states had passed new restrictions on both voting and abortion since the 2010 election, which pro-choice advocates don’t believe is a coincidence. Many of the constituencies that strongly support abortion rights—such as women, young people, and voters of color—are among the most likely to be impacted by tactics such as gerrymandering and voter suppression.
Georgia is a perfect example. The state’s 2018 governor’s race became the epicenter of Republican voter suppression efforts. As secretary of state, Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp essentially oversaw his own election and instituted a series of policies that hurt his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams. On Kemp’s watch, Georgia purged 1.4 million people from the voter rolls from 2012 to 2016; put the registrations of 53,000 people, 80 percent of whom were voters of color, on hold before the election; and closed 214 polling places in six years. On Election Day, there were four-hour lines in heavily black precincts. All this helped Kemp win the election, and last week he signed into to law a measure prohibiting abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
“Bad policies like the forced pregnancy bill are a direct result of voter suppression,” Abrams tweeted last week. “If leaders can silence Georgians’ voices at the ballot box, they can ignore Georgians’ voices when in office.”
Meanwhile, extreme partisan gerrymandering has helped Republicans establish strangleholds on state legislatures around the country. After winning control of the redistricting process following the 2010 election, Georgia Republicans concentrated black voters into as few districts as possible in order to maximize the number of safe, heavily white Republican seats. In 2018, Kemp narrowly won with 50.2 percent of the vote, but Republicans held nearly 60 percent of state’s legislative seats. There are few swing districts left in the state—in 2018, an incumbent was elected with no opposition in 112 of 180 House districts in the state.
This set-up helps insulate GOP lawmakers from any public backlash over their votes. Georgians oppose the new anti-abortion law 49 percent to 44 percent, according to a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll. Yet the bill easily cleared the GOP-dominated state legislature, with nearly all Republicans, and just one Democrat, voting yes.
Alabama Republicans have pursued a similar gerrymandering strategy, segregating black voters to boost conservative white Republicans. In his successful campaign for the US Senate in 2017, Democrat Doug Jones won 50 percent of the vote but carried just one of Alabama’s seven congressional districts—a sign of just how lopsided the state’s political map has become. That same year, a federal court ruled that 12 of Alabama’s legislative districts were illegally racially gerrymandered. The Republican State Leadership Committee—which funded the GOP’s takeover of numerous state legislatures in 2010 and then coordinated the drawing of new, gerrymandered maps—spent $1.5 million to flip Alabama red for the first time since Reconstruction.
Gerrymandering has similarly boosted Republicans in Missouri and Ohio, two other states where lawmakers have moved forward with near-total abortion bans. Republicans barely surpassed 50 percent of the vote in Ohio’s state legislative elections in 2018, but they won control of 63 percent of the seats in the Ohio House of Representatives. Republicans won 57 percent of the statewide vote for the Missouri House of Representatives, but they control 71 percent of the seats in the chamber—giving them 13 more seats than they would have under a neutral map, according to an Associated Press analysis.
Forty-five percent of Missourians support abortion rights in all or most cases, compared to 50 percent who oppose them in all or most cases, according to a 2014 Pew study. But that state’s bill—which outlaws abortion after eight weeks, even in cases of rape—sailed through the Senate Thursday with the backing of more than 70 percent of its lawmakers, all of them Republicans.
A 2016 analysis by Rewire News found that 22 states had passed new restrictions on both voting and abortion since the 2010 election, which pro-choice advocates don’t believe is a coincidence. Many of the constituencies that strongly support abortion rights—such as women, young people, and voters of color—are among the most likely to be impacted by tactics such as gerrymandering and voter suppression.
They did their time. They regained the vote. Florida is taking it away again.
“It’s not what the people voted for. It’s not what people supported. It’s heartbreaking.”
ADDY BAIRD - thinkprogress
MAY 14, 2019, 8:00 AM
Coral Nichols will be eligible to vote again when she is 188 years old. That’s the estimate, at least, if she pays the state of Florida $100 per month to satisfy her nearly $190,000 debt.
Nichols is one of 1.4 million people with felony convictions in Florida who had their right to vote restored last fall following the passage of Amendment 4, a victory that marked one of the most significant expansions of the right to vote in the United States in the last century.
“It was completely amazing,” Nichols said, recalling when the ballot initiative passed in November. “We had all worked so hard, and we had all believed that the people in the state of Florida believed in second chances.”
Many activists and experts argue that Amendment 4 was self-executing, meaning that once it was passed by voters, the measure would be put into effect, no questions asked.
But Republicans in the state legislature last week passed a new bill making regaining the vote conditional on having first fully repaid any outstanding fines and fees — including ones not related to their felony conviction.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has said he will sign the bill into law in the coming days. When he does, it could keep people like Nichols from the ballot box for the rest of their lives.
Nichols, 41, grew up in Oklahoma. Her father, a Vietnam War veteran, was abusive, and Nichols says stealing money from her family and being able to buy herself new things made her feel good. Her father died when she was 21, and Nichols’ spending habits spiraled. “My addiction became money,” she said.
Nichols embezzled money from an organization she worked for and attempted suicide before being arrested. While in jail, Nichols says she turned her life over to God. She was sentenced to five years in prison and 10 years’ probation, and ordered to pay $190,000 in restitution. A judge later converted that restitution order into a civil lien and called her sentence complete.
Nichols, who now lives in Seminole, Florida, says she told this story often while fighting for Amendment 4. Since her release, she has co-founded a non-profit organization that helps people with drug addiction deal with the court system, and sees herself as living proof that people can change their lives given the chance.
“I finished my probation,” she said. “I registered to vote.”
Chiraag Bains, the director of Legal Strategies at Demos, a think tank often involved in voting rights litigation, said Supreme Court precedent says it’s unconstitutional to price people out of their vote.
“The bill that the governor is expected to sign into law establishes blatant wealth discrimination in the restoration of rights process,” Bains told ThinkProgress. “The bill will create two classes of returning citizens… [and] under this bill your ability to pay will govern whether you can participate in democracy.”
Bains believes there is a strong case to be made that the legislation is blatantly discriminatory and punishes people for their poverty, but says he isn’t taking anything for granted. “Especially with civil rights [litigation] and especially when Trump has been filling the judiciary with quite conservative jurists,” he added.
Bains said that in addition to the argument that Florida’s fines-and-fees legislation creates two classes of returning citizens, he also has concerns about due process rights.
Currently, there is no way for returning citizens to know exactly how much they owe. This also makes it basically impossible to estimate how many people would be affected by the legislation, though it is likely hundreds of thousands.
The measure also creates a chilling effect, experts say, that will keep thousands of people who are potentially eligible to vote from ever registering out of fear, and could feed a voter fraud myth often perpetrated by the right.
“People move, mail gets lost, etc. So if someone got their rights back, registered and votes, but doesn’t know they have money owed, they’d be committing a felony and play into the right’s ‘voter fraud’ myth,” Nailah Summers, communications director for activist group Dream Defenders, said in an email.
“This bill is a huge set-up, besides the often and correctly pointed-to poll tax.”
Erica Racz, a 31-year-old returning citizen living in Lehigh Acres, Florida, believes she owes about $57,000 in court fees, but says it’s been impossible to get an exact figure.
“They gave me such a runaround,” Racz told ThinkProgress. The state said some things were sealed and that in order to access other things, she would need to contact federal agencies. “Nobody could tell me anything. They couldn’t give me a direct answer.”[...]
Nichols is one of 1.4 million people with felony convictions in Florida who had their right to vote restored last fall following the passage of Amendment 4, a victory that marked one of the most significant expansions of the right to vote in the United States in the last century.
“It was completely amazing,” Nichols said, recalling when the ballot initiative passed in November. “We had all worked so hard, and we had all believed that the people in the state of Florida believed in second chances.”
Many activists and experts argue that Amendment 4 was self-executing, meaning that once it was passed by voters, the measure would be put into effect, no questions asked.
But Republicans in the state legislature last week passed a new bill making regaining the vote conditional on having first fully repaid any outstanding fines and fees — including ones not related to their felony conviction.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has said he will sign the bill into law in the coming days. When he does, it could keep people like Nichols from the ballot box for the rest of their lives.
Nichols, 41, grew up in Oklahoma. Her father, a Vietnam War veteran, was abusive, and Nichols says stealing money from her family and being able to buy herself new things made her feel good. Her father died when she was 21, and Nichols’ spending habits spiraled. “My addiction became money,” she said.
Nichols embezzled money from an organization she worked for and attempted suicide before being arrested. While in jail, Nichols says she turned her life over to God. She was sentenced to five years in prison and 10 years’ probation, and ordered to pay $190,000 in restitution. A judge later converted that restitution order into a civil lien and called her sentence complete.
Nichols, who now lives in Seminole, Florida, says she told this story often while fighting for Amendment 4. Since her release, she has co-founded a non-profit organization that helps people with drug addiction deal with the court system, and sees herself as living proof that people can change their lives given the chance.
“I finished my probation,” she said. “I registered to vote.”
Chiraag Bains, the director of Legal Strategies at Demos, a think tank often involved in voting rights litigation, said Supreme Court precedent says it’s unconstitutional to price people out of their vote.
“The bill that the governor is expected to sign into law establishes blatant wealth discrimination in the restoration of rights process,” Bains told ThinkProgress. “The bill will create two classes of returning citizens… [and] under this bill your ability to pay will govern whether you can participate in democracy.”
Bains believes there is a strong case to be made that the legislation is blatantly discriminatory and punishes people for their poverty, but says he isn’t taking anything for granted. “Especially with civil rights [litigation] and especially when Trump has been filling the judiciary with quite conservative jurists,” he added.
Bains said that in addition to the argument that Florida’s fines-and-fees legislation creates two classes of returning citizens, he also has concerns about due process rights.
Currently, there is no way for returning citizens to know exactly how much they owe. This also makes it basically impossible to estimate how many people would be affected by the legislation, though it is likely hundreds of thousands.
The measure also creates a chilling effect, experts say, that will keep thousands of people who are potentially eligible to vote from ever registering out of fear, and could feed a voter fraud myth often perpetrated by the right.
“People move, mail gets lost, etc. So if someone got their rights back, registered and votes, but doesn’t know they have money owed, they’d be committing a felony and play into the right’s ‘voter fraud’ myth,” Nailah Summers, communications director for activist group Dream Defenders, said in an email.
“This bill is a huge set-up, besides the often and correctly pointed-to poll tax.”
Erica Racz, a 31-year-old returning citizen living in Lehigh Acres, Florida, believes she owes about $57,000 in court fees, but says it’s been impossible to get an exact figure.
“They gave me such a runaround,” Racz told ThinkProgress. The state said some things were sealed and that in order to access other things, she would need to contact federal agencies. “Nobody could tell me anything. They couldn’t give me a direct answer.”[...]
Michigan’s new law is getting the most reluctant voting group to the polls
"It's about them maybe now having a stake in the political system."
DANIELLE MCLEAN - thinkprogress
MAY 10, 2019, 11:43 AM
In the small city of Charlotte, Michigan, seven people took advantage of a new law this week allowing voters to cast ballots on the same day they register. And of those seven same-day voters, six were teenagers.
Election Day in Michigan on Tuesday was mostly a low-key affair. Balloting was held on a variety of local measures affecting school budgets and property taxes. Voters in one township considered allowing the introduction of marijuana businesses.
But the election was also a trial run for expanded voting access, including a potentially game-changing move that appears likely to significantly boost youth voting across the state.
Michigan voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 3 last November, which introduced various measures making it easier for people to vote.
In the past, residents in the state were not allowed to register to vote within 30 days of an election and they were unable to cast absentee ballots without a valid reason. Last year’s vote lifted those restrictions, allowing all voters to cast absentee ballots and allowing people to register the day of the election.
The new law’s effect was immediately felt in Charlotte, a small city with a population of around 9,000 people, some 20 miles from the state capital Lansing. High school teacher John Moran credits same-day voting with the impressive teen turnout at his school on Election Day.
“Knowing that kids are hearing the message and going out there and at least trying to make their voice heard is a pretty big deal for me,” said Moran, who has long preached greater civic engagement to the kids at his school.
Moran says the changes Michigan voters approved last November have increased the youth vote beyond his wildest dreams. “Six of seven people that used same-day registration were students? That’s amazing,” he said.
Voting rights activists for years have looked for the secret to getting more teens and young adults — historically one of the least likely demographic groups to vote — to turn out at the polls. The answer, it seems, might be as simple as making registration easier, and collecting ballots the same day so that voters can make just one, rather than two trips to their polling station.
At a time when a number of states and local jurisdictions are making it harder for people to vote by putting draconian and punitive ballot access measures into place, some localities, and states like Michigan, seem to have concluded that expanding the franchise is a desirable goal.
Even before this week’s balloting, there were signs that — if given enough of an opportunity — young voters in Michigan just might just turn out at the polls. Of 441 people who registered to vote on Election Day, a little more than half (231) were between 18 and 20 years old, said Shawn Starkey, a spokesperson for Michigan’s secretary of state.
“These are voters that otherwise would not have been able to exercise their right to vote,” Starkey told ThinkProgress.
The measures approved in November also make absentee voting easier. Moran said he could have gone to his local polling station in Charlotte on Tuesday, but opted to vote absentee this year — just because he could. “I could’ve easily gone in and voted like I normally do but I wanted to exercise my right to vote under Proposition 3, because to me, it’s historic,” he told ThinkProgress.
Moran was in good company. Election officials said that in Charlotte, 1,007 absentee ballot votes were cast, which comprises more than 15% of the town’s registered voters. And city officials said that an astonishing three times the number of people submitted absentee ballots as turned out at the polls. “We had more (absentee ballot voters) than we did people coming to the polls,” said Terpstra, adding that, by contrast, 336 people voted in person.
Sharon Dolente, a voting rights specialist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, told ThinkProgress that Michigan’s new voting law is expected to impact people within the state who move frequently. Such voters — who often fail to register at their new address in time to take part in elections in their new precincts — include younger voters, college students, lower-income residents, and people of color.
“You’re not doing anything wrong when you are moving frequently,” Dolente said. “When your voting system makes you do more work when you move, it makes it less likely that you will do that.”
A study by the Center for American Progress found that when states implement same-day voter registration, voter participation increases on average by 5%. Same-day voter registration laws particularly impact populations that have historically been underrepresented in the political system including young people and people of color, the study found. (ThinkProgress is an editorially independent news site housed at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.)
If put in place nationally, same-day voter registration could boost participation an estimated 12% among 18 to 25 year olds, 7.5% among African Americans and 11% among Latinx voters, the study found.
Before November, Michigan was one of more than 30 states that had still not adopted same-day voter registration. Its implementation was projected to increase voter turnout in Michigan by more than 243,000, the study found.
Likewise, states that impose no-excuse absentee ballot voting increases voter participation an estimated 3% over time. The law particularly benefits students and people with challenging work schedules, who struggle to pay for child care, and who face mobility challenges, the study found.
Moran said he can easily understand how the new law which only marginally affects him, could make a huge difference in the lives of other voters.
“Inconveniences for me [are] not as drastic as for single mothers who want to cast a ballot but have two jobs and are dropping off their kids,” he said.
“Maybe,” he added, “those people had a political opinion but wasn’t able to express it because they were fighting for their economic lives.”
The same is true for the teenagers and his school and elsewhere, who might finally have discovered that they not only have a reason, but now also have the opportunity, to vote.
“It’s about them maybe now having a stake in the political system,” he said.
Election Day in Michigan on Tuesday was mostly a low-key affair. Balloting was held on a variety of local measures affecting school budgets and property taxes. Voters in one township considered allowing the introduction of marijuana businesses.
But the election was also a trial run for expanded voting access, including a potentially game-changing move that appears likely to significantly boost youth voting across the state.
Michigan voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 3 last November, which introduced various measures making it easier for people to vote.
In the past, residents in the state were not allowed to register to vote within 30 days of an election and they were unable to cast absentee ballots without a valid reason. Last year’s vote lifted those restrictions, allowing all voters to cast absentee ballots and allowing people to register the day of the election.
The new law’s effect was immediately felt in Charlotte, a small city with a population of around 9,000 people, some 20 miles from the state capital Lansing. High school teacher John Moran credits same-day voting with the impressive teen turnout at his school on Election Day.
“Knowing that kids are hearing the message and going out there and at least trying to make their voice heard is a pretty big deal for me,” said Moran, who has long preached greater civic engagement to the kids at his school.
Moran says the changes Michigan voters approved last November have increased the youth vote beyond his wildest dreams. “Six of seven people that used same-day registration were students? That’s amazing,” he said.
Voting rights activists for years have looked for the secret to getting more teens and young adults — historically one of the least likely demographic groups to vote — to turn out at the polls. The answer, it seems, might be as simple as making registration easier, and collecting ballots the same day so that voters can make just one, rather than two trips to their polling station.
At a time when a number of states and local jurisdictions are making it harder for people to vote by putting draconian and punitive ballot access measures into place, some localities, and states like Michigan, seem to have concluded that expanding the franchise is a desirable goal.
Even before this week’s balloting, there were signs that — if given enough of an opportunity — young voters in Michigan just might just turn out at the polls. Of 441 people who registered to vote on Election Day, a little more than half (231) were between 18 and 20 years old, said Shawn Starkey, a spokesperson for Michigan’s secretary of state.
“These are voters that otherwise would not have been able to exercise their right to vote,” Starkey told ThinkProgress.
The measures approved in November also make absentee voting easier. Moran said he could have gone to his local polling station in Charlotte on Tuesday, but opted to vote absentee this year — just because he could. “I could’ve easily gone in and voted like I normally do but I wanted to exercise my right to vote under Proposition 3, because to me, it’s historic,” he told ThinkProgress.
Moran was in good company. Election officials said that in Charlotte, 1,007 absentee ballot votes were cast, which comprises more than 15% of the town’s registered voters. And city officials said that an astonishing three times the number of people submitted absentee ballots as turned out at the polls. “We had more (absentee ballot voters) than we did people coming to the polls,” said Terpstra, adding that, by contrast, 336 people voted in person.
Sharon Dolente, a voting rights specialist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, told ThinkProgress that Michigan’s new voting law is expected to impact people within the state who move frequently. Such voters — who often fail to register at their new address in time to take part in elections in their new precincts — include younger voters, college students, lower-income residents, and people of color.
“You’re not doing anything wrong when you are moving frequently,” Dolente said. “When your voting system makes you do more work when you move, it makes it less likely that you will do that.”
A study by the Center for American Progress found that when states implement same-day voter registration, voter participation increases on average by 5%. Same-day voter registration laws particularly impact populations that have historically been underrepresented in the political system including young people and people of color, the study found. (ThinkProgress is an editorially independent news site housed at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.)
If put in place nationally, same-day voter registration could boost participation an estimated 12% among 18 to 25 year olds, 7.5% among African Americans and 11% among Latinx voters, the study found.
Before November, Michigan was one of more than 30 states that had still not adopted same-day voter registration. Its implementation was projected to increase voter turnout in Michigan by more than 243,000, the study found.
Likewise, states that impose no-excuse absentee ballot voting increases voter participation an estimated 3% over time. The law particularly benefits students and people with challenging work schedules, who struggle to pay for child care, and who face mobility challenges, the study found.
Moran said he can easily understand how the new law which only marginally affects him, could make a huge difference in the lives of other voters.
“Inconveniences for me [are] not as drastic as for single mothers who want to cast a ballot but have two jobs and are dropping off their kids,” he said.
“Maybe,” he added, “those people had a political opinion but wasn’t able to express it because they were fighting for their economic lives.”
The same is true for the teenagers and his school and elsewhere, who might finally have discovered that they not only have a reason, but now also have the opportunity, to vote.
“It’s about them maybe now having a stake in the political system,” he said.
After the 2018 Blue Wave, Republicans Are Making It Harder to Vote
Key battleground states like Florida are adopting new voter suppression laws before the 2020 election.
ARI BERMAN - mother jones
Senior Reporter
5/5/19
In 2010, Karen Leicht was sentenced to 28 months in prison for conspiracy to commit insurance fraud. She was released in 2013, found a job as a paralegal in Miami, and completed her probation in 2016. But the 61-year-old lifelong Republican still couldn’t vote because of a Florida law banning people with past felony convictions from voting unless their rights were restored by the governor.
Leicht should have become eligible to get her voting rights back after the 2018 election, when 64 percent of Florida voters approved a ballot initiative overturning the state’s felon disenfranchisement law. Amendment 4 promised to restore the franchise to 1.4 million Floridians, the largest expansion of voting rights in the state since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Nubian Roberts from the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition talks with Taunya Tyson (right), who just registered to vote in Jacksonville, Florida, on January 8, 2019. Bob Self/The Florida Times-Union via AP
In 2010, Karen Leicht was sentenced to 28 months in prison for conspiracy to commit insurance fraud. She was released in 2013, found a job as a paralegal in Miami, and completed her probation in 2016. But the 61-year-old lifelong Republican still couldn’t vote because of a Florida law banning people with past felony convictions from voting unless their rights were restored by the governor.
Leicht should have become eligible to get her voting rights back after the 2018 election, when 64 percent of Florida voters approved a ballot initiative overturning the state’s felon disenfranchisement law. Amendment 4 promised to restore the franchise to 1.4 million Floridians, the largest expansion of voting rights in the state since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Yet Leicht and hundreds of thousands of other Floridians could lose the chance to regain their voting rights because of legislation that just passed Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature. The measure would require people with felony convictions to pay all restitution, fines, and fees resulting from their sentences before becoming eligible to vote. Leicht owes a staggering $59 million in restitution payments, meaning she’ll probably never vote again if Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signs the bill into law.
“$59 million—really?” Leicht asked a state senate committee in March. “You think I can ever pay that? I’ll never vote in this state again, at this rate. That’s like a poll tax.”
The bill could disenfranchise more than half a million Floridians who have not completed restitution payments. (More than 80 percent of fines levied by courts in Florida from 2014 to 2018 had “minimal collections expectations,” according to the Clerk of Courts association, because defendants were too poor to pay them off.) Those with past felony convictions who have completed probation and parole began registering to vote in January, when Amendment 4 went into effect, and voter registration numbers have more than doubled from the same period four years ago. Now that could all come to a halt. “This is clearly an effort to undermine the will of the voters,” says Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Florida. “We are creating a two-tiered system and saying how much money you have can determine whether you can vote.”
The measure passed the Florida House last week, and the Senate approved a similar bill on Thursday.
The move to gut Amendment 4 is part of a broader effort by Republican-controlled states to restrict access to the ballot after voters approved ballot initiatives in November’s midterm elections to expand voting rights and elected Democrats who supported policies like automatic voter registration and felon reenfranchisement. “There is an uptick in activity around measures to restrict voting access,” the Brennan Center for Justice states in a new report, with 19 bills restricting voting access moving through state legislatures in 10 states.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed a bill on Thursday that could curtail voter registration drives by imposing fines of up to $10,000 on groups that submit incomplete registration forms, even though they’re required by state law to hand in any registration forms they collect. The law imposes additional requirements on registration groups, such as mandatory state training and limited time windows to submit registrations, and failure to meet these requirements is punishable by jail time. Civil rights groups allege that the law is an effort to disenfranchise black voters after the Tennessee Black Voter Project registered 90,000 African Americans ahead of the 2018 election. Shortly after Lee signed the measure into law, the Tennessee chapter of the NAACP and other civil rights groups filed suit against state officials to challenge it.
The Texas state senate passed a similar bill, which would make it a felony—punishable by jail time—for a voter to provide false information on a voter registration form or cast a ballot when the person is ineligible to vote, even if it’s an honest mistake and the ballot is not counted. The Texas House of Representatives is now considering the bill.
Texas has a history of aggressive prosecutions of minority voters for alleged voter fraud. In 2018, Crystal Mason, a 43-year-old African American woman, was sentenced to five years in prison for voting while on supervised release during the 2016 election. Mason said she didn’t realize she was ineligible to vote, and her provisional ballot was not counted. The new bill, SB 9, could make such draconian prosecutions far more common. “SB 9 would sharply escalate the state’s ongoing campaign of voter suppression,” voting rights groups wrote to state lawmakers, “by spreading fear that people may be thrown in jail for honest mistakes while trying to vote.” Nearly 10,000 voters had their ballots rejected in 2018 in the state’s five largest counties for reasons like voting in the wrong precinct; now that could subject them to criminal prosecution.
Texas Democrats picked up 12 state legislative seats and nearly won a US Senate race in 2018, leading to GOP fears that the state is trending purple.
Arizona, another emerging battleground where Democrats picked up a US Senate seat and the secretary of state’s office in 2018, also passed a new law restricting voter access. Arizona holds early voting until the Friday before an election and then allows counties to open emergency voting centers for people that can’t get to the polls on Election Day. But under the new law, signed by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, voters at the emergency centers must sign an affidavit under penalty of perjury claiming they have an unavoidable emergency. If they’re shown not to have a valid emergency, they face up to three years in jail.
The Arizona law also gives county boards of supervisors the exclusive authority to open emergency voting centers. This seems aimed at Maricopa County elections director Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who opened five emergency centers before the 2018 election over the objections of the Republican-controlled county board of supervisors. Nearly 3,000 Maricopa County voters cast emergency ballots in 2018.
There have been some expansions of voting rights this legislative session in blue states. New York passed early voting, New Mexico adopted Election Day registration, and 115 bills expanding voter access are being considered by state legislatures in 35 states. But in Republican-controlled states—particularly those where voters took steps to expand ballot access in November—the crackdown on voting rights is more prevalent.
“While there are bright spots this legislative session, there is ongoing concern that voter suppression is real and attempts to roll back access to the ballot box are happening around us,” says Myrna Perez of the Brennan Center. “This requires extreme vigilance.”
Leicht should have become eligible to get her voting rights back after the 2018 election, when 64 percent of Florida voters approved a ballot initiative overturning the state’s felon disenfranchisement law. Amendment 4 promised to restore the franchise to 1.4 million Floridians, the largest expansion of voting rights in the state since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Nubian Roberts from the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition talks with Taunya Tyson (right), who just registered to vote in Jacksonville, Florida, on January 8, 2019. Bob Self/The Florida Times-Union via AP
In 2010, Karen Leicht was sentenced to 28 months in prison for conspiracy to commit insurance fraud. She was released in 2013, found a job as a paralegal in Miami, and completed her probation in 2016. But the 61-year-old lifelong Republican still couldn’t vote because of a Florida law banning people with past felony convictions from voting unless their rights were restored by the governor.
Leicht should have become eligible to get her voting rights back after the 2018 election, when 64 percent of Florida voters approved a ballot initiative overturning the state’s felon disenfranchisement law. Amendment 4 promised to restore the franchise to 1.4 million Floridians, the largest expansion of voting rights in the state since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Yet Leicht and hundreds of thousands of other Floridians could lose the chance to regain their voting rights because of legislation that just passed Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature. The measure would require people with felony convictions to pay all restitution, fines, and fees resulting from their sentences before becoming eligible to vote. Leicht owes a staggering $59 million in restitution payments, meaning she’ll probably never vote again if Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signs the bill into law.
“$59 million—really?” Leicht asked a state senate committee in March. “You think I can ever pay that? I’ll never vote in this state again, at this rate. That’s like a poll tax.”
The bill could disenfranchise more than half a million Floridians who have not completed restitution payments. (More than 80 percent of fines levied by courts in Florida from 2014 to 2018 had “minimal collections expectations,” according to the Clerk of Courts association, because defendants were too poor to pay them off.) Those with past felony convictions who have completed probation and parole began registering to vote in January, when Amendment 4 went into effect, and voter registration numbers have more than doubled from the same period four years ago. Now that could all come to a halt. “This is clearly an effort to undermine the will of the voters,” says Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Florida. “We are creating a two-tiered system and saying how much money you have can determine whether you can vote.”
The measure passed the Florida House last week, and the Senate approved a similar bill on Thursday.
The move to gut Amendment 4 is part of a broader effort by Republican-controlled states to restrict access to the ballot after voters approved ballot initiatives in November’s midterm elections to expand voting rights and elected Democrats who supported policies like automatic voter registration and felon reenfranchisement. “There is an uptick in activity around measures to restrict voting access,” the Brennan Center for Justice states in a new report, with 19 bills restricting voting access moving through state legislatures in 10 states.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed a bill on Thursday that could curtail voter registration drives by imposing fines of up to $10,000 on groups that submit incomplete registration forms, even though they’re required by state law to hand in any registration forms they collect. The law imposes additional requirements on registration groups, such as mandatory state training and limited time windows to submit registrations, and failure to meet these requirements is punishable by jail time. Civil rights groups allege that the law is an effort to disenfranchise black voters after the Tennessee Black Voter Project registered 90,000 African Americans ahead of the 2018 election. Shortly after Lee signed the measure into law, the Tennessee chapter of the NAACP and other civil rights groups filed suit against state officials to challenge it.
The Texas state senate passed a similar bill, which would make it a felony—punishable by jail time—for a voter to provide false information on a voter registration form or cast a ballot when the person is ineligible to vote, even if it’s an honest mistake and the ballot is not counted. The Texas House of Representatives is now considering the bill.
Texas has a history of aggressive prosecutions of minority voters for alleged voter fraud. In 2018, Crystal Mason, a 43-year-old African American woman, was sentenced to five years in prison for voting while on supervised release during the 2016 election. Mason said she didn’t realize she was ineligible to vote, and her provisional ballot was not counted. The new bill, SB 9, could make such draconian prosecutions far more common. “SB 9 would sharply escalate the state’s ongoing campaign of voter suppression,” voting rights groups wrote to state lawmakers, “by spreading fear that people may be thrown in jail for honest mistakes while trying to vote.” Nearly 10,000 voters had their ballots rejected in 2018 in the state’s five largest counties for reasons like voting in the wrong precinct; now that could subject them to criminal prosecution.
Texas Democrats picked up 12 state legislative seats and nearly won a US Senate race in 2018, leading to GOP fears that the state is trending purple.
Arizona, another emerging battleground where Democrats picked up a US Senate seat and the secretary of state’s office in 2018, also passed a new law restricting voter access. Arizona holds early voting until the Friday before an election and then allows counties to open emergency voting centers for people that can’t get to the polls on Election Day. But under the new law, signed by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, voters at the emergency centers must sign an affidavit under penalty of perjury claiming they have an unavoidable emergency. If they’re shown not to have a valid emergency, they face up to three years in jail.
The Arizona law also gives county boards of supervisors the exclusive authority to open emergency voting centers. This seems aimed at Maricopa County elections director Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who opened five emergency centers before the 2018 election over the objections of the Republican-controlled county board of supervisors. Nearly 3,000 Maricopa County voters cast emergency ballots in 2018.
There have been some expansions of voting rights this legislative session in blue states. New York passed early voting, New Mexico adopted Election Day registration, and 115 bills expanding voter access are being considered by state legislatures in 35 states. But in Republican-controlled states—particularly those where voters took steps to expand ballot access in November—the crackdown on voting rights is more prevalent.
“While there are bright spots this legislative session, there is ongoing concern that voter suppression is real and attempts to roll back access to the ballot box are happening around us,” says Myrna Perez of the Brennan Center. “This requires extreme vigilance.”
Are centrist candidates really the most "electable"? It may be the opposite
Despite the mainstream media's centrism fetish, voters want someone inspirational, not just "nicer than Trump"
AMANDA MARCOTTE - salon
MAY 6, 2019 5:05PM (UTC)
It appears the mainstream media — especially the political desk at the New York Times — has decided on its narrative framework for the Democratic primary campaign in 2020: There's a fraught and difficult choice between nominating an "electable" centrist or choosing a more progressive candidate who will motivate the base but supposedly will have a much harder time defeating Donald Trump.
Glenn Thrush of the Times is the latest reporter presenting the idea that a centrist is more "electable" as if this were an inescapable truth instead of a poorly evidenced assumption.
"Pelosi Warns Democrats: Stay in the Center or Trump May Contest Election Results," the headline on Thrush's weekend story blares. In it, he claims that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's desire is to "not risk alienating the moderate voters who flocked to the party in 2018 by drifting too far to the left."
Whether or not Pelosi actually said that, or whether that's just Thrush putting some spin on the ball, is unclear. He only quotes her saying, "Own the center left, own the mainstream," and adding that Democrats won in 2018 because they "did not engage in some of the other exuberances that exist in our party," which Thrush defines as "'Medicare for all' and the Green New Deal." But he doesn't directly quote Pelosi mentioning either of those things, and considering how many Democrats who ran on Medicare or All won in 2018, it's hard to imagine she was actually arguing that phrase is political poison.
But regardless of what Pelosi said, the article's clear implication — that Democrats have to choose between progressive politics and winning elections — remains a sacred doctrine in mainstream media circles. There is no real evidence for this proposition. Yet this is precisely why former Vice President Joe Biden is being held out as the most "electable" candidate in the race, on the grounds that he appeals to the supposed moderate swing voters who are viewed as the key to a Democrat winning the White House in 2020.
The "moderate" voter in the pundit imagination is not all that well-defined most of the time, but taking a stab at it, I'd say what is being imagined is often someone like Biden: Economically more conservative than most Democrats but generally liberal on social policy, while occasionally saying conservative-friendly things about race and gender issues to reassure white voters that he's not too woke. The idea is that candidates like that will scoop up voters, mainly in suburban areas, who often vote Republican but are gettable because they're economically conservative but basically cool with issues like gay marriage and abortion rights.
The problem is that this category of voters, who would be called "libertarians" in political science circles, don't really exist in American politics. As Paul Krugman of the New York Times noted in February, these fabled economically conservative but socially liberal voters only constitute about 4% of the electorate. This is in contrast with the consistently liberal (45% of voters), economically liberal but socially conservative (29%), and the consistently conservative (23%).
If we're talking about people who voted for Barack Obama and then switched to Trump, they mostly fall into group No. 3, the economically liberal but socially conservative types — aka "populists" — who seemed to feel safe making the switch mainly because Trump was (incorrectly) perceived as posing no threat to social safety net systems like Medicare or disability benefits on which this group relies.
All of which is to to say that the "centrist" model for a Democrat has it exactly backwards. If the goal is to win over swing voters in Midwestern states, the winning strategy isn't to back an economically centrist candidate like Biden, but a Democrat who appeals so strongly to these voters with progressive economic policies that they're willing to set aside the racial resentment that led them to vote for Trump.
Incidentally, this is part of the reason why Obama won in 2008. A small but important percentage of populist voters stifled their racism and voted for the black candidate for economic reasons. But Obama also ran in a time of economic crisis, when those voters were extremely worried about the security of their jobs and benefits. With a relatively strong economy, it may simply be impossible for Democrats to win them back this time around — and there's no point trying to appeal to them on social issues. Even the most socially conservative Democrat is far more liberal than the most liberal Republican, so any strategic effort to appeal to social conservatives is likelier to alienate liberal voters than to accomplish its stated goal.
Even that argument is likely giving too much weight to ideology as a factor in winning elections. Political science shows there's surprisingly little causal relationship between ideology and party affiliation, and that people tend to pick parties for identity reasons and then shape their political views around that. That's why Trump, who started out as a bitterly polarizing figure in the Republican Party, now has near-complete support from Republicans. Even if they were initially skeptical, it was easier to get on board with Trump than it was to abandon their identity as Republicans.
There are many fluctuating factors in play that make it nearly impossible to say for certain what an "electable" candidate looks like, one thing that's worth noting is that both Obama and Trump were able to garner a great deal of media attention by being something new and different. (Indeed, this might be the only quality they share.)
In Obama's case, it was not just his race, though that certainly mattered in terms of making the 2008 election seem historic. It was his personal charisma and his upbeat campaign style, which struck a strong contrast with the misery inflicted by eight years of George W. Bush, but also with the milquetoasty, triangulating style of the Democratic Party at the time. Obama was not actually on Hillary Clinton's left during the 2008 primaries — at least not on policy — but he was perceived as such, particularly since he hadn't supported the Iraq war, unlike the milquetoasty, triangulating Democrats. He was able to define himself as someone bold and interesting, which John Kerry was totally unable to do in his 2004 campaign against Bush.
Similarly, Trump, hateful monster that he is, was able to cast himself as a decisive, bold figure who was not given to compromise and would shake things up in Washington. That helped generate enough enthusiasm among the declining Republican base to drag him across the finish line.
What these elections demonstrate is that voters aren't really inspired by playing it safe or moving to the center. Instead, candidates do better by convincing voters that this election is a historic moment and they don't want to be left on the sidelines. There are a number of 2020 candidates who have that juice for different reasons: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris all seem to be generating excitement at their rallies. It could be catastrophic if Democratic voters, laboring under the panicky delusion that only a "centrist" can win, blow their chance to beat Trump by nominating exactly the wrong kind of candidate.
Glenn Thrush of the Times is the latest reporter presenting the idea that a centrist is more "electable" as if this were an inescapable truth instead of a poorly evidenced assumption.
"Pelosi Warns Democrats: Stay in the Center or Trump May Contest Election Results," the headline on Thrush's weekend story blares. In it, he claims that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's desire is to "not risk alienating the moderate voters who flocked to the party in 2018 by drifting too far to the left."
Whether or not Pelosi actually said that, or whether that's just Thrush putting some spin on the ball, is unclear. He only quotes her saying, "Own the center left, own the mainstream," and adding that Democrats won in 2018 because they "did not engage in some of the other exuberances that exist in our party," which Thrush defines as "'Medicare for all' and the Green New Deal." But he doesn't directly quote Pelosi mentioning either of those things, and considering how many Democrats who ran on Medicare or All won in 2018, it's hard to imagine she was actually arguing that phrase is political poison.
But regardless of what Pelosi said, the article's clear implication — that Democrats have to choose between progressive politics and winning elections — remains a sacred doctrine in mainstream media circles. There is no real evidence for this proposition. Yet this is precisely why former Vice President Joe Biden is being held out as the most "electable" candidate in the race, on the grounds that he appeals to the supposed moderate swing voters who are viewed as the key to a Democrat winning the White House in 2020.
The "moderate" voter in the pundit imagination is not all that well-defined most of the time, but taking a stab at it, I'd say what is being imagined is often someone like Biden: Economically more conservative than most Democrats but generally liberal on social policy, while occasionally saying conservative-friendly things about race and gender issues to reassure white voters that he's not too woke. The idea is that candidates like that will scoop up voters, mainly in suburban areas, who often vote Republican but are gettable because they're economically conservative but basically cool with issues like gay marriage and abortion rights.
The problem is that this category of voters, who would be called "libertarians" in political science circles, don't really exist in American politics. As Paul Krugman of the New York Times noted in February, these fabled economically conservative but socially liberal voters only constitute about 4% of the electorate. This is in contrast with the consistently liberal (45% of voters), economically liberal but socially conservative (29%), and the consistently conservative (23%).
If we're talking about people who voted for Barack Obama and then switched to Trump, they mostly fall into group No. 3, the economically liberal but socially conservative types — aka "populists" — who seemed to feel safe making the switch mainly because Trump was (incorrectly) perceived as posing no threat to social safety net systems like Medicare or disability benefits on which this group relies.
All of which is to to say that the "centrist" model for a Democrat has it exactly backwards. If the goal is to win over swing voters in Midwestern states, the winning strategy isn't to back an economically centrist candidate like Biden, but a Democrat who appeals so strongly to these voters with progressive economic policies that they're willing to set aside the racial resentment that led them to vote for Trump.
Incidentally, this is part of the reason why Obama won in 2008. A small but important percentage of populist voters stifled their racism and voted for the black candidate for economic reasons. But Obama also ran in a time of economic crisis, when those voters were extremely worried about the security of their jobs and benefits. With a relatively strong economy, it may simply be impossible for Democrats to win them back this time around — and there's no point trying to appeal to them on social issues. Even the most socially conservative Democrat is far more liberal than the most liberal Republican, so any strategic effort to appeal to social conservatives is likelier to alienate liberal voters than to accomplish its stated goal.
Even that argument is likely giving too much weight to ideology as a factor in winning elections. Political science shows there's surprisingly little causal relationship between ideology and party affiliation, and that people tend to pick parties for identity reasons and then shape their political views around that. That's why Trump, who started out as a bitterly polarizing figure in the Republican Party, now has near-complete support from Republicans. Even if they were initially skeptical, it was easier to get on board with Trump than it was to abandon their identity as Republicans.
There are many fluctuating factors in play that make it nearly impossible to say for certain what an "electable" candidate looks like, one thing that's worth noting is that both Obama and Trump were able to garner a great deal of media attention by being something new and different. (Indeed, this might be the only quality they share.)
In Obama's case, it was not just his race, though that certainly mattered in terms of making the 2008 election seem historic. It was his personal charisma and his upbeat campaign style, which struck a strong contrast with the misery inflicted by eight years of George W. Bush, but also with the milquetoasty, triangulating style of the Democratic Party at the time. Obama was not actually on Hillary Clinton's left during the 2008 primaries — at least not on policy — but he was perceived as such, particularly since he hadn't supported the Iraq war, unlike the milquetoasty, triangulating Democrats. He was able to define himself as someone bold and interesting, which John Kerry was totally unable to do in his 2004 campaign against Bush.
Similarly, Trump, hateful monster that he is, was able to cast himself as a decisive, bold figure who was not given to compromise and would shake things up in Washington. That helped generate enough enthusiasm among the declining Republican base to drag him across the finish line.
What these elections demonstrate is that voters aren't really inspired by playing it safe or moving to the center. Instead, candidates do better by convincing voters that this election is a historic moment and they don't want to be left on the sidelines. There are a number of 2020 candidates who have that juice for different reasons: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris all seem to be generating excitement at their rallies. It could be catastrophic if Democratic voters, laboring under the panicky delusion that only a "centrist" can win, blow their chance to beat Trump by nominating exactly the wrong kind of candidate.
This Plan for Fixing Our Elections Is Simple, Sensible, and Will Never Happen in This Political Moment
The Brennan Center outlines a plan for reforming the Federal Election Commission.
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE - esquire
APR 30, 2019
The good folks at the Brennan Center For Justice work long hours trying to recapture some sort of equilibrium in the way we run our elections. This, of course, has become harder since a) Anthony Kennedy opened the floorgates; b) John Roberts declared the Day of Jubilee, and c) the president* decided that worrying about foreign ratfcking is not his bag, man. Nevertheless, the Brennan folks are out with a new report examining in detail how toothless and useless the Federal Election Commission has become and how, possibly, perhaps in another universe, the Congress could make it less so.
In the past decade, the legal and technological landscape surrounding U.S. campaigns and elections has changed radically. Politically, one major catalyst for changes was the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, which permitted corporations to spend unlimited money on elections and led to the rise of super PACs. Since Citizens United, the financing of U.S. elections—and thus political power—has shifted to a small group of wealthy mega-donors, who make multimillion-dollar contributions to groups with close ties to candidates and parties. And technologically, the rapid growth of social media platforms has changed how politicians and others try to influence voters.
But as demonstrated in Fixing the FEC, the agency has essentially done nothing to update its rules in response to either the legal or technological changes of recent years. For example, the Citizens United ruling facilitated the rise of super PACs and unleashed a massive wave of new outside election spending. But the FEC hasn’t updated its rules to even include the term “super PAC,” much less taken into account all the ways super PACs, which are supposed to be independent, actually collaborate with candidates and parties. Another FEC rulemaking standstill involves a routine proceeding, currently stalled, to update disclaimer rules for the types of ads used by Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
Additionally, the agency has failed to deal with the problem of dark money, which Citizens United created when it allowed so many new groups to spend money on campaigns. Too many of these groups are not required to disclose the identities of their donors, allowing them to spend money on elections while hiding where their money comes from. The lack of effective disclosure rules has allowed more than $1 billion of secret money to pour into U.S. federal elections since 2010, including money from foreign actors.
The Center's proposed solutions are eminently sensible, eminently doable, and probably eminently beyond the reach of this deeply screwed up political moment. Many of them are derived from H.R. 1, the good-government bill that was the first order of business for the new Democratic House majority. Others seek to make the FEC more of an actual regulatory body with actual enforcement power and not a body as vulnerable to political gridlock as it is now.
· Creating an independent enforcement bureau within the Commission, whose director would be selected by a bipartisan majority of commissioners and have authority to initiate investigations and issue subpoenas (subject to override by a majority of commissioners);
· Providing an effective legal remedy for both complainants and alleged violators to obtain legal clarity if the Commission fails to act on an enforcement complaint within one year;
· Limiting the Commission’s use of prosecutorial discretion to avoid pursuing serious violations;
· Restoring the Commission’s authority to conduct random audits of political committees;
· Reinforcing the Commission’s system of “traffic ticket” administrative fines for reporting violations by making it permanent and requiring the Commission to expand the program to cover all reports; and
· Increasing the Commission’s budget to allow it to hire additional qualified staff to ensure timely, effective resolution of enforcement matters.
None of this is either complicated nor unconstitutional. It requires an act of political will and a commitment to clean and fair elections on the part of a group of people, some of whose continued employment depends on elections being neither one. Lord, this is a long road back.
In the past decade, the legal and technological landscape surrounding U.S. campaigns and elections has changed radically. Politically, one major catalyst for changes was the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, which permitted corporations to spend unlimited money on elections and led to the rise of super PACs. Since Citizens United, the financing of U.S. elections—and thus political power—has shifted to a small group of wealthy mega-donors, who make multimillion-dollar contributions to groups with close ties to candidates and parties. And technologically, the rapid growth of social media platforms has changed how politicians and others try to influence voters.
But as demonstrated in Fixing the FEC, the agency has essentially done nothing to update its rules in response to either the legal or technological changes of recent years. For example, the Citizens United ruling facilitated the rise of super PACs and unleashed a massive wave of new outside election spending. But the FEC hasn’t updated its rules to even include the term “super PAC,” much less taken into account all the ways super PACs, which are supposed to be independent, actually collaborate with candidates and parties. Another FEC rulemaking standstill involves a routine proceeding, currently stalled, to update disclaimer rules for the types of ads used by Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
Additionally, the agency has failed to deal with the problem of dark money, which Citizens United created when it allowed so many new groups to spend money on campaigns. Too many of these groups are not required to disclose the identities of their donors, allowing them to spend money on elections while hiding where their money comes from. The lack of effective disclosure rules has allowed more than $1 billion of secret money to pour into U.S. federal elections since 2010, including money from foreign actors.
The Center's proposed solutions are eminently sensible, eminently doable, and probably eminently beyond the reach of this deeply screwed up political moment. Many of them are derived from H.R. 1, the good-government bill that was the first order of business for the new Democratic House majority. Others seek to make the FEC more of an actual regulatory body with actual enforcement power and not a body as vulnerable to political gridlock as it is now.
· Creating an independent enforcement bureau within the Commission, whose director would be selected by a bipartisan majority of commissioners and have authority to initiate investigations and issue subpoenas (subject to override by a majority of commissioners);
· Providing an effective legal remedy for both complainants and alleged violators to obtain legal clarity if the Commission fails to act on an enforcement complaint within one year;
· Limiting the Commission’s use of prosecutorial discretion to avoid pursuing serious violations;
· Restoring the Commission’s authority to conduct random audits of political committees;
· Reinforcing the Commission’s system of “traffic ticket” administrative fines for reporting violations by making it permanent and requiring the Commission to expand the program to cover all reports; and
· Increasing the Commission’s budget to allow it to hire additional qualified staff to ensure timely, effective resolution of enforcement matters.
None of this is either complicated nor unconstitutional. It requires an act of political will and a commitment to clean and fair elections on the part of a group of people, some of whose continued employment depends on elections being neither one. Lord, this is a long road back.
Florida QAnon believer running unopposed in GOP primary for House seat
QAnon believer running against Rep. Al Lawson in north Florida says he plans to "decapitate the swamp creatures"
IGOR DERYSH - salon
APRIL 11, 2019 10:00AM (UTC)
A Florida bookseller appears to be the first QAnon follower to run for Congress -- and is currently the only Republican seeking to challenge incumbent Rep. Al Lawson, a Democrat.
Matthew Lusk is the first Republican to declare his candidacy in Florida’s 5th congressional district, Florida Politics reported. That may be because Republicans believe they have no chance: The district stretches from Orlando to Jacksonville in an awkward curlicue through central and northern Florida, and was evidently engineered to have a majority African American population. Lawson was elected last November with 66.8 percent of the vote.
“I belong to no secret societies or clubs, Q is one of my issues because it’s definitely a leak from high places,” Lusk told the outlet. “I follow Q, but I don’t know who or what Q is.”
QAnon, a bizarre pro-Trump conspiracy theory born out of anonymous postings on the far-right forum 4chan, posits that a high-level government insider who goes by “Q” is leaking clues to Trump supporters about what is really going on in the deep state. The conspiracy theory involves outlandish claims that Hillary Clinton and other high-profile Democrats are part of a child sex trafficking ring that Trump is secretly working to bring down. A best-selling book about QAnon “claims that Democrats murder and eat children and that the government created AIDS, polio and Lyme disease” and that “the world is run by a Satanic cabal led by Hillary Clinton,” MarketWatch reported.
Lusk did not get into details about his specific beliefs but said his “knowledge of the evil power players” is what sparked his interest in mounting a congressional bid.
“I pray over making wise decisions and am taking the sword of truth to D.C. to decapitate the swamp creatures, and I’ll chase off the RINOS while I’m there,” Lusk told Florida Politics. “There is plenty of danger and opportunity at the State level, but the State will be toast if Federal problems and mega-Crime syndicates are not brought to justice soon.”
Lusk insisted to The Daily Beast that he is not a “brainwashed cult member” but wrote online that “Q” has a “very articulate screening of past events, a very articulate screening of present conditions, and a somewhat prophetic divination of where the political and geopolitical ball will be bouncing next.”
“Q” is even listed as one of the issues on his campaign website, though the page simply says, “Who is…………..Q.”
Lusk told The Daily Beast that he would not use QAnon to guide his actions as a lawmaker unless “criminal leaks or seditious activity” revealed in the clues “warranted an investigation.”
QAnon is far from the only conspiracy theory Lusk subscribes to. The front page of his campaign website says he is concerned he will be “Arkancided,” a reference to the decades-long conspiracy theory that the Clintons had their Arkansas associates murdered.
Lusk has put about $2,000 into his campaign. He told the outlet he is self-funding until he gets a “full understanding of the law.”
While Lusk appears to be the first open QAnon follower to run for Congress, several elected officials have pushed QAnon conspiracy theories publicly.
South Carolina state Rep. Lin Bennett has posted about QAnon for months on her Facebook page. “They’re legit,” she wrote of Q. “And they haven’t been wrong.”
In December, Pam Patterson, a city councilwoman in San Juan Capistrano, California, endorsed Q in her farewell address on the council floor.
“To quote Q, number 2436, for far too long, we have been silent and allowed our bands of strength that we once formed to defend freedom and liberty to deteriorate. We became divided. We became weak. We elected traitors to govern us,” Paterson said. “Where we go one, we go all. Q.”
Earlier this year, a Montana judge named Michael Swingley used his official government email account to scold a reporter for being critical of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
“Whether Q is real or otherwise, there is a movement started by the hypothesis of a Q and somebody behind the scenes standing up for the average American citizen,” Swingley wrote to Washington Post reporter Avi Selk. “Patriots are uniting against people just like you. Your world of fake news and liberal agendas that give away our country to foreigners and protect the Clintons and Obamas is coming to an end. Wait for it……….. you pathetic, snobby ass.”
Matthew Lusk is the first Republican to declare his candidacy in Florida’s 5th congressional district, Florida Politics reported. That may be because Republicans believe they have no chance: The district stretches from Orlando to Jacksonville in an awkward curlicue through central and northern Florida, and was evidently engineered to have a majority African American population. Lawson was elected last November with 66.8 percent of the vote.
“I belong to no secret societies or clubs, Q is one of my issues because it’s definitely a leak from high places,” Lusk told the outlet. “I follow Q, but I don’t know who or what Q is.”
QAnon, a bizarre pro-Trump conspiracy theory born out of anonymous postings on the far-right forum 4chan, posits that a high-level government insider who goes by “Q” is leaking clues to Trump supporters about what is really going on in the deep state. The conspiracy theory involves outlandish claims that Hillary Clinton and other high-profile Democrats are part of a child sex trafficking ring that Trump is secretly working to bring down. A best-selling book about QAnon “claims that Democrats murder and eat children and that the government created AIDS, polio and Lyme disease” and that “the world is run by a Satanic cabal led by Hillary Clinton,” MarketWatch reported.
Lusk did not get into details about his specific beliefs but said his “knowledge of the evil power players” is what sparked his interest in mounting a congressional bid.
“I pray over making wise decisions and am taking the sword of truth to D.C. to decapitate the swamp creatures, and I’ll chase off the RINOS while I’m there,” Lusk told Florida Politics. “There is plenty of danger and opportunity at the State level, but the State will be toast if Federal problems and mega-Crime syndicates are not brought to justice soon.”
Lusk insisted to The Daily Beast that he is not a “brainwashed cult member” but wrote online that “Q” has a “very articulate screening of past events, a very articulate screening of present conditions, and a somewhat prophetic divination of where the political and geopolitical ball will be bouncing next.”
“Q” is even listed as one of the issues on his campaign website, though the page simply says, “Who is…………..Q.”
Lusk told The Daily Beast that he would not use QAnon to guide his actions as a lawmaker unless “criminal leaks or seditious activity” revealed in the clues “warranted an investigation.”
QAnon is far from the only conspiracy theory Lusk subscribes to. The front page of his campaign website says he is concerned he will be “Arkancided,” a reference to the decades-long conspiracy theory that the Clintons had their Arkansas associates murdered.
Lusk has put about $2,000 into his campaign. He told the outlet he is self-funding until he gets a “full understanding of the law.”
While Lusk appears to be the first open QAnon follower to run for Congress, several elected officials have pushed QAnon conspiracy theories publicly.
South Carolina state Rep. Lin Bennett has posted about QAnon for months on her Facebook page. “They’re legit,” she wrote of Q. “And they haven’t been wrong.”
In December, Pam Patterson, a city councilwoman in San Juan Capistrano, California, endorsed Q in her farewell address on the council floor.
“To quote Q, number 2436, for far too long, we have been silent and allowed our bands of strength that we once formed to defend freedom and liberty to deteriorate. We became divided. We became weak. We elected traitors to govern us,” Paterson said. “Where we go one, we go all. Q.”
Earlier this year, a Montana judge named Michael Swingley used his official government email account to scold a reporter for being critical of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
“Whether Q is real or otherwise, there is a movement started by the hypothesis of a Q and somebody behind the scenes standing up for the average American citizen,” Swingley wrote to Washington Post reporter Avi Selk. “Patriots are uniting against people just like you. Your world of fake news and liberal agendas that give away our country to foreigners and protect the Clintons and Obamas is coming to an end. Wait for it……….. you pathetic, snobby ass.”
Shunning Corporate PACs Won’t End Corporate Influence in Elections
BY
Michael Corcoran, Truthout
PUBLISHED
March 24, 2019
Americans have long been frustrated with the pervasive role of money in politics. When elections come, however, it seems to be accepted as the cost of doing business. Barack Obama broke records in Wall Street fundraising and among his largest donors was Goldman Sachs, but this did not stop Democratic voters from electing him twice (and for a time treating him almost like a deity).
Those days may be over for politicians seeking the Democratic nomination for president. While Obama was not given a hard time by voters for his connections to finance, the issue hindered Hillary Clinton in 2016, especially as the Bernie Sanders campaign pushed the issue of her contributions and paid speeches in front of the industry.
The increased scrutiny of the role of money in politics has continued to play a big role in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Most of the 2020 Democrats, accordingly, are racing to swear off “corporate PACs.”
Campaign finance advocates say this emphasis reflects important progress. “The ‘no corporate PAC’ pledges …were prompted by reform-minded candidates who were responding to voter anger over all of the money in politics,” Adam Bozzi, the strategic partnerships director of End Citizens United, told Truthout. “Voters know the amount of money spent in politics affects their own bottom lines and they know corporate special interests have outsized and undue influence.”
Nonetheless, campaign finance experts acknowledge that swearing off corporate PAC money, as Sarah Bryner of the Center for Responsive Politics tells Truthout, is “mostly symbolic.” Corporations will still find ways for money to reach the candidate. An “individual donation” is not a synonym for “small donations” ($200 or less – generally considered a better gauge of grassroots support).
In fact, the limits for individual donations is $2,800, compared with $5,000 for donations to corporate PACs. The very same people who could donate to a candidate through a corporate PAC can organize similar amounts in individual donations instead. They can also donate to PACs and attend corporate fundraisers. In fact, most of the campaign finance data cited by the press includes individual donations broken down by industry. This anti-PAC approach enables candidates to gain points with the base without giving up much in return.
Candidates for office at the federal level also benefit from Democratic Party fundraising institutions — which are funded largely by “individual wealthy donors,” as Kim Moody wrote:
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) saw its campaign contributions rise from $2 million in 1980 to $206 million in 2014, while those of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) climbed from $1.6 million to $169.2 million over the same period…. State parties [accounted for] an additional $182.6 million for congressional elections in 2014.
Beto’s Big Day
The issue of fundraising was at the center of the news recently, when Beto O’Rourke announced a $6.1 million in individual contributionswithin the first 24 hours of his campaign launch. This number just surpassed the fundraising totals of the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign in its first 24 hours ($5.9 million). This led to a barrage of favorable news coverage for O’Rourke after what many in the press described as a “rocky” start to his campaign.
Initially, O’Rourke did not include important context about these numbers, such as how many contributions accounted for this total and the average donation size. These metrics are often seen as a strong indicator of grassroots support: The more donors, the smaller the average donation, the more impressive the figure. Sanders was far more transparent and reported the average donation ($27) and the amount of donors (225,000). This led some to view O’Rourke’s number with skepticism.
O’Rourke’s team finally did announce those figures on Wednesday, citing 128,000 donors and an average of donation of $47. Still, campaign finance experts note that the same interests who donate to a corporate PAC can make individual donations as well. In fact, in 2018, O’Rourke was the largest recipient of individual donations from employees of hospitals,the oil and gas industry, health professionals (such as the American Medical Association) and many other powerful industries.
Campaign finance experts tell Truthout that as of now, the campaigns are under no obligation to share any fundraising data until April 15, when this data must be made public.
“At this point, campaigns are only going to give out the data they want people to see. That is true for every campaign…. Outside of that and we are left to speculate on the rest,” said Bryner, research director of the Center for Responsive Politics, in an interview with Truthout.
No Substitute for Campaign Finance Reform
Since the Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign put corporate money in politics at the center of a national debate, however, more and more Democratic candidates for president (and before that, Congress) have felt pressured to distance themselves from corporate money. In fact, when Sen. Cory Booker voted not to allow prescription drugs from Canada to cross the border to lower prices, he was criticized harshly on social media by progressives, prompting him to announce he was going to take a “pause” from collecting pharmaceutical money. This is quite the departure from the norm. As the Center for Responsive Politics reports:
In 2016, pharmaceutical PACs gave $57,500 to Booker. Becton, Dickinson & Co, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi PACs all contributed $5,000 each in 2016. Before that, in 2014, a cycle he was actually running in, Booker’s campaign took in $161,000 in pharmaceutical PAC money. Pfizer contributed $17,500, Merck & Co gave $12,500 and several more gave $10,000 each.
Booker, now a presidential candidate, made the anti-PAC pledge and said he would refuse to accept Super PAC money, although as the Center for Responsive Politics reported, “the campaign cannot actually prevent outside groups from making independent expenditures.”
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand — who, like the rest of the Democratic candidates has sworn off corporate PAC money — has already been garnering Wall Street support. She also has plans to attend a fundraiser for her campaign hosted by an executive of the drug giant Pfizer on March 31. The recommended donation is between $1,000 and $2,700 (the largest allowed individual donation). None of the money raised here qualifies as “corporate PAC” money, but it is hard to see why it is any less problematic.
“There are a number of people around the campaign finance world that come to the conclusion that you’re not giving up that much by giving up PACs,” said Dr. Steven Billet, director of the legislative affairs program at George Washington University.
Despite these contradictions, many advocates of campaign finance reform argue that these pledges are a start — not a substitute for comprehensive campaign finance reform or publicly financed elections.
“There are certainly other areas where special interest money is a problem, but some of it is outside of a candidate’s control,” Bozzi said.
“But they can control whether or no they take corporate PAC checks. And you’ve seen the focus on corporate PACs because that is where people recognize the problem is.”
RELATED: Foreign-Owned Corporations Funnel Millions Into US Elections
Those days may be over for politicians seeking the Democratic nomination for president. While Obama was not given a hard time by voters for his connections to finance, the issue hindered Hillary Clinton in 2016, especially as the Bernie Sanders campaign pushed the issue of her contributions and paid speeches in front of the industry.
The increased scrutiny of the role of money in politics has continued to play a big role in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Most of the 2020 Democrats, accordingly, are racing to swear off “corporate PACs.”
Campaign finance advocates say this emphasis reflects important progress. “The ‘no corporate PAC’ pledges …were prompted by reform-minded candidates who were responding to voter anger over all of the money in politics,” Adam Bozzi, the strategic partnerships director of End Citizens United, told Truthout. “Voters know the amount of money spent in politics affects their own bottom lines and they know corporate special interests have outsized and undue influence.”
Nonetheless, campaign finance experts acknowledge that swearing off corporate PAC money, as Sarah Bryner of the Center for Responsive Politics tells Truthout, is “mostly symbolic.” Corporations will still find ways for money to reach the candidate. An “individual donation” is not a synonym for “small donations” ($200 or less – generally considered a better gauge of grassroots support).
In fact, the limits for individual donations is $2,800, compared with $5,000 for donations to corporate PACs. The very same people who could donate to a candidate through a corporate PAC can organize similar amounts in individual donations instead. They can also donate to PACs and attend corporate fundraisers. In fact, most of the campaign finance data cited by the press includes individual donations broken down by industry. This anti-PAC approach enables candidates to gain points with the base without giving up much in return.
Candidates for office at the federal level also benefit from Democratic Party fundraising institutions — which are funded largely by “individual wealthy donors,” as Kim Moody wrote:
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) saw its campaign contributions rise from $2 million in 1980 to $206 million in 2014, while those of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) climbed from $1.6 million to $169.2 million over the same period…. State parties [accounted for] an additional $182.6 million for congressional elections in 2014.
Beto’s Big Day
The issue of fundraising was at the center of the news recently, when Beto O’Rourke announced a $6.1 million in individual contributionswithin the first 24 hours of his campaign launch. This number just surpassed the fundraising totals of the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign in its first 24 hours ($5.9 million). This led to a barrage of favorable news coverage for O’Rourke after what many in the press described as a “rocky” start to his campaign.
Initially, O’Rourke did not include important context about these numbers, such as how many contributions accounted for this total and the average donation size. These metrics are often seen as a strong indicator of grassroots support: The more donors, the smaller the average donation, the more impressive the figure. Sanders was far more transparent and reported the average donation ($27) and the amount of donors (225,000). This led some to view O’Rourke’s number with skepticism.
O’Rourke’s team finally did announce those figures on Wednesday, citing 128,000 donors and an average of donation of $47. Still, campaign finance experts note that the same interests who donate to a corporate PAC can make individual donations as well. In fact, in 2018, O’Rourke was the largest recipient of individual donations from employees of hospitals,the oil and gas industry, health professionals (such as the American Medical Association) and many other powerful industries.
Campaign finance experts tell Truthout that as of now, the campaigns are under no obligation to share any fundraising data until April 15, when this data must be made public.
“At this point, campaigns are only going to give out the data they want people to see. That is true for every campaign…. Outside of that and we are left to speculate on the rest,” said Bryner, research director of the Center for Responsive Politics, in an interview with Truthout.
No Substitute for Campaign Finance Reform
Since the Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign put corporate money in politics at the center of a national debate, however, more and more Democratic candidates for president (and before that, Congress) have felt pressured to distance themselves from corporate money. In fact, when Sen. Cory Booker voted not to allow prescription drugs from Canada to cross the border to lower prices, he was criticized harshly on social media by progressives, prompting him to announce he was going to take a “pause” from collecting pharmaceutical money. This is quite the departure from the norm. As the Center for Responsive Politics reports:
In 2016, pharmaceutical PACs gave $57,500 to Booker. Becton, Dickinson & Co, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi PACs all contributed $5,000 each in 2016. Before that, in 2014, a cycle he was actually running in, Booker’s campaign took in $161,000 in pharmaceutical PAC money. Pfizer contributed $17,500, Merck & Co gave $12,500 and several more gave $10,000 each.
Booker, now a presidential candidate, made the anti-PAC pledge and said he would refuse to accept Super PAC money, although as the Center for Responsive Politics reported, “the campaign cannot actually prevent outside groups from making independent expenditures.”
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand — who, like the rest of the Democratic candidates has sworn off corporate PAC money — has already been garnering Wall Street support. She also has plans to attend a fundraiser for her campaign hosted by an executive of the drug giant Pfizer on March 31. The recommended donation is between $1,000 and $2,700 (the largest allowed individual donation). None of the money raised here qualifies as “corporate PAC” money, but it is hard to see why it is any less problematic.
“There are a number of people around the campaign finance world that come to the conclusion that you’re not giving up that much by giving up PACs,” said Dr. Steven Billet, director of the legislative affairs program at George Washington University.
Despite these contradictions, many advocates of campaign finance reform argue that these pledges are a start — not a substitute for comprehensive campaign finance reform or publicly financed elections.
“There are certainly other areas where special interest money is a problem, but some of it is outside of a candidate’s control,” Bozzi said.
“But they can control whether or no they take corporate PAC checks. And you’ve seen the focus on corporate PACs because that is where people recognize the problem is.”
RELATED: Foreign-Owned Corporations Funnel Millions Into US Elections
voter suppression by infrastructure and incompetence!!!
As 2020 Nears, Pressure Grows to Replace Voting Machines
By Associated Press - atlanta black star
March 5, 2019
ATLANTA (AP) — Time and money are running short for states to replace aging or inadequate voting machines before the 2020 presidential primaries, according to a report released Tuesday.
State and local election officials in 31 states say they want to replace their voting equipment before the elections, but the vast majority said they don’t have enough money to do so, according to The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU’s School of Law.
“We basically have this year and then it’s too late,” said Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the center’s Democracy Program and author of the report.
It can take months to decide on replacement machines, secure the funding, develop security protocols, train workers and test the equipment.
States received $380 million in election security grants from Congress last year, but experts have said that’s merely a down payment on what is needed.
Pennsylvania received $13.5 million from the federal government, but that’s just a quarter of what it would cost to switch to voting machines that use paper ballots, said J. Alex Halderman, director of the Center for Computer Security and Society at the University of Michigan.
“Without further federal assistance, we risk that new equipment and other critical improvements won’t be in place for many years,” Halderman said in congressional testimony last month. “With the 2020 election on the horizon, the next major target for foreign cyber attacks, we need to act before it’s too late.”
In 2016, Russian hackers are believed to have targeted the nation’s voting systems, searching for vulnerabilities. The nation’s intelligence community has said there is no evidence of votes being changed, but warn of the continuing danger posed by foreign governments interested in undermining U.S. elections.
Congressional efforts to send more election security money to the states have yet to gain momentum despite some bipartisan support.
The most urgent concern centers on the 12 states that use, either statewide or in certain local jurisdictions, electronic voting machines that do not produce a paper record so voters can verify their choices before they cast their ballot. Experts say these machines are vulnerable and that hackers could manipulate the outcome without detection.
Of these states, Delaware has set aside money to buy replacement machines while lawmakers in Georgia and South Carolina are considering proposals to do the same. Louisiana’s plan to replace voting machines was delayed amid a dispute over the bidding process.
Officials in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Kansas and Kentucky have called for new machines, but efforts to secure the money haven’t gained much traction, according to the Brennan Center report. Indiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas do not appear to be taking major steps at this point to replace their paperless machines by 2020, the report said.
Cybersecurity experts and officials with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security say a paper record is essential to securing the nation’s elections and that rigorous audits are needed to detect any malfunction or efforts to interfere.
There is less a consensus on a return to paper ballots that are filled out by hand, although cybersecurity experts largely prefer them. That debate is playing out in Georgia as state lawmakers consider replacing the state’s paperless machines. Democrats and voting advocates say systems that use those types of ballots are the most secure and cost-effective options.
Republicans have thrown their support behind a more expensive “ballot-marking” voting machine. It features an electronic touchscreen that prints out a ballot that is then verified by voters before being cast.
They say this allows for one system used by all voters, including those with disabilities, while also offering a secure method for post-election audits.
Elsewhere, California has already allocated $134.3 million for counties to upgrade or replace old voting systems. It plans to decertify certain machines.
Norden, with The Brennan Center, said states can’t expect the federal government to cover everything, but the federal government can’t leave national security to state and local governments either.
“There needs to be an acknowledgment that everyone has a responsibility for this at the federal, state and local level,” he said. “There has been an attempt to shift responsibility from one to the other and too often that means nobody is responsible.”
State and local election officials in 31 states say they want to replace their voting equipment before the elections, but the vast majority said they don’t have enough money to do so, according to The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU’s School of Law.
“We basically have this year and then it’s too late,” said Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the center’s Democracy Program and author of the report.
It can take months to decide on replacement machines, secure the funding, develop security protocols, train workers and test the equipment.
States received $380 million in election security grants from Congress last year, but experts have said that’s merely a down payment on what is needed.
Pennsylvania received $13.5 million from the federal government, but that’s just a quarter of what it would cost to switch to voting machines that use paper ballots, said J. Alex Halderman, director of the Center for Computer Security and Society at the University of Michigan.
“Without further federal assistance, we risk that new equipment and other critical improvements won’t be in place for many years,” Halderman said in congressional testimony last month. “With the 2020 election on the horizon, the next major target for foreign cyber attacks, we need to act before it’s too late.”
In 2016, Russian hackers are believed to have targeted the nation’s voting systems, searching for vulnerabilities. The nation’s intelligence community has said there is no evidence of votes being changed, but warn of the continuing danger posed by foreign governments interested in undermining U.S. elections.
Congressional efforts to send more election security money to the states have yet to gain momentum despite some bipartisan support.
The most urgent concern centers on the 12 states that use, either statewide or in certain local jurisdictions, electronic voting machines that do not produce a paper record so voters can verify their choices before they cast their ballot. Experts say these machines are vulnerable and that hackers could manipulate the outcome without detection.
Of these states, Delaware has set aside money to buy replacement machines while lawmakers in Georgia and South Carolina are considering proposals to do the same. Louisiana’s plan to replace voting machines was delayed amid a dispute over the bidding process.
Officials in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Kansas and Kentucky have called for new machines, but efforts to secure the money haven’t gained much traction, according to the Brennan Center report. Indiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas do not appear to be taking major steps at this point to replace their paperless machines by 2020, the report said.
Cybersecurity experts and officials with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security say a paper record is essential to securing the nation’s elections and that rigorous audits are needed to detect any malfunction or efforts to interfere.
There is less a consensus on a return to paper ballots that are filled out by hand, although cybersecurity experts largely prefer them. That debate is playing out in Georgia as state lawmakers consider replacing the state’s paperless machines. Democrats and voting advocates say systems that use those types of ballots are the most secure and cost-effective options.
Republicans have thrown their support behind a more expensive “ballot-marking” voting machine. It features an electronic touchscreen that prints out a ballot that is then verified by voters before being cast.
They say this allows for one system used by all voters, including those with disabilities, while also offering a secure method for post-election audits.
Elsewhere, California has already allocated $134.3 million for counties to upgrade or replace old voting systems. It plans to decertify certain machines.
Norden, with The Brennan Center, said states can’t expect the federal government to cover everything, but the federal government can’t leave national security to state and local governments either.
“There needs to be an acknowledgment that everyone has a responsibility for this at the federal, state and local level,” he said. “There has been an attempt to shift responsibility from one to the other and too often that means nobody is responsible.”
a stolen election!!!
Hundreds of Declarations Detail Alleged Issues, ‘Gross Mismanagement’ of Georgia’s Voting System
By Tracy - atlanta black star
February 28, 2019
ATLANTA (AP) — Long lines, last-minute polling place changes, missing or incorrect voter registration records and malfunctioning machines are among the problems Georgians faced during last year’s midterm election, according to sworn statements gathered as part of a challenge to the way the state’s elections are run.
More than 200 declarations made public Wednesday are meant to bolster a lawsuit filed by a group founded by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who helped focus national attention on Georgia’s voting system during her campaign. She accused her Republican opponent, then-secretary of state Brian Kemp, of using his post as the state’s top elections official to suppress minority votes. Kemp, now governor, has vehemently denied the allegations.
The lawsuit says “gross mismanagement” of the election deprived citizens of their right to vote. Among other things, the lawsuit asks that Georgia be required to secure approval from a federal judge before changing voting rules.
State election officials have said the suit is without merit and that the allegations of “unrelated actions by mostly local officials” don’t result in constitutional violations requiring intervention by a judge. They also argued election system changes should be made by lawmakers, not by the courts.
The lawsuit was filed Nov. 27 by Fair Fight Action and Care in Action Georgia, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting for the rights of domestic workers. They were joined earlier this month by several churches, including Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had preached.
The 763 pages of sworn statements from voters and poll watchers echo stories Abrams’ allies have highlighted since the November election.
An overwhelming majority of the declarations are from voters around the state who say they encountered problems, including: absentee ballots that were never received or weren’t counted; excessively long waits at polling places; missing or erroneous voter registration records; machines that switched votes or had other glitches; and not being offered provisional ballots when appropriate.
Fulton County voter Arnaud Huguet went to his polling place three times on Election Day. But he left each time because he was unable to wait in lines lasting hours, complaining the precinct only had three voting machines when he first showed up.
DeKalb County voter Sheena Brinson said she “very carefully and deliberately” selected Abrams for governor.
“However, when I selected her name, the screen blinked quickly and then showed that I had selected Brian Kemp for governor,” her declaration says. “This made my heart flutter to see this happen in front of me.”
With a poll worker’s help, she said, she believes her vote was counted. But she worried about other voters who may not have noticed a similar switch.
Bertron Beard, a Gwinnett County resident stationed at Fort Knox in Kentucky, said he registered in time but was then told his registration was received too late. Only after he provided proof that he’d registered on time was his registration updated, he said.
“I was able to vote absentee but had to be persistent to be able to vote,” his declaration says. “I did not fight in Afghanistan and Iraq to be denied my right to vote.”
Lawyers planned to submit the names of the 200-plus people who had made sworn declarations to the court Wednesday, along with a summary. But Lauren Groh-Wargo, Abrams’ former campaign manager who’s now CEO of Fair Fight Action, said those represent a small fraction of the voters who had problems and that all the issues together represent systemic constitutional violations.
Of particular and timely value, she said, are the many stories of problems with the state’s paperless touchscreen voting machines.
State lawmakers are currently considering options to replace the state’s outdated election system. A Republican-sponsored bill that passed the House this week on a largely party-line vote, calls for new electronic touchscreen machines that print a paper ballot.
Critics of that proposal cite the advice of cybersecurity experts, who say hand-marked paper ballots are the most secure. Groh-Wargo said lawmakers would be wise to learn from the stories they’ve collected of problems with touchscreen machines and avoid buying a costly, potentially problematic electronic system.
More than 200 declarations made public Wednesday are meant to bolster a lawsuit filed by a group founded by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who helped focus national attention on Georgia’s voting system during her campaign. She accused her Republican opponent, then-secretary of state Brian Kemp, of using his post as the state’s top elections official to suppress minority votes. Kemp, now governor, has vehemently denied the allegations.
The lawsuit says “gross mismanagement” of the election deprived citizens of their right to vote. Among other things, the lawsuit asks that Georgia be required to secure approval from a federal judge before changing voting rules.
State election officials have said the suit is without merit and that the allegations of “unrelated actions by mostly local officials” don’t result in constitutional violations requiring intervention by a judge. They also argued election system changes should be made by lawmakers, not by the courts.
The lawsuit was filed Nov. 27 by Fair Fight Action and Care in Action Georgia, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting for the rights of domestic workers. They were joined earlier this month by several churches, including Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had preached.
The 763 pages of sworn statements from voters and poll watchers echo stories Abrams’ allies have highlighted since the November election.
An overwhelming majority of the declarations are from voters around the state who say they encountered problems, including: absentee ballots that were never received or weren’t counted; excessively long waits at polling places; missing or erroneous voter registration records; machines that switched votes or had other glitches; and not being offered provisional ballots when appropriate.
Fulton County voter Arnaud Huguet went to his polling place three times on Election Day. But he left each time because he was unable to wait in lines lasting hours, complaining the precinct only had three voting machines when he first showed up.
DeKalb County voter Sheena Brinson said she “very carefully and deliberately” selected Abrams for governor.
“However, when I selected her name, the screen blinked quickly and then showed that I had selected Brian Kemp for governor,” her declaration says. “This made my heart flutter to see this happen in front of me.”
With a poll worker’s help, she said, she believes her vote was counted. But she worried about other voters who may not have noticed a similar switch.
Bertron Beard, a Gwinnett County resident stationed at Fort Knox in Kentucky, said he registered in time but was then told his registration was received too late. Only after he provided proof that he’d registered on time was his registration updated, he said.
“I was able to vote absentee but had to be persistent to be able to vote,” his declaration says. “I did not fight in Afghanistan and Iraq to be denied my right to vote.”
Lawyers planned to submit the names of the 200-plus people who had made sworn declarations to the court Wednesday, along with a summary. But Lauren Groh-Wargo, Abrams’ former campaign manager who’s now CEO of Fair Fight Action, said those represent a small fraction of the voters who had problems and that all the issues together represent systemic constitutional violations.
Of particular and timely value, she said, are the many stories of problems with the state’s paperless touchscreen voting machines.
State lawmakers are currently considering options to replace the state’s outdated election system. A Republican-sponsored bill that passed the House this week on a largely party-line vote, calls for new electronic touchscreen machines that print a paper ballot.
Critics of that proposal cite the advice of cybersecurity experts, who say hand-marked paper ballots are the most secure. Groh-Wargo said lawmakers would be wise to learn from the stories they’ve collected of problems with touchscreen machines and avoid buying a costly, potentially problematic electronic system.
voter suppression texas style!!!
Texas County Failed To Give Any Contact Info In Voter Purge Notices
By Tierney Sneed - tpm
February 11, 2019 1:18 pm
The confusion and chaos caused by Texas’ bombastic voter fraud allegations has manifested in almost every element of the fallout.
The latest example is a voter purge notice sent out by one Texas county that lacked basic contact information or even an official letterhead.
The notice left one citizen mistakenly flagged by the stake feeling “very worried” and a “sense of fear,” according to court documents filed Monday.
The episode is one of many that have prompted civil rights groups to sue Texas over a list released last month purporting to show that tens of thousands of noncitizens were illegally registered to vote. The list went out with instructions that local election officials purge from the rolls any individuals who don’t respond to notices seeking confirmation of their citizenship.
In Wood County, those notices went out with the space left blank where the phone number of the local elections office should have been. The notices also lacked the response form the recipients were asked to use to reply, and there was no letterhead on the notices.
A woman in the court docs known as “Jane Doe #2” — who received the notice despite being naturalized in March 2018 and voting legally in that year — recounted in a declaration her frustration and her “sense of fear,” given that she could not tell if the letter was fake or real.
“I questioned whether I had done something wrong, or if somebody was trying to prank me.” Jane Doe #2 wrote in the declaration. “I did not know where to go or who to cal to receive answers to my questions.”
She first tried to call the county clerk’s office, where the staff member who answered her call said the letter might be fake and that the person whose name was on the notice didn’t work for the county clerk, according to Jane Doe #2’s statement. She finally got in touch with the county elections administrator, Lisa Wise, who explained that the notices had been sent out without the contact information by mistake. Jane Doe #2 eventually traveled to meet Wise in person and showed Wise a copy of her naturalization certificate.
Wise told TPM that the lack of contact information in the notices was an “honest mistake” and that the county has decided to not remove anyone from its voter lists while it awaits further instructions from the state. Two other people in Wood County came to her office and showed that they were legal voters, Wise said.
According to the court filings, 11 Wood County voters in total were flagged by the state on its controversial list, which purported to show that 95,000 noncitizens were potentially illegally registered and that 58,000 may have voted. President Trump was quick to jump on — and mischaracterize — those numbers.
Monday’s filings were in a lawsuit brought against Texas by the Mexican Education and Legal Defend Fund. It was one of three federal lawsuits that have been brought in reaction to the list.
Wood County is not the only county to have sent out notices based on the the list. Smith County also sent out the notices, but only after election officials checked to see if they could themselves confirm that any of the people flagged were actually citizens, according to the filing. Travis County is following a similar process, according to the MALDEF court filings. Meanwhile, in Galveston County, followed up their notices with retraction letters to some of the individuals initially flagged, as the county worked with the state to narrow its list, according to the filings.
“As a result of these arbitrary and disparate standards, Plaintiffs are being treated differently depending on the county in which they reside,” the lawsuit said.
The latest example is a voter purge notice sent out by one Texas county that lacked basic contact information or even an official letterhead.
The notice left one citizen mistakenly flagged by the stake feeling “very worried” and a “sense of fear,” according to court documents filed Monday.
The episode is one of many that have prompted civil rights groups to sue Texas over a list released last month purporting to show that tens of thousands of noncitizens were illegally registered to vote. The list went out with instructions that local election officials purge from the rolls any individuals who don’t respond to notices seeking confirmation of their citizenship.
In Wood County, those notices went out with the space left blank where the phone number of the local elections office should have been. The notices also lacked the response form the recipients were asked to use to reply, and there was no letterhead on the notices.
A woman in the court docs known as “Jane Doe #2” — who received the notice despite being naturalized in March 2018 and voting legally in that year — recounted in a declaration her frustration and her “sense of fear,” given that she could not tell if the letter was fake or real.
“I questioned whether I had done something wrong, or if somebody was trying to prank me.” Jane Doe #2 wrote in the declaration. “I did not know where to go or who to cal to receive answers to my questions.”
She first tried to call the county clerk’s office, where the staff member who answered her call said the letter might be fake and that the person whose name was on the notice didn’t work for the county clerk, according to Jane Doe #2’s statement. She finally got in touch with the county elections administrator, Lisa Wise, who explained that the notices had been sent out without the contact information by mistake. Jane Doe #2 eventually traveled to meet Wise in person and showed Wise a copy of her naturalization certificate.
Wise told TPM that the lack of contact information in the notices was an “honest mistake” and that the county has decided to not remove anyone from its voter lists while it awaits further instructions from the state. Two other people in Wood County came to her office and showed that they were legal voters, Wise said.
According to the court filings, 11 Wood County voters in total were flagged by the state on its controversial list, which purported to show that 95,000 noncitizens were potentially illegally registered and that 58,000 may have voted. President Trump was quick to jump on — and mischaracterize — those numbers.
Monday’s filings were in a lawsuit brought against Texas by the Mexican Education and Legal Defend Fund. It was one of three federal lawsuits that have been brought in reaction to the list.
Wood County is not the only county to have sent out notices based on the the list. Smith County also sent out the notices, but only after election officials checked to see if they could themselves confirm that any of the people flagged were actually citizens, according to the filing. Travis County is following a similar process, according to the MALDEF court filings. Meanwhile, in Galveston County, followed up their notices with retraction letters to some of the individuals initially flagged, as the county worked with the state to narrow its list, according to the filings.
“As a result of these arbitrary and disparate standards, Plaintiffs are being treated differently depending on the county in which they reside,” the lawsuit said.
american democracy: another stolen election!!!
Georgia's 127,000 Missing Votes--Disproportionate Vote Loss in African American Neighborhoods
diva77 - demo underground
Coalition for Good Governance
Marilyn Marks, Executive Director
Atlanta—As previously reported by the Coalition for Good Governance, more than 127,000 votes appear to be missing in November’s election for Lieutenant Governor. Today, the Coalition released a preliminary report revealing the disproportionate loss of votes in heavily African American neighborhood precincts. The findings are a result of the Coalition’s analyses of publicly reported results and demographics of voters in the 2018 mid-term election. The Coalition’s report contains detailed findings and statistical analyses.
The report findings are summarized as follows:
--Approximately 127,000 fewer votes were recorded in the 2018 Lt. Governor’s contest than experts estimate should have been cast.
--Statistical analyses and experts’ reports expose a dramatically increased number of missing votes (undervotes or drop-off in votes compared to the top-of-the-ballot contest) for the Lt. Governor’s contest in primarily African American neighborhood precincts.
--Voting machine defects and misprogramming are the likely culprits responsible for the significant number of missing votes. Some voters reported touchscreen machines that did not properly display the Lt. Governor’s contest, and others reported machine screen malfunction and “vote flipping” when they attempted to vote. [bold type added for emphasis]
--The extreme drop-off in votes in the Lt. Governor’s contest when compared to the Governor’s contest is significantly out of line with historic patterns and does not appear in any other 2018 statewide contest, including those contests that were much further “down ballot” than the Lt. Governor’s race. The drop-off indicates that 63,718 fewer votes were recorded for Lt. Governor than for the Commissioner of Agriculture, the statewide contest with the second-lowest participation rate.
--The extreme pattern of missing Lt. Governor’s contest votes only occurred in votes cast on the touchscreen machines. The larger-than-average number of undervotes did not occur in votes cast on paper ballots. Mail-in ballot voters voted down the ballot in typical historical voting patterns.
--There is no meaningful correlation between new voters and the Lt. Governor undervote, debunking officials’ excuse that newly registered voters were confused about the need to vote separately for Governor and Lt. Governor.
--Forensic examinations of the machine programming must be promptly undertaken to obtain answers, locate the source of the errors, and, if appropriate, hold officials accountable.
--Electronic voting systems must be immediately abandoned and paper ballots adopted so that no future elections are conducted on Georgia’s unauditable machines.
--Governor Kemp, Secretary Raffensperger, and legislative leaders must abandon their plan to adopt a new ballot-marking-device electronic voting system that, like the current system, is unauditable and vulnerable to problems of the type experienced in November’s election.
Marilyn Marks, Executive Director for the Coalition for Good Governance, said, “The findings are deeply disturbing and difficult to accept, but the statistics and evidence show an undeniable pattern of extreme numbers of missing votes, concentrated in precincts in predominately African American neighborhoods. It is imperative that voters, voting rights advocates, and civic leaders demand clear and factual answers. Our pending lawsuits are poised to obtain the technical answers through the discovery process, but the public deserves more immediate answers. Georgia’s voters must also call for an immediate halt to electronic touchscreen voting, including the proposed unauditable touchscreen system that Governor Kemp and Secretary Raffensperger are promoting despite warnings from the nation’s leading experts in voting system security.”
Bruce Brown, Atlanta-based attorney for the Coalition and other plaintiffs in two election security lawsuits added: “It clearly is in the public interest to get to the bottom of this—to figure out what caused the votes to go missing when cast on electronic voting machines but not when the votes were cast on paper ballots. The Secretary of State should be leading the effort to figure this out, but instead is resisting every effort to get to the truth.”
Coalition for Good Governance is a small, volunteer-run, nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization focused on election transparency and verifiability, currently devoting its resources to addressing Georgia’s failed election system.
The report findings are summarized as follows:
--Approximately 127,000 fewer votes were recorded in the 2018 Lt. Governor’s contest than experts estimate should have been cast.
--Statistical analyses and experts’ reports expose a dramatically increased number of missing votes (undervotes or drop-off in votes compared to the top-of-the-ballot contest) for the Lt. Governor’s contest in primarily African American neighborhood precincts.
--Voting machine defects and misprogramming are the likely culprits responsible for the significant number of missing votes. Some voters reported touchscreen machines that did not properly display the Lt. Governor’s contest, and others reported machine screen malfunction and “vote flipping” when they attempted to vote. [bold type added for emphasis]
--The extreme drop-off in votes in the Lt. Governor’s contest when compared to the Governor’s contest is significantly out of line with historic patterns and does not appear in any other 2018 statewide contest, including those contests that were much further “down ballot” than the Lt. Governor’s race. The drop-off indicates that 63,718 fewer votes were recorded for Lt. Governor than for the Commissioner of Agriculture, the statewide contest with the second-lowest participation rate.
--The extreme pattern of missing Lt. Governor’s contest votes only occurred in votes cast on the touchscreen machines. The larger-than-average number of undervotes did not occur in votes cast on paper ballots. Mail-in ballot voters voted down the ballot in typical historical voting patterns.
--There is no meaningful correlation between new voters and the Lt. Governor undervote, debunking officials’ excuse that newly registered voters were confused about the need to vote separately for Governor and Lt. Governor.
--Forensic examinations of the machine programming must be promptly undertaken to obtain answers, locate the source of the errors, and, if appropriate, hold officials accountable.
--Electronic voting systems must be immediately abandoned and paper ballots adopted so that no future elections are conducted on Georgia’s unauditable machines.
--Governor Kemp, Secretary Raffensperger, and legislative leaders must abandon their plan to adopt a new ballot-marking-device electronic voting system that, like the current system, is unauditable and vulnerable to problems of the type experienced in November’s election.
Marilyn Marks, Executive Director for the Coalition for Good Governance, said, “The findings are deeply disturbing and difficult to accept, but the statistics and evidence show an undeniable pattern of extreme numbers of missing votes, concentrated in precincts in predominately African American neighborhoods. It is imperative that voters, voting rights advocates, and civic leaders demand clear and factual answers. Our pending lawsuits are poised to obtain the technical answers through the discovery process, but the public deserves more immediate answers. Georgia’s voters must also call for an immediate halt to electronic touchscreen voting, including the proposed unauditable touchscreen system that Governor Kemp and Secretary Raffensperger are promoting despite warnings from the nation’s leading experts in voting system security.”
Bruce Brown, Atlanta-based attorney for the Coalition and other plaintiffs in two election security lawsuits added: “It clearly is in the public interest to get to the bottom of this—to figure out what caused the votes to go missing when cast on electronic voting machines but not when the votes were cast on paper ballots. The Secretary of State should be leading the effort to figure this out, but instead is resisting every effort to get to the truth.”
Coalition for Good Governance is a small, volunteer-run, nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization focused on election transparency and verifiability, currently devoting its resources to addressing Georgia’s failed election system.
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.[...]