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welcome to reality ~ TRIVIA
election news and items of interest
august 2020
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
*HOW REPUBLICANS ARE USING TECHNOLOGY TO DENY YOUR RIGHT TO VOTE IN AN ERA OF
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*10 Voter Fraud Lies Debunked
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*Federal judge rules that all Texas voters can apply to vote by mail amid coronavirus pandemic(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Trump intensifies war with Democrats over voting laws
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*Florida Judge Signals Clear Intent to Strike Down State’s New “Poll Tax” Law
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*A Conservative Legal Group Significantly Miscalculated Data in a Report on Mail-In Voting(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Virginia Democrats just enacted a huge range of voting reforms, including automatic registration(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Nonvoters Are Not Privileged. They Are Disproportionately Lower-Income, Non-White and Dissatisfied With The Two Parties.(excerpt below)
*Republicans block most aid to help states plan for presidential election amid coronavirus pandemic(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Kentucky Republicans quietly tighten voter restrictions as US focuses on Covid-19
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*TRUMP FEC NOMINEE WITH TIES TO THOMAS HOFELLER BRAGGED ABOUT WORKING ON UNCONSTITUTIONAL TEXAS GERRYMANDER — THEN DENIED IT
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*A Campaign Finance Solution Has Been Sitting on McConnell’s Desk for a Year
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*Georgia Closes Probe Into Kemp's Bogus Claim Of Democratic Election Hacking In 2018
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*Texas closes hundreds of polling sites, making it harder for minorities to vote
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*Think your vote doesn't matter? Remember the blood spilled in Selma
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*Investigative journalist Greg Palast: How Trump will steal the 2020 election
(excerpt below)
*‘Panties in a Bunch’: Kansas Official Blew Off Concerns About 2018 Polling Place Move
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*Why ‘Don’t-Care Democrats’ May Re-Elect Trump
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*It's 2020 – why are black university students still fighting for the right to vote?
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*The Iowa Caucus Has Choked Itself to Death at Last
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*'You basically are nothing': the Americans shut out of the Iowa caucuses
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*Arizona Republicans discriminated against minority voters, court rules
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*Here are the real reasons so many people don’t vote
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*Florida Republicans’ Voter Suppression Scheme May Backfire
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*Voter Suppression Exposes the Paradox of Black Citizenship in a Racist Society
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*GERRYMANDER GURU'S SECRET FILES: HE USED RACIAL DATA TO DISENFRANCHISE BLACK VOTERS(ARTICLE BELOW)
*No, both sides are not the same
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*Political Fundraising Has a Big, Nasty Secret
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*A List -- Why A Majority of Whites No Longer Vote Democratic at the Presidential Level
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*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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MAP OF THE HYPOCRITES!!!
THE DAILY KOS ELECTIONS GUIDE TO THE NATION'S RELIGIOUS POPULATIONS, BY CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT(ARTICLE BELOW)
funnies(at the end)
*PART 1: GOP RACIAL GERRYMANDERING MASTERMIND PARTICIPATED IN REDISTRICTING IN MORE STATES THAN PREVIOUSLY KNOWN, FILES REVEAL
THOMAS HOFELLER AND GOP STRATEGISTS EXPERIMENTED WITH USING RACE AS THE PRIMARY FACTOR IN DRAWING DISTRICTS IN ALABAMA, FLORIDA, AND WEST VIRGINIA.
*PART 2“WORTH THIS INVESTMENT”: MEMOS REVEAL THE SCOPE AND RACIAL ANIMUS OF GOP GERRYMANDERING AMBITIONS
IN A TROVE OF NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED MEMOS AND EMAILS, HOWEVER, GOP LEADERS COME CLEAN: THEIR NATIONWIDE ADVANTAGE IN STATE LEGISLATURES AND CONGRESS IS BUILT ON GERRYMANDERING. AND TOP REPUBLICAN STRATEGISTS AND POLITICAL OPERATIVES ADMIT TO WEAPONIZING RACIAL DATA AND THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT IN ORDER TO FLIP THE SOUTH RED AND TILT ELECTORAL MAPS IN THEIR DIRECTION.
*Status of National Popular Vote Bill in Each State
*MAP PORN: IF "DID NOT VOTE" WAS A CANDIDATE...( article below)
How Republicans Are Using Technology To Deny Your Right To Vote In an Era of
Blatant, Court-Sanctioned Voter Suppression, Voting Machines May Be Democracy’s Weakest Link
By Erik Sherman - dc report
7/10/2020
How do you win an election? You could gain a majority of votes. Or you can cheat—as Republicans have been doing in force since 2010.
Gerrymandering and other forms of suppression have been unleashed across the country so the minority party can gain and hold power even as its numbers shrink.
Now those who would discourage or disable unwanted ballots have a new potential tool: voting machines. If there aren’t enough working machines to enable people to cast their ballots, you blunt their will.
Manipulative conservative GOP politicians have a long history of actively attempting to interfere with voters they considered “unfriendly” or even “unworthy.”
Photo ID requirements, slashing available polling places in minority and poor areas, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, adoption of effective poll taxes and other tactics have resurfaced to target moderate or progressive voters.
Last December, Justin Clark, a top re-election adviser of Donald Trump was caught on a recording admitting this inconvenient truth: “Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places … It’s going to be a much bigger program [in 2020], a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program,” as The Associated Press reported.
Later, Clark claimed he was referring to false allegations of attempted vote-rigging.
But that isn’t the only evidence.
In 2016, Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) said, “Well I think Hillary Clinton is about the weakest candidate that the Democrats have ever put up and now we have photo ID. I think photo ID is going to make a little bit of a difference as well.”
Republicans this year are investing $20 million in a plan to challenge votes, even though evidence of widespread voter fraud is non-existent.
The Heritage Foundation list of voter fraud cases that argues for ID laws is a thin read. For instance, it shows only 77 cases in 2010 scattered throughout the country. That would be barely enough, if gathered, to affect the outcome of an election in a small town.
There is one well-documented example, which prosecutors allege happened on behalf of a GOP candidate in North Carolina. Republicans have done their best to downplay and ignore the case.
However, the GOP will spend 10s of millions because harassment might reduce turnout for Democrats.
Machine-Aided Suppression
Now there’s a new front in potential voter suppression: voting machines.
There’s a virtual industry of voting machine lobbyists, as Sue Halpern of The New Yorker reported. Often the attempt is to steer business away from a requirement for paper-ballot systems and toward fully electronic ones, even though paper is less expensive, more secure, can be audited and is otherwise reliable.
Hacking or manipulating the machines to change outcomes—long a concern of security and voting experts—isn’t the biggest problem. In practice, the Brennan Center for Justice has noted,b “vote flipping” is more likely a result of aging machines that act erratically from wear and tear.
The more realistic and immediate danger is the way technology can throw a wrench into the election process.
Ballot Breakdowns
Voting machines, especially the so-called ballot-market devices, or BMDs, have significant weaknesses. “If a touchscreen goes down, it’s out of service until it’s fixed,” said Christopher Deluzio, policy director of the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law. “That machine is out of service for the voters to have a ballot printed.”
The issue isn’t theoretical. “You want to vote on paper because there have been a number of instances where machine failure meant votes were lost,” Susannah Goodman, Common Cause’s director of election security, told DCReport. “That’s a known fact.”
Then, as Deluzio—who served on a commission that audited Pennsylvania’s voting system infrastructure—notes, the machines are expensive. “The BMB options were costing roughly twice as much per voter” as paper ballots, he said.
The potential for equipment failing, combined with elevated costs that keep governments from having plenty of spares (unlike stockpiling additional pencils), means the chance that citizens will find it difficult to vote.
Georgia on Their Minds
Georgia’s primary election in early June was a disaster so vast that Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state, called it “unacceptable” and vowed to investigate, according to NBC News.
The problems, which generally appeared in minority neighborhoods, caused multi-hour waits for people to exercise their franchise.
“I don’t think voter suppression was the idea behind it,” said Common Cause’s Goodman. But when there aren’t enough machines to let people vote efficiently that doesn’t matter.
“I do think there’s a real serious problem with the number of machines deployed,” Goodman added. “If you’re only going to let voters use a machine, then you damned well better be sure there are enough.”
“Especially in Georgia, they didn’t have enough machines and when the machines broke down, they didn’t fix them fast enough, replace them,” she said. “And it was in the areas that are more minority.”
In addition, the machines use a QR bar code that is the actual vote that will run through a scanner for the count. There is readable text as well, but, significantly, no way to know whether it represents what is in the QR code.
Kentucky’s Near Nightmare
This is exactly what many worried about Kentucky. Would minority residents get a fair chance to vote?
Only one polling place and 350 ballot machines were available last month for all of of Jefferson County, home to the state’s largest city, Louisville, and many minority residents. Half of black Kentuckians live in that county. Which at 389 square miles is the equivalent of 17 Manhattans.
There were widespread expectations of voter suppression in the primary vote on June 23.
Even though the procedure seemed largely smooth—because pandemic-driven mail-in voting and early voting took pressure off in-person—the concerns were reasonable.
Stephen Voss, professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, argued that an “alienating” process tended to disenfranchise “people with lower socioeconomic standing,” many of whom could no longer walk to their local polling place.
A higher in-person turnout, which couldn’t have been ruled out, would have made the situation far worse.
There are 616,523 registered voters in Jefferson County, which had a ratio of one voting machine to 1,762 voters, the highest in the state. That was 70% more than the next highest, a DCReport analysis of Kentucky state voting data found. The median figure was 379 voters per machine and the smallest was 150.
Even if voting took no more than five minutes per person, only a tenth of voters appeared and there were no breakdowns, each Jefferson County machine would have been busy for nearly 15 hours. Polls opened for only 12. Had every voter showed up, the polls would have needed to remain open for six days and until dawn on the seventh.
Areas with fewer financial resources might not be able to afford sufficient voting machines for people to cast ballots during the brief periods when the polls are open, constraining the process. That means that residents of less affluent areas can find themselves facing election disaster as their voices are subtly quashed.
Voters should push back on the lobbying and the assurances that technology solves all problems. Simple paper ballots, hand-marked with pencil or pen, should be standard issue at every polling place. Scan the ballots later when there is time.
Focus on ensuring the most fundamental right of citizenship—the ability to vote—is available to all…
…Even if those people aren’t financially comfortable white Republicans.
Gerrymandering and other forms of suppression have been unleashed across the country so the minority party can gain and hold power even as its numbers shrink.
Now those who would discourage or disable unwanted ballots have a new potential tool: voting machines. If there aren’t enough working machines to enable people to cast their ballots, you blunt their will.
Manipulative conservative GOP politicians have a long history of actively attempting to interfere with voters they considered “unfriendly” or even “unworthy.”
Photo ID requirements, slashing available polling places in minority and poor areas, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, adoption of effective poll taxes and other tactics have resurfaced to target moderate or progressive voters.
Last December, Justin Clark, a top re-election adviser of Donald Trump was caught on a recording admitting this inconvenient truth: “Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places … It’s going to be a much bigger program [in 2020], a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program,” as The Associated Press reported.
Later, Clark claimed he was referring to false allegations of attempted vote-rigging.
But that isn’t the only evidence.
In 2016, Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) said, “Well I think Hillary Clinton is about the weakest candidate that the Democrats have ever put up and now we have photo ID. I think photo ID is going to make a little bit of a difference as well.”
Republicans this year are investing $20 million in a plan to challenge votes, even though evidence of widespread voter fraud is non-existent.
The Heritage Foundation list of voter fraud cases that argues for ID laws is a thin read. For instance, it shows only 77 cases in 2010 scattered throughout the country. That would be barely enough, if gathered, to affect the outcome of an election in a small town.
There is one well-documented example, which prosecutors allege happened on behalf of a GOP candidate in North Carolina. Republicans have done their best to downplay and ignore the case.
However, the GOP will spend 10s of millions because harassment might reduce turnout for Democrats.
Machine-Aided Suppression
Now there’s a new front in potential voter suppression: voting machines.
There’s a virtual industry of voting machine lobbyists, as Sue Halpern of The New Yorker reported. Often the attempt is to steer business away from a requirement for paper-ballot systems and toward fully electronic ones, even though paper is less expensive, more secure, can be audited and is otherwise reliable.
Hacking or manipulating the machines to change outcomes—long a concern of security and voting experts—isn’t the biggest problem. In practice, the Brennan Center for Justice has noted,b “vote flipping” is more likely a result of aging machines that act erratically from wear and tear.
The more realistic and immediate danger is the way technology can throw a wrench into the election process.
Ballot Breakdowns
Voting machines, especially the so-called ballot-market devices, or BMDs, have significant weaknesses. “If a touchscreen goes down, it’s out of service until it’s fixed,” said Christopher Deluzio, policy director of the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law. “That machine is out of service for the voters to have a ballot printed.”
The issue isn’t theoretical. “You want to vote on paper because there have been a number of instances where machine failure meant votes were lost,” Susannah Goodman, Common Cause’s director of election security, told DCReport. “That’s a known fact.”
Then, as Deluzio—who served on a commission that audited Pennsylvania’s voting system infrastructure—notes, the machines are expensive. “The BMB options were costing roughly twice as much per voter” as paper ballots, he said.
The potential for equipment failing, combined with elevated costs that keep governments from having plenty of spares (unlike stockpiling additional pencils), means the chance that citizens will find it difficult to vote.
Georgia on Their Minds
Georgia’s primary election in early June was a disaster so vast that Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state, called it “unacceptable” and vowed to investigate, according to NBC News.
The problems, which generally appeared in minority neighborhoods, caused multi-hour waits for people to exercise their franchise.
“I don’t think voter suppression was the idea behind it,” said Common Cause’s Goodman. But when there aren’t enough machines to let people vote efficiently that doesn’t matter.
“I do think there’s a real serious problem with the number of machines deployed,” Goodman added. “If you’re only going to let voters use a machine, then you damned well better be sure there are enough.”
“Especially in Georgia, they didn’t have enough machines and when the machines broke down, they didn’t fix them fast enough, replace them,” she said. “And it was in the areas that are more minority.”
In addition, the machines use a QR bar code that is the actual vote that will run through a scanner for the count. There is readable text as well, but, significantly, no way to know whether it represents what is in the QR code.
Kentucky’s Near Nightmare
This is exactly what many worried about Kentucky. Would minority residents get a fair chance to vote?
Only one polling place and 350 ballot machines were available last month for all of of Jefferson County, home to the state’s largest city, Louisville, and many minority residents. Half of black Kentuckians live in that county. Which at 389 square miles is the equivalent of 17 Manhattans.
There were widespread expectations of voter suppression in the primary vote on June 23.
Even though the procedure seemed largely smooth—because pandemic-driven mail-in voting and early voting took pressure off in-person—the concerns were reasonable.
Stephen Voss, professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, argued that an “alienating” process tended to disenfranchise “people with lower socioeconomic standing,” many of whom could no longer walk to their local polling place.
A higher in-person turnout, which couldn’t have been ruled out, would have made the situation far worse.
There are 616,523 registered voters in Jefferson County, which had a ratio of one voting machine to 1,762 voters, the highest in the state. That was 70% more than the next highest, a DCReport analysis of Kentucky state voting data found. The median figure was 379 voters per machine and the smallest was 150.
Even if voting took no more than five minutes per person, only a tenth of voters appeared and there were no breakdowns, each Jefferson County machine would have been busy for nearly 15 hours. Polls opened for only 12. Had every voter showed up, the polls would have needed to remain open for six days and until dawn on the seventh.
Areas with fewer financial resources might not be able to afford sufficient voting machines for people to cast ballots during the brief periods when the polls are open, constraining the process. That means that residents of less affluent areas can find themselves facing election disaster as their voices are subtly quashed.
Voters should push back on the lobbying and the assurances that technology solves all problems. Simple paper ballots, hand-marked with pencil or pen, should be standard issue at every polling place. Scan the ballots later when there is time.
Focus on ensuring the most fundamental right of citizenship—the ability to vote—is available to all…
…Even if those people aren’t financially comfortable white Republicans.
10 Voter Fraud Lies Debunked
GET THE FACTS: American elections are clean and trustworthy despite what President Trump and others claim.
Max Feldman - brennan center for justice
PUBLISHED: May 27, 2020
Mail voting has taken on new importance as a crucial strategy for protecting voters’ safety amid the Covid-19 pandemic. As if on cue, President Trump and his surrogates have claimed that mail voting is rife with fraud, and that efforts to expand access to mail voting — like Michigan's, for example — are illegitimate. That is incorrect: as the Brennan Center has explained, fraud in mail voting remains extremely rare, and none of the states that hold their elections primarily by mail have had voter fraud scandals since implementing the systems.
These claims of widespread fraud are nothing more than old wine in new bottles. President Trump and his allies have long claimed, without evidence, that different aspects of our elections are infected with voter fraud. Before mail voting, they pushed similar false narratives about noncitizen voting, voter impersonation, and double voting in order to enact laws that reduce turnout and discredit adverse election results.
Here are 10 of the most egregious voter fraud claims of the past five years.
1. Trump Lies About Noncitizens Voting After Losing Popular Vote
..In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the Brennan Center researched and rebutted claims of widespread noncitizen voting. The ensuing report found only about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting that were referred for further investigation or prosecution out of 23.5 million votes tabulated in the 42 jurisdictions studied, which were selected because of their high rates of noncitizen residents. In other words, noncitizen votes accounted for no more than 0.0001 percent of the 2016 votes in these jurisdictions.
2. Trump Blames 2016 New Hampshire Loss on Out-of-State Voters
...The Brennan Center and a number of journalists have rebutted this claim — as did New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, who was a member of Trump’s own voter fraud commission. An investigation by the New Hampshire attorney general found virtually zero evidence of voter fraud in the state. Even though Trump’s claim was baseless, it has had a harmful effect on elections. Since 2016, the state has enacted two laws to make it more difficult for students to register and to vote. Furthermore, Trump has revived the claim, repeating it at a New Hampshire rally in February 2020.
3. Activist Group Falsely Accuses Virginia Citizens of Voter Fraud
In 2016 and 2017, an activist group called the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) published two documents — Alien Invasion of Virginia and Alien Invasion II, replete with flying saucers on the cover — claiming that thousands of noncitizens had registered and voted illegally in Virginia. PILF has targeted jurisdictions around the country, urging them to purge their voter rolls more aggressively.
The PILF documents misidentified lawfully registered U.S. citizens as noncitizens. Furthermore, PILF doxed these individuals, exposing their names, home addresses, and, in some cases, telephone numbers and email addresses. Voting rights advocates brought a lawsuit in response, arguing that the documents’ inaccurate claims were defamatory and also constituted voter intimidation, a violation of federal law. PILF initially fought the lawsuit but ultimately settled after an early loss in the litigation. As part of the settlement, PILF took down from its websites the exhibits that referenced individual voters, and PILF’s president issued a written apology to the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
4. Bad Social Science Props Up Noncitizen Voter Myth
In 2017, presidential press secretary Sean Spicer used a study, authored by professors at Old Dominion University and George Mason University, to justify Trump’s claims that widespread voter fraud marred the 2016 election. The study claimed that up to 14 percent of noncitizens had voted in recent elections, based on an analysis of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), which surveys tens of thousands of Americans about their election experience.
According to the scholars who run the CCES, the authors of the Old Dominion study misused CCES data to reach their conclusions. In surveys like the CCES, some individuals respond incorrectly to the survey’s questions. As a result, a small number of citizens were misclassified as noncitizens. The authors of the discredited study failed to account for this “measurement error,” rendering their study “irresponsible social science” that “should never have been published in the first place.” The CCES scholars concluded that “the likely percent of non-citizen voters in recent US elections is 0.”
5. Trump Alleges Widespread Voter Impersonation After 2018 Midterms
...The Brennan Center, alongside academics and journalists, have investigated claims of voter-impersonation fraud (which happens when an ineligible voter pretends to be an eligible voter at the polls) and found that it almost never happens. A Brennan Center report determined that Americans are more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter-impersonation fraud. Follow-up work by Loyola Law School’s Justin Levitt found just 31 credible instances of impersonation fraud from 2000 to 2014 out of more than 1 billion ballots cast.
6. Conservative Organization Compiles Misleading Database
...The Brennan Center analyzed this database and found that the claims were “grossly exaggerated” and “devoid of context.” There were only 10 cases involving in-person voter-impersonation fraud and only 41 involving noncitizen voting. Put in context, the think tank inadvertently undermined claims of widespread voter fraud. In the period covered by the database, which stretched back to the Truman era, more than 3 billion votes were cast in federal elections alone, along with many more in state and local elections. Thus, the cases identified in the database made up an infinitesimally small portion of the overall number of votes cast. Less than seven months after its inception, Trump’s voter fraud commission was disbanded.
7. Florida Senator Cries Fraud to Undermine Vote-Counting Process
In 2018, Rick Scott — at the time the governor of Florida — claimed without evidence that there was “rampant fraud” in the U.S. Senate election he ended up winning. This was a stark example of candidates in close races making wild fraud allegations to discredit the vote-counting process.
Scott’s claims of fraud were quickly and widely rejected, including by members of his own administration. For example, election monitors from Scott’s administration reported that they saw no evidence of fraud in Broward County, a focal point of Scott's accusations. A state judge, in an emergency lawsuit brought by the Scott campaign, also said that he had seen no evidence of fraud. Ultimately, in April 2020, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement closed lengthy investigations into these issues, finding no evidence to support Scott's allegations of widespread fraud.
8. Kobach Pushes Myth of Noncitizen Voter Registration in Kansas
...A federal district court rejected Kobach’s claim that the “best estimate” available was that 18,000 noncitizens were on Kansas voter rolls. The former secretary of state’s claim drew from the analysis of an expert witness he had hired to support his case, but the court found that the analysis “suffer[ed] from flaws that give it little probative value.” After trial, the court found that only 39 noncitizens had successfully registered to vote between 1999 and 2013 (before the DPOC law was put in place) — just 0.002 percent of all registered voters. The law blocked more than 31,000 Kansans from registering to vote between 2013 and 2016. The court struck it down, holding that it violated federal law, and the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed this decision in April 2020. The court also ordered Kobach to attend legal training classes, in response to his repeated violation of court rules.
9. Texas Secretary of State Uses Flawed Lists to Justify Voter Purges
In 2019, then–Secretary of State David Whitley declared that 95,000 noncitizens were on Texas’s voter rolls and accused 58,000 of them of casting a ballot. State officials and the president seized on these statistics to suggest that new voting laws, including voter ID laws, were needed. In addition, Whitley started forwarding lists of names to county election officials so that they could be purged from the rolls.
Almost immediately, county officials complained that the lists were inaccurate. A federal court quickly intervened to halt any purges that were based on the lists. Whitley had developed his lists by comparing driver’s license records with the state’s voter rolls. But noncitizens can first obtain driver’s licenses and later naturalize, making them eligible to register to vote. This happens frequently, especially in Texas, where 55,000 people become citizens each year. Whitley eventually apologized for the lists and resigned. Even though Trump amplified the claims when they were first aired, he never issued a correction when they were proven inaccurate.
10. Kentucky Governor Alleges Fraud to Challenge Reelection Outcome
In 2019, Gov. Matt Bevin lost his reelection campaign. He immediately sought a recanvass of the votes, claiming without evidence that there were “significant irregularities” in the election process. These claims appear to have been part of an effort to build momentum to challenge the election outcome before the state legislature.
The governor and his supporters alleged that the election results were contaminated by voter fraud and improper administration (such as absentee ballots being “illegally counted”). Online trolls and Twitter bots shared the unfounded narrative. None of Bevin’s vague and varied claims were substantiated, and GOP leadership quickly called on Bevin to concede.
These claims of widespread fraud are nothing more than old wine in new bottles. President Trump and his allies have long claimed, without evidence, that different aspects of our elections are infected with voter fraud. Before mail voting, they pushed similar false narratives about noncitizen voting, voter impersonation, and double voting in order to enact laws that reduce turnout and discredit adverse election results.
Here are 10 of the most egregious voter fraud claims of the past five years.
1. Trump Lies About Noncitizens Voting After Losing Popular Vote
..In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the Brennan Center researched and rebutted claims of widespread noncitizen voting. The ensuing report found only about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting that were referred for further investigation or prosecution out of 23.5 million votes tabulated in the 42 jurisdictions studied, which were selected because of their high rates of noncitizen residents. In other words, noncitizen votes accounted for no more than 0.0001 percent of the 2016 votes in these jurisdictions.
2. Trump Blames 2016 New Hampshire Loss on Out-of-State Voters
...The Brennan Center and a number of journalists have rebutted this claim — as did New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, who was a member of Trump’s own voter fraud commission. An investigation by the New Hampshire attorney general found virtually zero evidence of voter fraud in the state. Even though Trump’s claim was baseless, it has had a harmful effect on elections. Since 2016, the state has enacted two laws to make it more difficult for students to register and to vote. Furthermore, Trump has revived the claim, repeating it at a New Hampshire rally in February 2020.
3. Activist Group Falsely Accuses Virginia Citizens of Voter Fraud
In 2016 and 2017, an activist group called the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) published two documents — Alien Invasion of Virginia and Alien Invasion II, replete with flying saucers on the cover — claiming that thousands of noncitizens had registered and voted illegally in Virginia. PILF has targeted jurisdictions around the country, urging them to purge their voter rolls more aggressively.
The PILF documents misidentified lawfully registered U.S. citizens as noncitizens. Furthermore, PILF doxed these individuals, exposing their names, home addresses, and, in some cases, telephone numbers and email addresses. Voting rights advocates brought a lawsuit in response, arguing that the documents’ inaccurate claims were defamatory and also constituted voter intimidation, a violation of federal law. PILF initially fought the lawsuit but ultimately settled after an early loss in the litigation. As part of the settlement, PILF took down from its websites the exhibits that referenced individual voters, and PILF’s president issued a written apology to the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
4. Bad Social Science Props Up Noncitizen Voter Myth
In 2017, presidential press secretary Sean Spicer used a study, authored by professors at Old Dominion University and George Mason University, to justify Trump’s claims that widespread voter fraud marred the 2016 election. The study claimed that up to 14 percent of noncitizens had voted in recent elections, based on an analysis of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), which surveys tens of thousands of Americans about their election experience.
According to the scholars who run the CCES, the authors of the Old Dominion study misused CCES data to reach their conclusions. In surveys like the CCES, some individuals respond incorrectly to the survey’s questions. As a result, a small number of citizens were misclassified as noncitizens. The authors of the discredited study failed to account for this “measurement error,” rendering their study “irresponsible social science” that “should never have been published in the first place.” The CCES scholars concluded that “the likely percent of non-citizen voters in recent US elections is 0.”
5. Trump Alleges Widespread Voter Impersonation After 2018 Midterms
...The Brennan Center, alongside academics and journalists, have investigated claims of voter-impersonation fraud (which happens when an ineligible voter pretends to be an eligible voter at the polls) and found that it almost never happens. A Brennan Center report determined that Americans are more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter-impersonation fraud. Follow-up work by Loyola Law School’s Justin Levitt found just 31 credible instances of impersonation fraud from 2000 to 2014 out of more than 1 billion ballots cast.
6. Conservative Organization Compiles Misleading Database
...The Brennan Center analyzed this database and found that the claims were “grossly exaggerated” and “devoid of context.” There were only 10 cases involving in-person voter-impersonation fraud and only 41 involving noncitizen voting. Put in context, the think tank inadvertently undermined claims of widespread voter fraud. In the period covered by the database, which stretched back to the Truman era, more than 3 billion votes were cast in federal elections alone, along with many more in state and local elections. Thus, the cases identified in the database made up an infinitesimally small portion of the overall number of votes cast. Less than seven months after its inception, Trump’s voter fraud commission was disbanded.
7. Florida Senator Cries Fraud to Undermine Vote-Counting Process
In 2018, Rick Scott — at the time the governor of Florida — claimed without evidence that there was “rampant fraud” in the U.S. Senate election he ended up winning. This was a stark example of candidates in close races making wild fraud allegations to discredit the vote-counting process.
Scott’s claims of fraud were quickly and widely rejected, including by members of his own administration. For example, election monitors from Scott’s administration reported that they saw no evidence of fraud in Broward County, a focal point of Scott's accusations. A state judge, in an emergency lawsuit brought by the Scott campaign, also said that he had seen no evidence of fraud. Ultimately, in April 2020, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement closed lengthy investigations into these issues, finding no evidence to support Scott's allegations of widespread fraud.
8. Kobach Pushes Myth of Noncitizen Voter Registration in Kansas
...A federal district court rejected Kobach’s claim that the “best estimate” available was that 18,000 noncitizens were on Kansas voter rolls. The former secretary of state’s claim drew from the analysis of an expert witness he had hired to support his case, but the court found that the analysis “suffer[ed] from flaws that give it little probative value.” After trial, the court found that only 39 noncitizens had successfully registered to vote between 1999 and 2013 (before the DPOC law was put in place) — just 0.002 percent of all registered voters. The law blocked more than 31,000 Kansans from registering to vote between 2013 and 2016. The court struck it down, holding that it violated federal law, and the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed this decision in April 2020. The court also ordered Kobach to attend legal training classes, in response to his repeated violation of court rules.
9. Texas Secretary of State Uses Flawed Lists to Justify Voter Purges
In 2019, then–Secretary of State David Whitley declared that 95,000 noncitizens were on Texas’s voter rolls and accused 58,000 of them of casting a ballot. State officials and the president seized on these statistics to suggest that new voting laws, including voter ID laws, were needed. In addition, Whitley started forwarding lists of names to county election officials so that they could be purged from the rolls.
Almost immediately, county officials complained that the lists were inaccurate. A federal court quickly intervened to halt any purges that were based on the lists. Whitley had developed his lists by comparing driver’s license records with the state’s voter rolls. But noncitizens can first obtain driver’s licenses and later naturalize, making them eligible to register to vote. This happens frequently, especially in Texas, where 55,000 people become citizens each year. Whitley eventually apologized for the lists and resigned. Even though Trump amplified the claims when they were first aired, he never issued a correction when they were proven inaccurate.
10. Kentucky Governor Alleges Fraud to Challenge Reelection Outcome
In 2019, Gov. Matt Bevin lost his reelection campaign. He immediately sought a recanvass of the votes, claiming without evidence that there were “significant irregularities” in the election process. These claims appear to have been part of an effort to build momentum to challenge the election outcome before the state legislature.
The governor and his supporters alleged that the election results were contaminated by voter fraud and improper administration (such as absentee ballots being “illegally counted”). Online trolls and Twitter bots shared the unfounded narrative. None of Bevin’s vague and varied claims were substantiated, and GOP leadership quickly called on Bevin to concede.
Federal judge rules that all Texas voters can apply to vote by mail amid coronavirus pandemic
The judge said the "Grim Reaper's scepter of death" is "far more serious than an unsupported fear of voter fraud"
IGOR DERYSH - salon
MAY 21, 2020 9:30AM (UTC)
A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that all Texas voters can apply to vote by mail during the coronavirus pandemic, days after the state Supreme Court had blocked an expansion of the state's absentee voting system.
The Texas Democratic Party filed a lawsuit last month arguing that the state's existing rules, which limit absentee ballots to voters over 65, the disabled, people who are in jail but have not been convicted and people with firm travel plans, would impose unconstitutional burdens on in-person voters by forcing them to risk infection. A recent study linked in-person voting in April's Wisconsin election to a rise in coronavirus cases in subsequent weeks.
U.S. District Judge Fred Biery agreed with the Democrats on Tuesday and ordered that all voters under 65 "who seek to vote by mail to avoid transmission of the virus" can do so. He also argued that the party was likely to succeed in proving that the existing rules violate the 26th Amendment's protections against voting discrimination based on age.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who vehemently opposes the expansion and threatened criminal charges against voting rights groups that promote mail voting to those not currently eligible, vowed to appeal the ruling.
"The district court's opinion ignores the evidence and disregards well-established law," Paxton said, according to the Texas Tribune.
Biery said in his ruling that the Democratic Party was also likely to succeed in proving that Paxton's threats amounted to voter intimidation.
"Paxton's statements operate to discourage voters from seeking mail-in ballots because of their fear of criminal sanction or victimization by fraud," he wrote, "and have the intention and the effect of depriving legally eligible voters' access to the franchise."
Biery wrote in a lengthy and colorful order that opened by quoting the preamble to the Declaration of Independence that the right to vote "should not be elusively based on the whims of nature."
"Two hundred forty-years on, Americans now seek Life without fear of pandemic, Liberty to choose their leaders in an environment free of disease and the pursuit of Happiness without undue restrictions," he wrote. "There are some among us who would, if they could, nullify those aspirational ideas to return to the not so halcyon and not so thrilling days of yesteryear of the Divine Right of Kings, trading our birthright as a sovereign people for a modern mess of governing pottage in the hands of a few and forfeiting the vision of America as a shining city upon a hill."
Paxton argued that Biery should wait until the entirety of the case plays out in state court. Democrats also filed a similar state lawsuit last month. A state district court and an appeals court similarly ruled that voters who fear infection should be able to vote by mail, but the state Supreme Court put a hold on the ruling while it reviews the case.
Paxton has also echoed President Trump's debunked conspiracy theories that mail voting was linked to voter fraud.
Biery in his ruling said the state showed "little or no evidence" of widespread fraud where mail voting is already widely used.
"The Court finds the Grim Reaper's scepter of pandemic disease and death is far more serious than an unsupported fear of voter fraud in this sui generis experience," he said. "Indeed, if vote by mail fraud is real, logic dictates that all voting should be in person."
But Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, predicted that "there are good reasons to believe [the ruling] will soon be reversed by the 5th Circuit."
Citing the ongoing state lawsuit, Hasen said that federal courts typically wait until such litigation is complete, suggesting that this was a case of a "federal court jumping the gun."
He also predicted that the appeals court would reject the argument that current rules violate the 26th Amendment's age protections.
"It is quite novel to apply the 26th amendment in this context … I suspect the much more conservative 5th Circuit is going to be much more skeptical of these arguments than this district court is," he wrote. "Indeed, when one reads from the opening of the opinion, it is clear where the judge's sympathy lies. … There's a VERY STRONG case to be made under both statutory interpretation and constitutional law principles to get there, but this is not the kind of careful, cautious opinion that could potentially survive 5th Circuit review."
The Texas Democratic Party filed a lawsuit last month arguing that the state's existing rules, which limit absentee ballots to voters over 65, the disabled, people who are in jail but have not been convicted and people with firm travel plans, would impose unconstitutional burdens on in-person voters by forcing them to risk infection. A recent study linked in-person voting in April's Wisconsin election to a rise in coronavirus cases in subsequent weeks.
U.S. District Judge Fred Biery agreed with the Democrats on Tuesday and ordered that all voters under 65 "who seek to vote by mail to avoid transmission of the virus" can do so. He also argued that the party was likely to succeed in proving that the existing rules violate the 26th Amendment's protections against voting discrimination based on age.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who vehemently opposes the expansion and threatened criminal charges against voting rights groups that promote mail voting to those not currently eligible, vowed to appeal the ruling.
"The district court's opinion ignores the evidence and disregards well-established law," Paxton said, according to the Texas Tribune.
Biery said in his ruling that the Democratic Party was also likely to succeed in proving that Paxton's threats amounted to voter intimidation.
"Paxton's statements operate to discourage voters from seeking mail-in ballots because of their fear of criminal sanction or victimization by fraud," he wrote, "and have the intention and the effect of depriving legally eligible voters' access to the franchise."
Biery wrote in a lengthy and colorful order that opened by quoting the preamble to the Declaration of Independence that the right to vote "should not be elusively based on the whims of nature."
"Two hundred forty-years on, Americans now seek Life without fear of pandemic, Liberty to choose their leaders in an environment free of disease and the pursuit of Happiness without undue restrictions," he wrote. "There are some among us who would, if they could, nullify those aspirational ideas to return to the not so halcyon and not so thrilling days of yesteryear of the Divine Right of Kings, trading our birthright as a sovereign people for a modern mess of governing pottage in the hands of a few and forfeiting the vision of America as a shining city upon a hill."
Paxton argued that Biery should wait until the entirety of the case plays out in state court. Democrats also filed a similar state lawsuit last month. A state district court and an appeals court similarly ruled that voters who fear infection should be able to vote by mail, but the state Supreme Court put a hold on the ruling while it reviews the case.
Paxton has also echoed President Trump's debunked conspiracy theories that mail voting was linked to voter fraud.
Biery in his ruling said the state showed "little or no evidence" of widespread fraud where mail voting is already widely used.
"The Court finds the Grim Reaper's scepter of pandemic disease and death is far more serious than an unsupported fear of voter fraud in this sui generis experience," he said. "Indeed, if vote by mail fraud is real, logic dictates that all voting should be in person."
But Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, predicted that "there are good reasons to believe [the ruling] will soon be reversed by the 5th Circuit."
Citing the ongoing state lawsuit, Hasen said that federal courts typically wait until such litigation is complete, suggesting that this was a case of a "federal court jumping the gun."
He also predicted that the appeals court would reject the argument that current rules violate the 26th Amendment's age protections.
"It is quite novel to apply the 26th amendment in this context … I suspect the much more conservative 5th Circuit is going to be much more skeptical of these arguments than this district court is," he wrote. "Indeed, when one reads from the opening of the opinion, it is clear where the judge's sympathy lies. … There's a VERY STRONG case to be made under both statutory interpretation and constitutional law principles to get there, but this is not the kind of careful, cautious opinion that could potentially survive 5th Circuit review."
Trump intensifies war with Democrats over voting laws
The GOP has doubled its budget to fight Democratic lawsuits to $20 million.
By ALEX ISENSTADT - politico
05/07/2020 04:42 PM EDT
President Donald Trump’s political operation is expanding its legal effort to stop Democrats from overhauling voting laws in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The Republican National Committee and Trump reelection campaign are doubling their legal budget to $20 million as litigation spreads to an array of battleground states. With the virus likely to complicate in-person balloting in November, Democrats have been pushing to substantially ease remote voting restrictions — something the Trump campaign and RNC are aggressively fighting in the courts.
Trump, who has long been fixated on voter fraud, has taken a personal interest in the project. He is expected to discuss the legal maneuvering during a meeting with his political team Thursday.
The battle over voting laws — specifically Democrats' efforts to make it easier for people to vote remotely during the pandemic — has emerged as a key front in the general election showdown between the parties.
More than two dozen Republican operatives are focusing on the legal battles and have been closely coordinating with party officials at the state and local levels. The Trump campaign and RNC recently intervened in Nevada, where Democrats are pushing for the state to ease restrictions by mailing ballots to all registered voters. Republicans have also been active in New Mexico, where they fought back a similar Democratic-led lawsuit.
The legal skirmishing has also been taking place in such battlegrounds as Pennsylvania and Georgia. While Republicans say they are open to some changes amid the pandemic, they are opposed to many of the farther-reaching reforms Democrats are pursuing.
“We will not stand idly by while Democrats try to sue their way to victory in 2020,” said RNC chief of staff Richard Walters. “Democrats may be using the coronavirus as an excuse to strip away important election safeguards, but the American people continue to support commonsense protections that defend the integrity of our democratic processes.”
The RNC and Trump campaign initially announced in February that they would direct $10 million to legal fights. But the party, Walters said, is prepared to sue Democrats “into oblivion and spend whatever is necessary.”
Democrats have long pushed to ease voting restrictions. Marc Elias, a prominent election law attorney who is leading the party’s effort, said Democrats were currently focused on litigation in more than a dozen states, including Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Many of the lawsuits, he said, involve expanding vote-by-mail rules.
He acknowledged, however, that the Republican Party’s massive investment is a hurdle.
“We’re not unrealistic about the fight that is ahead,” Elias said. “There is no question that Donald Trump and the Republican Party have made opposing voting rights a top priority for their campaign.”
Republicans insist public opinion is on their side. Earlier this month, the RNC commissioned a survey finding that nearly two-thirds of voters believed there was fraud in elections and that a majority thought fraud occurs more frequently when ballots are cast by mail.
The Republican National Committee and Trump reelection campaign are doubling their legal budget to $20 million as litigation spreads to an array of battleground states. With the virus likely to complicate in-person balloting in November, Democrats have been pushing to substantially ease remote voting restrictions — something the Trump campaign and RNC are aggressively fighting in the courts.
Trump, who has long been fixated on voter fraud, has taken a personal interest in the project. He is expected to discuss the legal maneuvering during a meeting with his political team Thursday.
The battle over voting laws — specifically Democrats' efforts to make it easier for people to vote remotely during the pandemic — has emerged as a key front in the general election showdown between the parties.
More than two dozen Republican operatives are focusing on the legal battles and have been closely coordinating with party officials at the state and local levels. The Trump campaign and RNC recently intervened in Nevada, where Democrats are pushing for the state to ease restrictions by mailing ballots to all registered voters. Republicans have also been active in New Mexico, where they fought back a similar Democratic-led lawsuit.
The legal skirmishing has also been taking place in such battlegrounds as Pennsylvania and Georgia. While Republicans say they are open to some changes amid the pandemic, they are opposed to many of the farther-reaching reforms Democrats are pursuing.
“We will not stand idly by while Democrats try to sue their way to victory in 2020,” said RNC chief of staff Richard Walters. “Democrats may be using the coronavirus as an excuse to strip away important election safeguards, but the American people continue to support commonsense protections that defend the integrity of our democratic processes.”
The RNC and Trump campaign initially announced in February that they would direct $10 million to legal fights. But the party, Walters said, is prepared to sue Democrats “into oblivion and spend whatever is necessary.”
Democrats have long pushed to ease voting restrictions. Marc Elias, a prominent election law attorney who is leading the party’s effort, said Democrats were currently focused on litigation in more than a dozen states, including Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Many of the lawsuits, he said, involve expanding vote-by-mail rules.
He acknowledged, however, that the Republican Party’s massive investment is a hurdle.
“We’re not unrealistic about the fight that is ahead,” Elias said. “There is no question that Donald Trump and the Republican Party have made opposing voting rights a top priority for their campaign.”
Republicans insist public opinion is on their side. Earlier this month, the RNC commissioned a survey finding that nearly two-thirds of voters believed there was fraud in elections and that a majority thought fraud occurs more frequently when ballots are cast by mail.
Florida Judge Signals Clear Intent to Strike Down State’s New “Poll Tax” Law
BY Chris Walker, Truthout
PUBLISHED May 7, 2020
A U.S. district court judge for the state of Florida made it evident on Wednesday in no uncertain terms that he intends to strike down or significantly alter the state’s restrictive rules process for restoring the right to vote for individuals with felonies on their records.
In a 2018 statewide constitutional referendum, Florida residents overwhelmingly supported a measure that would restore voting rights to such individuals. But the following year, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law requiring those with felony records to pay fees due to the state before their suffrage rights could be restored.
Last October, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle placed an injunction on that law, favoring 17 plaintiffs who said their constitutional rights were being violated by the requirement to pay fees. The state appealed his injunction to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld Hinkle’s injunction in February, elaborating that the law indeed violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, due to the fact that the 2019 law “punishes those who cannot pay more harshly than those who can.”
The case returned to Hinkle’s courtroom as a result, where, on Wednesday, he made clear that he was not going to change his mind on the matter. Hinkle’s comments on the bench suggested he viewed the law passed by the state legislature last year to be equivalent to a poll tax.
“The Legislature plainly intended that you had to pay the money in order to vote, and if you didn’t pay the money you didn’t vote,” the judge said.
While recognizing the 2019 law didn’t use racist language in an overt manner, Hinkle noted that there was “clearly a racial impact” with regard to the law because a higher proportion of people with felonies on their record in Florida are Black.
In fact, the state itself admitted that it identified at least 85,000 voters who might be affected by the Republican-passed law. That number, however, is considered by many to be a conservative estimate. A study conducted by University of Florida professor Daniel Smith and the ACLU demonstrated that as many as 775,000 individuals might not be allowed to vote if the statute is upheld.
Felony disenfranchisement — a practice that some states across the nation employ to limit the ability of those with felony records to participate in the democratic process — affects around 6 million Americans, according to figures from The Sentencing Project. Notably, it’s a rule that disproportionately affects people of color, with one out of every 13 Black Americans being negatively affected, versus one out of every 56 for non-Black voters in the U.S.
The impending decision by Hinkle will likely have an impact on statewide and federal elections in Florida later this year. In 2016, the presidential race in Florida between Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was decided by just 112,911 votes — a margin of voters several times smaller than what the University of Florida’s study suggests will be positively impacted with the right to vote if Hinkle’s judgment is allowed to stand.
In a 2018 statewide constitutional referendum, Florida residents overwhelmingly supported a measure that would restore voting rights to such individuals. But the following year, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law requiring those with felony records to pay fees due to the state before their suffrage rights could be restored.
Last October, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle placed an injunction on that law, favoring 17 plaintiffs who said their constitutional rights were being violated by the requirement to pay fees. The state appealed his injunction to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld Hinkle’s injunction in February, elaborating that the law indeed violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, due to the fact that the 2019 law “punishes those who cannot pay more harshly than those who can.”
The case returned to Hinkle’s courtroom as a result, where, on Wednesday, he made clear that he was not going to change his mind on the matter. Hinkle’s comments on the bench suggested he viewed the law passed by the state legislature last year to be equivalent to a poll tax.
“The Legislature plainly intended that you had to pay the money in order to vote, and if you didn’t pay the money you didn’t vote,” the judge said.
While recognizing the 2019 law didn’t use racist language in an overt manner, Hinkle noted that there was “clearly a racial impact” with regard to the law because a higher proportion of people with felonies on their record in Florida are Black.
In fact, the state itself admitted that it identified at least 85,000 voters who might be affected by the Republican-passed law. That number, however, is considered by many to be a conservative estimate. A study conducted by University of Florida professor Daniel Smith and the ACLU demonstrated that as many as 775,000 individuals might not be allowed to vote if the statute is upheld.
Felony disenfranchisement — a practice that some states across the nation employ to limit the ability of those with felony records to participate in the democratic process — affects around 6 million Americans, according to figures from The Sentencing Project. Notably, it’s a rule that disproportionately affects people of color, with one out of every 13 Black Americans being negatively affected, versus one out of every 56 for non-Black voters in the U.S.
The impending decision by Hinkle will likely have an impact on statewide and federal elections in Florida later this year. In 2016, the presidential race in Florida between Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was decided by just 112,911 votes — a margin of voters several times smaller than what the University of Florida’s study suggests will be positively impacted with the right to vote if Hinkle’s judgment is allowed to stand.
conservatives always lie!!!
A Conservative Legal Group Significantly Miscalculated Data in a Report on Mail-In Voting
President Trump touted a new report on voter fraud, but ProPublica found a critical error with the data. Even with the correction, experts say the report is misleading.
by Derek Willis May 2, 11:45 a.m. EDT
In an April report that warns of the risks of fraud in mail-in voting, a conservative legal group significantly inflated a key statistic, a ProPublica analysis found. The Public Interest Legal Foundation reported that more than 1 million ballots sent out to voters in 2018 were returned as undeliverable. Taken at face value, that would represent a 91% increase over the number of undeliverable mail ballots in 2016, a sign that a vote-by-mail system would be a “catastrophe” for elections, the group argued.
However, after ProPublica provided evidence to PILF that it had in fact doubled the official government numbers, the organization corrected its figure. The number of undeliverable mail ballots dropped slightly from 2016 to 2018.
The PILF report said that one in five mail ballots issued between 2012 and 2018, a total of 28.3 million, were not returned by voters and were “missing,” which, according to the organization, creates an opportunity for fraud. In a May 1 tweet that included a link to coverage of the report, President Donald Trump wrote: “Don’t allow RIGGED ELECTIONS.”
PILF regularly sues state and local election officials to force them to purge some voters from registration rolls, including those it claims have duplicate registrations from another state or who are dead. It is headed by J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department attorney who was a member of the Trump administration’s disbanded commission on election integrity.
The report describes as “missing” all mail ballots that were delivered to a valid address but not returned to be counted. In a statement accompanying the report, Adams said that unaccounted-for ballots “represent 28 million opportunities for someone to cheat.” In particular, the organization argues that the number of unreturned ballots would grow if more states adopt voting by mail.
Experts who study voting and use the same data PILF used in the report, which is from the Election Administration and Voting Survey produced by the federal Election Assistance Commission, say that it’s wrong to describe unreturned ballots as missing.
“Election officials ‘know’ what happened to those ballots,” said Paul Gronke, a professor at Reed College, who is the director of the Early Voting Information Center, a research group based there. “They were received by eligible citizens and not filled out. Where are they now? Most likely, in landfills,” Gronke said by email.
A recent RealClear Politics article based on the PILF report suggested that an increase in voting by mail this year could make the kind of fraud uncovered in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District in 2018 more likely. In that case, a political consultant to a Republican candidate was indicted on charges of absentee ballot fraud for overseeing a paid ballot collection operation. “The potential to affect elections by chasing down unused mail-in ballots and make sure they get counted — using methods that may or may not be legal — is great,” the article argues.
PILF’s report was mentioned in other news outlets including the Grand Junction Sentinel in Colorado, “PBS NewsHour” and the New York Post. The Washington Times repeated the inaccurate claim of 1 million undeliverable mail ballots.
In a statement, the National Vote at Home Institute, an advocacy group, challenged the characterization of the 28.3 million ballots as missing. Of those ballots, 12 million were mailed by election officials in Colorado, Oregon and Washington, which by law send a mail-in ballot to every registered voter, roughly 30% of which are not returned for any given election. “Conflating voters choosing not to cast their ballots with ‘missing’ ballots is a fundamental flaw,” the statement reads.
In an interview, Logan Churchwell, the communications director for PILF, acknowledged the error in the number of undelivered ballots, but defended the report’s conclusions, saying that it showed potential vulnerabilities in the voting system. “Election officials send these ballots out in the mail, and for them to say ‘I have no idea what happened after that’ speaks more to the investments they haven’t made to track them,” he said in a telephone interview.
But 36 states have adopted processes where voters and local officials can track the status of mail ballots through delivery, much like they can track packages delivered to a home. Churchwell said there are other explanations why mail ballots are not returned and that state and local election officials could report more information about the status of mail ballots. “If you know a ballot got to a house, you can credibly say that ballot’s status is not unknown,” he said.
The EAVS data has been published after every general election since 2004, although not every local jurisdiction provides complete responses to its questions.
In the data, election officials are asked to provide the number of mail ballots sent to voters, the number returned to be counted and the number of ballots returned as undeliverable by the U.S. Postal Service, which provides specific ballot-tracking services. The survey also asks for the number of ballots that are turned in or invalidated by voters who chose to cast their ballots in person. It asks officials to report the number of ballots that do not fit into any of those categories, or are “otherwise unable to be tracked by your office.”
Gronke described the last category as “a placeholder for elections officials to put numbers so that the whole column adds up,” and said that there was no evidence to support calling those ballots a pathway to large-scale voter fraud.
Numerous academic studies have shown that cases of voter fraud are extremely rare, although they do occur, and that fraud in mail voting seems to occur more often than with in-person voting.
However, after ProPublica provided evidence to PILF that it had in fact doubled the official government numbers, the organization corrected its figure. The number of undeliverable mail ballots dropped slightly from 2016 to 2018.
The PILF report said that one in five mail ballots issued between 2012 and 2018, a total of 28.3 million, were not returned by voters and were “missing,” which, according to the organization, creates an opportunity for fraud. In a May 1 tweet that included a link to coverage of the report, President Donald Trump wrote: “Don’t allow RIGGED ELECTIONS.”
PILF regularly sues state and local election officials to force them to purge some voters from registration rolls, including those it claims have duplicate registrations from another state or who are dead. It is headed by J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department attorney who was a member of the Trump administration’s disbanded commission on election integrity.
The report describes as “missing” all mail ballots that were delivered to a valid address but not returned to be counted. In a statement accompanying the report, Adams said that unaccounted-for ballots “represent 28 million opportunities for someone to cheat.” In particular, the organization argues that the number of unreturned ballots would grow if more states adopt voting by mail.
Experts who study voting and use the same data PILF used in the report, which is from the Election Administration and Voting Survey produced by the federal Election Assistance Commission, say that it’s wrong to describe unreturned ballots as missing.
“Election officials ‘know’ what happened to those ballots,” said Paul Gronke, a professor at Reed College, who is the director of the Early Voting Information Center, a research group based there. “They were received by eligible citizens and not filled out. Where are they now? Most likely, in landfills,” Gronke said by email.
A recent RealClear Politics article based on the PILF report suggested that an increase in voting by mail this year could make the kind of fraud uncovered in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District in 2018 more likely. In that case, a political consultant to a Republican candidate was indicted on charges of absentee ballot fraud for overseeing a paid ballot collection operation. “The potential to affect elections by chasing down unused mail-in ballots and make sure they get counted — using methods that may or may not be legal — is great,” the article argues.
PILF’s report was mentioned in other news outlets including the Grand Junction Sentinel in Colorado, “PBS NewsHour” and the New York Post. The Washington Times repeated the inaccurate claim of 1 million undeliverable mail ballots.
In a statement, the National Vote at Home Institute, an advocacy group, challenged the characterization of the 28.3 million ballots as missing. Of those ballots, 12 million were mailed by election officials in Colorado, Oregon and Washington, which by law send a mail-in ballot to every registered voter, roughly 30% of which are not returned for any given election. “Conflating voters choosing not to cast their ballots with ‘missing’ ballots is a fundamental flaw,” the statement reads.
In an interview, Logan Churchwell, the communications director for PILF, acknowledged the error in the number of undelivered ballots, but defended the report’s conclusions, saying that it showed potential vulnerabilities in the voting system. “Election officials send these ballots out in the mail, and for them to say ‘I have no idea what happened after that’ speaks more to the investments they haven’t made to track them,” he said in a telephone interview.
But 36 states have adopted processes where voters and local officials can track the status of mail ballots through delivery, much like they can track packages delivered to a home. Churchwell said there are other explanations why mail ballots are not returned and that state and local election officials could report more information about the status of mail ballots. “If you know a ballot got to a house, you can credibly say that ballot’s status is not unknown,” he said.
The EAVS data has been published after every general election since 2004, although not every local jurisdiction provides complete responses to its questions.
In the data, election officials are asked to provide the number of mail ballots sent to voters, the number returned to be counted and the number of ballots returned as undeliverable by the U.S. Postal Service, which provides specific ballot-tracking services. The survey also asks for the number of ballots that are turned in or invalidated by voters who chose to cast their ballots in person. It asks officials to report the number of ballots that do not fit into any of those categories, or are “otherwise unable to be tracked by your office.”
Gronke described the last category as “a placeholder for elections officials to put numbers so that the whole column adds up,” and said that there was no evidence to support calling those ballots a pathway to large-scale voter fraud.
Numerous academic studies have shown that cases of voter fraud are extremely rare, although they do occur, and that fraud in mail voting seems to occur more often than with in-person voting.
Virginia Democrats just enacted a huge range of voting reforms, including automatic registration
Stephen Wolf for Daily Kos Elections
Daily Kos Staff
Monday April 13, 2020 · 9:11 AM PDT
Over the weekend, Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam signed several election bills into law, the culmination of a historic legislative session that saw Democrats exercise full control over state government for the first time in a quarter century. Among those new laws is one establishing automatic voter registration through the state Department of Motor Vehicles, meaning all eligible DMV customers will be automatically registered unless they opt out. As shown on the map at the top of this post (see here for a larger version), more than a dozen states have now adopted automatic registration in some form.
Northam also signed several other new laws, including ones that:
The enactment of these reforms follows the Democratic legislature's passage of redistricting reform, which will appear on November's ballot as a constitutional amendment.
Northam also sent some bills back to the legislature, including one that would end prison gerrymandering by counting incarcerated people for redistricting purposes at their last address instead of where they are imprisoned (and can't even vote). Northam asked lawmakers to give deadlines for prisons to provide the state with the needed information, and legislators will reconvene on April 22 to take up returned bills.
Meanwhile, Northam had until Saturday to act on several other bills, the status of which are not yet clear. These measures include bills that would:
Before Democrats won full control of the state government in 2019, Virginia ranked among the worst states for voting access. Once Democrats have enacted all of these reforms, Virginia will be one of the better states for making it easy to vote.
Northam also signed several other new laws, including ones that:
- Make Election Day a state holiday by replacing a holiday that had honored Confederate generals
- Remove the excuse requirement to vote absentee
- Count mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and received within three days afterward, instead of just those received by Election Day
- Extend the close of polling on Election Day from 7 PM to 8 PM
- Repeal the GOP's photo voter ID requirement and allow non-photo IDs instead
- Require hand-filled paper ballots or machines that print paper ballots
The enactment of these reforms follows the Democratic legislature's passage of redistricting reform, which will appear on November's ballot as a constitutional amendment.
Northam also sent some bills back to the legislature, including one that would end prison gerrymandering by counting incarcerated people for redistricting purposes at their last address instead of where they are imprisoned (and can't even vote). Northam asked lawmakers to give deadlines for prisons to provide the state with the needed information, and legislators will reconvene on April 22 to take up returned bills.
Meanwhile, Northam had until Saturday to act on several other bills, the status of which are not yet clear. These measures include bills that would:
- Enable same-day voter registration
- Prepay the postage on absentee mail ballots
- Allow voters to permanently receive an absentee mail ballot in all future elections
- Allow certain out-of-state college IDs to count as voter ID
- Let cities and counties adopt instant-runoff voting in local elections
Before Democrats won full control of the state government in 2019, Virginia ranked among the worst states for voting access. Once Democrats have enacted all of these reforms, Virginia will be one of the better states for making it easy to vote.
us against us!!!
Nonvoters Are Not Privileged. They Are Disproportionately Lower-Income, Non-White and Dissatisfied With The Two Parties.
Glenn Greenwald - the intercept
April 9 2020, 8:25 a.m.
NOT EVEN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS have elapsed since Bernie Sanders announced that he was suspending his presidential run, and already a shaming campaign has been launched against those who are contemplating abstaining from voting due to dissatisfaction with the two major-party candidates. The premise invoked for this tactic is that only those who are sufficiently “privileged” have the luxury of choosing not to vote — meaning that nonvoters are rich and white and thus largely immune from the harmful consequences of a Trump presidency, which largely fall on the backs of poorer and non-white Americans.
This tactic rests on a caricature: it is designed to suggest that the only people who make a deliberate and conscious choice not to vote due to dissatisfaction are white trust-fund leftists whose wealth, status and privilege immunize them from the consequences of abstention. By contrast, this you-must-vote campaign insists, those who lack such luxuries — poorer voters and racial and ethnic minorities — understand that voting is imperative.
This assertion about the identity and motives of nonvoters is critical not only to try to bully and coerce people into voting by associating nonvoting with rich, white privilege, but also to suppress any recognition of how widespread the dissatisfaction is for both parties and the political system generally among poor and non-white citizens.
But the problem with this claim is a rather significant one: it is based on the outright, demonstrable falsehood that those who choose not to vote are primarily rich, white and thus privileged, while those who lack those privileges — voters of color and poorer voters — are unwilling to abstain. This is something one can believe only if one’s views of the country and its electorate are shaped by social media and cable news bubbles.
The truth is exactly the opposite. Those who choose not to vote because of dissatisfaction with the choices offered are disproportionately poorer and non-white, while rich whites vote in far larger percentages. And the data also makes clear that the primary motive for nonvoting among those demographic groups is not voter suppression but a belief that election outcomes do not matter because both parties are corrupt or interested only in the lives of the wealthy.
Thus, those who try to demean, malign and shame non-voters are largely attacking poorer voters and voters of color, not the New York and California leftist trust-funders of their imagination.
ONE OF THE MOST comprehensive surveys of nonvoters was published by Pew Research Center on August 9, 2018. It summarized its bottom-line finding this way, the exact opposite of what is typically claimed by wealthy television media stars and DC operatives: “nonvoters were more likely to be younger, less educated, less affluent and nonwhite.”
The Pew data on this issue is stark. Almost half of non-voters in the 2016 presidential election were non-white, even though they compose only one-fourth of the voting population. Even more extreme is the data on class: more than half of non-voters — 56% — are quite poor, making less than $30,000, even though that income group constitutes just over one-fourth of the voting population. The people who choose to vote are disproportionately privileged; those who are non-privileged choose disproportionately not to vote.
As the Washington Post’s summary of that survey put it: “Pew’s data shows that almost half of the nonvoters were nonwhite and two-thirds were under age 50. More than half of those who didn’t vote earned less than $30,000 a year; more than half of those who did vote were over age 50.”
Those who choose not to vote — either those who are registered but do not vote or those who simply do not register — constitute a huge number of Americans. Indeed, the Post highlighted their size this way: “about 30 percent of Americans were eligible to vote but decided not to, a higher percentage than the portion of the country who voted for either Trump or his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.” And while rich whites chose to vote in large numbers in the 2016 presidential election, lower-income and racial minorities composed a much larger portion of those who chose not to vote: (figure above)
In November, the New York Times’ data journalist Nate Cohn, analyzing data from a New York Times/Siena College survey of nonvoters in battleground states who abstained from voting both in 2016 and 2018, similarly described them as “disproportionately young, nonwhite and low-income,” adding that “nonvoters are less likely to have graduated from a four-year college.” In a separate article last July, Cohn noted that “young and nonwhite and low-income voters are overrepresented among nonvoters,” and “young and nonwhite voters continued to vote at lower rates than older and white voters.”
This was true not only for the 2016 election but also the 2018 mid-term election, by which time Trump had been president for almost two full years. As Cohn reported, “young and nonwhite turnout was markedly higher than it had been in 2014, but still lower than that of older and white voters.”
Pew found that “in the U.S., roughly six-in-ten adults are registered to vote.” Of them, “four-in-ten Americans who were eligible to vote did not do so in 2016.” That means 40% of eligible voters in 2016 were nonvoters. The sheer number alone — millions of Americans — should preclude any claim that non-voters are rich, white and privileged.
[Even the voting preferences of the electorate are radically distorted by online “privilege” discourse: aside from the fact that 28% of Hispanics and 14% of black men voted for Tump in 2016, rich whites voted for the Democratic candidate, not the GOP candidate, while poorer whites voted for Trump: “whites with a four-year college degree or more education made up 30% of all validated voters. Among these voters, far more (55%) said they voted for Clinton than for Trump (38%). Among the much larger group of white voters who had not completed college (44% of all voters), Trump won by more than two-to-one (64% to 28%).”]
---
While voter suppression is unquestionably a serious stain on U.S. political life that does (by design) impede voting, the overwhelming reason people stay home is due to cynicism toward or dissatisfaction with the political process and the choices they were presented. As the Huffington Post explained about the 2018 midterm elections, “as a group, nonvoters also tend to be generally disengaged from public affairs and cynical about the government and their own roles in civic life. Nearly half of nonvoters in the most recent election said their personal dislike of politics played at least a minor role in their decision not to vote.” The Pew chart highlights how widespread is this belief among nonvoters:
This tactic rests on a caricature: it is designed to suggest that the only people who make a deliberate and conscious choice not to vote due to dissatisfaction are white trust-fund leftists whose wealth, status and privilege immunize them from the consequences of abstention. By contrast, this you-must-vote campaign insists, those who lack such luxuries — poorer voters and racial and ethnic minorities — understand that voting is imperative.
This assertion about the identity and motives of nonvoters is critical not only to try to bully and coerce people into voting by associating nonvoting with rich, white privilege, but also to suppress any recognition of how widespread the dissatisfaction is for both parties and the political system generally among poor and non-white citizens.
But the problem with this claim is a rather significant one: it is based on the outright, demonstrable falsehood that those who choose not to vote are primarily rich, white and thus privileged, while those who lack those privileges — voters of color and poorer voters — are unwilling to abstain. This is something one can believe only if one’s views of the country and its electorate are shaped by social media and cable news bubbles.
The truth is exactly the opposite. Those who choose not to vote because of dissatisfaction with the choices offered are disproportionately poorer and non-white, while rich whites vote in far larger percentages. And the data also makes clear that the primary motive for nonvoting among those demographic groups is not voter suppression but a belief that election outcomes do not matter because both parties are corrupt or interested only in the lives of the wealthy.
Thus, those who try to demean, malign and shame non-voters are largely attacking poorer voters and voters of color, not the New York and California leftist trust-funders of their imagination.
ONE OF THE MOST comprehensive surveys of nonvoters was published by Pew Research Center on August 9, 2018. It summarized its bottom-line finding this way, the exact opposite of what is typically claimed by wealthy television media stars and DC operatives: “nonvoters were more likely to be younger, less educated, less affluent and nonwhite.”
The Pew data on this issue is stark. Almost half of non-voters in the 2016 presidential election were non-white, even though they compose only one-fourth of the voting population. Even more extreme is the data on class: more than half of non-voters — 56% — are quite poor, making less than $30,000, even though that income group constitutes just over one-fourth of the voting population. The people who choose to vote are disproportionately privileged; those who are non-privileged choose disproportionately not to vote.
As the Washington Post’s summary of that survey put it: “Pew’s data shows that almost half of the nonvoters were nonwhite and two-thirds were under age 50. More than half of those who didn’t vote earned less than $30,000 a year; more than half of those who did vote were over age 50.”
Those who choose not to vote — either those who are registered but do not vote or those who simply do not register — constitute a huge number of Americans. Indeed, the Post highlighted their size this way: “about 30 percent of Americans were eligible to vote but decided not to, a higher percentage than the portion of the country who voted for either Trump or his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.” And while rich whites chose to vote in large numbers in the 2016 presidential election, lower-income and racial minorities composed a much larger portion of those who chose not to vote: (figure above)
In November, the New York Times’ data journalist Nate Cohn, analyzing data from a New York Times/Siena College survey of nonvoters in battleground states who abstained from voting both in 2016 and 2018, similarly described them as “disproportionately young, nonwhite and low-income,” adding that “nonvoters are less likely to have graduated from a four-year college.” In a separate article last July, Cohn noted that “young and nonwhite and low-income voters are overrepresented among nonvoters,” and “young and nonwhite voters continued to vote at lower rates than older and white voters.”
This was true not only for the 2016 election but also the 2018 mid-term election, by which time Trump had been president for almost two full years. As Cohn reported, “young and nonwhite turnout was markedly higher than it had been in 2014, but still lower than that of older and white voters.”
Pew found that “in the U.S., roughly six-in-ten adults are registered to vote.” Of them, “four-in-ten Americans who were eligible to vote did not do so in 2016.” That means 40% of eligible voters in 2016 were nonvoters. The sheer number alone — millions of Americans — should preclude any claim that non-voters are rich, white and privileged.
[Even the voting preferences of the electorate are radically distorted by online “privilege” discourse: aside from the fact that 28% of Hispanics and 14% of black men voted for Tump in 2016, rich whites voted for the Democratic candidate, not the GOP candidate, while poorer whites voted for Trump: “whites with a four-year college degree or more education made up 30% of all validated voters. Among these voters, far more (55%) said they voted for Clinton than for Trump (38%). Among the much larger group of white voters who had not completed college (44% of all voters), Trump won by more than two-to-one (64% to 28%).”]
---
While voter suppression is unquestionably a serious stain on U.S. political life that does (by design) impede voting, the overwhelming reason people stay home is due to cynicism toward or dissatisfaction with the political process and the choices they were presented. As the Huffington Post explained about the 2018 midterm elections, “as a group, nonvoters also tend to be generally disengaged from public affairs and cynical about the government and their own roles in civic life. Nearly half of nonvoters in the most recent election said their personal dislike of politics played at least a minor role in their decision not to vote.” The Pew chart highlights how widespread is this belief among nonvoters:
Non-voters, despite their large numbers, are rarely discussed in mainstream U.S. precincts. In part that is because national media figures in cable news and Washington are overwhelmingly affluent and have little connection to or interest in them.
But in large part, that omission is explained by the fact that interrogating why so many millions of Americans choose not to vote would force the political and media class to grapple with the reason for this choice: namely, the widespread perception that the political process and the two major parties are fundamentally corrupted and indifferent to all but a small sliver of privileged people. Confronting that problem and being forced to address it is far more difficult than creating a pleasant fiction that falsely maintains that people who abstain from voting do so because of selfish, amoral racial and class privilege.
---
...One of the best and most thoughtful articles was a New York Times survey of African-Americans in Milwaukee who chose not to vote in the 2016 election and, even knowing that it helped Trump win Wisconsin and thus the presidency, did not regret it.
The Times explained that “the [2016] election was notable as much for the people who did not show up, as for those who did. Nationally, about half of eligible voters did not cast ballots.” Wisconsin had its lowest turnout in sixteen years. The Times added:
Milwaukee’s lowest-income neighborhoods offer one explanation for the turnout figures. Of the city’s 15 council districts, the decline in turnout from 2012 to 2016 in the five poorest was consistently much greater than the drop seen in more prosperous areas — accounting for half of the overall decline in turnout citywide.
The interviews the paper conducted with African-Americans and other poor residents of Milwaukee who chose not to vote were illuminating. They overwhelmingly said they did not regret their choice, even knowing Trump won, because they do not believe that the outcome of elections improves their lives, and do not believe that a victory by the Democratic Party would be meaningful for them. One Milwaukee barber, Cedric Fleming, said in a quote that was representative of the survey: “I don’t feel bad. Milwaukee is tired. Both of them [Clinton and Trump] were terrible. They never do anything for us anyway.”
The Times quoted another Milwaukee barber as follows:
“I’m so numb,” said Jahn Toney, 45, who had written in Mr. Sanders. He said no president in his lifetime had done anything to improve the lives of black people, including Mr. Obama, whom he voted for twice. “It’s like I should have known this would happen. We’re worse off than before.”
That rationale for nonvoting –“both of them were terrible. They never do anything for us anyway” — is typically cast by media personalities and Washington operatives as the province of rich, white, privileged leftists. But that claim is a lie. The data makes overwhelmingly clear that those who make that choice are often those with the least amount of privilege who believe, with good reason, that both parties and the political process generally are constructed to have no interest in improving their lives.
It is crucial to understand who nonvoters are, and what their motives are for choosing to abstain, not only to prevent media figures and D.C. operatives from disseminating disinformation, but also because that understanding highlights what kinds of candidates can motivate the millions of nonvoters to go to the polls. As the New York Times’ Nate Cohn explained, the candidates most closely associated with the status quo are ones most likely to drive voters away from the polls, while those who appear to be outsiders who intend to deviate from bipartisan consensus are most likely to motivate them. That’s why Sanders, in 2019, had the greatest appeal among nonvoters when he was perceived as something other than a traditional Democrat:
When it comes to the candidates, Mr. Sanders shows relative strength among nonvoters: He has a 41 percent “very favorable” rating in the group, compared with 33 percent for Mr. Biden and 30 percent for Ms. Warren. This is at least in part because of Mr. Sanders’s longtime appeal to young voters.
Not only is Mr. Sanders’s favorability rating the best of these three candidates, but he is also the only Democrat whose favorability rating is stronger among nonvoting Democratic leaners than among those who have voted before. His outsider status and promise of fundamental change, without much focus on cultural issues, might offer at least one clue for how Democrats might appeal to these nonvoters, though it need not be the only one.
Polling already indicates that Joe Biden faces a serious problem whereby even his supporters — to say nothing of nonvoters — have extremely low enthusiasm for his candidacy. He could certainly win, but it will not be because he motivates large numbers of nonvoters to go the polls.
Whatever else is true, those who make the choice to abstain from voting in presidential and midterm elections are overwhelmingly anything but “privileged.” The claim that they are is deliberate disinformation spread by the political and media elite class to suppress the reality of their own systemic failures when it comes to serving the needs of the vast majority of the population and to try to shame, rather than persuade, disaffected people to vote for their candidate.
But in large part, that omission is explained by the fact that interrogating why so many millions of Americans choose not to vote would force the political and media class to grapple with the reason for this choice: namely, the widespread perception that the political process and the two major parties are fundamentally corrupted and indifferent to all but a small sliver of privileged people. Confronting that problem and being forced to address it is far more difficult than creating a pleasant fiction that falsely maintains that people who abstain from voting do so because of selfish, amoral racial and class privilege.
---
...One of the best and most thoughtful articles was a New York Times survey of African-Americans in Milwaukee who chose not to vote in the 2016 election and, even knowing that it helped Trump win Wisconsin and thus the presidency, did not regret it.
The Times explained that “the [2016] election was notable as much for the people who did not show up, as for those who did. Nationally, about half of eligible voters did not cast ballots.” Wisconsin had its lowest turnout in sixteen years. The Times added:
Milwaukee’s lowest-income neighborhoods offer one explanation for the turnout figures. Of the city’s 15 council districts, the decline in turnout from 2012 to 2016 in the five poorest was consistently much greater than the drop seen in more prosperous areas — accounting for half of the overall decline in turnout citywide.
The interviews the paper conducted with African-Americans and other poor residents of Milwaukee who chose not to vote were illuminating. They overwhelmingly said they did not regret their choice, even knowing Trump won, because they do not believe that the outcome of elections improves their lives, and do not believe that a victory by the Democratic Party would be meaningful for them. One Milwaukee barber, Cedric Fleming, said in a quote that was representative of the survey: “I don’t feel bad. Milwaukee is tired. Both of them [Clinton and Trump] were terrible. They never do anything for us anyway.”
The Times quoted another Milwaukee barber as follows:
“I’m so numb,” said Jahn Toney, 45, who had written in Mr. Sanders. He said no president in his lifetime had done anything to improve the lives of black people, including Mr. Obama, whom he voted for twice. “It’s like I should have known this would happen. We’re worse off than before.”
That rationale for nonvoting –“both of them were terrible. They never do anything for us anyway” — is typically cast by media personalities and Washington operatives as the province of rich, white, privileged leftists. But that claim is a lie. The data makes overwhelmingly clear that those who make that choice are often those with the least amount of privilege who believe, with good reason, that both parties and the political process generally are constructed to have no interest in improving their lives.
It is crucial to understand who nonvoters are, and what their motives are for choosing to abstain, not only to prevent media figures and D.C. operatives from disseminating disinformation, but also because that understanding highlights what kinds of candidates can motivate the millions of nonvoters to go to the polls. As the New York Times’ Nate Cohn explained, the candidates most closely associated with the status quo are ones most likely to drive voters away from the polls, while those who appear to be outsiders who intend to deviate from bipartisan consensus are most likely to motivate them. That’s why Sanders, in 2019, had the greatest appeal among nonvoters when he was perceived as something other than a traditional Democrat:
When it comes to the candidates, Mr. Sanders shows relative strength among nonvoters: He has a 41 percent “very favorable” rating in the group, compared with 33 percent for Mr. Biden and 30 percent for Ms. Warren. This is at least in part because of Mr. Sanders’s longtime appeal to young voters.
Not only is Mr. Sanders’s favorability rating the best of these three candidates, but he is also the only Democrat whose favorability rating is stronger among nonvoting Democratic leaners than among those who have voted before. His outsider status and promise of fundamental change, without much focus on cultural issues, might offer at least one clue for how Democrats might appeal to these nonvoters, though it need not be the only one.
Polling already indicates that Joe Biden faces a serious problem whereby even his supporters — to say nothing of nonvoters — have extremely low enthusiasm for his candidacy. He could certainly win, but it will not be because he motivates large numbers of nonvoters to go the polls.
Whatever else is true, those who make the choice to abstain from voting in presidential and midterm elections are overwhelmingly anything but “privileged.” The claim that they are is deliberate disinformation spread by the political and media elite class to suppress the reality of their own systemic failures when it comes to serving the needs of the vast majority of the population and to try to shame, rather than persuade, disaffected people to vote for their candidate.
the greatest threat to democracy: republicans!!!
Republicans block most aid to help states plan for presidential election amid coronavirus pandemic
Jon Ward Senior Political Correspondent,Yahoo News
March 25, 2020
WASHINGTON — Voting reforms that would make it much easier to cast ballots by mail in the fall presidential election were left out of the $2 trillion rescue package that was unveiled Wednesday, but key lawmakers vowed to keep pushing for a series of measures that would prepare the country for an election in the likely scenario that the coronavirus will still be a major presence in the country.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said that while the $400 million included in the current package is “a step in the right direction,” it fell well short of what they and other Democrats had pushed for.
The money included for now will be available to states “to increase the ability to vote by mail, expand early voting and online registration and increase the safety of voting in-person by providing additional voting facilities and more poll workers,” one House Democratic staffer told Yahoo News.
But it’s a fraction of the $4 billion that House Democrats had pushed for. Those measures, along with the reforms in the “Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act” proposed by Klobuchar and Wyden, would radically expand the ability of Americans to vote by mail in this fall’s elections, and would also expand early voting for up to two weeks prior to Election Day.
It’s still not clear where the country will be with the coronavirus pandemic in November, but one thing is certain: There won’t be a vaccine. Given that reality, these moves would be aimed at avoiding any kind of large gatherings at polling places this fall, to help prepare states for a nationwide election with outbreaks still happening.
“In times of crisis, the American people cannot be forced to choose between their health and exercising their right to vote,” Klobuchar and Wyden said in a statement. “We must enact election reforms across the country as well as secure more resources to guarantee safe and secure elections. We will continue to fight to pass the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act of 2020 to ensure every eligible American can safely and lawfully cast their ballot.”
On Monday, Wyden told reporters on a conference call that “it’s either going to be vote-by-mail or nothing if we have to deal with a worst-case scenario.”
Klobuchar announced Monday that her husband, John, had tested positive for the coronavirus.
Among Republicans who actually run elections at the state and local level, there is growing recognition of the need for such planning. A number of Republican elections officials signed a letter to Congress this past weekend calling on lawmakers to “include substantial funding in the coronavirus stimulus package so that we have the ability and resources to ensure that our voters can participate safely and with confidence in our elections.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had proposed $140 million in the current package for elections, but state and local officials said this was “simply not enough.”
The idea of broadening access to voting by mail has yet to be embraced by Republican politicians in Washington. No GOP members of Congress have backed the reforms, and some hard-line Republicans have railed against the idea.
Conservative think tankers said universal mail voting would “make it easier to manipulate election outcomes and commit fraud.”[...]
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said that while the $400 million included in the current package is “a step in the right direction,” it fell well short of what they and other Democrats had pushed for.
The money included for now will be available to states “to increase the ability to vote by mail, expand early voting and online registration and increase the safety of voting in-person by providing additional voting facilities and more poll workers,” one House Democratic staffer told Yahoo News.
But it’s a fraction of the $4 billion that House Democrats had pushed for. Those measures, along with the reforms in the “Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act” proposed by Klobuchar and Wyden, would radically expand the ability of Americans to vote by mail in this fall’s elections, and would also expand early voting for up to two weeks prior to Election Day.
It’s still not clear where the country will be with the coronavirus pandemic in November, but one thing is certain: There won’t be a vaccine. Given that reality, these moves would be aimed at avoiding any kind of large gatherings at polling places this fall, to help prepare states for a nationwide election with outbreaks still happening.
“In times of crisis, the American people cannot be forced to choose between their health and exercising their right to vote,” Klobuchar and Wyden said in a statement. “We must enact election reforms across the country as well as secure more resources to guarantee safe and secure elections. We will continue to fight to pass the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act of 2020 to ensure every eligible American can safely and lawfully cast their ballot.”
On Monday, Wyden told reporters on a conference call that “it’s either going to be vote-by-mail or nothing if we have to deal with a worst-case scenario.”
Klobuchar announced Monday that her husband, John, had tested positive for the coronavirus.
Among Republicans who actually run elections at the state and local level, there is growing recognition of the need for such planning. A number of Republican elections officials signed a letter to Congress this past weekend calling on lawmakers to “include substantial funding in the coronavirus stimulus package so that we have the ability and resources to ensure that our voters can participate safely and with confidence in our elections.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had proposed $140 million in the current package for elections, but state and local officials said this was “simply not enough.”
The idea of broadening access to voting by mail has yet to be embraced by Republican politicians in Washington. No GOP members of Congress have backed the reforms, and some hard-line Republicans have railed against the idea.
Conservative think tankers said universal mail voting would “make it easier to manipulate election outcomes and commit fraud.”[...]
The fight to vote
Kentucky Republicans quietly tighten voter restrictions as US focuses on Covid-19
Lawmakers approved new photo ID requirement that would make it harder to vote days after the governor closed the state capitol
Sam Levine - the guardian
Fri 20 Mar 2020 15.43 EDT
As states around the country enacted emergency measures to deal with the outbreak of coronavirus, Kentucky lawmakers quietly tightened and approved a new photo identification requirement that would make it harder to vote.
Lawmakers eliminated a “catch-all” provision that allowed voters to give their own reason for being unable to obtain acceptable identification if they signed an affidavit swearing they were unable to obtain acceptable identification, according to Joshua Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky, who said he had reviewed the changes. Now voters have to provide one of the specific and approved reasons for lacking ID to vote. The legislators also tweaked the law so that IDs from other states were not acceptable.
Kentucky’s secretary of state, Michael Adams, a Republican, praised the measure in a statement. He noted that the bill would allow anyone who did not have an ID to get one for nothing and allowed people to vote if a poll worker recognized them. “I ran for this office to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat,” he said.
The lawmakers made the changes in a committee days after Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear, a Democrat, closed the state capitol to the public over coronavirus concerns. DMV offices, one of the most common places people would obtain a photo ID throughout the state are also closed as Kentucky deals with 47 cases of Covid-19 thus far. The Kentucky primary is scheduled to take place on 23 June (the state postponed it from 19 May amid the coronavirus outbreak) and the deadline to register is 20 April.
“It’s absurd,” Douglas, who has advised Adams on the legislation, said of the timing of the changes. “It makes me question how much the legislature really care about the Kentucky voters.”
The measure now goes to Beshear, who will probably veto the measure. But the Kentucky legislature, where Republicans control a majority of seats, can override that veto with a majority vote.
Kentucky already has a voter identification requirement, but Republicans pushed the new measure after the state narrowly elected Democrat Beshear and want it in effect this fall when Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, faces re-election. The law will probably go into effect this summer.
“Many Kentuckians will not even have the option to obtain a new ID because county clerk’s offices throughout the commonwealth have closed following the recommendation of public health officials,” Corey Shapiro, the legal director of the Kentucky chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “It is unconscionable for politicians to move this legislation at a time when Kentuckians are not allowed in the capitol and are losing their jobs, their small businesses, access to childcare and more.”
The push for additional voting restrictions contradicts a national push to ease voting regulations so that people can vote by mail without having to gather at polling places this year. Kentucky currently requires voters to give an excuse if they want to vote absentee and does not have early voting.
Lawmakers eliminated a “catch-all” provision that allowed voters to give their own reason for being unable to obtain acceptable identification if they signed an affidavit swearing they were unable to obtain acceptable identification, according to Joshua Douglas, a law professor at the University of Kentucky, who said he had reviewed the changes. Now voters have to provide one of the specific and approved reasons for lacking ID to vote. The legislators also tweaked the law so that IDs from other states were not acceptable.
Kentucky’s secretary of state, Michael Adams, a Republican, praised the measure in a statement. He noted that the bill would allow anyone who did not have an ID to get one for nothing and allowed people to vote if a poll worker recognized them. “I ran for this office to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat,” he said.
The lawmakers made the changes in a committee days after Kentucky’s governor, Andy Beshear, a Democrat, closed the state capitol to the public over coronavirus concerns. DMV offices, one of the most common places people would obtain a photo ID throughout the state are also closed as Kentucky deals with 47 cases of Covid-19 thus far. The Kentucky primary is scheduled to take place on 23 June (the state postponed it from 19 May amid the coronavirus outbreak) and the deadline to register is 20 April.
“It’s absurd,” Douglas, who has advised Adams on the legislation, said of the timing of the changes. “It makes me question how much the legislature really care about the Kentucky voters.”
The measure now goes to Beshear, who will probably veto the measure. But the Kentucky legislature, where Republicans control a majority of seats, can override that veto with a majority vote.
Kentucky already has a voter identification requirement, but Republicans pushed the new measure after the state narrowly elected Democrat Beshear and want it in effect this fall when Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, faces re-election. The law will probably go into effect this summer.
“Many Kentuckians will not even have the option to obtain a new ID because county clerk’s offices throughout the commonwealth have closed following the recommendation of public health officials,” Corey Shapiro, the legal director of the Kentucky chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “It is unconscionable for politicians to move this legislation at a time when Kentuckians are not allowed in the capitol and are losing their jobs, their small businesses, access to childcare and more.”
The push for additional voting restrictions contradicts a national push to ease voting regulations so that people can vote by mail without having to gather at polling places this year. Kentucky currently requires voters to give an excuse if they want to vote absentee and does not have early voting.
rigging the vote!!
TRUMP FEC NOMINEE WITH TIES TO THOMAS HOFELLER BRAGGED ABOUT WORKING ON UNCONSTITUTIONAL TEXAS GERRYMANDER — THEN DENIED IT
Akela Lacy - the intercept
March 13 2020, 10:13 a.m.
ON TUESDAY, the Senate held a confirmation hearing for President Donald Trump’s nominee to the Federal Election Commission, James “Trey” Trainor. During the hearing, Trainor denied his role in a 2003 gerrymandering effort in Texas.
Trainor’s own resume says he was “intimately involved” in Texas’s 2003 redistricting, a point that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., made during Tuesday’s hearing. Trainor faced criticisms that he was not being forthright about his role as chief of staff to a Texas legislator who co-authored the redistricting bill and worked to push it through.
Senate Democrats also pressed Trainor, a conservative lawyer who had worked for the Texas secretary of state, on his connections to Thomas Hofeller, a longtime strategist for the Republican National Committee and the architect of racial gerrymanders in states including Florida, Alabama, West Virginia, and Texas. Many of those plans were found unconstitutional in recent years. According to files obtained by The Intercept, Trainor also worked with Hofeller between 2011 and 2013.
“Mr. Trainor has a long career as a conservative political operative,” Schumer said at Tuesday’s hearing. “He has worked closely with Thomas Hofeller, notorious for masterminding Republican gerrymandering schemes, to redraw maps that significantly disenfranchise minority voters at the local level. Mr. Trainor’s former law firm described him as being ‘intimately involved’ in Texas’s 2003 redistricting, which the Supreme Court deemed in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Mr. Trainor has argued the Voting Rights Act has become a political tool.”
Schumer said the FEC nomination was crucial given the upcoming November presidential election, adding that Trainor’s record raises “significant questions about his fitness to carry out the commission’s anti-corruption mandate.”
According to the Congressional Research Service, 42 of the 47 historical FEC nominees have been confirmed by the Senate through a bipartisan process, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said Tuesday. “Abandoning bipartisan norms and pushing forward a controversial nominee is not the way to do it,” Klobuchar said, suggesting that a Democratic nominee should be considered simultaneously.
Cortez Masto, for her part, dove deep into links between Trainor’s redistricting work for legislators and the Texas secretary of state’s office, where he defended redistricting maps against lawsuits. The Supreme Court struck down part of Texas’s 2003 plan, which Trainor’s resume indicates he worked on, in 2006. At first, Trainor denied the extent of his role in that work.
“I appreciate your testimony here today,” Cortez Masto said, after pointing out inconsistencies between Trainor’s public record and his remarks in the hearings. “I do think it is doing a disservice to the truth here.” She suggested that she would oppose his nomination to the FEC.
HOFELLER, the gerrymandering mastermind, died in 2018. A review of thousands of files found on his hard drive showed how Republican mapmakers “experimented with using race as the primary factor in drawing districts in these states,” a strategy that is unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. In January, Stephanie Hofeller, his daughter, released files saved on his hard drives publicly onto a website called “The Hofeller Files,” despite Republican state lawmakers’ efforts to keep some of those documents from becoming public.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Trainor praised Hofeller in response to Democrats’ questions. “God rest his soul,” Trainor said. “He is a well-recognized expert in the field.”
Hofeller has not always been forthcoming about his work with state officials on redistricting cases. In a 2013 affidavit submitted during a Florida case against the state’s 2012 redistricting plan, Hofeller failed to disclose his involvement with individuals working on the redistricting. The court ruled that GOP consultants’ documents could be considered in other trials related to the redistricting.
Eventually, Florida Circuit Judge Terry P. Lewis in 2014 invalidated the state’s congressional redistricting plan, writing that the map selection process “provided the means by which partisan maps, secretly drawn and submitted by political operatives, could be incorporated into the enacted map with no one in the general public the wiser.” In other states, links between Hofeller and state officials have come to light in court cases where his redistricting work was challenged.
Senate Rules Committee Chair Roy Blunt, R-Mo., asked Trainor if he had worked on or defended any redistricting maps, and if courts had struck down any maps he’d defended. Trainor said he’d worked on three Texas redistricting cases as legal counsel for the Texas secretary of state and that none of the maps he worked on were struck down. “I had a client that I represented their interest in,” Trainor said. “And I hope that we would not impute to the lawyer the acts of the client. But, in all three cases, the courts have upheld the maps I worked on.”
Maps he worked on years later with Hofeller, however, were rejected before they even took effect. According to files obtained by The Intercept, Trainor worked closely with Hofeller and his partner, Dale Oldham, in the 2011 redistricting of Texas’s Nueces County. At the time, Trainor was an attorney at Beirne, Maynard & Parsons, and Hofeller sent him an invoice for work on the county’s redistricting. Texas’s 2011 redistricting maps, including the redrawn Nueces County, were later found to be drawn with discriminatory intent, The Intercept reported, and reworked maps were the subject of Abbott v. Perez, a Supreme Court case dealing with Texas’s redistricting following the 2010 Census.
In 2013, while still at Beirne, Maynard & Parsons, Trainor also defended Galveston County and Judge Mark Henry in a case challenging the 2011 districts. According to the files, Hofeller drew several of the county’s Justice of the Peace precincts while working for Galveston County legal counsel. Although the 2011 maps weren’t officially used, courts eventually found that they were drawn with intentional racial discrimination.
CORTEZ MASTO, the Nevada Democrat, had the toughest questions for Trainor, asking him to explain discrepancies between his testimony — that he was not involved as a lawyer in redistricting — and an online resume for the law firm he works at, which boasts of Trainor’s role in the redistricting.
Cortez Masto began by raising a 2003 Texas redistricting map that the Supreme Court had ruled violated the Voting Rights Act. “My understanding is that you were involved in that plan in 2003,’ she said. “You coordinated the maps and legal aspects of passage, and Department of Justice preclearance of HB3” — a 2003 redistricting bill in the Texas legislature. “Is that correct?”
Trainor responded that it was not correct, explaining that he was a staffer at the time for Texas state Rep. Phil King — the author of the redistricting bill — and not a lawyer, since he was not yet licensed to give legal advice. Cortez Masto — who would later clarify that not only was Trainor a staffer, but he was King’s chief of staff — pressed Trainor on his role in the process. According to his LinkedIn profile, Trainor was King’s chief for more than six years, from December 1998 to July 2005.
“Obviously, I worked closely with him to help bring in individuals that he needed advice from to work on the effort,” Trainor said. “I helped to coordinate those type of meetings for him, just like — just like your staff I’m sure.”
“Did you help design the legislative districts adopted for the 2002 elections?” Cortez Masto said.
“No,” Trainor said.
“You did not?”
“No.”
“So I guess I’m confused then,” Cortez Masto said. She then began to read from his resume, posted online by his former law firm. “It says that ‘Trainor has been intimately involved in Texas redistricting, helping to design the Texas house legislative districts adopted for the 2002 elections. During the third-called special session of 2003, he coordinated the maps and legal aspects of passage and Department of Justice preclearance of HB3, the new congressional maps adopted for the 2004 election.’” Then Cortez Masto asked another question: “So is that statement as part of your resume, which is online for the firm that you worked for, inaccurate?”
Trainor blamed the text of his online resume on “some marketing licensed by marketing individuals at the firm.” He went on, “I did do coordinating efforts for the individuals who worked on the map. I spent time working with them, making sure that they had everything that they needed.” He added that he traveled with King to the Department of Justice for the preclearance meeting.
Cortez Masto parried the denials. “First of all, you’re chief of staff. We all have a chief of staff, we know what our chief of staff does,” she said, gesturing to her colleagues. “And for you to come back and say that what was on your resume was inaccurate and that you were not intimately involved, has concerns for me as somebody that I’m looking to appoint to the FEC.”
Trainor’s own resume says he was “intimately involved” in Texas’s 2003 redistricting, a point that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., made during Tuesday’s hearing. Trainor faced criticisms that he was not being forthright about his role as chief of staff to a Texas legislator who co-authored the redistricting bill and worked to push it through.
Senate Democrats also pressed Trainor, a conservative lawyer who had worked for the Texas secretary of state, on his connections to Thomas Hofeller, a longtime strategist for the Republican National Committee and the architect of racial gerrymanders in states including Florida, Alabama, West Virginia, and Texas. Many of those plans were found unconstitutional in recent years. According to files obtained by The Intercept, Trainor also worked with Hofeller between 2011 and 2013.
“Mr. Trainor has a long career as a conservative political operative,” Schumer said at Tuesday’s hearing. “He has worked closely with Thomas Hofeller, notorious for masterminding Republican gerrymandering schemes, to redraw maps that significantly disenfranchise minority voters at the local level. Mr. Trainor’s former law firm described him as being ‘intimately involved’ in Texas’s 2003 redistricting, which the Supreme Court deemed in violation of the Voting Rights Act. Mr. Trainor has argued the Voting Rights Act has become a political tool.”
Schumer said the FEC nomination was crucial given the upcoming November presidential election, adding that Trainor’s record raises “significant questions about his fitness to carry out the commission’s anti-corruption mandate.”
According to the Congressional Research Service, 42 of the 47 historical FEC nominees have been confirmed by the Senate through a bipartisan process, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said Tuesday. “Abandoning bipartisan norms and pushing forward a controversial nominee is not the way to do it,” Klobuchar said, suggesting that a Democratic nominee should be considered simultaneously.
Cortez Masto, for her part, dove deep into links between Trainor’s redistricting work for legislators and the Texas secretary of state’s office, where he defended redistricting maps against lawsuits. The Supreme Court struck down part of Texas’s 2003 plan, which Trainor’s resume indicates he worked on, in 2006. At first, Trainor denied the extent of his role in that work.
“I appreciate your testimony here today,” Cortez Masto said, after pointing out inconsistencies between Trainor’s public record and his remarks in the hearings. “I do think it is doing a disservice to the truth here.” She suggested that she would oppose his nomination to the FEC.
HOFELLER, the gerrymandering mastermind, died in 2018. A review of thousands of files found on his hard drive showed how Republican mapmakers “experimented with using race as the primary factor in drawing districts in these states,” a strategy that is unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. In January, Stephanie Hofeller, his daughter, released files saved on his hard drives publicly onto a website called “The Hofeller Files,” despite Republican state lawmakers’ efforts to keep some of those documents from becoming public.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Trainor praised Hofeller in response to Democrats’ questions. “God rest his soul,” Trainor said. “He is a well-recognized expert in the field.”
Hofeller has not always been forthcoming about his work with state officials on redistricting cases. In a 2013 affidavit submitted during a Florida case against the state’s 2012 redistricting plan, Hofeller failed to disclose his involvement with individuals working on the redistricting. The court ruled that GOP consultants’ documents could be considered in other trials related to the redistricting.
Eventually, Florida Circuit Judge Terry P. Lewis in 2014 invalidated the state’s congressional redistricting plan, writing that the map selection process “provided the means by which partisan maps, secretly drawn and submitted by political operatives, could be incorporated into the enacted map with no one in the general public the wiser.” In other states, links between Hofeller and state officials have come to light in court cases where his redistricting work was challenged.
Senate Rules Committee Chair Roy Blunt, R-Mo., asked Trainor if he had worked on or defended any redistricting maps, and if courts had struck down any maps he’d defended. Trainor said he’d worked on three Texas redistricting cases as legal counsel for the Texas secretary of state and that none of the maps he worked on were struck down. “I had a client that I represented their interest in,” Trainor said. “And I hope that we would not impute to the lawyer the acts of the client. But, in all three cases, the courts have upheld the maps I worked on.”
Maps he worked on years later with Hofeller, however, were rejected before they even took effect. According to files obtained by The Intercept, Trainor worked closely with Hofeller and his partner, Dale Oldham, in the 2011 redistricting of Texas’s Nueces County. At the time, Trainor was an attorney at Beirne, Maynard & Parsons, and Hofeller sent him an invoice for work on the county’s redistricting. Texas’s 2011 redistricting maps, including the redrawn Nueces County, were later found to be drawn with discriminatory intent, The Intercept reported, and reworked maps were the subject of Abbott v. Perez, a Supreme Court case dealing with Texas’s redistricting following the 2010 Census.
In 2013, while still at Beirne, Maynard & Parsons, Trainor also defended Galveston County and Judge Mark Henry in a case challenging the 2011 districts. According to the files, Hofeller drew several of the county’s Justice of the Peace precincts while working for Galveston County legal counsel. Although the 2011 maps weren’t officially used, courts eventually found that they were drawn with intentional racial discrimination.
CORTEZ MASTO, the Nevada Democrat, had the toughest questions for Trainor, asking him to explain discrepancies between his testimony — that he was not involved as a lawyer in redistricting — and an online resume for the law firm he works at, which boasts of Trainor’s role in the redistricting.
Cortez Masto began by raising a 2003 Texas redistricting map that the Supreme Court had ruled violated the Voting Rights Act. “My understanding is that you were involved in that plan in 2003,’ she said. “You coordinated the maps and legal aspects of passage, and Department of Justice preclearance of HB3” — a 2003 redistricting bill in the Texas legislature. “Is that correct?”
Trainor responded that it was not correct, explaining that he was a staffer at the time for Texas state Rep. Phil King — the author of the redistricting bill — and not a lawyer, since he was not yet licensed to give legal advice. Cortez Masto — who would later clarify that not only was Trainor a staffer, but he was King’s chief of staff — pressed Trainor on his role in the process. According to his LinkedIn profile, Trainor was King’s chief for more than six years, from December 1998 to July 2005.
“Obviously, I worked closely with him to help bring in individuals that he needed advice from to work on the effort,” Trainor said. “I helped to coordinate those type of meetings for him, just like — just like your staff I’m sure.”
“Did you help design the legislative districts adopted for the 2002 elections?” Cortez Masto said.
“No,” Trainor said.
“You did not?”
“No.”
“So I guess I’m confused then,” Cortez Masto said. She then began to read from his resume, posted online by his former law firm. “It says that ‘Trainor has been intimately involved in Texas redistricting, helping to design the Texas house legislative districts adopted for the 2002 elections. During the third-called special session of 2003, he coordinated the maps and legal aspects of passage and Department of Justice preclearance of HB3, the new congressional maps adopted for the 2004 election.’” Then Cortez Masto asked another question: “So is that statement as part of your resume, which is online for the firm that you worked for, inaccurate?”
Trainor blamed the text of his online resume on “some marketing licensed by marketing individuals at the firm.” He went on, “I did do coordinating efforts for the individuals who worked on the map. I spent time working with them, making sure that they had everything that they needed.” He added that he traveled with King to the Department of Justice for the preclearance meeting.
Cortez Masto parried the denials. “First of all, you’re chief of staff. We all have a chief of staff, we know what our chief of staff does,” she said, gesturing to her colleagues. “And for you to come back and say that what was on your resume was inaccurate and that you were not intimately involved, has concerns for me as somebody that I’m looking to appoint to the FEC.”
A Campaign Finance Solution Has Been Sitting on McConnell’s Desk for a Year
BY - Chiraag Bains, Inequality.org
PUBLISHED March 9, 2020
The 2020 election is shaping up to be the most expensive in American history. Ten years after Citizens United, our elections are awash with the money of mega-donors and corporations that drown out the voices of everyday Americans — with serious consequences for racial and economic justice.
An antidote is sitting on Mitch McConnell’s desk, having passed the House a year ago and still not been put up for a vote in the Senate. H.R. 1, the For the People Act, would blunt the distorting influence of big money in politics. It could transform who runs for office, who wins, and what issues get prioritized in Congress.
Elections have become extravagantly costly. In 2016, campaign spending by or in support of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton totaled $2.4 billion. The average Senate winner in 2018 spent $15.7 million, with challengers needing on average $23.8 million to topple incumbents. Even local election costs can be forbidding. Spending in the Los Angeles County school board primary last month topped $6 million.
Although occasionally a candidate like Bernie Sanders has strong enough national appeal to raise the money to compete from a broad network of small donors, that’s the exception. The vast majority have to rely on a class of large donors to be viable.
Less than 1 percent of the population provides the majority of campaign funds. Indeed, just 25 people pumped over $600 million into the 2016 federal elections.
That donor class looks nothing like America. The compounding of historical racial subordination and ongoing discrimination has given us an economy in which the Forbes 400 billionaires have as much wealth as the entire Black population and a quarter of the Latino population combined. Today, the top 1 percent are more than 90 percent white; the top 10 percent are 85-90 percent white. These are the groups that dominate political giving in America.
Dēmos’s analysis of campaign finance records bears this out. Ninety-two percent of federal election donors in 2014 and 91 percent of donors in 2012 were white. The numbers are even more skewed among large donors. Ninety-four percent of those giving more than $5,000 in 2014 and 93 percent in 2012 were white.
What’s the consequence of a political system dependent on an overwhelmingly white donor class? The perpetuation of racial inequality.
First, the big money system is a barrier to entry for Black and brown candidates. Studies show they’re less likely to have networks of rich friends and business associates, making it difficult for them to survive the “wealth primary” where donors filter the candidate pool before a single vote is cast. When candidates of color do run, they raise on average 47 percent less than their white counterparts. White candidates are also far more likely to be in a position to self-fund their campaigns. This is a big reason 90 percent of our elected officials are white, even though 37 percent of us are people of color.
Second, the policy preferences of the donor class are far out of step with those of the general public, and particularly of people of color.
On economic policy, for example, polls show that people of color support the role of government in reducing inequality at significantly higher rates (67 percent) than do people earning over $100,000 a year (53 percent). People of color are also more likely to list job creation and affordable college as their economic priorities, whereas the wealthy are more likely to cite lower taxes and deficit reduction.
It shouldn’t surprise us, then, when elected officials champion an agenda that serves the interests of the wealthy at the expense of Black and brown families and working people across America.
The challenge is that the Supreme Court has invalidated commonsense campaign finance protections time and again. It has struck down reasonable contribution limits and restrictions on self-financing, allowed the rise of SuperPACs, and greenlit wealthy individuals pumping millions into the system.
H.R. 1 contains innovative programs that would stay within the lines drawn by the Court and still curb the harmful influence of big money.
The most significant is a public financing system for congressional candidates that would match small-donor contributions — those under $200 — at a rate of 6:1. In this way, a $20 donation would become $140, a $200 donation $1,400. The cost of the program is reasonable — one estimate is $3 billion over 10 years, or $1 per citizen per year. The bill also creates a pilot program of $25 “My Choice” vouchers for people to give to congressional candidates they support.
These programs would amplify the voices of people currently being drowned out by big money. It would offer a path for congressional and presidential candidates to rely on donations from everyday people, not wealthy donors.
Similar public financing programs in New York City and Arizona and a voucher program in Seattle have diversified the donor pool and allowed more candidates of color to run. These programs can help produce more equitable public policy. For example, the advent of public financing in Connecticut was crucial to breaking a legislative logjam and becoming the first state in the nation to guarantee paid sick leave.
Countering the undue influence of big money in our elections is a civil rights issue. H.R. 1, the For the People Act, would be a giant step forward. The American people should demand that it become law.
An antidote is sitting on Mitch McConnell’s desk, having passed the House a year ago and still not been put up for a vote in the Senate. H.R. 1, the For the People Act, would blunt the distorting influence of big money in politics. It could transform who runs for office, who wins, and what issues get prioritized in Congress.
Elections have become extravagantly costly. In 2016, campaign spending by or in support of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton totaled $2.4 billion. The average Senate winner in 2018 spent $15.7 million, with challengers needing on average $23.8 million to topple incumbents. Even local election costs can be forbidding. Spending in the Los Angeles County school board primary last month topped $6 million.
Although occasionally a candidate like Bernie Sanders has strong enough national appeal to raise the money to compete from a broad network of small donors, that’s the exception. The vast majority have to rely on a class of large donors to be viable.
Less than 1 percent of the population provides the majority of campaign funds. Indeed, just 25 people pumped over $600 million into the 2016 federal elections.
That donor class looks nothing like America. The compounding of historical racial subordination and ongoing discrimination has given us an economy in which the Forbes 400 billionaires have as much wealth as the entire Black population and a quarter of the Latino population combined. Today, the top 1 percent are more than 90 percent white; the top 10 percent are 85-90 percent white. These are the groups that dominate political giving in America.
Dēmos’s analysis of campaign finance records bears this out. Ninety-two percent of federal election donors in 2014 and 91 percent of donors in 2012 were white. The numbers are even more skewed among large donors. Ninety-four percent of those giving more than $5,000 in 2014 and 93 percent in 2012 were white.
What’s the consequence of a political system dependent on an overwhelmingly white donor class? The perpetuation of racial inequality.
First, the big money system is a barrier to entry for Black and brown candidates. Studies show they’re less likely to have networks of rich friends and business associates, making it difficult for them to survive the “wealth primary” where donors filter the candidate pool before a single vote is cast. When candidates of color do run, they raise on average 47 percent less than their white counterparts. White candidates are also far more likely to be in a position to self-fund their campaigns. This is a big reason 90 percent of our elected officials are white, even though 37 percent of us are people of color.
Second, the policy preferences of the donor class are far out of step with those of the general public, and particularly of people of color.
On economic policy, for example, polls show that people of color support the role of government in reducing inequality at significantly higher rates (67 percent) than do people earning over $100,000 a year (53 percent). People of color are also more likely to list job creation and affordable college as their economic priorities, whereas the wealthy are more likely to cite lower taxes and deficit reduction.
It shouldn’t surprise us, then, when elected officials champion an agenda that serves the interests of the wealthy at the expense of Black and brown families and working people across America.
The challenge is that the Supreme Court has invalidated commonsense campaign finance protections time and again. It has struck down reasonable contribution limits and restrictions on self-financing, allowed the rise of SuperPACs, and greenlit wealthy individuals pumping millions into the system.
H.R. 1 contains innovative programs that would stay within the lines drawn by the Court and still curb the harmful influence of big money.
The most significant is a public financing system for congressional candidates that would match small-donor contributions — those under $200 — at a rate of 6:1. In this way, a $20 donation would become $140, a $200 donation $1,400. The cost of the program is reasonable — one estimate is $3 billion over 10 years, or $1 per citizen per year. The bill also creates a pilot program of $25 “My Choice” vouchers for people to give to congressional candidates they support.
These programs would amplify the voices of people currently being drowned out by big money. It would offer a path for congressional and presidential candidates to rely on donations from everyday people, not wealthy donors.
Similar public financing programs in New York City and Arizona and a voucher program in Seattle have diversified the donor pool and allowed more candidates of color to run. These programs can help produce more equitable public policy. For example, the advent of public financing in Connecticut was crucial to breaking a legislative logjam and becoming the first state in the nation to guarantee paid sick leave.
Countering the undue influence of big money in our elections is a civil rights issue. H.R. 1, the For the People Act, would be a giant step forward. The American people should demand that it become law.
Georgia Closes Probe Into Kemp's Bogus Claim Of Democratic Election Hacking In 2018
Kemp's bogus "investigation" into supposed "possible cyber crimes" by the Democratic Party of Georgia, has now been quietly closed by the state's attorney general's office, which says that it had found no evidence at all to substantiate the claim.
By Joan McCarter - crooks & liars
3/05/20 6:00pm
Remember when Brian Kemp, then the secretary of state of Georgia, was running for governor against Stacey Abrams in 2018? He was using his position to suppress the vote and, as Daily Kos’ Stephen Wolf wrote in November of that year, "suspended and purged countless voter registrations, removed hundreds of polling places to make voting less convenient for those with limited transportation options, had his allies on local elections boards fail to provide adequate resources to handle high turnout, exposed Georgia's election systems to massive security vulnerabilities, and baselessly claimed Democrats had committed cyber crimes to cover up his own security failures." Surely you remember all that, because Kemp "won" that election, the most blatant case of electoral theft since the Supreme Court selected George W. Bush to be president in 2000.
That wasn't all Kemp did, though. He made a big announcement the Sunday before the election, saying that "the Democratic Party of Georgia is under investigation for possible cyber crimes" and that he was launching an investigation into it. That "investigation" has now been quietly closed by the state's attorney general's office, which says that it had found no evidence at all to substantiate the claim.
State Democrats have called Kemp's investigation what it is—a sham—and now they have the state's findings to back them up. "More than a year after the sitting secretary of state leveraged baseless accusations against his political opponents, we're finally receiving closure on an 'investigation' that has been a sham from the start," said Democratic Party of Georgia Chairwoman Nikema Williams. "As we have since well before these outright lies came to light in the first place, Georgia Democrats will continue to do everything in our power to fight back against voter suppression."
"This is Kemp's playbook in his desperate attempt to keep his ever-loosening grasp on power," said Lauren Groh-Wargo, Abrams' campaign director and currently the CEO for Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group. "The motivation is clear: producing headlines while wasting the time and resources of individuals and groups who dared to challenge Kemp." And, of course, to eke out whatever other support he could to steal the election.
Reporting at the time of the election pointed to the efforts of a private citizen, Richard Wright, to inform the state about vulnerabilities he had found in two of the state's election webpages. Wright provided this information both to a Democratic Party volunteer and to lawyers who were involved in an election security-related lawsuit against Kemp. Kemp found out about it, and, rather than addressing the vulnerabilities, started this bogus investigation. The AG's office said in its memo on its closing of the investigation that it "did not reveal any evidence to support the criminal prosecution of Mr. Wright." Well, duh.
That wasn't all Kemp did, though. He made a big announcement the Sunday before the election, saying that "the Democratic Party of Georgia is under investigation for possible cyber crimes" and that he was launching an investigation into it. That "investigation" has now been quietly closed by the state's attorney general's office, which says that it had found no evidence at all to substantiate the claim.
State Democrats have called Kemp's investigation what it is—a sham—and now they have the state's findings to back them up. "More than a year after the sitting secretary of state leveraged baseless accusations against his political opponents, we're finally receiving closure on an 'investigation' that has been a sham from the start," said Democratic Party of Georgia Chairwoman Nikema Williams. "As we have since well before these outright lies came to light in the first place, Georgia Democrats will continue to do everything in our power to fight back against voter suppression."
"This is Kemp's playbook in his desperate attempt to keep his ever-loosening grasp on power," said Lauren Groh-Wargo, Abrams' campaign director and currently the CEO for Fair Fight Action, a voting rights group. "The motivation is clear: producing headlines while wasting the time and resources of individuals and groups who dared to challenge Kemp." And, of course, to eke out whatever other support he could to steal the election.
Reporting at the time of the election pointed to the efforts of a private citizen, Richard Wright, to inform the state about vulnerabilities he had found in two of the state's election webpages. Wright provided this information both to a Democratic Party volunteer and to lawyers who were involved in an election security-related lawsuit against Kemp. Kemp found out about it, and, rather than addressing the vulnerabilities, started this bogus investigation. The AG's office said in its memo on its closing of the investigation that it "did not reveal any evidence to support the criminal prosecution of Mr. Wright." Well, duh.
the racists and fascists in charge!!!
The fight to vote
Texas closes hundreds of polling sites, making it harder for minorities to vote
Guardian analysis finds that places where black and Latino population is growing by the largest numbers experienced the majority of closures and could benefit Republicans
Richard Salame
the guardian
2 Mar 2020 09.39 EST
Last year, Texas led the US south in an unenviable statistic: closing down the most polling stations, making it more difficult for people to vote and arguably benefiting Republicans.
A report by civil rights group The Leadership Conference Education Fund found that 750 polls had been closed statewide since 2012.
Long considered a Republican bastion, changing racial demographics in the state have caused leading Democrats to recast Texas as a potential swing state. Texas Democratic party official Manny Garcia has called it “the biggest battleground state in the country”.
The closures could exacerbate Texas’s already chronically low voter turnout rates, to the advantage of incumbent Republicans. Ongoing research by University of Houston political scientists Jeronimo Cortina and Brandon Rottinghaus indicates that people are less likely to vote if they have to travel farther to do so, and the effect is disproportionately greater for some groups of voters, such as Latinxs.
“The fact of the matter is that Texas is not a red state,” said Antonio Arellano of Jolt, a progressive Latino political organization. “Texas is a nonvoting state.”
On a local level, the changes can be stark. McLennan county, home to Waco, Texas, closed 44% of its polling places from 2012 to 2018, despite the fact that its population grew by more than 15,000 people during the same time period, with more than two-thirds of that growth coming from Black and Latinx residents.
In 2012, there was one polling place for every 4,000 residents. By 2018 that figure had dropped to one polling place per 7,700 residents. A 2019 paper by University of Houston political scientists found that after the county’s transition to vote centers, more voting locations were closed in Latinx neighborhoods than in non-Latinx neighborhoods, and that Latinx people had to travel farther to vote than non-Hispanic whites.
Some counties closed enough polling locations to violate Texas state law. Brazoria county, south of Houston, closed almost 60% of its polling locations between 2012 and 2018, causing it to fall below the statutory minimum, along with another county. In a statement, Brazoria county clerk Joyce Hudman said the closures were inadvertent, and that this would not happen again in 2020.
A Guardian analysis based on that report confirms what many activists have suspected: the places where the black and Latinx population is growing by the largest numbers have experienced the vast majority of the state’s poll site closures.
The analysis finds that the 50 counties that gained the most Black and Latinx residents between 2012 and 2018 closed 542 polling sites, compared to just 34 closures in the 50 counties that have gained the fewest black and Latinx residents. This is despite the fact that the population in the former group of counties has risen by 2.5 million people, whereas in the latter category the total population has fallen by over 13,000.
‘Turned out to be a nightmare’
Until 2013, hundreds of counties and nine states, including Texas, with a history of severe voter suppression had to submit any changes they wanted to make to their election systems to the Department of Justice under the Voting Rights Act. The department sought to ensure that the changes did not hurt minority voters. But seven years ago, a supreme court ruling gutted this law and allowed these jurisdictions to operate without oversight, and now the previously mandatory racial-impact analysis is no longer performed.
The rush of poll closures in Texas cannot be attributed to any one policy. Just over half of the closures are part of a push toward centralized, countywide polling places, called “vote centers”, which exist in almost a third of US states. Under countywide voting schemes, voters are no longer assigned to a polling place in their local precinct and can instead cast their ballot at any polling location in the county.
Voting rights advocates and both Republican and Democratic leaders have largely been in favor of vote centers because they can make it more convenient to vote – by allowing people to vote near work, for instance – and because they can reduce the number of people whose votes are thrown out because they went to the wrong polling place.
But Texas state law allows a county that transitions to vote centers to operate with half as many locations as they would otherwise have needed under a traditional precinct-based system.
When deciding whether to close a polling station, elected officials typically consider how many people used it, as well as factors like public transportation accessibility. Some elections administrators who agree on the importance of protecting minority voters warn against assuming that closures are automatically a bad thing.
“I’d be curious to know how many of the consolidation efforts were good faith efforts [to] … increase the number of options for a voter but also improve the kind of polling place that a particular voter may have voted in,” said Chris Davis, the Williamson County elections administrator and former president of the Texas Association of Election Administrators. He pointed out that some precinct polling places were ADA-inaccessible.
McLennan county GOP chair Jon Ker called concerns about closures impacting turnout “hogwash,” saying that turnout was actually higher in his county after the number of voting locations dropped from 59 to 33. The 2018 midterm elections did indeed have higher turnout than the 2014 midterms in McLennan county, though voting also surged more broadly across the state and nation.
Mary Duty, chair of the McLennan County Democratic party, has soured on the centralization program since the county entered it in 2014. “It turned out to be kind of a nightmare,” she said, pointing to large areas of the county without a voting location. And activists argue that low turnout at a particular polling place is not a reason to close it – it is a sign that the turnout itself, which is typically lower in Latinx neighborhoods, must be addressed. Closing a polling station for reasons of low turnout can have a discriminatory impact, activists say.
The 334 poll closures between 2012 and 2018 that took place outside the vote center program would by themselves still rank Texas among the biggest poll closers in the country, ahead of Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Elections officials have cited tight budgets and difficulty recruiting poll workers as among the reasons for the reductions.
The upshot is that for many Texas voters, the ballot box is ever further away.
A report by civil rights group The Leadership Conference Education Fund found that 750 polls had been closed statewide since 2012.
Long considered a Republican bastion, changing racial demographics in the state have caused leading Democrats to recast Texas as a potential swing state. Texas Democratic party official Manny Garcia has called it “the biggest battleground state in the country”.
The closures could exacerbate Texas’s already chronically low voter turnout rates, to the advantage of incumbent Republicans. Ongoing research by University of Houston political scientists Jeronimo Cortina and Brandon Rottinghaus indicates that people are less likely to vote if they have to travel farther to do so, and the effect is disproportionately greater for some groups of voters, such as Latinxs.
“The fact of the matter is that Texas is not a red state,” said Antonio Arellano of Jolt, a progressive Latino political organization. “Texas is a nonvoting state.”
On a local level, the changes can be stark. McLennan county, home to Waco, Texas, closed 44% of its polling places from 2012 to 2018, despite the fact that its population grew by more than 15,000 people during the same time period, with more than two-thirds of that growth coming from Black and Latinx residents.
In 2012, there was one polling place for every 4,000 residents. By 2018 that figure had dropped to one polling place per 7,700 residents. A 2019 paper by University of Houston political scientists found that after the county’s transition to vote centers, more voting locations were closed in Latinx neighborhoods than in non-Latinx neighborhoods, and that Latinx people had to travel farther to vote than non-Hispanic whites.
Some counties closed enough polling locations to violate Texas state law. Brazoria county, south of Houston, closed almost 60% of its polling locations between 2012 and 2018, causing it to fall below the statutory minimum, along with another county. In a statement, Brazoria county clerk Joyce Hudman said the closures were inadvertent, and that this would not happen again in 2020.
A Guardian analysis based on that report confirms what many activists have suspected: the places where the black and Latinx population is growing by the largest numbers have experienced the vast majority of the state’s poll site closures.
The analysis finds that the 50 counties that gained the most Black and Latinx residents between 2012 and 2018 closed 542 polling sites, compared to just 34 closures in the 50 counties that have gained the fewest black and Latinx residents. This is despite the fact that the population in the former group of counties has risen by 2.5 million people, whereas in the latter category the total population has fallen by over 13,000.
‘Turned out to be a nightmare’
Until 2013, hundreds of counties and nine states, including Texas, with a history of severe voter suppression had to submit any changes they wanted to make to their election systems to the Department of Justice under the Voting Rights Act. The department sought to ensure that the changes did not hurt minority voters. But seven years ago, a supreme court ruling gutted this law and allowed these jurisdictions to operate without oversight, and now the previously mandatory racial-impact analysis is no longer performed.
The rush of poll closures in Texas cannot be attributed to any one policy. Just over half of the closures are part of a push toward centralized, countywide polling places, called “vote centers”, which exist in almost a third of US states. Under countywide voting schemes, voters are no longer assigned to a polling place in their local precinct and can instead cast their ballot at any polling location in the county.
Voting rights advocates and both Republican and Democratic leaders have largely been in favor of vote centers because they can make it more convenient to vote – by allowing people to vote near work, for instance – and because they can reduce the number of people whose votes are thrown out because they went to the wrong polling place.
But Texas state law allows a county that transitions to vote centers to operate with half as many locations as they would otherwise have needed under a traditional precinct-based system.
When deciding whether to close a polling station, elected officials typically consider how many people used it, as well as factors like public transportation accessibility. Some elections administrators who agree on the importance of protecting minority voters warn against assuming that closures are automatically a bad thing.
“I’d be curious to know how many of the consolidation efforts were good faith efforts [to] … increase the number of options for a voter but also improve the kind of polling place that a particular voter may have voted in,” said Chris Davis, the Williamson County elections administrator and former president of the Texas Association of Election Administrators. He pointed out that some precinct polling places were ADA-inaccessible.
McLennan county GOP chair Jon Ker called concerns about closures impacting turnout “hogwash,” saying that turnout was actually higher in his county after the number of voting locations dropped from 59 to 33. The 2018 midterm elections did indeed have higher turnout than the 2014 midterms in McLennan county, though voting also surged more broadly across the state and nation.
Mary Duty, chair of the McLennan County Democratic party, has soured on the centralization program since the county entered it in 2014. “It turned out to be kind of a nightmare,” she said, pointing to large areas of the county without a voting location. And activists argue that low turnout at a particular polling place is not a reason to close it – it is a sign that the turnout itself, which is typically lower in Latinx neighborhoods, must be addressed. Closing a polling station for reasons of low turnout can have a discriminatory impact, activists say.
The 334 poll closures between 2012 and 2018 that took place outside the vote center program would by themselves still rank Texas among the biggest poll closers in the country, ahead of Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Elections officials have cited tight budgets and difficulty recruiting poll workers as among the reasons for the reductions.
The upshot is that for many Texas voters, the ballot box is ever further away.
Opinion
Think your vote doesn't matter? Remember the blood spilled in Selma
Al Sharpton
Civil rights leaders understood the significance of that right to vote. Now we must fight to preserve – and use – those rights
the guardian
Sun 1 Mar 2020 06.24 EST
The United States is at a monumental crossroads in the year 2020. As a presidential election awaits in the very near future, so many of the civil rights that countless Americans fought for – and were beaten, imprisoned and even killed for – are on the line. This weekend, we remember one of those pivotal moments in history that helped shape the course of the civil rights movement and the trajectory of our nation.
It was 55 years ago when nonviolent demonstrators in Selma, Alabama attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way to the state capital of Montgomery in their push for voting rights for African Americans. At the foot of the bridge, they were met by Alabama state troopers on horseback armed with billy clubs and pepper spray. “Bloody Sunday” as it would come to be known left dozens hospitalized, hundreds (including children) traumatized and the country disgusted. But what it also did was galvanize even more solidarity as many other protests, sit-ins and marches took place everywhere comprised of a cross-section of Americans. A federal court order permitted a protest from Selma to Montgomery a few weeks later under the protection of the National Guard. Bloody Sunday, the peaceful marches of Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr and others, as well as the public’s support eventually pushed Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act which was finally signed into law later that summer.
This weekend, all roads once again lead to Selma as we pay homage to the historical sacrifices of people like Congressman John Lewis (who was beaten badly on Bloody Sunday) and Reverend Hosea Williams who both led the march that infamous day, as well as the hundreds of others who walked along with them knowing that they may face danger. At a moment when the very rights they were courageously fighting for - that basic fundamental right to vote - is under renewed threat. Voters are being purged from the rolls in key states, strict new voter ID laws are in place in dozens of states, modern day poll taxes are being enacted for some in places like Florida and voter suppression tactics are being implemented in many jurisdictions and states. It is an insult to the brave souls that tirelessly fought for our right to vote.
As candidates vie for the Democratic nomination in this year’s Presidential election, they understand the importance of Bloody Sunday, of our vote and of fighting to preserve that legal right. Many of these presidential hopefuls appeared this week at the South Carolina Minister’s Breakfast that I convened ahead of that state’s primary on Saturday. Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Tom Steyer, Bernie Sanders Peter Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar all attended to address the crucial role of the black vote, the black church and our work advancing the legacy and vision of Dr King. Many of those candidates will be in Selma this Sunday as they not only march to honor the past, but also participate in the first ever Selma Presidential Candidate Forum to lay the groundwork for the future.
There’s only a few months remaining between now and the November election. The outcome of this presidential race will have an impact on every aspect of our lives from health care, education, equal pay, jobs, worker’s rights, the social safety net, wages, housing, environmental laws, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, immigration, civil rights, protections for minority groups to everything in between. Our collective future – both as a nation and on the world stage – is literally on the line. And because of this importance, many forces have worked hard to take away people’s fundamental right to vote. Some are actively suppressing a person’s ability to participate in the process, to have a say in their own government and to help build the country that they would like to see.
Civil rights leaders 55 years ago, and all those before them, understood the significance of that right to vote. The civil rights leaders of today understand the significance of fighting to preserve those rights. And the Democratic presidential candidates themselves also understand the significance of honoring the sacrifices of the past and ensuring that our fight and our voices are not excluded. As everyone gathers in Selma this Sunday and prepares for November’s election, I’d just like to remind those who may be misguided into believing that their vote doesn’t matter or take it for granted, that many sacrificed greatly so that we could have this fundamental right to vote.
And if it wasn’t so important, why would people be working around the clock to come up with new schemes to take away your chance to participate in our democracy?
It was 55 years ago when nonviolent demonstrators in Selma, Alabama attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way to the state capital of Montgomery in their push for voting rights for African Americans. At the foot of the bridge, they were met by Alabama state troopers on horseback armed with billy clubs and pepper spray. “Bloody Sunday” as it would come to be known left dozens hospitalized, hundreds (including children) traumatized and the country disgusted. But what it also did was galvanize even more solidarity as many other protests, sit-ins and marches took place everywhere comprised of a cross-section of Americans. A federal court order permitted a protest from Selma to Montgomery a few weeks later under the protection of the National Guard. Bloody Sunday, the peaceful marches of Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr and others, as well as the public’s support eventually pushed Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act which was finally signed into law later that summer.
This weekend, all roads once again lead to Selma as we pay homage to the historical sacrifices of people like Congressman John Lewis (who was beaten badly on Bloody Sunday) and Reverend Hosea Williams who both led the march that infamous day, as well as the hundreds of others who walked along with them knowing that they may face danger. At a moment when the very rights they were courageously fighting for - that basic fundamental right to vote - is under renewed threat. Voters are being purged from the rolls in key states, strict new voter ID laws are in place in dozens of states, modern day poll taxes are being enacted for some in places like Florida and voter suppression tactics are being implemented in many jurisdictions and states. It is an insult to the brave souls that tirelessly fought for our right to vote.
As candidates vie for the Democratic nomination in this year’s Presidential election, they understand the importance of Bloody Sunday, of our vote and of fighting to preserve that legal right. Many of these presidential hopefuls appeared this week at the South Carolina Minister’s Breakfast that I convened ahead of that state’s primary on Saturday. Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Tom Steyer, Bernie Sanders Peter Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar all attended to address the crucial role of the black vote, the black church and our work advancing the legacy and vision of Dr King. Many of those candidates will be in Selma this Sunday as they not only march to honor the past, but also participate in the first ever Selma Presidential Candidate Forum to lay the groundwork for the future.
There’s only a few months remaining between now and the November election. The outcome of this presidential race will have an impact on every aspect of our lives from health care, education, equal pay, jobs, worker’s rights, the social safety net, wages, housing, environmental laws, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, immigration, civil rights, protections for minority groups to everything in between. Our collective future – both as a nation and on the world stage – is literally on the line. And because of this importance, many forces have worked hard to take away people’s fundamental right to vote. Some are actively suppressing a person’s ability to participate in the process, to have a say in their own government and to help build the country that they would like to see.
Civil rights leaders 55 years ago, and all those before them, understood the significance of that right to vote. The civil rights leaders of today understand the significance of fighting to preserve those rights. And the Democratic presidential candidates themselves also understand the significance of honoring the sacrifices of the past and ensuring that our fight and our voices are not excluded. As everyone gathers in Selma this Sunday and prepares for November’s election, I’d just like to remind those who may be misguided into believing that their vote doesn’t matter or take it for granted, that many sacrificed greatly so that we could have this fundamental right to vote.
And if it wasn’t so important, why would people be working around the clock to come up with new schemes to take away your chance to participate in our democracy?
The Political Punchline
Putting the Mock in Democracy
Investigative journalist Greg Palast: How Trump will steal the 2020 election
Reporter who uncovered Georgia vote suppression says Trump will cheat again, and Dems will try to stop Bernie
CHAUNCEY DEVEGA - salon
FEBRUARY 28, 2020 12:00PM (UTC)
How do you make sense of Trump's presidency? How did this all happen?
The nasty secret of American democracy is that we don't count all the votes and we do not let all people vote. In the past two years, according to the federal government, 17 million Americans have been stripped of their right to vote. Some of it is quite legitimate. If someone's dead, they should not be voting. If someone has left Georgia or Michigan, they should not be voting in Georgia or Michigan. But about half of that number, 9 million or so people, were removed from the voter rolls on a false premise. These potential voters are overwhelmingly young people and voters of color. Young people are the new target. There is a massive purge of voters in America and few people are talking about it.
What I've been doing is filing suits to get the lists and names and addresses and the reasons for everyone who has been purged from the voter rolls. One of the most important stories I have ever done was for Salon in 2018. From the lawsuit my organization filed, we discovered a massive number of people blocked from voting — again, overwhelmingly young people and voters of color. That means Democratic Party voters could have had a massive impact on the outcome in states such as Ohio and Georgia. Moreover, Georgia really should be a swing state because it is minority majority. White people are in the minority in Georgia, as of this year.
Michigan is another example. In the 2016 presidential election, 75,355 ballots were never counted. In Michigan, Trump won by 10,700. What is the state's response? "We don't know whose votes those were. These are disqualified ballots." Why were they disqualified? Eighty-seven voting machines broke down in Detroit. Even though there were paper ballots, they had to be scanned by machines. The 87 machines could not read the ballots. Is Detroit Trump country? Of the 75,355 ballots that no one counted, most came out of Detroit. Who won Michigan?
This is what's going on here. In California in 2016, 8.6 million people cast votes in the June 2016 primary. Add up the presidential total, and it comes to 7.3 million votes. This means 1.3 million people did not have their ballots counted for president of the United States in that primary.
In particular, this is the group known as NPP voters — "no party preference voters" — who have a right to vote in the Democratic primary, but the procedure is really complicated. So a big hunk of those voters, close to half of those voters in practice, were disqualified because they got the wrong ballot or they didn't know the procedure. Because you have to use a special ballot if you're a NPP voter — you can't get a regular Democratic Party ballot. If you are given the regular party ballot it gets disqualified.
This procedure is so complicated that almost no one, even at the polling stations, knows what the rules are. So basically, a million people, mostly NPP voters, lose their vote. Now who did they vote for? NPP voters voted more than two to one for Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders won the California primary last time, and the Democratic Party leadership is going to try and take it away from him this time in 2020. [In the reported California results in 2016, Hillary Clinton defeated Sanders, 53 to 46 percent.]
How does one go about rigging an election?
Not the way people most people believe. It isn't done by some guy pressing a lever and changing the vote from blue to red. Rigging an election is usually done by blocking people from casting ballots or not counting the ballots they cast. For example, and these are hard numbers from the federal government, more than 2 million provisional ballots were cast in the United States. Most white people, unless they live in California, have never heard of a provisional ballot, but those types of ballots are handed out like candy in black and Hispanic precincts. These provisional ballots are just what they sound like, "provisional." A person's name is not on the voter rolls. So rather than have a person scream and holler and pound the desk and say, "Why is my name missing? I've voted here for 50 years!" they are told, "Don't worry. Here's a provisional ballot. Fill this out and we'll count that later." But those votes are not counted later. Over a million provisional ballots were never counted in each of the last two presidential elections.
Absentee ballots are another problem. In the United States there are about 30 million people who mail in their ballots. This year that number will be closer to 60 million. Many of those ballots will never be counted. And then machines break down. Where do the machines break? Where everything breaks down. In the barrio, in the ghetto. Under resourced schools, bad hospitals — that all equals broken voting machines.
A person's vote in those poor areas is not being changed. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission discovered that the chance your vote will "spoil' is 900% higher if you're black than if you're white. The votes don't get counted. People are not allowed to vote. It's not random at all. This is a violently racial system.
Demographics are against the Republican Party. Their ideas are unpopular. Their solution is to maintain a type of American apartheid. The only way for Trump and his Republicans to stay in power is to keep nonwhites and other people who oppose them from voting. What are some specific examples of the Republican Party rigging elections to achieve their goals?
The following is very important. Georgia in 2018 was the test drive for the theft of 2020 by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. All across America — in 20 states and perhaps more — there is a new system of purging the voter rolls which will change the 2020 elections. There has been a massive increase in voter purges through an initiative called "use it or lose it." So for example, in Georgia, if you miss a couple of elections and they mailed you a postcard and you didn't return it, you lost your vote. That is a Jim Crow tactic which is illegal under the National Voter Registration Act. They used to stop black people from voting using such tactics.
What is happening in Georgia? How come Republicans are removing people who have not voted? The answer is they're saying that not returning the postcard is evidence that a given voter moved. "They missed two elections. They didn't return a card. Obviously, they've moved." Is that true? For my Salon piece in 2018 I went to the No. 1 experts on demography and where people actually live. Who are the experts on that subject? Amazon, eBay and American Express. I asked those experts to look at the data and then to tell me who moved In Georgia.
The experts went through the Georgia purge list and found out that exactly 340,134 voters had not ever moved from their original registration address. Over a third of a million voters were removed for leaving Georgia, or leaving their county, and had never actually moved away at all. Stacey Abrams put up a ton of money to go even deeper and found another 100,000 people who were wrongly purged. You're talking close to half a million people who were wrongly purged for moving. Based on my research, that is why Stacey Abrams said that she had won the governorship of Georgia — she just wouldn't be inaugurated.
Now the Republicans are trying to do the same thing in Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. All over the country. The Republicans and Trump are going to steal 2020 by saying that millions of people have moved, don't qualify for voting. They won't know until they show up to vote. Then those voters will be given a provisional ballot that won't get counted. These people will think they voted when they have not — and they will lose their vote. If they send in an absentee ballot and they're marked as having moved, their ballot will be thrown away.
---
Donald Trump and other Republicans — especially Fox News and the right-wing propaganda machine at large– are obsessed with these stories about nonwhites, especially black Americans, showing up to vote illegally to rig elections against white conservatives. What do we know about that strategic rhetoric?
It is strategic. Absolutely. I call it the "hysteria factory." To kick people off the voter rolls using a system like Crosscheck won't work unless you can claim that people are voting twice en masse. Trump and the Republicans have to create a hysteria that black people are voting twice if they want to be able to purge the votes. It's not as though Kris Kobach or Donald Trump invented that strategy of racial rumor-mongering. Watch the movie "Birth of a Nation" from a hundred years ago and you will see black people shown breaking the law in terms of voting.
This is an old racist trope. And Trump has turned it into a hammer. Kobach turned it into the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck program, which is supposed to find people that are voting in different states. In reality, if a person votes in two different states in the same election, they can go to prison for five years. Crosscheck is ostensibly chasing something that almost never happens. Kobach, Trump and other Republicans use a racial stereotype that people of color cheat when they vote. People of color vote as some type of horde, and therefore we have to have all these laws to prevent black people, and now Hispanics, Asian-Americans and others, from doing the same thing.
The nasty secret of American democracy is that we don't count all the votes and we do not let all people vote. In the past two years, according to the federal government, 17 million Americans have been stripped of their right to vote. Some of it is quite legitimate. If someone's dead, they should not be voting. If someone has left Georgia or Michigan, they should not be voting in Georgia or Michigan. But about half of that number, 9 million or so people, were removed from the voter rolls on a false premise. These potential voters are overwhelmingly young people and voters of color. Young people are the new target. There is a massive purge of voters in America and few people are talking about it.
What I've been doing is filing suits to get the lists and names and addresses and the reasons for everyone who has been purged from the voter rolls. One of the most important stories I have ever done was for Salon in 2018. From the lawsuit my organization filed, we discovered a massive number of people blocked from voting — again, overwhelmingly young people and voters of color. That means Democratic Party voters could have had a massive impact on the outcome in states such as Ohio and Georgia. Moreover, Georgia really should be a swing state because it is minority majority. White people are in the minority in Georgia, as of this year.
Michigan is another example. In the 2016 presidential election, 75,355 ballots were never counted. In Michigan, Trump won by 10,700. What is the state's response? "We don't know whose votes those were. These are disqualified ballots." Why were they disqualified? Eighty-seven voting machines broke down in Detroit. Even though there were paper ballots, they had to be scanned by machines. The 87 machines could not read the ballots. Is Detroit Trump country? Of the 75,355 ballots that no one counted, most came out of Detroit. Who won Michigan?
This is what's going on here. In California in 2016, 8.6 million people cast votes in the June 2016 primary. Add up the presidential total, and it comes to 7.3 million votes. This means 1.3 million people did not have their ballots counted for president of the United States in that primary.
In particular, this is the group known as NPP voters — "no party preference voters" — who have a right to vote in the Democratic primary, but the procedure is really complicated. So a big hunk of those voters, close to half of those voters in practice, were disqualified because they got the wrong ballot or they didn't know the procedure. Because you have to use a special ballot if you're a NPP voter — you can't get a regular Democratic Party ballot. If you are given the regular party ballot it gets disqualified.
This procedure is so complicated that almost no one, even at the polling stations, knows what the rules are. So basically, a million people, mostly NPP voters, lose their vote. Now who did they vote for? NPP voters voted more than two to one for Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders won the California primary last time, and the Democratic Party leadership is going to try and take it away from him this time in 2020. [In the reported California results in 2016, Hillary Clinton defeated Sanders, 53 to 46 percent.]
How does one go about rigging an election?
Not the way people most people believe. It isn't done by some guy pressing a lever and changing the vote from blue to red. Rigging an election is usually done by blocking people from casting ballots or not counting the ballots they cast. For example, and these are hard numbers from the federal government, more than 2 million provisional ballots were cast in the United States. Most white people, unless they live in California, have never heard of a provisional ballot, but those types of ballots are handed out like candy in black and Hispanic precincts. These provisional ballots are just what they sound like, "provisional." A person's name is not on the voter rolls. So rather than have a person scream and holler and pound the desk and say, "Why is my name missing? I've voted here for 50 years!" they are told, "Don't worry. Here's a provisional ballot. Fill this out and we'll count that later." But those votes are not counted later. Over a million provisional ballots were never counted in each of the last two presidential elections.
Absentee ballots are another problem. In the United States there are about 30 million people who mail in their ballots. This year that number will be closer to 60 million. Many of those ballots will never be counted. And then machines break down. Where do the machines break? Where everything breaks down. In the barrio, in the ghetto. Under resourced schools, bad hospitals — that all equals broken voting machines.
A person's vote in those poor areas is not being changed. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission discovered that the chance your vote will "spoil' is 900% higher if you're black than if you're white. The votes don't get counted. People are not allowed to vote. It's not random at all. This is a violently racial system.
Demographics are against the Republican Party. Their ideas are unpopular. Their solution is to maintain a type of American apartheid. The only way for Trump and his Republicans to stay in power is to keep nonwhites and other people who oppose them from voting. What are some specific examples of the Republican Party rigging elections to achieve their goals?
The following is very important. Georgia in 2018 was the test drive for the theft of 2020 by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. All across America — in 20 states and perhaps more — there is a new system of purging the voter rolls which will change the 2020 elections. There has been a massive increase in voter purges through an initiative called "use it or lose it." So for example, in Georgia, if you miss a couple of elections and they mailed you a postcard and you didn't return it, you lost your vote. That is a Jim Crow tactic which is illegal under the National Voter Registration Act. They used to stop black people from voting using such tactics.
What is happening in Georgia? How come Republicans are removing people who have not voted? The answer is they're saying that not returning the postcard is evidence that a given voter moved. "They missed two elections. They didn't return a card. Obviously, they've moved." Is that true? For my Salon piece in 2018 I went to the No. 1 experts on demography and where people actually live. Who are the experts on that subject? Amazon, eBay and American Express. I asked those experts to look at the data and then to tell me who moved In Georgia.
The experts went through the Georgia purge list and found out that exactly 340,134 voters had not ever moved from their original registration address. Over a third of a million voters were removed for leaving Georgia, or leaving their county, and had never actually moved away at all. Stacey Abrams put up a ton of money to go even deeper and found another 100,000 people who were wrongly purged. You're talking close to half a million people who were wrongly purged for moving. Based on my research, that is why Stacey Abrams said that she had won the governorship of Georgia — she just wouldn't be inaugurated.
Now the Republicans are trying to do the same thing in Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. All over the country. The Republicans and Trump are going to steal 2020 by saying that millions of people have moved, don't qualify for voting. They won't know until they show up to vote. Then those voters will be given a provisional ballot that won't get counted. These people will think they voted when they have not — and they will lose their vote. If they send in an absentee ballot and they're marked as having moved, their ballot will be thrown away.
---
Donald Trump and other Republicans — especially Fox News and the right-wing propaganda machine at large– are obsessed with these stories about nonwhites, especially black Americans, showing up to vote illegally to rig elections against white conservatives. What do we know about that strategic rhetoric?
It is strategic. Absolutely. I call it the "hysteria factory." To kick people off the voter rolls using a system like Crosscheck won't work unless you can claim that people are voting twice en masse. Trump and the Republicans have to create a hysteria that black people are voting twice if they want to be able to purge the votes. It's not as though Kris Kobach or Donald Trump invented that strategy of racial rumor-mongering. Watch the movie "Birth of a Nation" from a hundred years ago and you will see black people shown breaking the law in terms of voting.
This is an old racist trope. And Trump has turned it into a hammer. Kobach turned it into the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck program, which is supposed to find people that are voting in different states. In reality, if a person votes in two different states in the same election, they can go to prison for five years. Crosscheck is ostensibly chasing something that almost never happens. Kobach, Trump and other Republicans use a racial stereotype that people of color cheat when they vote. People of color vote as some type of horde, and therefore we have to have all these laws to prevent black people, and now Hispanics, Asian-Americans and others, from doing the same thing.
just what a racist would do!!!
‘Panties in a Bunch’: Kansas Official Blew Off Concerns About 2018 Polling Place Move
Tierney Sneed
tpm
February 26, 2020 10:00 a.m.
The House Oversight Committee revealed Wednesday new information about how local election officials in Kansas botched the relocation of a polling place that put Dodge City’s single site for voting at a location more than a mile from the nearest bus stop.
The move by Ford County in 2018 to move the city’s sole polling place outside city limits prompted an ACLU lawsuit and national controversy, particularly because the city’s population is 60 percent Hispanic and the new location was not accessible by public transport or even sidewalk.
The move also prompted an investigation from the newly Democratic controlled House Oversight Committee, which also released on Wednesday details of parallel investigations into voting rights debacles in Texas and Georgia.
According to an update to those investigations the committee unveiled Wednesday, Ford County Clerk Debbie Cox dismissed concerns about how the relocation would affect voters, particularly those who don’t drive.
“The ones complaining do not even live here in Ford Co or some in Kansas,” she said in a September 2018 email released Wednesday.
Cox also participated in a phone interview with the committee, where, according to Wednesday’s release, she admitted that she did not bother to consult with community groups and other residents about the plan to move the polling site.
“That is solely my responsibility,” she told the committee, according to its release, when asked why she didn’t seek outside advice about the move.
She also told the committee, according to its summary, that she didn’t consider it her responsibility to arrange transport to the new polling site, nor did she have any plans initially to station people at the old site to direct voters to the new location. She said she only decided to those steps to mitigate the access issues after “all this blew up,” according to the committee’s summary.
Additionally, she admitted that some newly registered voters received registration confirmation notices that lasted incorrectly the old polling place.
The committee did not release the full transcript of the interview. Cox did not immediately respond to TPM’s inquiry.
Ford County settled the lawsuit brought by the ACLU in 2019, while announcing that it would operate two polling places for the city’s 13,000 voters from then on.
During the litigation, a judge expressed concern about a Cox email where she said “LOL” to another official about ACLU’s request that she add its voter assistance hotline to the county election website.
Cox decided to move the polling place after learning the usual location was under construction that limited parking at it, according to the emails released Wednesday. She told a former clerk that “either way I will have complaints.”
“I know I will be damned if I do and damned if I don’t,” she said then about the decision to move voting to the new site.
The former clerk she consulted agreed she’d “catch flack” for the relocation, but said that it was the right thing to do, while joking about how the new site was a more convenient location for the former clerk.
In a later email, apparently after the controversy over the relocation had erupted, Cox complained that the “ACLU has their panties in a bunch” about there being just one voting location.
The ex-clerk Sharon Seibel, responded that, “People just need to get over themselves, they can drive to anything else they want to or they have someone take them, why is this different.”
The move by Ford County in 2018 to move the city’s sole polling place outside city limits prompted an ACLU lawsuit and national controversy, particularly because the city’s population is 60 percent Hispanic and the new location was not accessible by public transport or even sidewalk.
The move also prompted an investigation from the newly Democratic controlled House Oversight Committee, which also released on Wednesday details of parallel investigations into voting rights debacles in Texas and Georgia.
According to an update to those investigations the committee unveiled Wednesday, Ford County Clerk Debbie Cox dismissed concerns about how the relocation would affect voters, particularly those who don’t drive.
“The ones complaining do not even live here in Ford Co or some in Kansas,” she said in a September 2018 email released Wednesday.
Cox also participated in a phone interview with the committee, where, according to Wednesday’s release, she admitted that she did not bother to consult with community groups and other residents about the plan to move the polling site.
“That is solely my responsibility,” she told the committee, according to its release, when asked why she didn’t seek outside advice about the move.
She also told the committee, according to its summary, that she didn’t consider it her responsibility to arrange transport to the new polling site, nor did she have any plans initially to station people at the old site to direct voters to the new location. She said she only decided to those steps to mitigate the access issues after “all this blew up,” according to the committee’s summary.
Additionally, she admitted that some newly registered voters received registration confirmation notices that lasted incorrectly the old polling place.
The committee did not release the full transcript of the interview. Cox did not immediately respond to TPM’s inquiry.
Ford County settled the lawsuit brought by the ACLU in 2019, while announcing that it would operate two polling places for the city’s 13,000 voters from then on.
During the litigation, a judge expressed concern about a Cox email where she said “LOL” to another official about ACLU’s request that she add its voter assistance hotline to the county election website.
Cox decided to move the polling place after learning the usual location was under construction that limited parking at it, according to the emails released Wednesday. She told a former clerk that “either way I will have complaints.”
“I know I will be damned if I do and damned if I don’t,” she said then about the decision to move voting to the new site.
The former clerk she consulted agreed she’d “catch flack” for the relocation, but said that it was the right thing to do, while joking about how the new site was a more convenient location for the former clerk.
In a later email, apparently after the controversy over the relocation had erupted, Cox complained that the “ACLU has their panties in a bunch” about there being just one voting location.
The ex-clerk Sharon Seibel, responded that, “People just need to get over themselves, they can drive to anything else they want to or they have someone take them, why is this different.”
Why ‘Don’t-Care Democrats’ May Re-Elect Trump
How Major News Outlets Misread Sanders’s Nevada Victory: Turnout Was Awful, 84% of the State’s Democrats Said No
By David Cay Johnston, DCReport Editor-in-Chief
2/25/2020
We caution readers to be very careful in interpreting the Democratic primary election results so far for reasons cited below. We think the way our major news organizations are reporting the primary results can easily create a misleading impression of voter sentiment.
The analysis below should give you pause whether you think Sanders is, and should be, a shoo-in to beat Trump or you fear that a Sanders nomination will ensure a second Trump term and a romp by Republican Congressional candidates.
We ask ardent supporters and foes of Sanders, or any other candidate, to avoid a hot or presumptive reaction to what follows, a concern based on many responses to some of my caucus night tweets and Facebook posts in recent weeks.
Please ponder what follows in terms of the real issues in the 2020 general election.
First, whether our Electoral College gives Trump a second term even as he will certainly lose the popular vote—and by a huge margin. Second, how voter turnout will affect whether Republicans retain control of the Senate, which will enable Mitch McConnell to continue packing the federal courts with minimally qualified corporatist and right-wing ideologues.
As a general historic rule, the bigger the turnout the better Democrats fare, the worse Republicans do.
Now let’s look at the Nevada primary that ended on Saturday.
News reports focus on Bernie Sanders as the winner—alongside his win in New Hampshire and his tie with Pete Buttigieg in Iowa.
Different Measures
Measured in percentages, Sanders won by a huge plurality with more than 40% of the final caucus votes, nearly all of which were counted by Monday morning Nevada time. That’s impressive, especially since in initial caucus voting Sanders got 33% and second-place finisher Joe Biden’s final results came in at less than 20%. (These numbers are updated from an earlier version, when only 60% of votes had been counted.)
But now consider the numbers of votes cast.
Nevada has almost 611,000 registered Democrats. Final results will show a bit more than 40,000 votes for Sanders. That means for every vote Sanders won there were 15 Democrats who choose someone else—or no one at all.
The low turnout is surprising since the party made voting easy. Ballots could be cast in person for four days or at the Saturday caucuses. Yet about 84% out of Nevada Democrats didn’t vote or caucus.
Most Democrats Didn’t Bother
Let’s call the roughly 555,000 Nevada Democrats who didn’t participate the “Don’t-Care Democrats.” What does it say about the Culinary Workers Union and its much-discussed political power in Nevada that so few Democrats voted? What does it say about the union, slightly more than half of whose members are Latino, endorsed no candidate and by some accounts was openly hostile to Sanders?
The numbers of votes cast, rather than percentages, were downplayed in many news reports, especially on television and radio. Actual votes cast were pushed down in reports like those in The New York Times. Even worse was the main Washington Post Sunday story, which never mentioned how many ballots were cast or the overall percentages, but declared in its headline that “Sanders decisively wins.”
Granite State Voting
Now compare the Nevada results with New Hampshire, where Sanders also won. New Hampshire has less than half the population of Nevada—1.3 million people to 3.1 million.
There are 276,400 registered Democrats in the Granite State. Sanders won more than 76,000 votes.
Democratic primary votes for all candidates totaled 296,622 or 107% of the number of New Hampshire Democrats.
Don’t be alarmed—no gravestones voted. In New Hampshire, people who register without choosing a party affiliation can vote in primaries as either Democrats or Republicans. New Hampshire’s largest registration is undeclared with 415,900 out of 981,000 total registered voters.
Sanders got 11% of the potential primary vote in New Hampshire. And that state’s “Don’t-Care Democrats,” even assuming every undeclared voter is a Democrat, were 58% of potential voters compared to 95% in Nevada.
Trump Fatigue
The results from these two of our 50 states show that the overwhelming majority of Democrats in a demographically diverse and fast-growing western state seem to have no interest in who lives in the White House. They show that in New Hampshire, with its century-old town meeting traditions, draws many more voters but still a majority can’t be bothered to cast ballots.
And they show that it is possible to win a party primary with a tiny number of registered primary eligible voters, less than one in 17 in Nevada.
What do the Nevada numbers tell us?
When the overwhelming majority of eligible voters do nothing does that mean they are content with Trump in the White House? Do they believe (wrongly) that their votes don’t matter? Is the problem political lethargy? Indifference? Tacit acceptance?
The fact is that until after-vote survey work is finished we won’t know.
A Handful of Voters Will Decide
What we do know is that a tiny fraction of registered voters could determine who faces Trump. And we now know that there is not much enthusiasm for Sanders in Nevada, a state that is more like America as a whole than either New Hampshire or Iowa, the first caucus state.
Trump won despite only 46% of actual voters favoring him. Trump brags about his not quite 63 million votes, but Hillary Clinton got close to 66 million votes. Add in minor candidates and 74 million Americans voted against Trump.
The big question is whether Trump fatigue weighs so heavily on America that the November election will be determined not by the American people, but by tiny minorities in picking the Democratic Party candidate. Even if Sanders founders in the next few primaries, a minority of Democrats will decide.
And what happens if the vast majority stay home on Nov. 3?
In the end, our government is the result not of what the American people want, but of who votes. Turnout first. Turnout last. Turnout is all that matters.
Ask yourself what it means that in the Nevada Democratic primary the real vote was 16% care enough to vote for someone and 84% couldn’t be bothered.
I don’t know the answer. What I do know is that we should be actively discussing this. And we should do so not from wishes or fears, but from thoughtful concern about the future, we will soon choose for our nation.
The analysis below should give you pause whether you think Sanders is, and should be, a shoo-in to beat Trump or you fear that a Sanders nomination will ensure a second Trump term and a romp by Republican Congressional candidates.
We ask ardent supporters and foes of Sanders, or any other candidate, to avoid a hot or presumptive reaction to what follows, a concern based on many responses to some of my caucus night tweets and Facebook posts in recent weeks.
Please ponder what follows in terms of the real issues in the 2020 general election.
First, whether our Electoral College gives Trump a second term even as he will certainly lose the popular vote—and by a huge margin. Second, how voter turnout will affect whether Republicans retain control of the Senate, which will enable Mitch McConnell to continue packing the federal courts with minimally qualified corporatist and right-wing ideologues.
As a general historic rule, the bigger the turnout the better Democrats fare, the worse Republicans do.
Now let’s look at the Nevada primary that ended on Saturday.
News reports focus on Bernie Sanders as the winner—alongside his win in New Hampshire and his tie with Pete Buttigieg in Iowa.
Different Measures
Measured in percentages, Sanders won by a huge plurality with more than 40% of the final caucus votes, nearly all of which were counted by Monday morning Nevada time. That’s impressive, especially since in initial caucus voting Sanders got 33% and second-place finisher Joe Biden’s final results came in at less than 20%. (These numbers are updated from an earlier version, when only 60% of votes had been counted.)
But now consider the numbers of votes cast.
Nevada has almost 611,000 registered Democrats. Final results will show a bit more than 40,000 votes for Sanders. That means for every vote Sanders won there were 15 Democrats who choose someone else—or no one at all.
The low turnout is surprising since the party made voting easy. Ballots could be cast in person for four days or at the Saturday caucuses. Yet about 84% out of Nevada Democrats didn’t vote or caucus.
Most Democrats Didn’t Bother
Let’s call the roughly 555,000 Nevada Democrats who didn’t participate the “Don’t-Care Democrats.” What does it say about the Culinary Workers Union and its much-discussed political power in Nevada that so few Democrats voted? What does it say about the union, slightly more than half of whose members are Latino, endorsed no candidate and by some accounts was openly hostile to Sanders?
The numbers of votes cast, rather than percentages, were downplayed in many news reports, especially on television and radio. Actual votes cast were pushed down in reports like those in The New York Times. Even worse was the main Washington Post Sunday story, which never mentioned how many ballots were cast or the overall percentages, but declared in its headline that “Sanders decisively wins.”
Granite State Voting
Now compare the Nevada results with New Hampshire, where Sanders also won. New Hampshire has less than half the population of Nevada—1.3 million people to 3.1 million.
There are 276,400 registered Democrats in the Granite State. Sanders won more than 76,000 votes.
Democratic primary votes for all candidates totaled 296,622 or 107% of the number of New Hampshire Democrats.
Don’t be alarmed—no gravestones voted. In New Hampshire, people who register without choosing a party affiliation can vote in primaries as either Democrats or Republicans. New Hampshire’s largest registration is undeclared with 415,900 out of 981,000 total registered voters.
Sanders got 11% of the potential primary vote in New Hampshire. And that state’s “Don’t-Care Democrats,” even assuming every undeclared voter is a Democrat, were 58% of potential voters compared to 95% in Nevada.
Trump Fatigue
The results from these two of our 50 states show that the overwhelming majority of Democrats in a demographically diverse and fast-growing western state seem to have no interest in who lives in the White House. They show that in New Hampshire, with its century-old town meeting traditions, draws many more voters but still a majority can’t be bothered to cast ballots.
And they show that it is possible to win a party primary with a tiny number of registered primary eligible voters, less than one in 17 in Nevada.
What do the Nevada numbers tell us?
When the overwhelming majority of eligible voters do nothing does that mean they are content with Trump in the White House? Do they believe (wrongly) that their votes don’t matter? Is the problem political lethargy? Indifference? Tacit acceptance?
The fact is that until after-vote survey work is finished we won’t know.
A Handful of Voters Will Decide
What we do know is that a tiny fraction of registered voters could determine who faces Trump. And we now know that there is not much enthusiasm for Sanders in Nevada, a state that is more like America as a whole than either New Hampshire or Iowa, the first caucus state.
Trump won despite only 46% of actual voters favoring him. Trump brags about his not quite 63 million votes, but Hillary Clinton got close to 66 million votes. Add in minor candidates and 74 million Americans voted against Trump.
The big question is whether Trump fatigue weighs so heavily on America that the November election will be determined not by the American people, but by tiny minorities in picking the Democratic Party candidate. Even if Sanders founders in the next few primaries, a minority of Democrats will decide.
And what happens if the vast majority stay home on Nov. 3?
In the end, our government is the result not of what the American people want, but of who votes. Turnout first. Turnout last. Turnout is all that matters.
Ask yourself what it means that in the Nevada Democratic primary the real vote was 16% care enough to vote for someone and 84% couldn’t be bothered.
I don’t know the answer. What I do know is that we should be actively discussing this. And we should do so not from wishes or fears, but from thoughtful concern about the future, we will soon choose for our nation.
Opinion - Texas
It's 2020 – why are black university students still fighting for the right to vote?
Polling stations have been pushed off campus, and we don’t have the early voting opportunities residents in whiter areas get
Maia A Young
the guardian
Thu 13 Feb 2020 06.00 EST
In the 1970s, just after the Voting Rights Act was passed, Waller county was the only majority black county in Texas. And that didn’t include the students from the local historically black institution, Prairie View A&M University.
Knowing that students could shift local politics, county officials denied Prairie View students the right to vote in the 1972 presidential Nixon v McGovern election by requiring proof of residential status. In 1979, that was overturned after a white student sued county officials.
Today, Prairie View is still a majority black community, but its elected officials are resoundingly white. Meanwhile, our student population of approximately 9,500 – compared with the population of approximately 6,400 non-students – keeps the county alive in many ways. We are the city’s biggest consumers, and populate local businesses. We pay tuition and fees that are invested in the university and the local government.
But we’re still denied equal access to voting.
For one, we don’t have the same early voting opportunities as other residents of the city, especially in whiter neighborhoods. Five students sued the county two years ago for not providing a location – either on campus or in the city – for early voting, similar to the one that was closer to white and older residents. Represented by the NAACP, the students demanded a precinct be set up with weekend hours. But the case was dismissed.
Meanwhile, Prairie View students won their bid for an on-campus voting center in 2013 after pointing out that the lack of access could be seen as race-based discrimination. But since 2016, the polling stations have been pushed off campus, and hardly accessible to students. To vote, students who do not have a car would have to walk at least 1,000ft from the closest part of our campus, and sometimes a mile, to the nearest polling location. This might not seem far, but trying to fit the visit into a full class schedule during limited voting hours doesn’t make it easy and there is no public transportation.
Prairie View’s mayor, David Allen, has repeatedly emphasized that non-student residents are more important because they pay county and city taxes. In an early January 2020 letter, the mayor wrote to the county judge that the city of Prairie View was willing to make voting accessible to students, but in the end his decision to hold the location at a community center off campus prevailed.
Last summer, the Texas legislature also passed HB1888, which bans mobile or temporary voting centers that could help close the gap in access. This was only further proof that the state, and county officials, had no desire to protect black students’ rights to vote.
The fight for the students’ right to vote is a problem throughout the country – New Hampshire has attempted to implement state laws that would disenfranchise students, and the University of Florida had to fight to get a polling place on its campus of 52,000 students. In Prairie View, that fight hurts students, but also the black community, which has always been more vulnerable to voter suppression in this country.
That we are in the year of 2020, and battling the same struggles and political powers from 1970 is ridiculous. Targeting legislation is why the fight for student voting rights has been the theme of Prairie View, Texas, for 50 years.
But this is a fight we continue to take into our own hands. My friends and I – dubbed the Poli-Sci Posse – have organized to encourage registered students to vote and make sure they show up to the polls. Along with faculty members, we’re hoping to prove that no amount of bureaucratic loopholes will deter us from our right to vote.
The city of Prairie View might not welcome the student population as residents, even if we comprise the majority of the population. But when we march to the polls together this election day, we are marching for many generations of students who have been barred from using their voices.
Knowing that students could shift local politics, county officials denied Prairie View students the right to vote in the 1972 presidential Nixon v McGovern election by requiring proof of residential status. In 1979, that was overturned after a white student sued county officials.
Today, Prairie View is still a majority black community, but its elected officials are resoundingly white. Meanwhile, our student population of approximately 9,500 – compared with the population of approximately 6,400 non-students – keeps the county alive in many ways. We are the city’s biggest consumers, and populate local businesses. We pay tuition and fees that are invested in the university and the local government.
But we’re still denied equal access to voting.
For one, we don’t have the same early voting opportunities as other residents of the city, especially in whiter neighborhoods. Five students sued the county two years ago for not providing a location – either on campus or in the city – for early voting, similar to the one that was closer to white and older residents. Represented by the NAACP, the students demanded a precinct be set up with weekend hours. But the case was dismissed.
Meanwhile, Prairie View students won their bid for an on-campus voting center in 2013 after pointing out that the lack of access could be seen as race-based discrimination. But since 2016, the polling stations have been pushed off campus, and hardly accessible to students. To vote, students who do not have a car would have to walk at least 1,000ft from the closest part of our campus, and sometimes a mile, to the nearest polling location. This might not seem far, but trying to fit the visit into a full class schedule during limited voting hours doesn’t make it easy and there is no public transportation.
Prairie View’s mayor, David Allen, has repeatedly emphasized that non-student residents are more important because they pay county and city taxes. In an early January 2020 letter, the mayor wrote to the county judge that the city of Prairie View was willing to make voting accessible to students, but in the end his decision to hold the location at a community center off campus prevailed.
Last summer, the Texas legislature also passed HB1888, which bans mobile or temporary voting centers that could help close the gap in access. This was only further proof that the state, and county officials, had no desire to protect black students’ rights to vote.
The fight for the students’ right to vote is a problem throughout the country – New Hampshire has attempted to implement state laws that would disenfranchise students, and the University of Florida had to fight to get a polling place on its campus of 52,000 students. In Prairie View, that fight hurts students, but also the black community, which has always been more vulnerable to voter suppression in this country.
That we are in the year of 2020, and battling the same struggles and political powers from 1970 is ridiculous. Targeting legislation is why the fight for student voting rights has been the theme of Prairie View, Texas, for 50 years.
But this is a fight we continue to take into our own hands. My friends and I – dubbed the Poli-Sci Posse – have organized to encourage registered students to vote and make sure they show up to the polls. Along with faculty members, we’re hoping to prove that no amount of bureaucratic loopholes will deter us from our right to vote.
The city of Prairie View might not welcome the student population as residents, even if we comprise the majority of the population. But when we march to the polls together this election day, we are marching for many generations of students who have been barred from using their voices.
op -ed: The Iowa Caucus Has Choked Itself to Death at Last
BY William Rivers Pitt, Truthout
PUBLISHED February 4, 2020
“A Systemwide Disaster.” “Meltdown.” “Debacle.” These are the headlines coming out of Iowa after the caucus on Monday night. Maybe it had to end this way for Iowa, a state that re-elects men like Chuck Grassley and Steve King with dreary consistency, and which has now seen disaster during its caucus for the third straight time.
A Vesuvian eruption of failure and disgrace to finally and forever end the unanswerable conundrum: Why does a diverse, technologically advanced nation of 327 million people allow a rural, farm-bound state with three million people, nearly all of them white, serve as the thresher for national presidential candidates every four years? And why does that decision have to happen via a chaotic, inaccessible-for-many system that remains confusing to even the most dedicated political wonks?
Answer: Because, well, see, tradition and the agrarian fantasy we cling to and, um, retail politics, right, that, plus Iowa is lovely in February, right? Right?
There is no good reason, and now there is no reason at all. An already cumbersome caucus system got slathered with confusing new voting “tiers,” whose introduction apparently vapor-locked the higher functions of state and local election officials. Half the state of Iowa did the new-version caucus wrong, bollixing the second “tier” so thoroughly that the results are not simply late, again. The results are skewed, confused and screwed.
If you were watching cable news for results last night, you knew things were going bad when Steve Kornacki, MSNBC’s normally frenetic stats guy, began gesticulating so wildly that he looked like some flightless, bespectacled waterfowl attempting to slip the surly bonds of Earth. I finally turned it off and went to bed before Kornacki’s arms flew off, expecting greater clarity would arrive with the dawn. The sun is up, and none has been forthcoming.
The Iowa Caucus collapsed last night like a child’s cardboard fort left out in the rain. There is, at this point, every reason to believe that no sure winner will emerge from this debacle, and whoever does claim victory will be standing on very shaky ground. Pete Buttigieg declared victory before midnight based on absolutely, positively nothing. “The whole system largely broke,” stated an Iowa Democrat, as quoted by Politico reporter Elena Schneider.
There is quite a lot of bullshit to endure during even a pristinely managed Iowa caucus — the weeks-long media frenzy before the vote, the tired explanations about tradition, the overhyped conclusion which comes after an inevitable delay — all for a crummy sack of 41 delegates. A candidate can take a deep breath in California and get 41 delegates. This is farce, and the stinging humiliation of this failure should finally and forever sound the death knell for Iowa’s undeserved electoral pole position.
The ancient media cliché “Dems in disarray” does not even begin to encompass the totality of this debacle.
For a while, it appeared the whole mess could be laid at the feet of Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager. Reports indicated Mook was the mastermind behind a phone app that election officials were supposed to use to report results. When the app failed spectacularly, virtually the entire political internet pounced on him. Mook vociferously denied having anything to do with the thing, and told everyone to go bother the Iowa Democratic Party.
Right or wrong (and it looks like wrong), here we have a notorious Hillary Clinton operative who stands accused of being at the center of a failed election that virtually every poll had Bernie Sanders winning handily. Given the old and recent history of animosity between the Clinton and Sanders camps, the conspiracy theories pretty much write themselves.
But wait, there’s more! It now appears that none of the Iowa election officials running the election on the ground were actually trained to use the app. When they couldn’t figure it out, they tried to call the proffered hotline to deliver caucus results, only to find themselves on permanent hold. Some officials attempted to hand-deliver caucus results directly to Iowa Democratic officials, only to be turned away with no explanation.
This all-encompassing failure of the new “tiered” voting system, app included, was folded into the caucus by the Iowa Democratic Party with the blessing of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Once again, there is old, bad blood between Sanders and the DNC, and this mess will only reinforce the justified sense that establishment Democrats, embodied by the DNC and its cohort of Clinton holdovers, are actively trying to run the Sanders campaign off the road.
For the DNC, this black eye is the very last thing they need. A change in the debate rules to allow newly arrived billionaire candidates to participate, after every candidate of color besides Andrew Yang was chased out of the race by the old rules, has sparked broad outrage.
Compounding this is a scandal at the top of the convention host committee that has cashiered its top two officials only six short months before the convention in Milwaukee. What promised to be a chaotic and possibly brokered convention now faces the same total calamity that subsumed the Iowa caucus on Monday night.
The Buttigieg campaign released Iowa numbers to underscore how well they performed, claiming they’d won, and the Sanders campaign did likewise, sharing numbers that showed Sanders at the top. In contrast, the Biden campaign is keeping its head down, likely thrilled that what may well have been a poor showing has been obscured by this mess. None of it matters, because any results have been tainted. “Train wreck” is too kind a euphemism.
The candidates have already headed to New Hampshire, whose standard-practice primary next week will hopefully come off with a measurable level of competence. Iowa officials are promising results at some point on Tuesday, but those results will likely be so muddled and corrupted as to be utterly meaningless.
Donald Trump won the Iowa Democratic caucus on Monday night. You don’t have to wait for evidence of this. The State of the Union address is tonight, and if you think Trump won’t be gloating even as he weaponizes this catastrophe — “These are the people you want running your health care?” — you have not been paying attention. Between this and his inevitable impeachment acquittal in the Senate tomorrow, the man will be positively bursting at the seams.
At this rate, Trump won’t have to leave the White House to secure victory in November. “Dems in disarray” will do all the heavy lifting for him, and they will have no one but themselves to blame. The Iowa Caucus needed to be a showcase of Democratic competence, if only to justify its presence at the head of the line.
Instead, it was the most humiliating and dispiriting political event in modern election memory. The convention riot in 1968 was the fault of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s skull-cracking cops, and 2000 belongs to the Supreme Court. This one is all Democrats, and the sting of it will not be subsiding anytime soon.
Thanks for nothing, Iowa.
A Vesuvian eruption of failure and disgrace to finally and forever end the unanswerable conundrum: Why does a diverse, technologically advanced nation of 327 million people allow a rural, farm-bound state with three million people, nearly all of them white, serve as the thresher for national presidential candidates every four years? And why does that decision have to happen via a chaotic, inaccessible-for-many system that remains confusing to even the most dedicated political wonks?
Answer: Because, well, see, tradition and the agrarian fantasy we cling to and, um, retail politics, right, that, plus Iowa is lovely in February, right? Right?
There is no good reason, and now there is no reason at all. An already cumbersome caucus system got slathered with confusing new voting “tiers,” whose introduction apparently vapor-locked the higher functions of state and local election officials. Half the state of Iowa did the new-version caucus wrong, bollixing the second “tier” so thoroughly that the results are not simply late, again. The results are skewed, confused and screwed.
If you were watching cable news for results last night, you knew things were going bad when Steve Kornacki, MSNBC’s normally frenetic stats guy, began gesticulating so wildly that he looked like some flightless, bespectacled waterfowl attempting to slip the surly bonds of Earth. I finally turned it off and went to bed before Kornacki’s arms flew off, expecting greater clarity would arrive with the dawn. The sun is up, and none has been forthcoming.
The Iowa Caucus collapsed last night like a child’s cardboard fort left out in the rain. There is, at this point, every reason to believe that no sure winner will emerge from this debacle, and whoever does claim victory will be standing on very shaky ground. Pete Buttigieg declared victory before midnight based on absolutely, positively nothing. “The whole system largely broke,” stated an Iowa Democrat, as quoted by Politico reporter Elena Schneider.
There is quite a lot of bullshit to endure during even a pristinely managed Iowa caucus — the weeks-long media frenzy before the vote, the tired explanations about tradition, the overhyped conclusion which comes after an inevitable delay — all for a crummy sack of 41 delegates. A candidate can take a deep breath in California and get 41 delegates. This is farce, and the stinging humiliation of this failure should finally and forever sound the death knell for Iowa’s undeserved electoral pole position.
The ancient media cliché “Dems in disarray” does not even begin to encompass the totality of this debacle.
For a while, it appeared the whole mess could be laid at the feet of Robby Mook, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign manager. Reports indicated Mook was the mastermind behind a phone app that election officials were supposed to use to report results. When the app failed spectacularly, virtually the entire political internet pounced on him. Mook vociferously denied having anything to do with the thing, and told everyone to go bother the Iowa Democratic Party.
Right or wrong (and it looks like wrong), here we have a notorious Hillary Clinton operative who stands accused of being at the center of a failed election that virtually every poll had Bernie Sanders winning handily. Given the old and recent history of animosity between the Clinton and Sanders camps, the conspiracy theories pretty much write themselves.
But wait, there’s more! It now appears that none of the Iowa election officials running the election on the ground were actually trained to use the app. When they couldn’t figure it out, they tried to call the proffered hotline to deliver caucus results, only to find themselves on permanent hold. Some officials attempted to hand-deliver caucus results directly to Iowa Democratic officials, only to be turned away with no explanation.
This all-encompassing failure of the new “tiered” voting system, app included, was folded into the caucus by the Iowa Democratic Party with the blessing of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Once again, there is old, bad blood between Sanders and the DNC, and this mess will only reinforce the justified sense that establishment Democrats, embodied by the DNC and its cohort of Clinton holdovers, are actively trying to run the Sanders campaign off the road.
For the DNC, this black eye is the very last thing they need. A change in the debate rules to allow newly arrived billionaire candidates to participate, after every candidate of color besides Andrew Yang was chased out of the race by the old rules, has sparked broad outrage.
Compounding this is a scandal at the top of the convention host committee that has cashiered its top two officials only six short months before the convention in Milwaukee. What promised to be a chaotic and possibly brokered convention now faces the same total calamity that subsumed the Iowa caucus on Monday night.
The Buttigieg campaign released Iowa numbers to underscore how well they performed, claiming they’d won, and the Sanders campaign did likewise, sharing numbers that showed Sanders at the top. In contrast, the Biden campaign is keeping its head down, likely thrilled that what may well have been a poor showing has been obscured by this mess. None of it matters, because any results have been tainted. “Train wreck” is too kind a euphemism.
The candidates have already headed to New Hampshire, whose standard-practice primary next week will hopefully come off with a measurable level of competence. Iowa officials are promising results at some point on Tuesday, but those results will likely be so muddled and corrupted as to be utterly meaningless.
Donald Trump won the Iowa Democratic caucus on Monday night. You don’t have to wait for evidence of this. The State of the Union address is tonight, and if you think Trump won’t be gloating even as he weaponizes this catastrophe — “These are the people you want running your health care?” — you have not been paying attention. Between this and his inevitable impeachment acquittal in the Senate tomorrow, the man will be positively bursting at the seams.
At this rate, Trump won’t have to leave the White House to secure victory in November. “Dems in disarray” will do all the heavy lifting for him, and they will have no one but themselves to blame. The Iowa Caucus needed to be a showcase of Democratic competence, if only to justify its presence at the head of the line.
Instead, it was the most humiliating and dispiriting political event in modern election memory. The convention riot in 1968 was the fault of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s skull-cracking cops, and 2000 belongs to the Supreme Court. This one is all Democrats, and the sting of it will not be subsiding anytime soon.
Thanks for nothing, Iowa.
a bullshit election!!!
The fight to vote
US elections 2020
'You basically are nothing': the Americans shut out of the Iowa caucuses
Hundreds of thousands of Iowans are barred from the Iowa caucus because of physical and legal barriers
Sam Levine in Des Moines, Iowa
the guardian
Mon 3 Feb 2020 01.00 EST
Emmanuel Smith, who has brittle bone disease, said their caucuses had to travel over an hour each way to caucus in 2016. Photograph: Nick Rohlman/Nick Rohlman/for The Guardian
As Democratic candidates began a last minute blitz across Iowa on Friday evening, nearly a dozen men gathered in a cavernous YMCA meeting room in downtown Des Moines to have a conversation that felt a universe removed from the 2020 race.
They were part of one of the largest groups shut out of Monday’s caucus: people with felony convictions. Iowans are barred from voting for life once they commit a felony, and people can’t vote even if they committed a crime decades ago. The state’s policy, one of the strictest in the country, means more than 42,000 Iowans out of prison won’t have a say in choosing a presidential candidate. Almost 10% of the black voting age population can’t vote because of a felony conviction.
For decades, the Iowa caucuses have marked the beginning of the presidential primary, and often set the tone for the election year. But the event has come under increasing scrutiny for giving some voters – namely white and wealthy Iowans – outsized power in choosing the president in a state that’s already more than 90% white. Meanwhile, the physical and legal barriers built into the structure of the caucuses leave out large swaths of the population, whether they are disabled, work long hours, or were once convicted of a crime.
“When you know you can’t vote, you remove a certain segment of people from the political process,” said Mendoor Smith, one of the participants at the two hour meeting, organized by IMAGE 4 Lives, a mentorship and support group founded by Robert Pate, a former felon. “If they’re removed from the process, then they’re not learning anything. If they have children, then they’re not telling their children anything.”
Smith, 46, who got his bachelor’s degree after getting released from prison said he had been closely following the caucuses and has been going to rallies and encouraging others to caucus, even though he can’t.
A few miles north, Gretchen Brown-Waech was getting ready for a historic caucus designed to serve another community often sidelined in the political dialogue: the 300,000 voting-age Iowans with disabilities.
For decades the population has struggled to take part in the caucuses, which requires Iowans to physically show up at a location and spend hours choosing a candidate. Brown-Waech, who is deaf, first tried to caucus in the 1990s, but when people started talking over each other, she found it overwhelming and left early. She didn’t try again until 2016 with the help of a friend because she felt the choice was so important.
Now, on Monday, after pressing state Democratic party officials, Brown-Waech is leading the first ever Iowa caucus in American Sign Language. She expects about 20 people to come to the event on Monday, some from hours away, including a deaf couple in their 60s that has never voted. “Anytime anyone who is not part of the mainstream is shut out of the political process, our country loses,” said Brown-Waech. “If we don’t design something for people on the margins, someone will always be left out.”
Since 2016, advocates have been pushing the Iowa Democratic party to address obstacles like transportation, navigating crowded spaces, and seating that people with disabilities face to caucusing. The party has introduced some solutions – like allowing some groups to hold satellite caucuses in their homes or accessible locales.
“We’ve made it easier for Iowans to request accommodations, get in the room faster, and caucus at a site that’s more convenient to them,” said Mandy McClure, a spokesperson for the Iowa Democratic party, in a statement. “Expanding participation has been at the heart of all of these changes.”
But many advocates say the party’s approach has been abysmal, noting that a staffer handling disability outreach wasn’t hired until January.
“Because there’s such a lack of understanding about this constituency, not only in the Democratic party, but just systematically, there’s a reticence to engage in the process of making spaces more inclusive and accessible,” said Reyma McDeid, executive director of the Central Iowa Center for Independent Living. “The thought is, ‘it’s going to be confusing, it’s going to be expensive. It’s going to be time consuming. Let’s just put this off.’”
That places undue burden on people with disabilities to create their own caucuses, said Emmanuel Smith, a disability rights advocate who works at Disability Rights Iowa. Smith, who has brittle bone disease and uses an electric wheelchair, said they had to travel over an hour each way to caucus in 2016.
This year, Smith is hosting a caucus event at their house. But they’ve had to spend time learning the rules for caucuses and on Monday, they will have to leave work early to set up. “The very people who need their voices heard the most in our democratic system are facing all these barriers. They’re often the populations that are going to be directly threatened or bolstered by the policies that get implemented,” Smith said.
As Monday approached, Brown-Waech worked on the final touches to the American Sign Language caucus she was planning. She was making sure that people knew to arrive on time and wanted to make a video explaining how it would work for the attendees, but had yet to receive their information from the state Democratic party.
Brown-Waech is hoping her single ASL caucus will evolve to be 15 or 20 during the next time around. But for the men in YMCA room, the ability to participate remains out of reach.
While Iowa governor Kim Reynolds, a Republican, supports a constitutional amendment to end the policy, a push to put it on the ballot failed last year. Reynolds has declined to follow the lead of the governors of Kentucky and Virginia in issuing an executive order to automatically restore voting rights to some people with felonies once they complete their sentences. Currently, the only way for someone to have their voting rights restored is to have Reynolds approve their right to vote on an individual basis after they’ve completed their sentences entirely, including probation and parole.
Over the last month, Reynolds’ office has reviewed more than 400 applications, a sliver of the population in question. Until there’s a sweeping reform, Iowa will continue to leave out tens of thousands of people. People like Aundrey Roberts, 44, who was released in 2017 and has never voted in his life.
“It sends the message that once you’re a felon you basically are nothing,” he said.
They were part of one of the largest groups shut out of Monday’s caucus: people with felony convictions. Iowans are barred from voting for life once they commit a felony, and people can’t vote even if they committed a crime decades ago. The state’s policy, one of the strictest in the country, means more than 42,000 Iowans out of prison won’t have a say in choosing a presidential candidate. Almost 10% of the black voting age population can’t vote because of a felony conviction.
For decades, the Iowa caucuses have marked the beginning of the presidential primary, and often set the tone for the election year. But the event has come under increasing scrutiny for giving some voters – namely white and wealthy Iowans – outsized power in choosing the president in a state that’s already more than 90% white. Meanwhile, the physical and legal barriers built into the structure of the caucuses leave out large swaths of the population, whether they are disabled, work long hours, or were once convicted of a crime.
“When you know you can’t vote, you remove a certain segment of people from the political process,” said Mendoor Smith, one of the participants at the two hour meeting, organized by IMAGE 4 Lives, a mentorship and support group founded by Robert Pate, a former felon. “If they’re removed from the process, then they’re not learning anything. If they have children, then they’re not telling their children anything.”
Smith, 46, who got his bachelor’s degree after getting released from prison said he had been closely following the caucuses and has been going to rallies and encouraging others to caucus, even though he can’t.
A few miles north, Gretchen Brown-Waech was getting ready for a historic caucus designed to serve another community often sidelined in the political dialogue: the 300,000 voting-age Iowans with disabilities.
For decades the population has struggled to take part in the caucuses, which requires Iowans to physically show up at a location and spend hours choosing a candidate. Brown-Waech, who is deaf, first tried to caucus in the 1990s, but when people started talking over each other, she found it overwhelming and left early. She didn’t try again until 2016 with the help of a friend because she felt the choice was so important.
Now, on Monday, after pressing state Democratic party officials, Brown-Waech is leading the first ever Iowa caucus in American Sign Language. She expects about 20 people to come to the event on Monday, some from hours away, including a deaf couple in their 60s that has never voted. “Anytime anyone who is not part of the mainstream is shut out of the political process, our country loses,” said Brown-Waech. “If we don’t design something for people on the margins, someone will always be left out.”
Since 2016, advocates have been pushing the Iowa Democratic party to address obstacles like transportation, navigating crowded spaces, and seating that people with disabilities face to caucusing. The party has introduced some solutions – like allowing some groups to hold satellite caucuses in their homes or accessible locales.
“We’ve made it easier for Iowans to request accommodations, get in the room faster, and caucus at a site that’s more convenient to them,” said Mandy McClure, a spokesperson for the Iowa Democratic party, in a statement. “Expanding participation has been at the heart of all of these changes.”
But many advocates say the party’s approach has been abysmal, noting that a staffer handling disability outreach wasn’t hired until January.
“Because there’s such a lack of understanding about this constituency, not only in the Democratic party, but just systematically, there’s a reticence to engage in the process of making spaces more inclusive and accessible,” said Reyma McDeid, executive director of the Central Iowa Center for Independent Living. “The thought is, ‘it’s going to be confusing, it’s going to be expensive. It’s going to be time consuming. Let’s just put this off.’”
That places undue burden on people with disabilities to create their own caucuses, said Emmanuel Smith, a disability rights advocate who works at Disability Rights Iowa. Smith, who has brittle bone disease and uses an electric wheelchair, said they had to travel over an hour each way to caucus in 2016.
This year, Smith is hosting a caucus event at their house. But they’ve had to spend time learning the rules for caucuses and on Monday, they will have to leave work early to set up. “The very people who need their voices heard the most in our democratic system are facing all these barriers. They’re often the populations that are going to be directly threatened or bolstered by the policies that get implemented,” Smith said.
As Monday approached, Brown-Waech worked on the final touches to the American Sign Language caucus she was planning. She was making sure that people knew to arrive on time and wanted to make a video explaining how it would work for the attendees, but had yet to receive their information from the state Democratic party.
Brown-Waech is hoping her single ASL caucus will evolve to be 15 or 20 during the next time around. But for the men in YMCA room, the ability to participate remains out of reach.
While Iowa governor Kim Reynolds, a Republican, supports a constitutional amendment to end the policy, a push to put it on the ballot failed last year. Reynolds has declined to follow the lead of the governors of Kentucky and Virginia in issuing an executive order to automatically restore voting rights to some people with felonies once they complete their sentences. Currently, the only way for someone to have their voting rights restored is to have Reynolds approve their right to vote on an individual basis after they’ve completed their sentences entirely, including probation and parole.
Over the last month, Reynolds’ office has reviewed more than 400 applications, a sliver of the population in question. Until there’s a sweeping reform, Iowa will continue to leave out tens of thousands of people. People like Aundrey Roberts, 44, who was released in 2017 and has never voted in his life.
“It sends the message that once you’re a felon you basically are nothing,” he said.
The fight to vote
Arizona
Arizona Republicans discriminated against minority voters, court rules
Ruling says Republican effort to restrict third-party ballot collection appeared to be part of effort to suppress black, Hispanic and Native American votes
Sam Levine
the guardian
Mon 27 Jan 2020 17.13 EST
A federal court has ruled Arizona Republicans’ ban on mail-in ballots is illegal and unconstitutional, calling it intentionally discriminatory toward people of color, who already face increased barriers to voting.
The ruling is a major victory for the Democratic party, which filed the suit, and will likely make it easier for minorities to get their ballots counted in the largely red state.
Four years ago, Arizona Republicans made it a felony, punishable by prison time, for third-party groups to collect mail-in ballots during elections – a process often called “ballot harvesting.”
Marginalized communities in the state may rely more on ballot harvesting, the court noted. Native Americans, for example, benefit significantly from third-party ballot collection efforts because just 18% of registered voters have mail service at home, and reservations can be far from polling stations. Some minority communities also have widespread distrust in the mailing system: in San Luis, a city that is 98% Hispanic, a major highway separates 13,000 residents from the nearest post office.
“The adverse impact on minority communities is substantial. Without ‘access to reliable and secure mail services,’ and without reliable transportation, many minority voters ‘prefer instead to give their ballots to a volunteer’,” the court said. And Hispanics and Native Americans make up nearly 37% of the state’s population – promising to be a key demographic in this year’s presidential election.
The ruling noted that the Republican effort to restrict third-party ballot collection appeared to be part of a longstanding effort to suppress black, Hispanic and Native American votes. Republicans passed a similar law in 2011, but abandoned the effort after a state election official admitted that the measure was designed to target voting activity in Hispanic areas.
The court also struck down a separate state policy that required election officials to throw out ballots if someone voted in the wrong precinct. But voters faced some egregious challenges. At times they were directed to the wrong precinct, without being told their vote wouldn’t count, the court noted. And Arizona changes its polling locations with unusual frequency and rejected 38,355 ballots from people who voted in the wrong place between 2008 to 2016. (Minority voters were more than twice as likely than their white counterparts to cast a ballot out of their precinct.)
Arizona has a long history of voter discrimination and until 2013 was required to submit any voting changes to the federal government for approval under a provision in the Voting Rights Act. But after the supreme court gutted that provision, Arizona was free to implement changes – like the discriminatory ballot harvesting ban – without federal oversight.
Republicans have claimed that several of those changes, including the Arizona ballot harvesting ban, were created to avoid voter fraud. But voter fraud is exceedingly rare in the United States, and there was no evidence it was connected to ballot collection in Arizona.
“No one has ever found a case of voter fraud connected to third-party ballot collection in Arizona,” the court wrote. “This has not been for want of trying.”
The ruling is a major victory for the Democratic party, which filed the suit, and will likely make it easier for minorities to get their ballots counted in the largely red state.
Four years ago, Arizona Republicans made it a felony, punishable by prison time, for third-party groups to collect mail-in ballots during elections – a process often called “ballot harvesting.”
Marginalized communities in the state may rely more on ballot harvesting, the court noted. Native Americans, for example, benefit significantly from third-party ballot collection efforts because just 18% of registered voters have mail service at home, and reservations can be far from polling stations. Some minority communities also have widespread distrust in the mailing system: in San Luis, a city that is 98% Hispanic, a major highway separates 13,000 residents from the nearest post office.
“The adverse impact on minority communities is substantial. Without ‘access to reliable and secure mail services,’ and without reliable transportation, many minority voters ‘prefer instead to give their ballots to a volunteer’,” the court said. And Hispanics and Native Americans make up nearly 37% of the state’s population – promising to be a key demographic in this year’s presidential election.
The ruling noted that the Republican effort to restrict third-party ballot collection appeared to be part of a longstanding effort to suppress black, Hispanic and Native American votes. Republicans passed a similar law in 2011, but abandoned the effort after a state election official admitted that the measure was designed to target voting activity in Hispanic areas.
The court also struck down a separate state policy that required election officials to throw out ballots if someone voted in the wrong precinct. But voters faced some egregious challenges. At times they were directed to the wrong precinct, without being told their vote wouldn’t count, the court noted. And Arizona changes its polling locations with unusual frequency and rejected 38,355 ballots from people who voted in the wrong place between 2008 to 2016. (Minority voters were more than twice as likely than their white counterparts to cast a ballot out of their precinct.)
Arizona has a long history of voter discrimination and until 2013 was required to submit any voting changes to the federal government for approval under a provision in the Voting Rights Act. But after the supreme court gutted that provision, Arizona was free to implement changes – like the discriminatory ballot harvesting ban – without federal oversight.
Republicans have claimed that several of those changes, including the Arizona ballot harvesting ban, were created to avoid voter fraud. But voter fraud is exceedingly rare in the United States, and there was no evidence it was connected to ballot collection in Arizona.
“No one has ever found a case of voter fraud connected to third-party ballot collection in Arizona,” the court wrote. “This has not been for want of trying.”
Here are the real reasons so many people don’t vote
Andrew Joseph Pegoda, The Conversation - alternet
January 17, 2020
At least 40% to 90% of American voters stay home during elections, evidence that low voter turnout for both national and local elections is a serious problem throughout the United States.
With the 2020 presidential election approaching, directives for people to “get out and vote” will be firing up again.
Some people might be indifferent or simply not care, but many who forgo voting have legitimate reasons.
Over the past decade, through my extensive research on civil rights and oppression, through my observations of social media comments and through my conversations with hundreds of college students, I have concluded that such reasons are both important and, generally, unnoticed.
1. Voter suppression
Republican-led efforts to diminish participation in voting and voter registration have greatly contributed to the number of nonvoters.
Since 2010, 25 states have adopted measures specifically aimed at making voting more difficult. Such measures include additional voter identification requirements.
Sometimes lawmakers said these were necessary to curb illegal voting, which research shows is an all-but-nonexistent problem.
Some counties and states have also created confusion and uncertainty about how to initially register or re-register after a voter has moved.
In other cases, people might not know where to vote, due to the distribution of deliberately false information.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 that key aspects of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were unconstitutional, states have closed over 1,000 polling locations, half of these in Texas.
2. Personal choice
Some people decide to forgo voting.
I hear again and again that sometimes people make such choices because they were intimidated by friends, by family members or by people at polling places.
When facing the complexities of races with dozens of candidates and complicated issues, others say they don’t feel they know enough to make informed decisions.
People have also told me they worry about feeling personally responsible if they vote for a candidate or position and there are unforeseen consequences, such as cuts to important aid programs. Members of any group, but especially those of underrepresented groups, may long to vote for desirable candidates but not feel that current candidates offer the possibility that anything will really change.
Individuals have shared with me that they have not voted because they do not trust a nation that they feel has lied and perpetuated systemic abuse against minorities, aggravated further by widespread gerrymandering and for presidential elections, by an Electoral College system that doesn’t weigh each vote the same.
In France and India, for example, people who dislike all of the candidates can formally “vote” without endorsing any candidate by selecting “none of the above.” Not having this option in the U.S. might affect turnout, too.
3. Obstacles to access
For others, voting may simply be too difficult.
I often hear of people who – even with early voting or absentee options – cannot vote because they lack transportation. They are homeless. They lack child care. They are disabled. They work, go to school and live in different cities.
This is even more applicable for the 7 to 8 million in the U.S. who hold multiple jobs. Laws guarantee time off for voting but aren’t enforceable and aren’t always workable.
Such people are effectively disenfranchised.
4. Lack of rights
Only nonincarcerated, mentally competent, registered citizens of age can vote.
Based on 2015 data, the right to vote was not extended to an over 13 million people with green cards, work visas or refugee status. Given the total population of people 18 and older exceeded 248 million in 2015, one out of every 20 adults living, working and spending money in the U.S. was not eligible to vote.
Using vague and inconsistent language, states have also worked to deny disabled or mentally ill people a political voice. This affects potentially over a million people nationwide.
As discussed in the books “The New Jim Crow” and in “Race, Incarceration and American Values,” an additional 6 million Americans cannot vote because of felony convictions, an issue that disproportionately affects black people. In some states, this disenfranchisement remains in effect for life.
The future
Given the legitimacy of reasons why they don’t participate, nonvoters certainly shouldn’t be scolded with, “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.” Or with even harsher words, as one friend on Facebook put it: “If you don’t vote, everything wrong in the world is your fault.”
People long to be heard and deserve fair representation. Instead of bashing nonvoters, I recommend taking some deep breaths and initiating friendly conversations. Listen and learn. At a time when public trust in government is at historic lows, such conversations might even encourage someone to demand a voice.
With the 2020 presidential election approaching, directives for people to “get out and vote” will be firing up again.
Some people might be indifferent or simply not care, but many who forgo voting have legitimate reasons.
Over the past decade, through my extensive research on civil rights and oppression, through my observations of social media comments and through my conversations with hundreds of college students, I have concluded that such reasons are both important and, generally, unnoticed.
1. Voter suppression
Republican-led efforts to diminish participation in voting and voter registration have greatly contributed to the number of nonvoters.
Since 2010, 25 states have adopted measures specifically aimed at making voting more difficult. Such measures include additional voter identification requirements.
Sometimes lawmakers said these were necessary to curb illegal voting, which research shows is an all-but-nonexistent problem.
Some counties and states have also created confusion and uncertainty about how to initially register or re-register after a voter has moved.
In other cases, people might not know where to vote, due to the distribution of deliberately false information.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 that key aspects of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were unconstitutional, states have closed over 1,000 polling locations, half of these in Texas.
2. Personal choice
Some people decide to forgo voting.
I hear again and again that sometimes people make such choices because they were intimidated by friends, by family members or by people at polling places.
When facing the complexities of races with dozens of candidates and complicated issues, others say they don’t feel they know enough to make informed decisions.
People have also told me they worry about feeling personally responsible if they vote for a candidate or position and there are unforeseen consequences, such as cuts to important aid programs. Members of any group, but especially those of underrepresented groups, may long to vote for desirable candidates but not feel that current candidates offer the possibility that anything will really change.
Individuals have shared with me that they have not voted because they do not trust a nation that they feel has lied and perpetuated systemic abuse against minorities, aggravated further by widespread gerrymandering and for presidential elections, by an Electoral College system that doesn’t weigh each vote the same.
In France and India, for example, people who dislike all of the candidates can formally “vote” without endorsing any candidate by selecting “none of the above.” Not having this option in the U.S. might affect turnout, too.
3. Obstacles to access
For others, voting may simply be too difficult.
I often hear of people who – even with early voting or absentee options – cannot vote because they lack transportation. They are homeless. They lack child care. They are disabled. They work, go to school and live in different cities.
This is even more applicable for the 7 to 8 million in the U.S. who hold multiple jobs. Laws guarantee time off for voting but aren’t enforceable and aren’t always workable.
Such people are effectively disenfranchised.
4. Lack of rights
Only nonincarcerated, mentally competent, registered citizens of age can vote.
Based on 2015 data, the right to vote was not extended to an over 13 million people with green cards, work visas or refugee status. Given the total population of people 18 and older exceeded 248 million in 2015, one out of every 20 adults living, working and spending money in the U.S. was not eligible to vote.
Using vague and inconsistent language, states have also worked to deny disabled or mentally ill people a political voice. This affects potentially over a million people nationwide.
As discussed in the books “The New Jim Crow” and in “Race, Incarceration and American Values,” an additional 6 million Americans cannot vote because of felony convictions, an issue that disproportionately affects black people. In some states, this disenfranchisement remains in effect for life.
The future
Given the legitimacy of reasons why they don’t participate, nonvoters certainly shouldn’t be scolded with, “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.” Or with even harsher words, as one friend on Facebook put it: “If you don’t vote, everything wrong in the world is your fault.”
People long to be heard and deserve fair representation. Instead of bashing nonvoters, I recommend taking some deep breaths and initiating friendly conversations. Listen and learn. At a time when public trust in government is at historic lows, such conversations might even encourage someone to demand a voice.
fighting the fascists!!!
Florida Republicans’ Voter Suppression Scheme May Backfire
Blue counties are restoring ex-felons’ voting rights. Red counties are leaving them disenfranchised.
By MARK JOSEPH STERN - slate
JAN 07, 20204:38 PM
After Floridians approved an initiative to restore voting rights to approximately 1.4 million people with felony convictions, Republican lawmakers immediately moved to sabotage the historic effort. The GOP-controlled legislature passed a law along party lines that effectively required a poll tax from a majority of those poised to regain their right to vote. The GOP’s brazenly partisan measure, however, appears to be backfiring. Democratic counties are taking advantage of a compromise buried in the statute to give residents their voting rights. Meanwhile, Republican counties are taking a hard line against suffrage—meaning a substantial majority of Floridians who do manage to register to vote are likely to be Democrats.
For more than a year, Florida’s politicians have been embroiled in a fight over Amendment 4, which 65 percent of Florida voters approved in 2018. Amendment 4 abolished a Jim Crow era law that permanently stripped the right to vote from anyone convicted of a felony. But Florida Republicans quickly kneecapped it, passing a bill that forced individuals to pay all fines and fees associated with their sentences before regaining their voting rights. This legislative assault on Amendment 4 threatened to take away the franchise from more than 1.1 million Floridians; the state is a pioneer of cash register justice, imposing a mind-boggling array of “user fees” on defendants to finance its criminal justice system.
Following immense backlash from Democrats and civil rights advocates, though, legislators added a conciliatory section to their bill. It allowed courts to modify “the original sentencing order to no longer require completion” of the initial sentence. In other words, courts can waive fines and fees imposed as part of a sentence. By doing so, courts can clear the way for former felons to complete their sentences and immediately become eligible to vote.
To implement this section, Florida’s four most populous counties created “rocket dockets” to waive fines and fees en masse. Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Hillsborough—which, together, make up more than a third of the state’s population—launched programs to identify individuals who owe fines and fees and fast-track their cases to the courts. A judge then waives their financial obligations (except restitution to victims) and provides them with a court order declaring their sentences complete. This order reestablishes their right to vote. Courts, prosecutors, and public defenders all support these programs, and celebrity activist John Legend helped to publicize them by sitting in on a “rocket docket” session. Local officials provide individuals with voter registration forms as soon as their fines and fees are waived.
As WLRN pointed out on Sunday, these four counties’ swift action raises the possibility that Republicans’ plan to undercut Amendment 4 may backfire. There is little doubt that GOP legislators opposed the amendment because they feared it would disproportionately enfranchise Democrats. But their bill has led to a bizarre system in which Democratic counties are reenfranchising their voters while Republican-majority counties are not. Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Hillsborough all overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016. They are Democratic strongholds in a state with notoriously close elections. In 2016, Trump beat Clinton by about 113,000 votes. Meanwhile, Miami-Dade hopes to grant about 150,000 former felons the right to vote. The reenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of voters in primarily Democratic counties may very well swing the 2020 election.
Trump probably needs to win Florida, with its 29 electoral votes, in order to win in November. That is why he has been relentlessly campaigning there and even made the state his legal home. But there are signs of trouble. Former Republican Gov. Rick Scott unseated Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson by just 10,333 votes out of 8.19 million despite dramatically outspending him. Since Trump took office, his approval rating in Florida has plummeted by 23 percentage points; in December, his net approval dipped underwater in the state.
Yet no Republican counties have initiated any kind of program to help voters take advantage of Amendment 4. As Kathryn DePalo-Gould, a political science professor at Florida International University, told WLRN, the effect of this asymmetry “could be dramatic,” since “some of these very, very red counties who had huge turnouts for Trump in 2016 could be missing out on some of these felons.”
A Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald analysis found that 52 percent of Floridians who lost their voting rights because of a felony conviction were Democrats. A third were independents, while just 14 percent were Republicans. In recent years, black voters were five times more likely to lose their voting rights than white voters; Democrats were three times more likely to lose their voting rights than Republicans. Overall, the majority of former felons in the state are white.
Given these odds, GOP-controlled counties will undoubtedly suppress the votes of some Democratic ex-felons within their borders. But they may well depress their own turnout numbers in a tight election year while their neighbors gain voting power.
In a better world, we would not view formerly incarcerated people in such starkly partisan terms. But that is not the world Republicans created when they mangled Amendment 4. Instead, they left ex-felons’ fundamental rights at the mercy of individual counties. And they did not, it seems, foresee the fact that this scheme might disenfranchise their own supporters.
For more than a year, Florida’s politicians have been embroiled in a fight over Amendment 4, which 65 percent of Florida voters approved in 2018. Amendment 4 abolished a Jim Crow era law that permanently stripped the right to vote from anyone convicted of a felony. But Florida Republicans quickly kneecapped it, passing a bill that forced individuals to pay all fines and fees associated with their sentences before regaining their voting rights. This legislative assault on Amendment 4 threatened to take away the franchise from more than 1.1 million Floridians; the state is a pioneer of cash register justice, imposing a mind-boggling array of “user fees” on defendants to finance its criminal justice system.
Following immense backlash from Democrats and civil rights advocates, though, legislators added a conciliatory section to their bill. It allowed courts to modify “the original sentencing order to no longer require completion” of the initial sentence. In other words, courts can waive fines and fees imposed as part of a sentence. By doing so, courts can clear the way for former felons to complete their sentences and immediately become eligible to vote.
To implement this section, Florida’s four most populous counties created “rocket dockets” to waive fines and fees en masse. Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Hillsborough—which, together, make up more than a third of the state’s population—launched programs to identify individuals who owe fines and fees and fast-track their cases to the courts. A judge then waives their financial obligations (except restitution to victims) and provides them with a court order declaring their sentences complete. This order reestablishes their right to vote. Courts, prosecutors, and public defenders all support these programs, and celebrity activist John Legend helped to publicize them by sitting in on a “rocket docket” session. Local officials provide individuals with voter registration forms as soon as their fines and fees are waived.
As WLRN pointed out on Sunday, these four counties’ swift action raises the possibility that Republicans’ plan to undercut Amendment 4 may backfire. There is little doubt that GOP legislators opposed the amendment because they feared it would disproportionately enfranchise Democrats. But their bill has led to a bizarre system in which Democratic counties are reenfranchising their voters while Republican-majority counties are not. Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, and Hillsborough all overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016. They are Democratic strongholds in a state with notoriously close elections. In 2016, Trump beat Clinton by about 113,000 votes. Meanwhile, Miami-Dade hopes to grant about 150,000 former felons the right to vote. The reenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of voters in primarily Democratic counties may very well swing the 2020 election.
Trump probably needs to win Florida, with its 29 electoral votes, in order to win in November. That is why he has been relentlessly campaigning there and even made the state his legal home. But there are signs of trouble. Former Republican Gov. Rick Scott unseated Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson by just 10,333 votes out of 8.19 million despite dramatically outspending him. Since Trump took office, his approval rating in Florida has plummeted by 23 percentage points; in December, his net approval dipped underwater in the state.
Yet no Republican counties have initiated any kind of program to help voters take advantage of Amendment 4. As Kathryn DePalo-Gould, a political science professor at Florida International University, told WLRN, the effect of this asymmetry “could be dramatic,” since “some of these very, very red counties who had huge turnouts for Trump in 2016 could be missing out on some of these felons.”
A Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald analysis found that 52 percent of Floridians who lost their voting rights because of a felony conviction were Democrats. A third were independents, while just 14 percent were Republicans. In recent years, black voters were five times more likely to lose their voting rights than white voters; Democrats were three times more likely to lose their voting rights than Republicans. Overall, the majority of former felons in the state are white.
Given these odds, GOP-controlled counties will undoubtedly suppress the votes of some Democratic ex-felons within their borders. But they may well depress their own turnout numbers in a tight election year while their neighbors gain voting power.
In a better world, we would not view formerly incarcerated people in such starkly partisan terms. But that is not the world Republicans created when they mangled Amendment 4. Instead, they left ex-felons’ fundamental rights at the mercy of individual counties. And they did not, it seems, foresee the fact that this scheme might disenfranchise their own supporters.
PART OF THE SERIES: Voting Wrongs
Voter Suppression Exposes the Paradox of Black Citizenship in a Racist Society
BY William C. Anderson, Truthout
PUBLISHED December 28, 2019
Back citizenship has always been up for debate in the United States. The conditions in which Black people live — or survive — are a testament to this. Whether rich or poor, Black people live under the constant threat of state violence. There is no escape from it, and any Black person can fall victim to it. For many, citizenship can feel like a saving grace, despite continually being subject to constant threats. But the category of citizenship itself is a contradiction when we take Black people’s past and present circumstances into consideration. The state invalidates Black citizenship through violence in many ways. One specific way the state reveals this paradox is through voter suppression.
For Black America, gaining the right to vote has never been a complete event. Black suffrage following “emancipation” from slavery never completely materialized, despite constitutional amendments and reforms guaranteeing Black men, and later Black women, the right to vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is seen as a momentous turning point for Black people and while its impact should not be lost on us, our rights have been under attack ever since. Not to mention, following that legislation, many more reforms have had to be implemented to continue trying to uphold Black people’s supposed right to vote. A “right” that requires consistent protection through reform begins to feel like a farce — especially when, despite those reforms, exercising that right remains a constant struggle.
More clarity on the matter comes when we fully take the history of Black citizenship into account. The Dred Scott case is one of many examples from the past that still has real life implications today. Scott was an enslaved man who sued for his freedom in 1847 and lost. That infamous decision stated that Black people were not and could not be citizens. A key takeaway here is that since Scott was not a citizen, he didn’t have the right to sue, and he didn’t have the right to be free. The ruling stated that Black people “were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.” It’s hard to argue that’s not still the case now.
Voting is supposed to be the right of a citizen and is widely accepted as a human right throughout the world. But for Black people, being designated either citizen or human has never been a guarantee. Therefore, by extension, Black people can gather that efforts to suppress the Black vote are much deeper than partisan politics. Voter suppression is a modern-day reminder that Black people have still not been granted full citizenship. Black voters are especially susceptible to being “purged,” a process of removal where names can be removed from voter rolls due to ineligibility. Black voters are purged at higher rates now than they were a decade ago and it’s no accident.
Furthermore, rates of Black voters being removed from voter rolls are higher in places that were subject to federal oversight. To make matters even worse, oversight itself is weaker due to the fact that the 2013 Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While it’s certain this did damage to Black voting ability, that certainty is shadowed by the precariousness that’s all Black residents of the United States have ever known.
One of the most flagrant examples of this in modern times was the 2018 defeat of Stacey Abrams, who nearly became Georgia’s governor. Had she won, she would have been the first Black woman to win a governor’s race anywhere in the nation. However, she lost due to what some experts describe as “the largest mass disenfranchisement in U.S. history.” Hundreds of thousands were purged and voting machines were locked up creating unnecessary lines at Black polling places. A 2018 study also found this was a trend, in which Black voters were waiting longer on average than white voters.
The problem is much more insidious than reformers would have people think. If reform itself were working, the cases above would not be so easily executable by the most blatantly staunch opponents of Black voters. The reason that these things can happen is because at the very foundation of the country itself is the racist notion that Black people are incapable of citizenship. Though many people are upset by racist voter suppression efforts, few are truly surprised; they are simply different manifestations of a long-running status quo.
At the national level, the Electoral College originally only counted Black people as three-fifths of a person for elections’ sake. The Black vote is now disregarded in other ways by this voting system that allows presidents to be elected despite not securing the popular vote. We often hear criticisms of Black people themselves, exhorting more voter participation in the Black community – but this misses the point. Black people could participate fully and that wouldn’t change the fact that an anti-Black system renders us neither human, nor citizen. We’re not going to vote our way into either category, either; voter suppression is actually a manifestation of our reality.
Anyone that suggests that “America wasn’t a democracy until Black Americans made it one,” neglects the fact that this is no democracy. The experience of Black people in the United States is one marked by the death and destruction wrought by racism, and we cannot escape that through the system that perpetuates it. We also won’t escape it through patriotism or nationalist sentiments that suggest Black people are forcing the United States to live up to its foundation. As pointed out by theorist Sylvia Wynter, those very ideals require the exclusion of Black people to situate who is and who is not a human, or a citizen for that matter, today.
The solution is clear: The abolition of racial capitalism and white supremacy is the only way out. Though voting can be useful in achieving incremental changes, it is not a requirement and is not a route to ultimate liberation. Only through the death of the oppression that kills us can we find new life.
For Black America, gaining the right to vote has never been a complete event. Black suffrage following “emancipation” from slavery never completely materialized, despite constitutional amendments and reforms guaranteeing Black men, and later Black women, the right to vote. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is seen as a momentous turning point for Black people and while its impact should not be lost on us, our rights have been under attack ever since. Not to mention, following that legislation, many more reforms have had to be implemented to continue trying to uphold Black people’s supposed right to vote. A “right” that requires consistent protection through reform begins to feel like a farce — especially when, despite those reforms, exercising that right remains a constant struggle.
More clarity on the matter comes when we fully take the history of Black citizenship into account. The Dred Scott case is one of many examples from the past that still has real life implications today. Scott was an enslaved man who sued for his freedom in 1847 and lost. That infamous decision stated that Black people were not and could not be citizens. A key takeaway here is that since Scott was not a citizen, he didn’t have the right to sue, and he didn’t have the right to be free. The ruling stated that Black people “were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.” It’s hard to argue that’s not still the case now.
Voting is supposed to be the right of a citizen and is widely accepted as a human right throughout the world. But for Black people, being designated either citizen or human has never been a guarantee. Therefore, by extension, Black people can gather that efforts to suppress the Black vote are much deeper than partisan politics. Voter suppression is a modern-day reminder that Black people have still not been granted full citizenship. Black voters are especially susceptible to being “purged,” a process of removal where names can be removed from voter rolls due to ineligibility. Black voters are purged at higher rates now than they were a decade ago and it’s no accident.
Furthermore, rates of Black voters being removed from voter rolls are higher in places that were subject to federal oversight. To make matters even worse, oversight itself is weaker due to the fact that the 2013 Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While it’s certain this did damage to Black voting ability, that certainty is shadowed by the precariousness that’s all Black residents of the United States have ever known.
One of the most flagrant examples of this in modern times was the 2018 defeat of Stacey Abrams, who nearly became Georgia’s governor. Had she won, she would have been the first Black woman to win a governor’s race anywhere in the nation. However, she lost due to what some experts describe as “the largest mass disenfranchisement in U.S. history.” Hundreds of thousands were purged and voting machines were locked up creating unnecessary lines at Black polling places. A 2018 study also found this was a trend, in which Black voters were waiting longer on average than white voters.
The problem is much more insidious than reformers would have people think. If reform itself were working, the cases above would not be so easily executable by the most blatantly staunch opponents of Black voters. The reason that these things can happen is because at the very foundation of the country itself is the racist notion that Black people are incapable of citizenship. Though many people are upset by racist voter suppression efforts, few are truly surprised; they are simply different manifestations of a long-running status quo.
At the national level, the Electoral College originally only counted Black people as three-fifths of a person for elections’ sake. The Black vote is now disregarded in other ways by this voting system that allows presidents to be elected despite not securing the popular vote. We often hear criticisms of Black people themselves, exhorting more voter participation in the Black community – but this misses the point. Black people could participate fully and that wouldn’t change the fact that an anti-Black system renders us neither human, nor citizen. We’re not going to vote our way into either category, either; voter suppression is actually a manifestation of our reality.
Anyone that suggests that “America wasn’t a democracy until Black Americans made it one,” neglects the fact that this is no democracy. The experience of Black people in the United States is one marked by the death and destruction wrought by racism, and we cannot escape that through the system that perpetuates it. We also won’t escape it through patriotism or nationalist sentiments that suggest Black people are forcing the United States to live up to its foundation. As pointed out by theorist Sylvia Wynter, those very ideals require the exclusion of Black people to situate who is and who is not a human, or a citizen for that matter, today.
The solution is clear: The abolition of racial capitalism and white supremacy is the only way out. Though voting can be useful in achieving incremental changes, it is not a requirement and is not a route to ultimate liberation. Only through the death of the oppression that kills us can we find new life.
Gerrymander guru's secret files: He used racial data to disenfranchise black voters
Former Salon editor David Daley reveals Thomas Hofeller's plans to stop black people and students from voting
IGOR DERYSH - salon
SEPTEMBER 11, 2019 10:00AM (UTC)
Secret files found on a longtime Republican operative’s computer after his death revealed that he compiled racial data to help his party draw new political maps and impose voter ID laws.
Thomas Hofeller, who is considered the master of modern gerrymandering, left behind at least 70,000 files that were found by his estranged daughter after his death in August 2018. Some of those files have already been used to successfully challenge North Carolina’s gerrymander and the Trump administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the census, which Hofeller argued would help “Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”
More files, obtained by former Salon editor David Daley at The New Yorker, show that Hofeller and his race research played a key role in Republican gerrymandering efforts in North Carolina and other states, as well as other efforts intended to make it harder for African-Americans and college students to vote.
Though North Carolina Republicans have argued that their maps discriminate based on partisanship and not race, Hofeller’s files show that he compiled maps with overlays of the black voting-age population by district, suggesting that racial data was a key part of the gerrymander, which is at the center of a years-long legal battle.
The files contradict claims Republicans have long used to defend their maps in court. Republicans had long denied that a congressional-district line that cuts right down the middle of the largest historically black college in the United States, North Carolina A&T State University, was intentionally drawn to dilute the black vote, even though it effectively guaranteed two Republican districts. But Hofeller’s files show that the effort clearly focused on the race of students.
Hofeller created “giant databases that detailed the racial makeup, voting patterns, and residence halls of more than a thousand North Carolina A&T students,” Daley reported. “He also collected similar data that tracked the race, voting patterns, and addresses of tens of thousands of other North Carolina college students. Some spreadsheets have more than fifty different fields with precise racial, gender, and geographic details on thousands of college voters.”
A spreadsheet found on Hofeller’s computer shows that the operative sorted students by the residence halls they lived in along with racial data and voting status information.
Hofeller also had dozens of “intensely detailed studies” of the racial makeup of North Carolina college students that was cross-referenced with driver’s license files to determine whether these students likely had a proper ID to vote, according to the report.
Emails on his computer also show that Hofeller billed North Carolina Republicans tens of thousands of dollars for his work. Federal Election Commission filings also show that the national Republican Party paid Hofeller more than $2 million for his work.
Other files show that Hofeller, a key player in the Trump administration’s push to add a citizenship question to the census, compiled data on the citizen voting-age population in North Carolina, Texas, Arizona and other states going back to 2011. In memos, Hofeller argued that drawing maps based on the number of citizens rather than the population would “clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and help “non-Hispanic whites.”
Hofeller also submitted memos to the Trump administration urging them to justify the census question with the dubious argument that it was necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act. The New Yorker report shows that he also worked for a Massachusetts Republican who wanted to use the Voting Rights Act to turn Boston into a single district, so Republicans could contend for suburban Massachusetts congressional seats. Though Hofeller’s efforts were unsuccessful in Massachusetts, the files show he also compiled data on states like Virginia, Mississippi and Alabama.
Emails found on Hofeller’s computer also show that he advised top Republicans in Florida on gerrymandering effort, despite a state constitutional amendment that bars partisan gerrymandering. Florida officials have denied that Hofeller played any official role in the effort but a state judge later ruled that the Republicans “conducted a stealth redistricting operation that snuck partisan maps into the public process and made a ‘mockery’ of the state’s constitutional amendments,” The New Yorker reported.
The files show that Hofeller also traveled around the country to educate Republicans about redistricting and urged them to push for prison gerrymandering, which allows inmates to be counted as residents of the area where the prison is located, often helping Republican lawmakers.
Hofeller’s emails also show that he grew concerned that his maps would be undone by the anti-Trump wave that followed his election.
“Meanwhile the GOP continues to bury its collective heads in the sand or in other higher places. Trump is only a product to this stupidity,” he wrote to a Republican consultant in 2016. “Do not worry about us in North Carolina in terms of redistricting. Even in the coming political bloodbath we should still maintain majority control of the General Assembly. The Governor cannot veto a redistricting map, so the Democrats hope is that the Obamista judiciary will come to their rescue.”
Last week, a North Carolina court struck down the state’s legislative maps that Hofeller helped create, ruling that they violated the Constitution. The new map had been drawn after the Supreme Court struck down North Carolina's previous map as a racial gerrymander.
The court ruled that Hofeller’s maps “deliberately minimized the effectiveness of the votes of citizens with whom they disagree,” arguing that the map amounted to “viewpoint discrimination” against Democrats and an effort to “retaliate against voters” for voting for Democrats.
The court said that the files on Hofeller’s computer showed evidence of “predominant focus on maximizing Republican partisan advantage in creating the 2017 Plans.”
“The evidence establishes that Dr. Hofeller drew the 2017 Plans very precisely to create as many ‘safe’ Republican districts as possible, so that Republicans would maintain their supermajorities, or at least majorities even in a strong election year for Democrats,” the court said. “Hofeller drew the maps with an intent to preserve Republicans’ control of the House and Senate.”
The court gave state lawmakers two weeks to draw nonpartisan maps. Republicans have sued to try to get a court to seal or destroy the files, arguing that they should remain confidential because they were obtained from his daughter and not from him.
The files could be a treasure trove for voting rights groups as they seek to challenge years of Republican efforts to gerrymander districts in order to gain an unfair advantage, as well as to impose voter ID laws to make it harder for certain populations to vote.
“We’ve already seen that these files have been instrumental in exposing lies around the effort to add a citizenship question to the census and around subverting a court’s order to redraw gerrymandered lines,” Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director of Common Cause, told The New York Times. “The Hofeller files are important because they’re the only thing that will allow the American people to know the truth behind the efforts to rig redistricting and elections.”
The files show only a fraction of the work Hofeller did, which stretches back to the 1980s. Files obtained by The New Yorker show that Hofeller continued to work to help Republicans even after he was diagnosed with lung cancer.
“I still have time to bedevil the Democrats with more redistricting plans before I exit,” he wrote to a friend. “Look my name up on the Internet and you can follow the damage.”
Thomas Hofeller, who is considered the master of modern gerrymandering, left behind at least 70,000 files that were found by his estranged daughter after his death in August 2018. Some of those files have already been used to successfully challenge North Carolina’s gerrymander and the Trump administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the census, which Hofeller argued would help “Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”
More files, obtained by former Salon editor David Daley at The New Yorker, show that Hofeller and his race research played a key role in Republican gerrymandering efforts in North Carolina and other states, as well as other efforts intended to make it harder for African-Americans and college students to vote.
Though North Carolina Republicans have argued that their maps discriminate based on partisanship and not race, Hofeller’s files show that he compiled maps with overlays of the black voting-age population by district, suggesting that racial data was a key part of the gerrymander, which is at the center of a years-long legal battle.
The files contradict claims Republicans have long used to defend their maps in court. Republicans had long denied that a congressional-district line that cuts right down the middle of the largest historically black college in the United States, North Carolina A&T State University, was intentionally drawn to dilute the black vote, even though it effectively guaranteed two Republican districts. But Hofeller’s files show that the effort clearly focused on the race of students.
Hofeller created “giant databases that detailed the racial makeup, voting patterns, and residence halls of more than a thousand North Carolina A&T students,” Daley reported. “He also collected similar data that tracked the race, voting patterns, and addresses of tens of thousands of other North Carolina college students. Some spreadsheets have more than fifty different fields with precise racial, gender, and geographic details on thousands of college voters.”
A spreadsheet found on Hofeller’s computer shows that the operative sorted students by the residence halls they lived in along with racial data and voting status information.
Hofeller also had dozens of “intensely detailed studies” of the racial makeup of North Carolina college students that was cross-referenced with driver’s license files to determine whether these students likely had a proper ID to vote, according to the report.
Emails on his computer also show that Hofeller billed North Carolina Republicans tens of thousands of dollars for his work. Federal Election Commission filings also show that the national Republican Party paid Hofeller more than $2 million for his work.
Other files show that Hofeller, a key player in the Trump administration’s push to add a citizenship question to the census, compiled data on the citizen voting-age population in North Carolina, Texas, Arizona and other states going back to 2011. In memos, Hofeller argued that drawing maps based on the number of citizens rather than the population would “clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and help “non-Hispanic whites.”
Hofeller also submitted memos to the Trump administration urging them to justify the census question with the dubious argument that it was necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act. The New Yorker report shows that he also worked for a Massachusetts Republican who wanted to use the Voting Rights Act to turn Boston into a single district, so Republicans could contend for suburban Massachusetts congressional seats. Though Hofeller’s efforts were unsuccessful in Massachusetts, the files show he also compiled data on states like Virginia, Mississippi and Alabama.
Emails found on Hofeller’s computer also show that he advised top Republicans in Florida on gerrymandering effort, despite a state constitutional amendment that bars partisan gerrymandering. Florida officials have denied that Hofeller played any official role in the effort but a state judge later ruled that the Republicans “conducted a stealth redistricting operation that snuck partisan maps into the public process and made a ‘mockery’ of the state’s constitutional amendments,” The New Yorker reported.
The files show that Hofeller also traveled around the country to educate Republicans about redistricting and urged them to push for prison gerrymandering, which allows inmates to be counted as residents of the area where the prison is located, often helping Republican lawmakers.
Hofeller’s emails also show that he grew concerned that his maps would be undone by the anti-Trump wave that followed his election.
“Meanwhile the GOP continues to bury its collective heads in the sand or in other higher places. Trump is only a product to this stupidity,” he wrote to a Republican consultant in 2016. “Do not worry about us in North Carolina in terms of redistricting. Even in the coming political bloodbath we should still maintain majority control of the General Assembly. The Governor cannot veto a redistricting map, so the Democrats hope is that the Obamista judiciary will come to their rescue.”
Last week, a North Carolina court struck down the state’s legislative maps that Hofeller helped create, ruling that they violated the Constitution. The new map had been drawn after the Supreme Court struck down North Carolina's previous map as a racial gerrymander.
The court ruled that Hofeller’s maps “deliberately minimized the effectiveness of the votes of citizens with whom they disagree,” arguing that the map amounted to “viewpoint discrimination” against Democrats and an effort to “retaliate against voters” for voting for Democrats.
The court said that the files on Hofeller’s computer showed evidence of “predominant focus on maximizing Republican partisan advantage in creating the 2017 Plans.”
“The evidence establishes that Dr. Hofeller drew the 2017 Plans very precisely to create as many ‘safe’ Republican districts as possible, so that Republicans would maintain their supermajorities, or at least majorities even in a strong election year for Democrats,” the court said. “Hofeller drew the maps with an intent to preserve Republicans’ control of the House and Senate.”
The court gave state lawmakers two weeks to draw nonpartisan maps. Republicans have sued to try to get a court to seal or destroy the files, arguing that they should remain confidential because they were obtained from his daughter and not from him.
The files could be a treasure trove for voting rights groups as they seek to challenge years of Republican efforts to gerrymander districts in order to gain an unfair advantage, as well as to impose voter ID laws to make it harder for certain populations to vote.
“We’ve already seen that these files have been instrumental in exposing lies around the effort to add a citizenship question to the census and around subverting a court’s order to redraw gerrymandered lines,” Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director of Common Cause, told The New York Times. “The Hofeller files are important because they’re the only thing that will allow the American people to know the truth behind the efforts to rig redistricting and elections.”
The files show only a fraction of the work Hofeller did, which stretches back to the 1980s. Files obtained by The New Yorker show that Hofeller continued to work to help Republicans even after he was diagnosed with lung cancer.
“I still have time to bedevil the Democrats with more redistricting plans before I exit,” he wrote to a friend. “Look my name up on the Internet and you can follow the damage.”
No, both sides are not the same
Mark E Andersen for Daily Kos
Community
Sunday July 28, 2019 · 6:30 PM PDT
Read the comments on any political post and sooner or later you will run across the obligatory “Both sides are the same” argument, or some variant of that sentiment. It is normally said by someone who thinks they are smarter than everyone else, and when they say it, they talk down to all who disagree with them. They also happen to be wrong.
There are two distinct sides in American politics today. The differences between the two sides could not be any more apparent or clear, especially since the election of the current White House occupant.
On one side is the American right, where facts and reason have been cast off as if they were a worthless trinket won at the country fair. Members of the Republican Party are expected to walk lockstep with party leadership: There is no dissent, and very little, if any, diversity. They are a party that uses racism, hatred, and fear to drive voters to the polls. Someone is always coming to get their guns or bring sharia law to the country, and scary brown people are constantly trying to take their jobs.
The GOP is a party that claims fiscal restraint yet cuts taxes with abandon, never worrying about the impacts those tax cuts will have on the very institutions that rely on government funding to function. Infrastructure crumbles, college tuition climbs, and elementary and secondary education suffer. Parents have to pick up the slack by selling wrapping paper, magazine subscriptions, discount cards, and various other schemes to replace funding that has been cut to pay for ill-advised tax cuts, while the Air Force gets all the money they want for a bomber that we really don’t need. You can bet the Air Force won’t be holding a bake sale to raise $600 million to buy a new bomber.
The Republican Party also claims the moral high ground. With the backing of American evangelicals, they claim to be the soul of America, yet they support a thrice-married cheater who epitomizes everything Jesus preached against.
On the left you have the Democratic Party which, while not perfect, is a damn sight better than anything on the right. On the left there are actual proposals that will make peoples lives better, and not just rich folks.
The Affordable Care Act was a long time coming and is the first step in making health care a right, and not a privilege. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has a plan for everything, recently released a plan to eliminate student debt, a plan that could help millions of Americans and prevent an economic collapse.
Democrats stand for taxes and decry income equality, arguing that billionaires and large corporations should not be paying less in taxes than the average American making a median income. Democrats believe that no one should suffer from food insecurity, while Republicans have no issue with kicking 3 million people off the SNAP program.
Democrats want inclusivity and as a result, it often seems like getting the Democratic Party to agree on anything is like herding cats. Every group has a voice and every voice has a different priority, but eventually a consensus is achieved, and moved forward.
Some of America’s greatest achievements have been shepherded in by the American left. In the throes of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced Social Security. John F. Kennedy gave us the moon. Lyndon Johnson gave us Medicare. Barack Obama gave us the Affordable Care Act.
Is the Democratic Party perfect? Not by a long shot. But that is what is so great about it: We can all complain about the party, we can argue about its future, we can agree, and we can disagree. We do not have to march in lockstep with the party leaders, and that is the strength of the American left.
So the next time you hear someone smugly say that “both parties are the same,” do not engage them, and do not argue with them. Let them have their little moment, and know that they are not as smart as they think they are. There is a stark difference between the parties. Anyone who says any different is doing nothing more than displaying their ignorance of American politics.
There are two distinct sides in American politics today. The differences between the two sides could not be any more apparent or clear, especially since the election of the current White House occupant.
On one side is the American right, where facts and reason have been cast off as if they were a worthless trinket won at the country fair. Members of the Republican Party are expected to walk lockstep with party leadership: There is no dissent, and very little, if any, diversity. They are a party that uses racism, hatred, and fear to drive voters to the polls. Someone is always coming to get their guns or bring sharia law to the country, and scary brown people are constantly trying to take their jobs.
The GOP is a party that claims fiscal restraint yet cuts taxes with abandon, never worrying about the impacts those tax cuts will have on the very institutions that rely on government funding to function. Infrastructure crumbles, college tuition climbs, and elementary and secondary education suffer. Parents have to pick up the slack by selling wrapping paper, magazine subscriptions, discount cards, and various other schemes to replace funding that has been cut to pay for ill-advised tax cuts, while the Air Force gets all the money they want for a bomber that we really don’t need. You can bet the Air Force won’t be holding a bake sale to raise $600 million to buy a new bomber.
The Republican Party also claims the moral high ground. With the backing of American evangelicals, they claim to be the soul of America, yet they support a thrice-married cheater who epitomizes everything Jesus preached against.
On the left you have the Democratic Party which, while not perfect, is a damn sight better than anything on the right. On the left there are actual proposals that will make peoples lives better, and not just rich folks.
The Affordable Care Act was a long time coming and is the first step in making health care a right, and not a privilege. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has a plan for everything, recently released a plan to eliminate student debt, a plan that could help millions of Americans and prevent an economic collapse.
Democrats stand for taxes and decry income equality, arguing that billionaires and large corporations should not be paying less in taxes than the average American making a median income. Democrats believe that no one should suffer from food insecurity, while Republicans have no issue with kicking 3 million people off the SNAP program.
Democrats want inclusivity and as a result, it often seems like getting the Democratic Party to agree on anything is like herding cats. Every group has a voice and every voice has a different priority, but eventually a consensus is achieved, and moved forward.
Some of America’s greatest achievements have been shepherded in by the American left. In the throes of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced Social Security. John F. Kennedy gave us the moon. Lyndon Johnson gave us Medicare. Barack Obama gave us the Affordable Care Act.
Is the Democratic Party perfect? Not by a long shot. But that is what is so great about it: We can all complain about the party, we can argue about its future, we can agree, and we can disagree. We do not have to march in lockstep with the party leaders, and that is the strength of the American left.
So the next time you hear someone smugly say that “both parties are the same,” do not engage them, and do not argue with them. Let them have their little moment, and know that they are not as smart as they think they are. There is a stark difference between the parties. Anyone who says any different is doing nothing more than displaying their ignorance of American politics.
A List -- Why A Majority of Whites No Longer Vote Democratic at the Presidential Level
Stephen Nelson
Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)
Wednesday March 06, 2013 · 2:59 PM PST
In seven of the nine Presidential elections that took place in the United States from 1932 through 1964 a majority of white voters in the country voted for the Democratic nominee for President. However, not once in the twelve President elections since 1964 has a majority of white voters voted for the Democratic nominee for President. What has happened to cause this rather dramatic and consistent shift among white voters?
There is no single simple answer. It's a complex confluence of many different causes and issues. Below is simply a list, in my opinion, of some of the causes of white flight from the Democratic party at the Presidential level.
Race --
The 1964 Civil Rights Act -- Lyndon Johnson reportedly said to Bill Moyers after Johnson signed the 1964 Civil rights act, "We have last the South for a generation." Johnson actually underestimated the length of time that the Democrats would lose the South as it's been almost 50 years since the Civil Rights Act was signed and with very few exceptions Democratic Presidential nominees have not won states in the South (I'm not considering Florida to be part of the original South). Out of the 132 opportunities to win states in the South between 1968 and 2012 Democratic nominees have won only 24 times, and 10 of those wins occurred during a single election, the post-Watergate backlash election of 1976 when Georgia native Jimmy Carter was on the Democratic ticket.
The 1965 Immigration Law --
Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Immigration Law which changed the immigration policy toward non-Europeans. In 1970 Europeans accounted for almost 60% of the foreign born population but by 2000 Europeans accounted for only 15% of the foreign born population. Many white xenophobes blame the Democrats for what they see as the browning of America.
Affimative Action --
White backlash to affirmation action (the 1978 Bakke case held that racial quotas were unconstitutional) which was started started by executive orders of the Kennedy (10925) and Johnson (11246 and 11375) administrations.
The Perceived Breakdown of "Law and Order" --
The term "Law and Order" was used as coded racism by the right-wing as they used it to dissolve a liberal consensus about crime that involved federal court decisions and a pushback against illegal drugs and violent gang activity. Many whites turned against the Democratic party, blaming it for being soft on crime and rioters, including the Watts riots in 1965 and the Newark and Detroit riots in 1967.
The Warren Court --
many "law abiding" citizens blamed the "activist" Warren Court and Democrats for its "liberal" decisions, such as Escobedo vs. Illinois and Miranda vs. Arizona, which they believed handcuffed law enforcement and allowed criminals to evade justice.
Student Demonstrations --
In the Fall of 1964 the Free Speech Movement erupted on the Berkeley campus of the Univeristy of California, and many, including Ronald Reagan, blamed the "permissive, liberal" establishment, including Pat Brown, who was California governor, Clark Kerr, who was President of the University of California, and Edward Strong, who was chancellor at Berkeley, all of whom were Democrats. The FSM demonstrations were just the beginning, as later in the decade the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations become center stage.
1968 Democratic National Convention --
There was the chaos and disorder at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago which was seen by millions of Americans on television and reinforced the view that the Democrats could not maintain order in their own party, much less in the streets of America.
General Distrust of Goverment --
Democrats have tended to be seen as the pro-government party and the Republicans have been the anti-government party and there has been, in general, a mistrust of government including:
The Warren Commission -- 25 years after the JFK assassination a majority of the American public believed (rightly or wrongly) that JFK was assassinated as part of a conspiracy and not by a lone assassin as the Warren Commission concluded.
The Vietnam War --
The American public was constantly told by government officials that there was light at the end of the Tunnel, then early in 1968 the Tet Offensive occurred and it became obvious that the light at the end of the tunnel was the headlight of an oncoming train. Then, of course, there was Nixon's non-existant secret plan to end the war.
Watergate --
If people at the highest levels of the Federal government are corrupt, then government in general must be corrupt by definiation.
Democrats seen as weak on Defense/Foreign Policy --
Vietnam War-- One reason the Vietnam War divided and discredited Democrats and splintered the liberal consensus was because it was a Democratic adminstration that effectively started that war. Opposition to the war didn’t unify the party, it divided it. Nixon won the 1968 election, in part, because Humphrey was associated with the war, and couldn’t split with Johnson, and Nixon promised a non-existant secret plan to end the war. The national security gap for Democrats first appeared in polls in 1967, because Johnson was held responsible for the war itself, not because Democrats were associated intially with antiwar activists. But the anti-war demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic convention permantly linked anti-war protesters to the Democratic party.
Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion --
After tne 1972 Massachusetts Democratic primary, long before Thomas Eagleton was chosen as George McGovern's running mate, Thomas Eagleton told reporter Robert Novak "The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot," Once "middle America—Catholic middle America, in particular" — once they find out, "he’s dead." Somewhere along the way the "pot" was dropped and the alliterative acid was substituted. The Acid, Amnesy, and Abortion label stuck to Democratic party for many years afterwards. In reality, of course, in 1972 McGovern was not for the legalization of marijuana, much less acid, as his daughter was an addict, and on abortion McGovern was to the Right of Roe, as he believed that abortion was better left to the states.
Iranian Hostage Crisis --
Throughout 1980 in the United States, constant media coverage -- yellow ribbons, footage of chanting Iranian mobs, even a whole new television news program, ABC's Nightline (orignally titled American Held Hostage) -- provided a dispiriting backdrop to the presidential election season. Because people felt that Jimmy Carter had not been tough enough in foreign policy, this symbolized for them that some bunch of students could seize American diplomatic officials and hold them prisoner and thumb their nose at the United States. This associated Carter and the Democrats with American impotence the in world.
Of course, this list is incomplete as these are just some of the major reasons that Democrats at the Presidential level no longer receive a majority of the white vote. The reasons are quite numerous and very complex and can't be adequately addressed in detail in a single diary.
There is no single simple answer. It's a complex confluence of many different causes and issues. Below is simply a list, in my opinion, of some of the causes of white flight from the Democratic party at the Presidential level.
Race --
The 1964 Civil Rights Act -- Lyndon Johnson reportedly said to Bill Moyers after Johnson signed the 1964 Civil rights act, "We have last the South for a generation." Johnson actually underestimated the length of time that the Democrats would lose the South as it's been almost 50 years since the Civil Rights Act was signed and with very few exceptions Democratic Presidential nominees have not won states in the South (I'm not considering Florida to be part of the original South). Out of the 132 opportunities to win states in the South between 1968 and 2012 Democratic nominees have won only 24 times, and 10 of those wins occurred during a single election, the post-Watergate backlash election of 1976 when Georgia native Jimmy Carter was on the Democratic ticket.
The 1965 Immigration Law --
Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Immigration Law which changed the immigration policy toward non-Europeans. In 1970 Europeans accounted for almost 60% of the foreign born population but by 2000 Europeans accounted for only 15% of the foreign born population. Many white xenophobes blame the Democrats for what they see as the browning of America.
Affimative Action --
White backlash to affirmation action (the 1978 Bakke case held that racial quotas were unconstitutional) which was started started by executive orders of the Kennedy (10925) and Johnson (11246 and 11375) administrations.
The Perceived Breakdown of "Law and Order" --
The term "Law and Order" was used as coded racism by the right-wing as they used it to dissolve a liberal consensus about crime that involved federal court decisions and a pushback against illegal drugs and violent gang activity. Many whites turned against the Democratic party, blaming it for being soft on crime and rioters, including the Watts riots in 1965 and the Newark and Detroit riots in 1967.
The Warren Court --
many "law abiding" citizens blamed the "activist" Warren Court and Democrats for its "liberal" decisions, such as Escobedo vs. Illinois and Miranda vs. Arizona, which they believed handcuffed law enforcement and allowed criminals to evade justice.
Student Demonstrations --
In the Fall of 1964 the Free Speech Movement erupted on the Berkeley campus of the Univeristy of California, and many, including Ronald Reagan, blamed the "permissive, liberal" establishment, including Pat Brown, who was California governor, Clark Kerr, who was President of the University of California, and Edward Strong, who was chancellor at Berkeley, all of whom were Democrats. The FSM demonstrations were just the beginning, as later in the decade the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations become center stage.
1968 Democratic National Convention --
There was the chaos and disorder at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago which was seen by millions of Americans on television and reinforced the view that the Democrats could not maintain order in their own party, much less in the streets of America.
General Distrust of Goverment --
Democrats have tended to be seen as the pro-government party and the Republicans have been the anti-government party and there has been, in general, a mistrust of government including:
The Warren Commission -- 25 years after the JFK assassination a majority of the American public believed (rightly or wrongly) that JFK was assassinated as part of a conspiracy and not by a lone assassin as the Warren Commission concluded.
The Vietnam War --
The American public was constantly told by government officials that there was light at the end of the Tunnel, then early in 1968 the Tet Offensive occurred and it became obvious that the light at the end of the tunnel was the headlight of an oncoming train. Then, of course, there was Nixon's non-existant secret plan to end the war.
Watergate --
If people at the highest levels of the Federal government are corrupt, then government in general must be corrupt by definiation.
Democrats seen as weak on Defense/Foreign Policy --
Vietnam War-- One reason the Vietnam War divided and discredited Democrats and splintered the liberal consensus was because it was a Democratic adminstration that effectively started that war. Opposition to the war didn’t unify the party, it divided it. Nixon won the 1968 election, in part, because Humphrey was associated with the war, and couldn’t split with Johnson, and Nixon promised a non-existant secret plan to end the war. The national security gap for Democrats first appeared in polls in 1967, because Johnson was held responsible for the war itself, not because Democrats were associated intially with antiwar activists. But the anti-war demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic convention permantly linked anti-war protesters to the Democratic party.
Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion --
After tne 1972 Massachusetts Democratic primary, long before Thomas Eagleton was chosen as George McGovern's running mate, Thomas Eagleton told reporter Robert Novak "The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot," Once "middle America—Catholic middle America, in particular" — once they find out, "he’s dead." Somewhere along the way the "pot" was dropped and the alliterative acid was substituted. The Acid, Amnesy, and Abortion label stuck to Democratic party for many years afterwards. In reality, of course, in 1972 McGovern was not for the legalization of marijuana, much less acid, as his daughter was an addict, and on abortion McGovern was to the Right of Roe, as he believed that abortion was better left to the states.
Iranian Hostage Crisis --
Throughout 1980 in the United States, constant media coverage -- yellow ribbons, footage of chanting Iranian mobs, even a whole new television news program, ABC's Nightline (orignally titled American Held Hostage) -- provided a dispiriting backdrop to the presidential election season. Because people felt that Jimmy Carter had not been tough enough in foreign policy, this symbolized for them that some bunch of students could seize American diplomatic officials and hold them prisoner and thumb their nose at the United States. This associated Carter and the Democrats with American impotence the in world.
Of course, this list is incomplete as these are just some of the major reasons that Democrats at the Presidential level no longer receive a majority of the white vote. The reasons are quite numerous and very complex and can't be adequately addressed in detail in a single diary.
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)
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.[...]