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welcome to reality ~ triva
election news and items of interest
october 19, 2018
Automatic Voter Registration
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
*Georgia Is Using Amateur Handwriting Analysis to Disenfranchise Minority Voters
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*Georgia county, election official sued for throwing out black voters’ absentee ballots
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*Group Sues Tennessee County Over Invalid Voter Registrations
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*GOP’s Brian Kemp Purged 1 in 10 Georgia Voters: I’ve Got the Names
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*North Carolina Republicans heading for disaster in Supreme Court election
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*The Hidden Money Funding the Midterms
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*WHAT'S IN A NAME? ONE-THIRD OF U.S. VOTERS DON'T KNOW CANDIDATES: REUTERS/IPSOS POLL
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*Georgia to be sued for purging minority voters ahead of the midterm elections
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*Studies: Voter ID Tied to Lower Turnout In Wisconsin
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*GOP congressional candidate caught misleading about his background
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*The Republican Running for Governor of Georgia Sent the Sleaziest Mailer of the Year
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*Voter ID law revived in major setback to Native American voters
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*Bipartisan Furor as North Carolina Election Law Shrinks Early Voting Locations by Almost 20 Percent
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*Red State Victory for Voting Rights: Federal Court Blocks a Massive Potential Voter Suppression Tactic
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*REPUBLICANS BAR AFRICAN-AMERICANS AND OTHER MINORITIES FROM VOTING
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MAP OF THE HYPOCRITES!!!
THE DAILY KOS ELECTIONS GUIDE TO THE NATION'S RELIGIOUS POPULATIONS, BY CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT(ARTICLE BELOW)
funnies(at the end)
*MAP PORN: IF "DID NOT VOTE" WAS A CANDIDATE...( article below)
The Political Punchline
Putting the Mock in Democracy
Georgia Is Using Amateur Handwriting Analysis to Disenfranchise Minority Voters
The scourge of “signature mismatch” laws strikes again.
By MARK JOSEPH STERN - slate
OCT 18, 20186:37 PM
Say you live in Georgia. You’re eager to vote in this year’s election—a tight race between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Trump acolyte Brian Kemp—so you fill out an absentee ballot and mail it in. Then, days or weeks after the election, you receive a notice in the mail. The signature on your absentee ballot, it explains, looked different from the signature on your voter-registration card. So an election official threw out your ballot. There is nothing you can do. Your vote has been voided.
If Georgia’s signature-mismatch law remains in effect through the November election, this fate will befall thousands of would-be voters. The statute directs elections officials to apply amateur handwriting analysis to voters’ signatures and reject any potential “mismatch.” Nearly 500 ballots in Gwinnett County alone have already been rejected for mismatch, a disproportionate number of them cast by minority voters. Now the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia is suing, demanding that the state give all citizens an opportunity to cure ballots rejected for mismatch. Its suit will help determine how successfully Georgia will suppress minority votes in the upcoming race.
Signature-mismatch laws are a scourge of American elections. The very premise makes no sense: In a similar lawsuit filed in New Hampshire, a forensic document examiner testifiedthat effective signature comparison requires 10 signature samples “at a minimum” to account for variability. Even then, experts may struggle to verify a signature, because our signatures often change over time. Voters who are disabled or elderly, or are nonnative English speakers, are especially likely to have variation between signatures. That’s one reason why New Hampshire’s mismatch law disproportionately impacted seniors, California’s disproportionately impacts first-generation Asian Americans, and Florida’s disproportionately impacts Hispanics.
But there’s likely something more insidious going on here too. The extreme racial disparitiesamong those affected by mismatch laws may also reflect the broad discretion that election officials have to toss ballots. In states with stringent mismatch rules, a handful of election officials are frequently responsible for the vast majority of ballots voided for mismatch. And those officials routinely work in counties with large minority communities.
That’s the case in Georgia. The epicenter of the current mismatch crisis is Gwinnett County, the most diverse county in the state. While Gwinnett has just 12 percent of the state’s total mail-in ballots, it’s already responsible for 40 percent of statewide rejections this election cycle. Voters who cast absentee ballots very early may receive their rejection letters before Election Day, which allows them to try again by voting in person. But there is no requirement that the state send these letters speedily, so many receive them far too late. And even worse, there is no procedure by which a voter can cure her ballot—by, say, verifying her identity to an election official. If she wants to cast a ballot that counts, she must start from the beginning. And if the election is over, she has no ability to exercise her right to vote.
The ACLU argues that this scheme violates due process. It’s well established that qualified voters have a liberty interest in casting a ballot that counts, and so the government must provide some process before depriving citizens of that right. Georgia grants them none. Under long-standing Supreme Court precedent, courts must decide “what process is due” by weighing the interests at stake, the risk of violating those interests, the value of additional safeguards, and the burdens they will impose on the government.
Here, all these factors weigh heavily in the ACLU’s favor. The interest at stake is monumental—the fundamental right to vote. And the risk of Georgia infringing upon that interest is astonishingly high: The state does not even require election workers to learn rudimentary handwriting analysis, leaving the job to the whims of untrained (and potentially politically motivated) county officials. They may use their limitless discretion to nullify ballots, and victims have no chance of redress.
To remedy this constitutional flaw, the ACLU has urged a federal district court to impose a backstop for voters whose ballots are voided for mismatch. Sean J. Young, legal director of the ACLU of Georgia, told me on Thursday that “we aren’t insisting on some hyper-elaborate formal proceeding.” Rather, “We’re asking that voters be able to resolve the discrepancy by emailing or mailing extrinsic evidence to confirm that they’re the same person,” like similar signatures on other documents. A voter should also be able to send over a copy of her ID, Young said, or even chat with officials on the phone to verify her identity. A federal district court ordered these kinds of backstops in New Hampshire, and the state has had no trouble implementing them.
Sounds reasonable enough, right? The problem is that Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp--the same guy running for governor—is a ruthless voter suppressor who is already keeping 53,000 voters, mostly minorities, off the rolls. Kemp is an expert at deploying legally dubious maneuvers to disenfranchise minorities, and he has gone all out for this election. He will surely fight any lower-court decision injecting some fairness into the signature-mismatch mess, since his own shot at the governor’s office is on the line.
The situation is a distressing but helpful reminder that signature-mismatch laws are useless at best and dangerous at worst. In the hands of a maestro vote thief like Kemp, they can be deployed to quash votes for your opponent. But even in the hands of well-meaning but hapless election officials, mismatch rules are anathema to equal suffrage. The ACLU’s proposed safeguards are an excellent way to reform them, but they really need to be abolished altogether. There is no rational defense of signature-mismatch laws—unless you’re a politician trying to swing an election.
If Georgia’s signature-mismatch law remains in effect through the November election, this fate will befall thousands of would-be voters. The statute directs elections officials to apply amateur handwriting analysis to voters’ signatures and reject any potential “mismatch.” Nearly 500 ballots in Gwinnett County alone have already been rejected for mismatch, a disproportionate number of them cast by minority voters. Now the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia is suing, demanding that the state give all citizens an opportunity to cure ballots rejected for mismatch. Its suit will help determine how successfully Georgia will suppress minority votes in the upcoming race.
Signature-mismatch laws are a scourge of American elections. The very premise makes no sense: In a similar lawsuit filed in New Hampshire, a forensic document examiner testifiedthat effective signature comparison requires 10 signature samples “at a minimum” to account for variability. Even then, experts may struggle to verify a signature, because our signatures often change over time. Voters who are disabled or elderly, or are nonnative English speakers, are especially likely to have variation between signatures. That’s one reason why New Hampshire’s mismatch law disproportionately impacted seniors, California’s disproportionately impacts first-generation Asian Americans, and Florida’s disproportionately impacts Hispanics.
But there’s likely something more insidious going on here too. The extreme racial disparitiesamong those affected by mismatch laws may also reflect the broad discretion that election officials have to toss ballots. In states with stringent mismatch rules, a handful of election officials are frequently responsible for the vast majority of ballots voided for mismatch. And those officials routinely work in counties with large minority communities.
That’s the case in Georgia. The epicenter of the current mismatch crisis is Gwinnett County, the most diverse county in the state. While Gwinnett has just 12 percent of the state’s total mail-in ballots, it’s already responsible for 40 percent of statewide rejections this election cycle. Voters who cast absentee ballots very early may receive their rejection letters before Election Day, which allows them to try again by voting in person. But there is no requirement that the state send these letters speedily, so many receive them far too late. And even worse, there is no procedure by which a voter can cure her ballot—by, say, verifying her identity to an election official. If she wants to cast a ballot that counts, she must start from the beginning. And if the election is over, she has no ability to exercise her right to vote.
The ACLU argues that this scheme violates due process. It’s well established that qualified voters have a liberty interest in casting a ballot that counts, and so the government must provide some process before depriving citizens of that right. Georgia grants them none. Under long-standing Supreme Court precedent, courts must decide “what process is due” by weighing the interests at stake, the risk of violating those interests, the value of additional safeguards, and the burdens they will impose on the government.
Here, all these factors weigh heavily in the ACLU’s favor. The interest at stake is monumental—the fundamental right to vote. And the risk of Georgia infringing upon that interest is astonishingly high: The state does not even require election workers to learn rudimentary handwriting analysis, leaving the job to the whims of untrained (and potentially politically motivated) county officials. They may use their limitless discretion to nullify ballots, and victims have no chance of redress.
To remedy this constitutional flaw, the ACLU has urged a federal district court to impose a backstop for voters whose ballots are voided for mismatch. Sean J. Young, legal director of the ACLU of Georgia, told me on Thursday that “we aren’t insisting on some hyper-elaborate formal proceeding.” Rather, “We’re asking that voters be able to resolve the discrepancy by emailing or mailing extrinsic evidence to confirm that they’re the same person,” like similar signatures on other documents. A voter should also be able to send over a copy of her ID, Young said, or even chat with officials on the phone to verify her identity. A federal district court ordered these kinds of backstops in New Hampshire, and the state has had no trouble implementing them.
Sounds reasonable enough, right? The problem is that Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp--the same guy running for governor—is a ruthless voter suppressor who is already keeping 53,000 voters, mostly minorities, off the rolls. Kemp is an expert at deploying legally dubious maneuvers to disenfranchise minorities, and he has gone all out for this election. He will surely fight any lower-court decision injecting some fairness into the signature-mismatch mess, since his own shot at the governor’s office is on the line.
The situation is a distressing but helpful reminder that signature-mismatch laws are useless at best and dangerous at worst. In the hands of a maestro vote thief like Kemp, they can be deployed to quash votes for your opponent. But even in the hands of well-meaning but hapless election officials, mismatch rules are anathema to equal suffrage. The ACLU’s proposed safeguards are an excellent way to reform them, but they really need to be abolished altogether. There is no rational defense of signature-mismatch laws—unless you’re a politician trying to swing an election.
Georgia county, election official sued for throwing out black voters’ absentee ballots
Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, running for governor, faces suit over rejection of black voters’ ballots
IGOR DERYSH - salon
OCTOBER 18, 2018 10:30AM (UTC)
Georgia's Gwinnett County and the state's secretary of state are facing lawsuits after rejecting a disproportionate number of minority voters' absentee ballots.
A lawsuit by the Coalition of Good Governance names the county and Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who is also the Republican nominee for governor, in its bid to have the ballots and ballot applications reviewed and reinstated where possible.
A separate lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union along with multiple other voting rights groups makes a similar request, as does a letter by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law to the county's officials, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
The lawsuits come after WhoWhatWhy reported that the county was rejecting a disproportionate number of minority voters' absentee ballots.
According to an updated report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Gwinnett County has rejected 8.5 percent of absentee ballots, compared to 2 percent of ballots rejected statewide. The county, which has rejected 390 ballots so far, accounts for 37 percent of all ballots rejected in the state despite making up less than 12 percent of the state's overall mail-in ballots.
According to University of Florida professor Michael McDonald, who runs the United States Elections Project, Asian and Pacific Islander voters were rejected at four times the rate of white voters and black voters were rejected at nearly three times the rate of white voters. More than 60 percent of the county's voters are non-white.
The ballots were reportedly rejected for minor errors. The state requires a voter's date of birth on the absentee envelope but many people put the current date. In other cases, a ballot is rejected because a county official does not believe the signature on the ballot matches the one on the voter registration card.
The county denied any wrongdoing, saying that the ballots were rejected due to invalid signatures, birth dates and addresses.
McDonald suggested that the high rate of rejections may not be part of a nefarious scheme but rather an unintended consequence of a federal law that requires counties with large Hispanic populations to provide election materials in both English and Spanish. Gwinnett County is the only Georgia county that has such a large number of Hispanic voters.
“In attempting to comply with Section 203 (of the federal Voting Rights Act), Gwinnett County election officials appear to have created a confusing envelope, which places English and Spanish directions side-by-side when requesting a key piece of information, a voter’s year of birth,” McDonald told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “As a result, Gwinnett has rejected 180 or more absentee ballots because voters failed to provide a correct birth year. This is far more than any other county reports.”
The Coalition of Good Governance argues in its lawsuit that regardless of the reason, the punishment for a minor error should not be voter disenfranchisement.
“The penalty for even the smallest clerical error or a question about the voter’s signature is disenfranchisement, with no meaningful opportunity to cure any perceived discrepancy,” the suit says, calling for the reinstatement of “any mail ballot that was previously rejected for the sole reason of an incorrect or missing year of birth” and a judge's order that such ballots not be rejected in future elections.
The suit also requests that voters whose ballots are rejected be notified within one day and calls for the creation of “bi-partisan signature review teams” to review ballots before they are rejected.
The suit goes on to ask for voters to be given until the Friday after Election Day to resolve any errors on their mail-in ballot.
Kemp distanced himself from the situation, saying that it is up to individual counties to process absentee ballots.
Kemp faces multiple other lawsuits after his office blocked 53,000 voter registrations under the state's “exact match” law, which rejects applications even for small discrepancies like missing hyphens or single-letter typos. According to civil rights groups, the exact match program has been used to remove as many as 700,000 voters from the state's rolls in the last two years.
Voters whose applications are still pending as a result of the law can still submit ballots if they show up in person with a photo ID.
Kemp is in a tight race against former state lawmaker Stacey Abrams, who would become Georgia's first African-American governor if elected. Virtually every poll released in the race shows the two in a dead heat.
A lawsuit by the Coalition of Good Governance names the county and Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who is also the Republican nominee for governor, in its bid to have the ballots and ballot applications reviewed and reinstated where possible.
A separate lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union along with multiple other voting rights groups makes a similar request, as does a letter by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law to the county's officials, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
The lawsuits come after WhoWhatWhy reported that the county was rejecting a disproportionate number of minority voters' absentee ballots.
According to an updated report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Gwinnett County has rejected 8.5 percent of absentee ballots, compared to 2 percent of ballots rejected statewide. The county, which has rejected 390 ballots so far, accounts for 37 percent of all ballots rejected in the state despite making up less than 12 percent of the state's overall mail-in ballots.
According to University of Florida professor Michael McDonald, who runs the United States Elections Project, Asian and Pacific Islander voters were rejected at four times the rate of white voters and black voters were rejected at nearly three times the rate of white voters. More than 60 percent of the county's voters are non-white.
The ballots were reportedly rejected for minor errors. The state requires a voter's date of birth on the absentee envelope but many people put the current date. In other cases, a ballot is rejected because a county official does not believe the signature on the ballot matches the one on the voter registration card.
The county denied any wrongdoing, saying that the ballots were rejected due to invalid signatures, birth dates and addresses.
McDonald suggested that the high rate of rejections may not be part of a nefarious scheme but rather an unintended consequence of a federal law that requires counties with large Hispanic populations to provide election materials in both English and Spanish. Gwinnett County is the only Georgia county that has such a large number of Hispanic voters.
“In attempting to comply with Section 203 (of the federal Voting Rights Act), Gwinnett County election officials appear to have created a confusing envelope, which places English and Spanish directions side-by-side when requesting a key piece of information, a voter’s year of birth,” McDonald told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “As a result, Gwinnett has rejected 180 or more absentee ballots because voters failed to provide a correct birth year. This is far more than any other county reports.”
The Coalition of Good Governance argues in its lawsuit that regardless of the reason, the punishment for a minor error should not be voter disenfranchisement.
“The penalty for even the smallest clerical error or a question about the voter’s signature is disenfranchisement, with no meaningful opportunity to cure any perceived discrepancy,” the suit says, calling for the reinstatement of “any mail ballot that was previously rejected for the sole reason of an incorrect or missing year of birth” and a judge's order that such ballots not be rejected in future elections.
The suit also requests that voters whose ballots are rejected be notified within one day and calls for the creation of “bi-partisan signature review teams” to review ballots before they are rejected.
The suit goes on to ask for voters to be given until the Friday after Election Day to resolve any errors on their mail-in ballot.
Kemp distanced himself from the situation, saying that it is up to individual counties to process absentee ballots.
Kemp faces multiple other lawsuits after his office blocked 53,000 voter registrations under the state's “exact match” law, which rejects applications even for small discrepancies like missing hyphens or single-letter typos. According to civil rights groups, the exact match program has been used to remove as many as 700,000 voters from the state's rolls in the last two years.
Voters whose applications are still pending as a result of the law can still submit ballots if they show up in person with a photo ID.
Kemp is in a tight race against former state lawmaker Stacey Abrams, who would become Georgia's first African-American governor if elected. Virtually every poll released in the race shows the two in a dead heat.
Election Officials Sued For Georgia County’s Mail-In Ballot Rejection Practices
By Tierney Sneed - tpm
October 16, 2018 1:14 pm
State and local election officials in Georgia face a lawsuit over the rate at which one county has been rejecting mail-in ballots ahead of next month’s election.
The complaint — filed by the group Coalition for Good Governance, on behalf of individual voters and candidates in the state — takes issue with the relatively high rejection rates of absentee ballots in Gwinnett County, which is outside of Atlanta.
It comes on the heels of a Atlanta Journal-Constitution report Monday finding that the county had rejected 8.5 percent of the absentee ballots its received so far, compared with a statewide rejection rate of under 2 percent.
The lawsuit zeroed in on the 128 ballots — out of 391 ballots rejected — Gwinnett County tossed out because they were missing the voter’s date of birth, or the current date had been filled in instead.
Gwinnett County Board of Registration and Elections is named as a defendant, as is the state board of elections and Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the GOP gubernatorial who also has been sued for the state’s “exact match” law for voter registration.
Candice Brice, a spokesperson for the secretary of state, said in a statement that under Georgia law, the policies for processing mail-in ballots were up local officials’ discretion and that state officials are “not involved in those decisions.”
“Today, our office opened an investigation on behalf of the State Election Board to ensure that counties are following the law in making these determinations,” she said. “We will not be bullied by out-of-state organizations or political operatives who want to generate headlines and advance a baseless narrative. We will do our part to keep elections secure, accessible, and fair in Georgia.”
The Gwinnett County Board did not return TPM’s request for comment.
Stephen Day — the Democratic-appointed chair of of the Gwinnett Elections Board, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit — told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution earlier this week that the rejection rates were “unsettling,” but he denied that they were “rooted in some nefarious scheme” by local officials to ” to suppress any type of voter from voting.”
The complaint is seeking a court order that election officials stop rejecting absentee ballots on the basis of birth date issues, that they adopt new protocols for notifying affected voters that their absentee ballots have been rejected, and that they allow those voters to turn in their corrected absentee ballots in person to their voting precinct on election day.
The group Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights also sent the county a letter highlighting the absentee ballot rejection issues. According to the letter, the mail-in ballots rejected in Gwinnett County make up 40 percent of all absentee ballots rejected in Georgia. Nearly 15 percent of all mail-in ballots submitted by Asian voters in the county were rejected, according to the letter, as were 8 percent of the absentee ballots sent by black voters. Only 2.5 percent of absentee ballots sent in by white voters were rejected, the letter said.
The complaint — filed by the group Coalition for Good Governance, on behalf of individual voters and candidates in the state — takes issue with the relatively high rejection rates of absentee ballots in Gwinnett County, which is outside of Atlanta.
It comes on the heels of a Atlanta Journal-Constitution report Monday finding that the county had rejected 8.5 percent of the absentee ballots its received so far, compared with a statewide rejection rate of under 2 percent.
The lawsuit zeroed in on the 128 ballots — out of 391 ballots rejected — Gwinnett County tossed out because they were missing the voter’s date of birth, or the current date had been filled in instead.
Gwinnett County Board of Registration and Elections is named as a defendant, as is the state board of elections and Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the GOP gubernatorial who also has been sued for the state’s “exact match” law for voter registration.
Candice Brice, a spokesperson for the secretary of state, said in a statement that under Georgia law, the policies for processing mail-in ballots were up local officials’ discretion and that state officials are “not involved in those decisions.”
“Today, our office opened an investigation on behalf of the State Election Board to ensure that counties are following the law in making these determinations,” she said. “We will not be bullied by out-of-state organizations or political operatives who want to generate headlines and advance a baseless narrative. We will do our part to keep elections secure, accessible, and fair in Georgia.”
The Gwinnett County Board did not return TPM’s request for comment.
Stephen Day — the Democratic-appointed chair of of the Gwinnett Elections Board, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit — told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution earlier this week that the rejection rates were “unsettling,” but he denied that they were “rooted in some nefarious scheme” by local officials to ” to suppress any type of voter from voting.”
The complaint is seeking a court order that election officials stop rejecting absentee ballots on the basis of birth date issues, that they adopt new protocols for notifying affected voters that their absentee ballots have been rejected, and that they allow those voters to turn in their corrected absentee ballots in person to their voting precinct on election day.
The group Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights also sent the county a letter highlighting the absentee ballot rejection issues. According to the letter, the mail-in ballots rejected in Gwinnett County make up 40 percent of all absentee ballots rejected in Georgia. Nearly 15 percent of all mail-in ballots submitted by Asian voters in the county were rejected, according to the letter, as were 8 percent of the absentee ballots sent by black voters. Only 2.5 percent of absentee ballots sent in by white voters were rejected, the letter said.
Group Sues Tennessee County Over Invalid Voter Registrations
A group representing black voters is suing the election commission in Tennessee's largest county after thousands of registrations were deemed invalid by the commission.
us news
Oct. 16, 2018, at 1:09 p.
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — A group representing black voters is suing the election commission in Tennessee's largest county after thousands of registrations were deemed invalid by the commission.
The Tennessee Black Voter Project filed a lawsuit Monday in Shelby County Chancery Court asking a judge to allow the group to inspect voter registration forms that the county's Election Commission has rejected.
Groups including the Black Voter Project submitted more than 36,000 registrations to the Election Commission in Shelby County, which includes Memphis. But the commission said about 55 percent were found invalid because they were incomplete, they were duplicates from previously registered voters or they came from convicted felons.
The group wants to inspect records detailing why applications were rejected. The commission did not immediately return a call seeking comment Tuesday.
The Tennessee Black Voter Project filed a lawsuit Monday in Shelby County Chancery Court asking a judge to allow the group to inspect voter registration forms that the county's Election Commission has rejected.
Groups including the Black Voter Project submitted more than 36,000 registrations to the Election Commission in Shelby County, which includes Memphis. But the commission said about 55 percent were found invalid because they were incomplete, they were duplicates from previously registered voters or they came from convicted felons.
The group wants to inspect records detailing why applications were rejected. The commission did not immediately return a call seeking comment Tuesday.
GOP’s Brian Kemp Purged 1 in 10 Georgia Voters: I’ve Got the Names
BY
Greg Palast Truthout
PUBLISHED
October 8, 2018
My lawyer had to threaten Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp with a federal lawsuit to force him to turn over the names of over half a million voters whose citizenship rights he quietly extinguished.
This past week, I released the name of every one of these Georgia voters Kemp flushed from voter rolls in 2017. If you’re a Georgia resident, check the list. If your name is on it, re-register right now. You only have through tomorrow (October 9).
It’s no coincidence that Georgia’s Purge’n General is also running for Governor: The Republican candidate is fighting a dead-even race against Stacey Abrams, Democratic House Minority Leader. Abrams, if she wins, would become the first Black woman governor in US history.
Suspiciously, Kemp sent no notice to these citizens after he took away their voting rights. If they show up to vote on November 6, they’re out of luck — and so is Georgia’s democracy.
I brought in one of the nation’s top mailing database experts, Mark Swedlund, and his team to go through the list, name by name. Among the voters purged are thousands who supposedly left the state but remain in Georgia. Thousands more are people who moved from one end of town to another and lost their vote — and we even found one who simply moved from one apartment to another in the same building.
These registration cancellations are therefore dead wrong and, say voting law experts, coldly break the law.
That is why Gerald Griggs, counsel for the Atlanta NAACP, and voting rights attorney Nse Ufot, executive director of the New Georgia Project (a nonpartisan voter registration initiative), are joining in my suit against Kemp.
We’ll be hauling Kemp into federal court to force him to open the records to which the public is entitled under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 — provisions meant to prevent just this type of voter roll shenanigan. In particular, we’re forcing him to disclose the complete detailed process that led to each voter’s removal.
I don’t file federal suits on a whim. Kemp has continually turned down legitimate Open Records Act requests over my five years of investigation for Al Jazeera and Rolling Stone.
Griggs and Ufot made their announcement about the suit at a press conference October 2 in Atlanta at the national headquarters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the civil rights group that traces its origins to the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
The location was meant to make a point. The racial stench from the computerized torching of the Georgia voter files has motivated prominent civil rights leaders from Georgia to add their names to the lawsuit: Axel Adams, executive editor of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition that grew out of two nonprofit organizations founded by Jesse Jackson; Joe Beasley, the former southern regional director for Rainbow PUSH; and SCLC President Dr. Charles Steele Jr., who currently holds the post held by Dr. Martin L. King Jr. until his assassination.
Steele told the gathered media and rights leaders, “Many people have died and paid the supreme sacrifice for people to have the right to vote. What is taking place here in Georgia is an insult to all these efforts and accomplishments.”
Why did I wait to release endangered voters’ names until days before the last day of registration? Because Kemp dragged his feet on my request for the purge lists until literally the last hours before the 90-day deadline imposed by the law.
I tried to get Kemp’s answers to the NAACP’s and SCLC’s charges that the mass purge of 1 in 10 Georgia voters was aimed at decimating the Black electorate so he could steal the governorship from Abrams.
Technically, Kemp removed voters after they had skipped voting — and failed to return a postcard that, according to Morgan County Elections Board member Helen Butler, “Looks like junk mail. You’d throw it away.” Butler, who also serves as executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, is wary of Kemp’s purge methods. Just last year, her group settled a suit against Kemp that forced him to return over 40,000 voters to the rolls.
The National Voter Registration Act specifically prohibits cancelling voter registrations for not voting. But the failure to vote, in combination with not returning a postcard or other information, can be used to justify a cancellation if there is legitimate belief this is evidence the voter has moved.
“But they have not moved,” notes Swedlund, who says not returning a postcard is an “absurd, dangerous” way to determine if voters have moved — especially if their rights are at stake. And basing cancellations on non-responses to postcards is, Swedlund notes, endemically biased against voters who move often, including the poor, students, and Black and Latino voters — in other words, Democrats.
Notably, Swedlund’s analysts found that 108,000 of the names on Kemp’s hit list were also on the notorious “Interstate Crosscheck” list, which my investigations team had obtained from an insider in Kemp’s office as part of my investigations for Rolling Stone.
The lists were created for Georgia by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, President Donald Trump’s “fraudulent voter hunter.” Kobach himself, interviewed in Kansas, told me the list was sent to Kemp and others to indicate a voter had moved out of state. In fact, we went through each and every Crosscheck-tagged voter’s name — and only 2,000 of the 108,000 Crosschecked voters who were purged have left the state. And the majority of others purged had not moved from their original registration address. In simple terms, most of those whose registrations have been cancelled are legitimate Georgia voters.
Representatives from Kemp’s office issued a statement this week denying they used the Crosscheck list, but they did not know we had obtained the list despite Kemp’s resistance. Furthermore, Kemp’s former deputy and his predecessor as Secretary of State both confirmed Georgia participated in Crosscheck.
Meanwhile, Kemp had no clear response as to why the others were removed.
So, I thought it important to get the answers about the purges from the horse’s mouth. But Kemp has weaved and ducked all my interview requests in my several trips to Georgia beginning in 2014.
So, this time, I decided to track down his campaign bus. On Tuesday, I located the candidate in the parking lot of a BBQ joint in Newnan, 38 miles outside Atlanta. You could smell the pigs roasting.
I asked Kemp, bluntly, “Mr. Kemp are you removing Black voters from the voter rolls just so you can win this election?”
Kemp’s answer was to turn his back as I was physically body-blocked, then grabbed and hauled away by Georgia “smokies,” the local county deputy sheriffs. (They claimed that Sprayberry’s Barbecue ordered me off the property, but the owner said otherwise.) It was later reported that his handlers had clocked me before the bus pulled in.
The civil rights leaders are dissatisfied with Kemp’s response and will press our litigation. “Georgia,” said the SCLC’s Steele, “needs to know that we’re not going to take it anymore.”
This past week, I released the name of every one of these Georgia voters Kemp flushed from voter rolls in 2017. If you’re a Georgia resident, check the list. If your name is on it, re-register right now. You only have through tomorrow (October 9).
It’s no coincidence that Georgia’s Purge’n General is also running for Governor: The Republican candidate is fighting a dead-even race against Stacey Abrams, Democratic House Minority Leader. Abrams, if she wins, would become the first Black woman governor in US history.
Suspiciously, Kemp sent no notice to these citizens after he took away their voting rights. If they show up to vote on November 6, they’re out of luck — and so is Georgia’s democracy.
I brought in one of the nation’s top mailing database experts, Mark Swedlund, and his team to go through the list, name by name. Among the voters purged are thousands who supposedly left the state but remain in Georgia. Thousands more are people who moved from one end of town to another and lost their vote — and we even found one who simply moved from one apartment to another in the same building.
These registration cancellations are therefore dead wrong and, say voting law experts, coldly break the law.
That is why Gerald Griggs, counsel for the Atlanta NAACP, and voting rights attorney Nse Ufot, executive director of the New Georgia Project (a nonpartisan voter registration initiative), are joining in my suit against Kemp.
We’ll be hauling Kemp into federal court to force him to open the records to which the public is entitled under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 — provisions meant to prevent just this type of voter roll shenanigan. In particular, we’re forcing him to disclose the complete detailed process that led to each voter’s removal.
I don’t file federal suits on a whim. Kemp has continually turned down legitimate Open Records Act requests over my five years of investigation for Al Jazeera and Rolling Stone.
Griggs and Ufot made their announcement about the suit at a press conference October 2 in Atlanta at the national headquarters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the civil rights group that traces its origins to the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
The location was meant to make a point. The racial stench from the computerized torching of the Georgia voter files has motivated prominent civil rights leaders from Georgia to add their names to the lawsuit: Axel Adams, executive editor of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition that grew out of two nonprofit organizations founded by Jesse Jackson; Joe Beasley, the former southern regional director for Rainbow PUSH; and SCLC President Dr. Charles Steele Jr., who currently holds the post held by Dr. Martin L. King Jr. until his assassination.
Steele told the gathered media and rights leaders, “Many people have died and paid the supreme sacrifice for people to have the right to vote. What is taking place here in Georgia is an insult to all these efforts and accomplishments.”
Why did I wait to release endangered voters’ names until days before the last day of registration? Because Kemp dragged his feet on my request for the purge lists until literally the last hours before the 90-day deadline imposed by the law.
I tried to get Kemp’s answers to the NAACP’s and SCLC’s charges that the mass purge of 1 in 10 Georgia voters was aimed at decimating the Black electorate so he could steal the governorship from Abrams.
Technically, Kemp removed voters after they had skipped voting — and failed to return a postcard that, according to Morgan County Elections Board member Helen Butler, “Looks like junk mail. You’d throw it away.” Butler, who also serves as executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, is wary of Kemp’s purge methods. Just last year, her group settled a suit against Kemp that forced him to return over 40,000 voters to the rolls.
The National Voter Registration Act specifically prohibits cancelling voter registrations for not voting. But the failure to vote, in combination with not returning a postcard or other information, can be used to justify a cancellation if there is legitimate belief this is evidence the voter has moved.
“But they have not moved,” notes Swedlund, who says not returning a postcard is an “absurd, dangerous” way to determine if voters have moved — especially if their rights are at stake. And basing cancellations on non-responses to postcards is, Swedlund notes, endemically biased against voters who move often, including the poor, students, and Black and Latino voters — in other words, Democrats.
Notably, Swedlund’s analysts found that 108,000 of the names on Kemp’s hit list were also on the notorious “Interstate Crosscheck” list, which my investigations team had obtained from an insider in Kemp’s office as part of my investigations for Rolling Stone.
The lists were created for Georgia by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, President Donald Trump’s “fraudulent voter hunter.” Kobach himself, interviewed in Kansas, told me the list was sent to Kemp and others to indicate a voter had moved out of state. In fact, we went through each and every Crosscheck-tagged voter’s name — and only 2,000 of the 108,000 Crosschecked voters who were purged have left the state. And the majority of others purged had not moved from their original registration address. In simple terms, most of those whose registrations have been cancelled are legitimate Georgia voters.
Representatives from Kemp’s office issued a statement this week denying they used the Crosscheck list, but they did not know we had obtained the list despite Kemp’s resistance. Furthermore, Kemp’s former deputy and his predecessor as Secretary of State both confirmed Georgia participated in Crosscheck.
Meanwhile, Kemp had no clear response as to why the others were removed.
So, I thought it important to get the answers about the purges from the horse’s mouth. But Kemp has weaved and ducked all my interview requests in my several trips to Georgia beginning in 2014.
So, this time, I decided to track down his campaign bus. On Tuesday, I located the candidate in the parking lot of a BBQ joint in Newnan, 38 miles outside Atlanta. You could smell the pigs roasting.
I asked Kemp, bluntly, “Mr. Kemp are you removing Black voters from the voter rolls just so you can win this election?”
Kemp’s answer was to turn his back as I was physically body-blocked, then grabbed and hauled away by Georgia “smokies,” the local county deputy sheriffs. (They claimed that Sprayberry’s Barbecue ordered me off the property, but the owner said otherwise.) It was later reported that his handlers had clocked me before the bus pulled in.
The civil rights leaders are dissatisfied with Kemp’s response and will press our litigation. “Georgia,” said the SCLC’s Steele, “needs to know that we’re not going to take it anymore.”
North Carolina Republicans heading for disaster in Supreme Court election
The North Carolina GOP intended to make it harder for Democratic candidate Anita Earls to win. She’s up 21 points
MATTHEW CHAPMAN - salon
OCTOBER 10, 2018 6:08PM (UTC)
The North Carolina GOP have thrown every trick in the book they have at the state Supreme Court race, to protect incumbent Justice Barbara Jackson and head off liberal challenger Anita Earls. And yet they seem to be heading toward a crushing defeat.
A new poll of the race shows Jackson in a distant third place, behind even spoiler candidate Chris Anglin — and Earls ahead by a whopping 21 points.
Such a result would be devastating for Republicans in the North Carolina General Assembly, who, following the surprise victory of liberal candidate Mike Morgan in 2016 that gave the high court a 4-3 majority of Democratic-leaning justices, worked hard to thwart anyone from mounting a serious challenge to Jackson in her 2018 re-election.
Over the veto of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, the Republican supermajorities in the legislature passed a series of laws changing the election system for the state Supreme Court. The new laws made judicial elections officially partisan, and canceled this year's judicial primaries. Republicans hoped that by doing this, they would cause multiple Democrats to run and split their vote against Jackson, ensuring her re-election. Instead, Anglin, an attorney in Raleigh jumped into the race as a Republican, leaving Earls the sole Democrat on the ballot and causing Republicans to worry their vote will be split.
A frantic attempt by Republicans to pass another law removing Anglin's party affiliation from the ballot was smacked down in state court.
An Earls win would be a nightmare for Republicans. She is a longtime civil rights attorney who has led the charge against GOP gerrymandering and voter suppression. Already, the liberal 4-3 majority on the court could undo their extreme partisan gerrymanders, which were already ruled illegal by a federal court earlier this year. A 5-2 Democratic majority that includes Earls would be even more likely to do so — and furthermore, it would make it impossible for Republicans to court-pack their way to a majority, because the state constitution says only two more seats can be added.
The greatest irony is that, as some observers have argued, this race would have been much closer, or even safe for Republicans, if the legislature had not interfered with election law in the first place.
A new poll of the race shows Jackson in a distant third place, behind even spoiler candidate Chris Anglin — and Earls ahead by a whopping 21 points.
Such a result would be devastating for Republicans in the North Carolina General Assembly, who, following the surprise victory of liberal candidate Mike Morgan in 2016 that gave the high court a 4-3 majority of Democratic-leaning justices, worked hard to thwart anyone from mounting a serious challenge to Jackson in her 2018 re-election.
Over the veto of Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, the Republican supermajorities in the legislature passed a series of laws changing the election system for the state Supreme Court. The new laws made judicial elections officially partisan, and canceled this year's judicial primaries. Republicans hoped that by doing this, they would cause multiple Democrats to run and split their vote against Jackson, ensuring her re-election. Instead, Anglin, an attorney in Raleigh jumped into the race as a Republican, leaving Earls the sole Democrat on the ballot and causing Republicans to worry their vote will be split.
A frantic attempt by Republicans to pass another law removing Anglin's party affiliation from the ballot was smacked down in state court.
An Earls win would be a nightmare for Republicans. She is a longtime civil rights attorney who has led the charge against GOP gerrymandering and voter suppression. Already, the liberal 4-3 majority on the court could undo their extreme partisan gerrymanders, which were already ruled illegal by a federal court earlier this year. A 5-2 Democratic majority that includes Earls would be even more likely to do so — and furthermore, it would make it impossible for Republicans to court-pack their way to a majority, because the state constitution says only two more seats can be added.
The greatest irony is that, as some observers have argued, this race would have been much closer, or even safe for Republicans, if the legislature had not interfered with election law in the first place.
The Hidden Money Funding the Midterms
Strategies that let super PACs delay revealing their donors until after the election are gaining popularity among both Democrats and Republicans.
by Derek Willis, ProPublica, and Maggie Severns, Politico - pro publica
Oct. 9, 5 a.m. EDT
Allies of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used a blind spot in campaign finance laws to undercut a candidate from their own party this year — and their fingerprints remained hidden until the primary was already over.
Super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited sums of money in elections, are supposed to regularly disclose their funders. But in the case of Mountain Families PAC, Republicans managed to spend $1.3 million against Don Blankenship, a mustachioed former coal baron who was a wild-card candidate for a must-win West Virginia Senate seat, in May without revealing who was supplying the cash.
The move worked like this: Start a new super PAC after a deadline for reporting donors and expenses, then raise and spend money before the next report is due. Timed right, a super PAC might get a month or more undercover before being required to reveal its donors. And if a super PAC launches right before the election, voters won’t know who’s funding it until after they go to the polls.
The strategy — which is legal — is proving increasingly popular among Democrats and Republicans. The amount of super PAC spending during the 2016 congressional primaries in which the first donor disclosure occurred after the primary election totaled $9 million. That figure increased to $15.6 million during the 2018 congressional primaries and special elections.
Backers of Mountain Families PAC didn’t respond to a request for comment. It is one of 63 super PACs this election cycle that have managed to spend money to influence races and postpone telling voters who funded them, according to an analysis by Politico and ProPublica of Federal Election Commission data.
Voters bear much of the cost when they head to the polls without information on who funded a PAC that tried to sway their votes, said Meredith McGehee, executive director at the nonpartisan watchdog group Issue One.
“The whole idea behind disclosure is that one of the factors that voters can, and understandably should, take into account in judging the message is who the messenger is,” McGehee said.
In total, super PACs have spent at least $21.6 million this cycle in 78 congressional races before disclosing who donated that money — $15.7 million of it during primary races. In many cases, that disclosure came after voters had gone to the polls.
Super PACs were created after the Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision ruled that people and corporations had the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on independent expenditures such as funding ads or mailers, but that they couldn’t hide that spending from the public.
But while they can’t keep donors secret forever, super PACs are increasingly figuring out methods of temporarily masking donor identities that are either legal or fall into gray areas that rarely attract regulators’ attention.
One tactic is the one Mountain Families PAC used, which is likely to be replicated for the general election. A new super PAC that starts between Oct. 18 and Nov. 6 could spend money right before Election Day without having to disclose its donors until after the midterm results are tallied. (There are 11 super PACs that together have spent at least $5.8 million since the primaries but should begin disclosing their donors on Oct. 15, when the next FEC filing is due.)
Another involves going into debt to pay for advertising and other campaign-related activities, and fundraising later to pay off those debts. A super PAC that does this would not have to disclose donors until well after the money is spent.
In the case of Mountain Families PAC, Blankenship was increasingly popular among the state’s anti-Washington set. So D.C. Republicans behind the PAC avoided disclosing they were behind ads attacking Blankenship — “Isn’t there enough toxic sludge in Washington?” asked one of them — until after the primary.
Then they revealed their identity and dissolved the super PAC entirely.
Here are more examples of PACs that have delayed disclosing their donors this cycle — and how they did it:
As Republican Martha McSally battled two opponents in the Arizona Senate primary, a super PAC called Red and Gold spent $1.7 million attacking McSally, airing television ads that said McSally had supported an “age tax” on older people’s health insurance. But shortly after filing its initial paperwork with the FEC, Red and Gold notified the commission it was going to file on a monthly basis, which meant its first disclosure wasn’t due until Sept. 20, three weeks after the primary election.
When Red and Gold finally disclosed its funders, it was revealed that Senate Majority PAC, which is aligned with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, was the main funder of Red and Gold and had meddled in the primary in an attempt to hurt McSally’s chances of victory and boost a weaker Republican. Chris Hayden, spokesman for Senate Majority PAC, said that “Senate Majority PAC and Red and Gold have followed the FEC reporting schedule and follow the law governing super PACs.”
A super PAC called Ohio First PAC has been in operation since the start of April and has spent $774,822 helping Republican Jim Renacci in the Ohio Senate race. But it has only disclosed raising $79,200 from donors. Instead of disclosing donations, Ohio First’s filings with the FEC show the committee has hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to vendors for advertising and mailers, and almost no fundraising yet. The PAC did not respond to a request for comment.
The FEC has sent the PAC two letters about possible late filings for some of its spending; the committee said in correspondence in August that it is working to resolve any issues.
During the week leading up to a seven-way Democratic primary in Illinois in March, a super PAC called SunshinePAC blitzed the battleground 6th Congressional District with $130,000 in mailers and phone calls. Because it started spending money so late in the race, SunshinePAC didn’t have to reveal its donors before the primary.
But nearly a month after the election, SunshinePAC revealed its lone funder: Tom Casten, the father of primary contender Sean Casten — raising questions about whether the super PAC was really independent from the campaign. By then, Sean Casten had eked out a victory in the primary by 2,177 votes.
Tom Casten said in an interview that “there was no effort or conversation about reporting in the delayed form” when he gave to SunshinePAC, and that “I certainly didn’t ask for it.” Greg Bales, campaign manager for Casten for Congress, said in an email that “as with any outside group, there was no coordination between Sean or the campaign and that group on their spending or disclosure practices.” SunshinePAC did not respond to a request for comment.
Super PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited sums of money in elections, are supposed to regularly disclose their funders. But in the case of Mountain Families PAC, Republicans managed to spend $1.3 million against Don Blankenship, a mustachioed former coal baron who was a wild-card candidate for a must-win West Virginia Senate seat, in May without revealing who was supplying the cash.
The move worked like this: Start a new super PAC after a deadline for reporting donors and expenses, then raise and spend money before the next report is due. Timed right, a super PAC might get a month or more undercover before being required to reveal its donors. And if a super PAC launches right before the election, voters won’t know who’s funding it until after they go to the polls.
The strategy — which is legal — is proving increasingly popular among Democrats and Republicans. The amount of super PAC spending during the 2016 congressional primaries in which the first donor disclosure occurred after the primary election totaled $9 million. That figure increased to $15.6 million during the 2018 congressional primaries and special elections.
Backers of Mountain Families PAC didn’t respond to a request for comment. It is one of 63 super PACs this election cycle that have managed to spend money to influence races and postpone telling voters who funded them, according to an analysis by Politico and ProPublica of Federal Election Commission data.
Voters bear much of the cost when they head to the polls without information on who funded a PAC that tried to sway their votes, said Meredith McGehee, executive director at the nonpartisan watchdog group Issue One.
“The whole idea behind disclosure is that one of the factors that voters can, and understandably should, take into account in judging the message is who the messenger is,” McGehee said.
In total, super PACs have spent at least $21.6 million this cycle in 78 congressional races before disclosing who donated that money — $15.7 million of it during primary races. In many cases, that disclosure came after voters had gone to the polls.
Super PACs were created after the Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision ruled that people and corporations had the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on independent expenditures such as funding ads or mailers, but that they couldn’t hide that spending from the public.
But while they can’t keep donors secret forever, super PACs are increasingly figuring out methods of temporarily masking donor identities that are either legal or fall into gray areas that rarely attract regulators’ attention.
One tactic is the one Mountain Families PAC used, which is likely to be replicated for the general election. A new super PAC that starts between Oct. 18 and Nov. 6 could spend money right before Election Day without having to disclose its donors until after the midterm results are tallied. (There are 11 super PACs that together have spent at least $5.8 million since the primaries but should begin disclosing their donors on Oct. 15, when the next FEC filing is due.)
Another involves going into debt to pay for advertising and other campaign-related activities, and fundraising later to pay off those debts. A super PAC that does this would not have to disclose donors until well after the money is spent.
In the case of Mountain Families PAC, Blankenship was increasingly popular among the state’s anti-Washington set. So D.C. Republicans behind the PAC avoided disclosing they were behind ads attacking Blankenship — “Isn’t there enough toxic sludge in Washington?” asked one of them — until after the primary.
Then they revealed their identity and dissolved the super PAC entirely.
Here are more examples of PACs that have delayed disclosing their donors this cycle — and how they did it:
As Republican Martha McSally battled two opponents in the Arizona Senate primary, a super PAC called Red and Gold spent $1.7 million attacking McSally, airing television ads that said McSally had supported an “age tax” on older people’s health insurance. But shortly after filing its initial paperwork with the FEC, Red and Gold notified the commission it was going to file on a monthly basis, which meant its first disclosure wasn’t due until Sept. 20, three weeks after the primary election.
When Red and Gold finally disclosed its funders, it was revealed that Senate Majority PAC, which is aligned with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, was the main funder of Red and Gold and had meddled in the primary in an attempt to hurt McSally’s chances of victory and boost a weaker Republican. Chris Hayden, spokesman for Senate Majority PAC, said that “Senate Majority PAC and Red and Gold have followed the FEC reporting schedule and follow the law governing super PACs.”
A super PAC called Ohio First PAC has been in operation since the start of April and has spent $774,822 helping Republican Jim Renacci in the Ohio Senate race. But it has only disclosed raising $79,200 from donors. Instead of disclosing donations, Ohio First’s filings with the FEC show the committee has hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to vendors for advertising and mailers, and almost no fundraising yet. The PAC did not respond to a request for comment.
The FEC has sent the PAC two letters about possible late filings for some of its spending; the committee said in correspondence in August that it is working to resolve any issues.
During the week leading up to a seven-way Democratic primary in Illinois in March, a super PAC called SunshinePAC blitzed the battleground 6th Congressional District with $130,000 in mailers and phone calls. Because it started spending money so late in the race, SunshinePAC didn’t have to reveal its donors before the primary.
But nearly a month after the election, SunshinePAC revealed its lone funder: Tom Casten, the father of primary contender Sean Casten — raising questions about whether the super PAC was really independent from the campaign. By then, Sean Casten had eked out a victory in the primary by 2,177 votes.
Tom Casten said in an interview that “there was no effort or conversation about reporting in the delayed form” when he gave to SunshinePAC, and that “I certainly didn’t ask for it.” Greg Bales, campaign manager for Casten for Congress, said in an email that “as with any outside group, there was no coordination between Sean or the campaign and that group on their spending or disclosure practices.” SunshinePAC did not respond to a request for comment.
in the land of stupid!!!
What's in a name? One-third of U.S. voters don't know candidates: Reuters/Ipsos poll
Maria Caspani - reuters
OCTOBER 3, 2018 / 6:47 AM
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Less than five weeks before elections that will determine control of the U.S. Congress for the next two years, about a third of registered voters do not know the name of their party’s candidate for office, a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll found.
Name recognition is critical in motivating voters, is the reason candidates spend millions of dollars on TV ads and is a major factor in incumbents’ advantage in fending off challengers.
But it may be slightly less critical on Nov. 6 as many voters may view their choices as referendums on a man whose name will not be on the ballot: Republican President Donald Trump.
“With the current party polarization, voters increasingly vote based on party (read: like or dislike Trump) rather than the local candidates,” Robert Erikson, a professor of political science at Columbia University in New York City, wrote in an email.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday found that 34 percent of Republican registered voters and 32.5 percent of Democratic registered voters said they did not know the names of their party's congressional candidates in their districts.
The poll of 2,597 registered voters taken Sept. 24-30 had a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of 3 percentage points.
The level of congressional candidate name recognition is about in line with recent elections, said Marc Hetherington, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina.
“People aren’t voting for their side as much as they are voting against the other side,” Hetherington said. “It really doesn’t matter what the names are these days.”
Generic party interest is not working to Republicans' advantage nationally. Some 54 percent of U.S. adults told Reuters/Ipsos they disapprove of the way Trump is handling the presidency and Democrats have a 9 percentage point lead in a generic question on which party they expect to vote for in Congress.
Democrats need to pick up 23 seats in the House to win a majority that they could use to more effectively oppose Trump's agenda.
Beyond party and name recognition, gender may play a role in voters’ decisions this year, said Michael Cornfield, an associate professor of political management at George Washington University. The #MeToo movement and protests around Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh have played into that trend.
“In these cases, it’s not just the name,” Cornfield said in an email. “Gender relations may be the top issue.”
Name recognition is critical in motivating voters, is the reason candidates spend millions of dollars on TV ads and is a major factor in incumbents’ advantage in fending off challengers.
But it may be slightly less critical on Nov. 6 as many voters may view their choices as referendums on a man whose name will not be on the ballot: Republican President Donald Trump.
“With the current party polarization, voters increasingly vote based on party (read: like or dislike Trump) rather than the local candidates,” Robert Erikson, a professor of political science at Columbia University in New York City, wrote in an email.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday found that 34 percent of Republican registered voters and 32.5 percent of Democratic registered voters said they did not know the names of their party's congressional candidates in their districts.
The poll of 2,597 registered voters taken Sept. 24-30 had a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of 3 percentage points.
The level of congressional candidate name recognition is about in line with recent elections, said Marc Hetherington, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina.
“People aren’t voting for their side as much as they are voting against the other side,” Hetherington said. “It really doesn’t matter what the names are these days.”
Generic party interest is not working to Republicans' advantage nationally. Some 54 percent of U.S. adults told Reuters/Ipsos they disapprove of the way Trump is handling the presidency and Democrats have a 9 percentage point lead in a generic question on which party they expect to vote for in Congress.
Democrats need to pick up 23 seats in the House to win a majority that they could use to more effectively oppose Trump's agenda.
Beyond party and name recognition, gender may play a role in voters’ decisions this year, said Michael Cornfield, an associate professor of political management at George Washington University. The #MeToo movement and protests around Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh have played into that trend.
“In these cases, it’s not just the name,” Cornfield said in an email. “Gender relations may be the top issue.”
Georgia to be sued for purging minority voters ahead of the midterm elections
Voting activists claim purged voters were not notified they were removed from the rolls.
KIRA LERNER - thinkprogress
OCT 3, 2018, 9:46 AM
Voting activists have filed a lawsuit against Georgia Secretary of State and GOP gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, alleging he used a racially-biased method to purge roughly 700,000 voters from the rolls ahead of the November election.
The lawsuit, which was filed on Tuesday, alleges that Kemp has not notified the affected voters — who represent roughly one in ten Georgians eligible to cast ballots — that they have been removed from the rolls over the last two years.
In additional to legal action, the activists plan to make the list of purged voters public so that individuals can check for their names and then re-register before the October 9 deadline.
Kemp’s office relies on the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, maintained by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), to maintain Georgia’s rolls. But the Crosscheck system is extremely flawed. One report found that when the program flags potential double-voters, or people registered to vote in more than one state, it identifies false positives more than 99 percent of the time. The National Voter Registration Act includes protections against types of voter roll maintenance programs that inadvertently remove properly registered voters.
The groups filing the lawsuit include the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Rainbow/PUSH, Georgia Coalition for The Peoples Agenda, and the New Georgia Project. Investigative journalist Greg Palast is also named as a plaintiff, alleging the state has not responded to his requests to public information regarding the purges.
“What has taken place here in Georgia is an insult to all of the efforts and accomplishments that we have done throughout this country,” Charles Steele, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said in a press conference Tuesday, explaining the efforts African Americans in the South went through to secure the right to vote.
Kemp, who has refused to recuse himself from administering the upcoming election while he campaigns for governor, said in a statement that the threatened lawsuit “has no merit.”
“To be crystal clear, Georgia has never used data from the Crosscheck Program to conduct list maintenance in any capacity,” Kemp said in his statement, according to local reporters. “Zero voters have been removed from the rolls based on Crosscheck data in this state. Greg Palast is completely blind to this indisputable fact in his pursuit of a sensationalist headline. Real journalists have already reported that Georgia does not use this data for list maintenance. Frankly, Mr. Palast should be embarrassed, and any credibility that he had left is now completely destroyed.”
Palast and the voting groups said the Georgia lawsuit is just the first of 26 they plan to file across the country in states that use Kobach’s Crosscheck system.
A July report from the Brennan Center for Justice found that states purged more than 16 million voters from the rolls between 2014 and 2016, with low-income and minority voters disproportionately affected. The increase in purged voters was most significant in parts of the country like Georgia with a history of racial discrimination that, until the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision in 2013, were required to seek pre-approval of changes to their voting laws from the Department of Justice.
Many of the states conducting illegal purges use the Crosscheck program, which has generated significant controversy in recent years. At least eight states have pulled out of the system because of its high margin of error.
The lawsuit, which was filed on Tuesday, alleges that Kemp has not notified the affected voters — who represent roughly one in ten Georgians eligible to cast ballots — that they have been removed from the rolls over the last two years.
In additional to legal action, the activists plan to make the list of purged voters public so that individuals can check for their names and then re-register before the October 9 deadline.
Kemp’s office relies on the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, maintained by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), to maintain Georgia’s rolls. But the Crosscheck system is extremely flawed. One report found that when the program flags potential double-voters, or people registered to vote in more than one state, it identifies false positives more than 99 percent of the time. The National Voter Registration Act includes protections against types of voter roll maintenance programs that inadvertently remove properly registered voters.
The groups filing the lawsuit include the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Rainbow/PUSH, Georgia Coalition for The Peoples Agenda, and the New Georgia Project. Investigative journalist Greg Palast is also named as a plaintiff, alleging the state has not responded to his requests to public information regarding the purges.
“What has taken place here in Georgia is an insult to all of the efforts and accomplishments that we have done throughout this country,” Charles Steele, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said in a press conference Tuesday, explaining the efforts African Americans in the South went through to secure the right to vote.
Kemp, who has refused to recuse himself from administering the upcoming election while he campaigns for governor, said in a statement that the threatened lawsuit “has no merit.”
“To be crystal clear, Georgia has never used data from the Crosscheck Program to conduct list maintenance in any capacity,” Kemp said in his statement, according to local reporters. “Zero voters have been removed from the rolls based on Crosscheck data in this state. Greg Palast is completely blind to this indisputable fact in his pursuit of a sensationalist headline. Real journalists have already reported that Georgia does not use this data for list maintenance. Frankly, Mr. Palast should be embarrassed, and any credibility that he had left is now completely destroyed.”
Palast and the voting groups said the Georgia lawsuit is just the first of 26 they plan to file across the country in states that use Kobach’s Crosscheck system.
A July report from the Brennan Center for Justice found that states purged more than 16 million voters from the rolls between 2014 and 2016, with low-income and minority voters disproportionately affected. The increase in purged voters was most significant in parts of the country like Georgia with a history of racial discrimination that, until the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision in 2013, were required to seek pre-approval of changes to their voting laws from the Department of Justice.
Many of the states conducting illegal purges use the Crosscheck program, which has generated significant controversy in recent years. At least eight states have pulled out of the system because of its high margin of error.
can your government be legitimate when your vote is SUPPRESSED???
Studies: Voter ID Tied to Lower Turnout In Wisconsin
By Associated Press - atlanta black star
October 1, 2018
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — With all of her necessary documentation, University of Wisconsin-Madison student Brooke Evans arrived at her polling place on Nov. 8, 2016, for the presidential election. For her, voting that day meant not only casting a ballot for the first female presidential candidate with a real shot of winning, but having a voice in a society in which homeless people such as herself were marginalized.
“There’s something about voting that makes you very real,” Evans said.
But when poll workers examined her mailing address under the guidelines of the Wisconsin voter ID law enacted in 2015, the University of Wisconsin-Madison philosophy major initially was barred from voting due to confusion over her address.
The nonprofit news outlet Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism provided this article to The Associated Press through a collaboration with Institute for Nonprofit News.
The law requires Wisconsin residents to present certain forms of photo identification to vote but does not require that the ID have the voter’s current address. Such voters must provide proof of their current address — and that is where Evans ran into trouble. She eventually was able to cast a ballot using a campus address she herself had advocated for to help homeless students.
Not only did Evans, as a college student, face increased obstacles under the voter ID law, her homelessness was another barrier — one that almost prevented her from exercising a fundamental right of citizenship.
“I was just really surprised at the hassle I was given,” Evans said.
Over the past 15 years, voting has become increasingly difficult for people such as Evans. A recent PRRI/The Atlantic 2018 Voter Engagement Survey found that 5 percent of Wisconsin residents surveyed said they or someone in their household was told they lacked the proper documentation to vote. (The Joyce Foundation is a funder of the survey and also is a funder of the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism’s coverage of democracy issues.)
A 2014 U.S. Government Accountability Office report concluded that voter ID laws may reduce voter turnout. The report examined 10 studies, as well as turnout in Kansas and Tennessee compared to other states without voter ID laws. The GAO estimated turnout was cut by up to 2.2 percentage points in Kansas and 3.2 percentage points in Tennessee in the 2008 and 2012 elections — with larger decreases seen among specific groups, including those ages 18 to 23 and African-Americans.
Such a margin can be decisive. In 2016, Republican Donald Trump won Wisconsin by less than 1 percentage point, or 47.22 percent of the vote, edging out Democrat Hillary Clinton, who got 46.45 percent. Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel has even credited the photo ID requirement with helping Trump win Wisconsin.
Although requiring voter identification in some form has a history stemming back to the 1950s, laws requiring all voters without exception to have specific forms of identification gained traction in 2005. Currently, 34 states have voter ID laws, with Georgia, Indiana, Kansas and Wisconsin being some of the strictest, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Except for people with religious objections, all voters in Wisconsin are required to present photo identification at the polls. These include state-issued driver’s licenses and identification cards, U.S. passports and certain IDs issued by Wisconsin accredited universities or colleges.
Wisconsin’s photo ID requirement passed in 2011 and was prompted by Republican concerns about ostensible voter fraud. But that justification has been discredited by several subsequent studies and rejected by a federal judge who in 2016 labeled concerns over voter fraud “mostly phantom.”
So after years of legal wrangling, Wisconsin’s photo ID requirement was put in place for the first general statewide election in 2016.
In Wisconsin, voter ID enjoys strong support from the public. Marquette Law School polls taken between 2012 and 2014 showed between 60 and 66 percent of Wisconsin residents surveyed favored requiring a government-issued photo identification card to vote. It should be noted that among those answering the poll in 2014, 99 percent said they had a valid photo ID to vote.
There are still lingering challenges to the law. The federal appeals court in Chicago has not issued a ruling in two cases despite hearing arguments in February 2017.
Analiese Eicher described how, during her time as a UW-Madison student from 2006 to 2011, she and her roommates would walk to the polling places together so that one could vouch for the address of the others. Eicher is program director at One Wisconsin Now, the left-leaning advocacy group suing to overturn the law. The law no longer allows for a “corroborating witness” to provide proof of residency for voters.
Since Eicher’s time in college, ID requirements for students have become much stricter. Of the 13 University of Wisconsin four-year campuses, only four provide campus-issued student IDs that are compliant for voting.
That means out-of-state students and students with no driver’s licenses at those schools must get a second ID card from the university, which is valid for only two years, as well as a Voter Enrollment Verification letter proving they are enrolled in school.
These extra steps were by design: A former GOP staffer testified in 2016 that some Republican senators in a closed session were “giddy” about the prospect of voter ID suppressing votes by Milwaukee residents and college students, both of whom tend to vote Democratic.
Brian Klaas, a fellow in comparative politics at the London School of Economics, said Wisconsin and other states risk delegitimizing their own elections by suppressing participation.
“We have to think really carefully about the barriers that are put into voting in an already-declining voter turnout reality that we live in,” Klaas said.
In the 2016 presidential election, Wisconsin’s overall voter turnout was 70.5 percent, the lowest in two decades.
In Sauk City, a town of around 3,400 residents about 30 miles north of the state Capitol in Madison, voters in the last presidential election without a proper form of identification could obtain free state ID cards at local Division of Motor Vehicles offices — but that office was only open every fifth Wednesday of every month — or just four days in 2016.
“(The voter ID law) made it harder for people to cast a ballot,” said Matt Rothschild, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan political watchdog group. “Making it much harder to vote is about as anti-democratic as you can get.”
Gail Juszczak of Lake Mills said she believes the voter ID law is aimed squarely at people likely to vote Democratic.
“I think that the whole vote and the whole idea of changing this is to exclude certain people from voting,” said Juszczak, interviewed outside her polling place during the Aug. 14 partisan primary election. “And I think it’s definitely hurt the Democratic Party, particularly because more of the Democrats are people who aren’t as able to show identification as clearly.”
The state also initially did a poor job of explaining the changes to residents, said Anita Johnson, a Milwaukee resident who has been educating voters on their rights for 25 years. In 2015, Johnson began working with VoteRiders, a national nonprofit organization specializing in helping people obtain proper identification to vote
“People are confused,” Johnson said. “Some people at the beginning thought that there was an actual voter ID card. There is no such thing as a voter ID card.”
Among those who may have difficulty obtaining proper ID for voting are senior citizens, some of whom lack state-issued driver’s licenses or other documentation, said Gail Bliss, a senior liaison for the League of Women Voters in Dane County.
Kathleen Fullin, who also works for the league, remembers the case of a senior citizen with a driver’s license that had expired since the last general election, which is a valid form of ID for voting under the law.
“Her family had actually contacted the Wisconsin Elections Commission and knew she should be permitted to cast a regular ballot, but the chief inspector at her polling place would not permit it,” Fullin said in an email.
Said Johnson: “Voting should be one of the easiest things you can do. And it allows you to participate in democracy. So when you put up problems like the voter ID law, people say ‘Forget it, I’m not going to vote.’ ”
Challengers to the voter ID law had argued that hundreds of thousands of valid Wisconsin voters — many of them Hispanic, African-American and students — could be barred from casting ballots because of the identification requirement.
A UW-Madison study commissioned by Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell in 2017 estimated that thousands of registered voters in Dane and Milwaukee counties were deterred or prevented from voting because of the photo ID requirement in the 2016 presidential election — a situation that more heavily affected low-income people and African-Americans. The survey was mailed to 2,400 registered voters; 293 were returned.
Based on the sampling weight, UW-Madison political science professor Kenneth Mayer concluded that between 11,701 and 23,252 people did not vote due to confusion over voter ID requirements or lack of proper identification.
Trump won Wisconsin by 22,748 votes.
Mayer’s conclusion was challenged by a free market, limited government legal group, which contended there was no proven linkage between the photo ID requirement and the election results. Will Flanders, research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, said the study “pushed a narrative” of voter suppression but did not actually prove it.
“The most this survey can claim to prove is that the administration of the law could have been improved or that the candidates could have run better ground games,” Flanders wrote.
But, with the 2018 general election approaching, stories like Brooke Evans’ show how easily confusion about voting can jeopardize voting. If it were not for her own efforts to help homeless students, Evans said, she herself might not have been able to vote.
“I ended up relying on (activism) to access basic human rights, like the right to vote.”
“There’s something about voting that makes you very real,” Evans said.
But when poll workers examined her mailing address under the guidelines of the Wisconsin voter ID law enacted in 2015, the University of Wisconsin-Madison philosophy major initially was barred from voting due to confusion over her address.
The nonprofit news outlet Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism provided this article to The Associated Press through a collaboration with Institute for Nonprofit News.
The law requires Wisconsin residents to present certain forms of photo identification to vote but does not require that the ID have the voter’s current address. Such voters must provide proof of their current address — and that is where Evans ran into trouble. She eventually was able to cast a ballot using a campus address she herself had advocated for to help homeless students.
Not only did Evans, as a college student, face increased obstacles under the voter ID law, her homelessness was another barrier — one that almost prevented her from exercising a fundamental right of citizenship.
“I was just really surprised at the hassle I was given,” Evans said.
Over the past 15 years, voting has become increasingly difficult for people such as Evans. A recent PRRI/The Atlantic 2018 Voter Engagement Survey found that 5 percent of Wisconsin residents surveyed said they or someone in their household was told they lacked the proper documentation to vote. (The Joyce Foundation is a funder of the survey and also is a funder of the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism’s coverage of democracy issues.)
A 2014 U.S. Government Accountability Office report concluded that voter ID laws may reduce voter turnout. The report examined 10 studies, as well as turnout in Kansas and Tennessee compared to other states without voter ID laws. The GAO estimated turnout was cut by up to 2.2 percentage points in Kansas and 3.2 percentage points in Tennessee in the 2008 and 2012 elections — with larger decreases seen among specific groups, including those ages 18 to 23 and African-Americans.
Such a margin can be decisive. In 2016, Republican Donald Trump won Wisconsin by less than 1 percentage point, or 47.22 percent of the vote, edging out Democrat Hillary Clinton, who got 46.45 percent. Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel has even credited the photo ID requirement with helping Trump win Wisconsin.
Although requiring voter identification in some form has a history stemming back to the 1950s, laws requiring all voters without exception to have specific forms of identification gained traction in 2005. Currently, 34 states have voter ID laws, with Georgia, Indiana, Kansas and Wisconsin being some of the strictest, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Except for people with religious objections, all voters in Wisconsin are required to present photo identification at the polls. These include state-issued driver’s licenses and identification cards, U.S. passports and certain IDs issued by Wisconsin accredited universities or colleges.
Wisconsin’s photo ID requirement passed in 2011 and was prompted by Republican concerns about ostensible voter fraud. But that justification has been discredited by several subsequent studies and rejected by a federal judge who in 2016 labeled concerns over voter fraud “mostly phantom.”
So after years of legal wrangling, Wisconsin’s photo ID requirement was put in place for the first general statewide election in 2016.
In Wisconsin, voter ID enjoys strong support from the public. Marquette Law School polls taken between 2012 and 2014 showed between 60 and 66 percent of Wisconsin residents surveyed favored requiring a government-issued photo identification card to vote. It should be noted that among those answering the poll in 2014, 99 percent said they had a valid photo ID to vote.
There are still lingering challenges to the law. The federal appeals court in Chicago has not issued a ruling in two cases despite hearing arguments in February 2017.
Analiese Eicher described how, during her time as a UW-Madison student from 2006 to 2011, she and her roommates would walk to the polling places together so that one could vouch for the address of the others. Eicher is program director at One Wisconsin Now, the left-leaning advocacy group suing to overturn the law. The law no longer allows for a “corroborating witness” to provide proof of residency for voters.
Since Eicher’s time in college, ID requirements for students have become much stricter. Of the 13 University of Wisconsin four-year campuses, only four provide campus-issued student IDs that are compliant for voting.
That means out-of-state students and students with no driver’s licenses at those schools must get a second ID card from the university, which is valid for only two years, as well as a Voter Enrollment Verification letter proving they are enrolled in school.
These extra steps were by design: A former GOP staffer testified in 2016 that some Republican senators in a closed session were “giddy” about the prospect of voter ID suppressing votes by Milwaukee residents and college students, both of whom tend to vote Democratic.
Brian Klaas, a fellow in comparative politics at the London School of Economics, said Wisconsin and other states risk delegitimizing their own elections by suppressing participation.
“We have to think really carefully about the barriers that are put into voting in an already-declining voter turnout reality that we live in,” Klaas said.
In the 2016 presidential election, Wisconsin’s overall voter turnout was 70.5 percent, the lowest in two decades.
In Sauk City, a town of around 3,400 residents about 30 miles north of the state Capitol in Madison, voters in the last presidential election without a proper form of identification could obtain free state ID cards at local Division of Motor Vehicles offices — but that office was only open every fifth Wednesday of every month — or just four days in 2016.
“(The voter ID law) made it harder for people to cast a ballot,” said Matt Rothschild, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan political watchdog group. “Making it much harder to vote is about as anti-democratic as you can get.”
Gail Juszczak of Lake Mills said she believes the voter ID law is aimed squarely at people likely to vote Democratic.
“I think that the whole vote and the whole idea of changing this is to exclude certain people from voting,” said Juszczak, interviewed outside her polling place during the Aug. 14 partisan primary election. “And I think it’s definitely hurt the Democratic Party, particularly because more of the Democrats are people who aren’t as able to show identification as clearly.”
The state also initially did a poor job of explaining the changes to residents, said Anita Johnson, a Milwaukee resident who has been educating voters on their rights for 25 years. In 2015, Johnson began working with VoteRiders, a national nonprofit organization specializing in helping people obtain proper identification to vote
“People are confused,” Johnson said. “Some people at the beginning thought that there was an actual voter ID card. There is no such thing as a voter ID card.”
Among those who may have difficulty obtaining proper ID for voting are senior citizens, some of whom lack state-issued driver’s licenses or other documentation, said Gail Bliss, a senior liaison for the League of Women Voters in Dane County.
Kathleen Fullin, who also works for the league, remembers the case of a senior citizen with a driver’s license that had expired since the last general election, which is a valid form of ID for voting under the law.
“Her family had actually contacted the Wisconsin Elections Commission and knew she should be permitted to cast a regular ballot, but the chief inspector at her polling place would not permit it,” Fullin said in an email.
Said Johnson: “Voting should be one of the easiest things you can do. And it allows you to participate in democracy. So when you put up problems like the voter ID law, people say ‘Forget it, I’m not going to vote.’ ”
Challengers to the voter ID law had argued that hundreds of thousands of valid Wisconsin voters — many of them Hispanic, African-American and students — could be barred from casting ballots because of the identification requirement.
A UW-Madison study commissioned by Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell in 2017 estimated that thousands of registered voters in Dane and Milwaukee counties were deterred or prevented from voting because of the photo ID requirement in the 2016 presidential election — a situation that more heavily affected low-income people and African-Americans. The survey was mailed to 2,400 registered voters; 293 were returned.
Based on the sampling weight, UW-Madison political science professor Kenneth Mayer concluded that between 11,701 and 23,252 people did not vote due to confusion over voter ID requirements or lack of proper identification.
Trump won Wisconsin by 22,748 votes.
Mayer’s conclusion was challenged by a free market, limited government legal group, which contended there was no proven linkage between the photo ID requirement and the election results. Will Flanders, research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, said the study “pushed a narrative” of voter suppression but did not actually prove it.
“The most this survey can claim to prove is that the administration of the law could have been improved or that the candidates could have run better ground games,” Flanders wrote.
But, with the 2018 general election approaching, stories like Brooke Evans’ show how easily confusion about voting can jeopardize voting. If it were not for her own efforts to help homeless students, Evans said, she herself might not have been able to vote.
“I ended up relying on (activism) to access basic human rights, like the right to vote.”
stupid people will vote for him anyway!!!
GOP congressional candidate caught misleading about his background
Steve Watkins was caught exaggerating about his business record in Kansas
MATTHEW ROZSA - salon
SEPTEMBER 28, 2018 1:24PM (UTC)
A congressional candidate in Kansas has been caught embellishing the facts about his own business record.
"I didn’t own it, no ... when I say I helped start and grow, it was operational," Republican candidate Steve Watkins, who is running to represent the 2nd congressional district in Kansas, told The Kansas City Star after initially claiming on a number of occasions that he had "started" a business known as VIAP Inc., — which is actually a wholly owned subsidiary of a global project management firm based out of the nation's capital called Versar Inc.
"There were processes, systems that didn’t exist and I helped to start and create those processes and systems and products and services that we provided clients."
The Star contacted Watkins about his business record when their investigation into company records, as well as their own interviews, revealed that VIAP had existed for years before Watkins was hired as a consultant and that Versar's chief executive had at the time given credit for building VIAP to someone other than Watkins.
The newspaper was unable to find any public records which identified Watkins as having ownership stake in either VIAP or Versar, and at the time Versar Services was founded in 1997, Watkins was still a student at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point. The candidate's financial disclosure forms fail to mention VIAP among his assets and a number of corporate executives told The Star that they had never heard of Watkins being either an owner or a founder of VIAP. Most didn't even recall who he was.
The Star also chronicled a number of occasions in which Watkins had claimed to have helped start the company. His statements included:
"I got out of the military, started a small business and grew it from three people to 470 people. So I know what it’s like to have to sweat it and work to make payroll, to not take any salary so you can make ends meet."
"I started an engineering and security company. It was a paramilitary company that did work strictly for the U.S. government. This was in Iraq and Afghanistan. We grew to a number of countries. We grew from three people to 470 with me as the principal during that growth period."
"I grew that outfit from three people to 450 people. There were times when I did not take pay to make sure my employees could make ends meet."
Watkins' campaign spokesman, Bryan Piligra, told the Star that Watkins had "never intentionally claimed" to have owned VIAP.
The revelation about Watkins' fudged business background couldn't come at a worst time for the Republican Party. They are already widely considered to be at risk of losing the House of Representatives to the Democrats, and Watkins' Kansas district is considered to be highly competitive as he runs against Democratic candidate Paul Davis. A recent poll by The New York Times Upshot and Siena College found that 45 percent of voters in the district supported Davis and 44 percent supported Watkins, with 12 percent remaining undecided. The poll had a 4.8 percent margin of error.
"I didn’t own it, no ... when I say I helped start and grow, it was operational," Republican candidate Steve Watkins, who is running to represent the 2nd congressional district in Kansas, told The Kansas City Star after initially claiming on a number of occasions that he had "started" a business known as VIAP Inc., — which is actually a wholly owned subsidiary of a global project management firm based out of the nation's capital called Versar Inc.
"There were processes, systems that didn’t exist and I helped to start and create those processes and systems and products and services that we provided clients."
The Star contacted Watkins about his business record when their investigation into company records, as well as their own interviews, revealed that VIAP had existed for years before Watkins was hired as a consultant and that Versar's chief executive had at the time given credit for building VIAP to someone other than Watkins.
The newspaper was unable to find any public records which identified Watkins as having ownership stake in either VIAP or Versar, and at the time Versar Services was founded in 1997, Watkins was still a student at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point. The candidate's financial disclosure forms fail to mention VIAP among his assets and a number of corporate executives told The Star that they had never heard of Watkins being either an owner or a founder of VIAP. Most didn't even recall who he was.
The Star also chronicled a number of occasions in which Watkins had claimed to have helped start the company. His statements included:
"I got out of the military, started a small business and grew it from three people to 470 people. So I know what it’s like to have to sweat it and work to make payroll, to not take any salary so you can make ends meet."
"I started an engineering and security company. It was a paramilitary company that did work strictly for the U.S. government. This was in Iraq and Afghanistan. We grew to a number of countries. We grew from three people to 470 with me as the principal during that growth period."
"I grew that outfit from three people to 450 people. There were times when I did not take pay to make sure my employees could make ends meet."
Watkins' campaign spokesman, Bryan Piligra, told the Star that Watkins had "never intentionally claimed" to have owned VIAP.
The revelation about Watkins' fudged business background couldn't come at a worst time for the Republican Party. They are already widely considered to be at risk of losing the House of Representatives to the Democrats, and Watkins' Kansas district is considered to be highly competitive as he runs against Democratic candidate Paul Davis. A recent poll by The New York Times Upshot and Siena College found that 45 percent of voters in the district supported Davis and 44 percent supported Watkins, with 12 percent remaining undecided. The poll had a 4.8 percent margin of error.
no surprise, he is a republican!!!
The Republican Running for Governor of Georgia Sent the Sleaziest Mailer of the Year
He falsely accuses his opponent of promising to let undocumented immigrants vote.
JAMILAH KING - mother jones
SEPTEMBER 26, 2018 3:11 PM
Only weeks out from Georgia’s contentious gubernatorial race, Republican Brian Kemp is sending a flier to potential voters falsely claiming that his opponent, democrat Stacey Abrams, plans to allow undocumented immigrants the right to vote.
The two-sided mailer plays on some voters’ basest fears around race, immigration, and safety. The front features photos of Kemp posing with police officers and his family while extolling his promises to fight street gangs, sex trafficking, and opioid abuse.
The back side of the mailer features an image of Abrams, saying that she’s “too extreme for Georgia.” His proof: Kemp says that Abrams intends to turn Georgia into a “sanctuary state” and would “allow illegal immigrants to vote.”
It’s a sly political maneuver on Kemp’s part, but it’s also false. The claim apparently dates back to Abrams’ time as a member of the Georgia House of Representatives, when she voted against a law that would have required potential voters to provide proof of citizenship registering to vote. Georgia passed its law in 2009, while Alabama followed in 2011 and Kansas in 2013, as reported by my colleague Ari Berman. But in 2016, a federal appeals court blocked all three states from implementing proof of citizenship laws for people who use the federal voter registration form under the National Voter Registration Act, because it would be unfair to require proof of citizenship for some registrants and not others.
Proof of citizenship laws have been a key strategy in what some observers call voter suppression, particularly in communities of color. As Georgia’s secretary of state, Kemp has been the subject of several lawsuits alleging that Kemp’s office failed to process voter registrations in communities of color. As reported by my colleague Pema Levy, in 2017 Kemp settled a federal lawsuit in which his office was accused of rejecting thousands of voter registration forms from people of color on the grounds that their names didn’t match exactly what was listed in state databases.
The ad is in line with the Kemp campaign’s previous tactics. During the primary, he released a series of incendiary TV ads—in one, he promised to “round up criminal illegals and take ’em home myself.”
Perhaps more than any other election this year, Kemp and Abrams represent two opposite ends of the political spectrum. Kemp proudly touts an endorsement from Donald Trump, while Abrams has gotten the nod from the likes of Sens. Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders and, if elected, would be the first black woman governor in the United States.
The two-sided mailer plays on some voters’ basest fears around race, immigration, and safety. The front features photos of Kemp posing with police officers and his family while extolling his promises to fight street gangs, sex trafficking, and opioid abuse.
The back side of the mailer features an image of Abrams, saying that she’s “too extreme for Georgia.” His proof: Kemp says that Abrams intends to turn Georgia into a “sanctuary state” and would “allow illegal immigrants to vote.”
It’s a sly political maneuver on Kemp’s part, but it’s also false. The claim apparently dates back to Abrams’ time as a member of the Georgia House of Representatives, when she voted against a law that would have required potential voters to provide proof of citizenship registering to vote. Georgia passed its law in 2009, while Alabama followed in 2011 and Kansas in 2013, as reported by my colleague Ari Berman. But in 2016, a federal appeals court blocked all three states from implementing proof of citizenship laws for people who use the federal voter registration form under the National Voter Registration Act, because it would be unfair to require proof of citizenship for some registrants and not others.
Proof of citizenship laws have been a key strategy in what some observers call voter suppression, particularly in communities of color. As Georgia’s secretary of state, Kemp has been the subject of several lawsuits alleging that Kemp’s office failed to process voter registrations in communities of color. As reported by my colleague Pema Levy, in 2017 Kemp settled a federal lawsuit in which his office was accused of rejecting thousands of voter registration forms from people of color on the grounds that their names didn’t match exactly what was listed in state databases.
The ad is in line with the Kemp campaign’s previous tactics. During the primary, he released a series of incendiary TV ads—in one, he promised to “round up criminal illegals and take ’em home myself.”
Perhaps more than any other election this year, Kemp and Abrams represent two opposite ends of the political spectrum. Kemp proudly touts an endorsement from Donald Trump, while Abrams has gotten the nod from the likes of Sens. Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders and, if elected, would be the first black woman governor in the United States.
continuing the oppression!!!
Voter ID law revived in major setback to Native American voters
A court previously found that almost half of North Dakota's Native voters lack the required ID.
KIRA LERNER - thinkprogress
SEP 25, 2018, 10:03 AM
A federal appeals court on Monday sided with North Dakota in a lawsuit over the state’s voter ID law, presenting a significant burden to Native American voters ahead of the November election.
A three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed a lower court’s injunction which had required the state to accept a longer list of potential forms of identification at the polls, including IDs that show a voter’s “current mailing address” instead of their “current residential street address.” The court found that the state would be “irreparably harmed by the injunction during the general election in November, 2018,” according to the order.
Many homes on Native American reservations lack traditional postal addresses. Instead, Native voters often rely on P.O. boxes which could be located outside their precincts. Furthermore, there are no motor-vehicle license offices on North Dakota’s reservations, making it difficult for Native voters to obtain the necessary forms of ID.
Native Americans make up more than five percent of North Dakota and represent a critical demographic in the sparsely populated state, where Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) is trailing in the polls as she campaigns for reelection.
According the AP, a federal judge had previously found that “nearly 49 percent of Native Americans who lacked a qualifying ID also lacked sufficient supplemental documentation, so around 2,300 would be prevented from voting.”
In their lawsuit, Native voters alleged that the ID law violated their constitutional right to vote. A federal judge in April 2018 ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, finding that certain parts of the law presented “a clear ‘legal obstacle’ inhibiting the opportunity to vote.” In issuing the injunction, the judge cited the “public interest in protecting the most cherished right to vote for thousands of Native Americans who currently lack a qualifying ID and cannot obtain one.”
But North Dakota’s Republican Secretary of State Al Jaeger appealed, arguing that the law is necessary to protect against voter fraud and that voters may use a mailing address that’s in a different precinct from their residence. The state worried that voters could cast ballots in the wrong precincts and sway local elections.
Studies show that in-person voter fraud is exceedingly rare and that voters have little motivation to cast illegal ballots. Nevertheless, the appeals court sided with the state, finding the state is likely to win on the merits when the full appeals court considers the case at a later date.
Matthew Campbell, an attorney with the Native American Rights Fund who is representing the plaintiffs, expressed his disappointment in a statement Monday.
“The Court acknowledged that thousands of Native American voters will not be able to vote under the State’s system, and that certain North Dakota communities lack residential addresses,” he said. “Given that absentee voting is scheduled to begin very soon and given the Court’s invitation in its decision that the courthouse doors remain open if any voters are being prevented from voting, we plan to continue our fight for Native American voters in North Dakota.”
The lawsuit comes after a similar effort by Native American voters in North Dakota to protect their civil rights. In August 2016, shortly before the presidential election, a court invalidated the state’s previous voter ID law, finding that it disenfranchised minority voters. But the state legislature was able to turn around and in April 2017, enacted another form of the same law.
Although North Dakota was not specifically covered by the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance requirements, the state has similarly seen an increase in suppressive laws since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the landmark voting law in its 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision. As a result, Native voters in North Dakota and across the country have had to fight aggressively against efforts to suppress their ballots.
“What has essentially resulted is a lot of expensive and time consuming litigation by civil rights groups… to stop the laws from going into effect,” Jim Tucker, an attorney and member of the Native American Voting Rights Coalition, told ThinkProgress earlier this year.
Since 2013, many of the nine states that previously had to have federal approval to change their voting laws have implemented new laws that created new barriers to voting. According to a ThinkProgress analysis, elected officials in states with large Native American populations have cut voting hours and opportunities, refused to add polling places on reservations, eliminated language assistance services, and fought to keep Native voters into majority-white gerrymandered districts where they’d never get political representation.
A three-judge panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed a lower court’s injunction which had required the state to accept a longer list of potential forms of identification at the polls, including IDs that show a voter’s “current mailing address” instead of their “current residential street address.” The court found that the state would be “irreparably harmed by the injunction during the general election in November, 2018,” according to the order.
Many homes on Native American reservations lack traditional postal addresses. Instead, Native voters often rely on P.O. boxes which could be located outside their precincts. Furthermore, there are no motor-vehicle license offices on North Dakota’s reservations, making it difficult for Native voters to obtain the necessary forms of ID.
Native Americans make up more than five percent of North Dakota and represent a critical demographic in the sparsely populated state, where Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) is trailing in the polls as she campaigns for reelection.
According the AP, a federal judge had previously found that “nearly 49 percent of Native Americans who lacked a qualifying ID also lacked sufficient supplemental documentation, so around 2,300 would be prevented from voting.”
In their lawsuit, Native voters alleged that the ID law violated their constitutional right to vote. A federal judge in April 2018 ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, finding that certain parts of the law presented “a clear ‘legal obstacle’ inhibiting the opportunity to vote.” In issuing the injunction, the judge cited the “public interest in protecting the most cherished right to vote for thousands of Native Americans who currently lack a qualifying ID and cannot obtain one.”
But North Dakota’s Republican Secretary of State Al Jaeger appealed, arguing that the law is necessary to protect against voter fraud and that voters may use a mailing address that’s in a different precinct from their residence. The state worried that voters could cast ballots in the wrong precincts and sway local elections.
Studies show that in-person voter fraud is exceedingly rare and that voters have little motivation to cast illegal ballots. Nevertheless, the appeals court sided with the state, finding the state is likely to win on the merits when the full appeals court considers the case at a later date.
Matthew Campbell, an attorney with the Native American Rights Fund who is representing the plaintiffs, expressed his disappointment in a statement Monday.
“The Court acknowledged that thousands of Native American voters will not be able to vote under the State’s system, and that certain North Dakota communities lack residential addresses,” he said. “Given that absentee voting is scheduled to begin very soon and given the Court’s invitation in its decision that the courthouse doors remain open if any voters are being prevented from voting, we plan to continue our fight for Native American voters in North Dakota.”
The lawsuit comes after a similar effort by Native American voters in North Dakota to protect their civil rights. In August 2016, shortly before the presidential election, a court invalidated the state’s previous voter ID law, finding that it disenfranchised minority voters. But the state legislature was able to turn around and in April 2017, enacted another form of the same law.
Although North Dakota was not specifically covered by the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance requirements, the state has similarly seen an increase in suppressive laws since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the landmark voting law in its 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision. As a result, Native voters in North Dakota and across the country have had to fight aggressively against efforts to suppress their ballots.
“What has essentially resulted is a lot of expensive and time consuming litigation by civil rights groups… to stop the laws from going into effect,” Jim Tucker, an attorney and member of the Native American Voting Rights Coalition, told ThinkProgress earlier this year.
Since 2013, many of the nine states that previously had to have federal approval to change their voting laws have implemented new laws that created new barriers to voting. According to a ThinkProgress analysis, elected officials in states with large Native American populations have cut voting hours and opportunities, refused to add polling places on reservations, eliminated language assistance services, and fought to keep Native voters into majority-white gerrymandered districts where they’d never get political representation.
Bipartisan Furor as North Carolina Election Law Shrinks Early Voting Locations by Almost 20 Percent
Nearly half of the state’s counties are shutting down polling places, in part because of a law passed in June.
by Blake Paterson - pro publica
Sept. 24, 5 a.m. EDT
In June, the North Carolina General Assembly passed legislation mandating that all early voting sites in the state remain open for uniform hours on weekdays from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., a move supporters argued would reduce confusion and ultimately make early voting easier and more accessible.
But with the start of early voting only weeks away, county election officials across the state — who previously had control over setting polling hours in their jurisdictions — say the new law has hamstrung their ability to best serve voters. Some officials in rural counties say they’ve had to shrink the number of early voting locations to accommodate the law’s longer hour requirements and stay within their budgets.
A ProPublica analysis of polling locations shows that North Carolina’s 2018 midterm election will have nearly 20 percent fewer early voting locations than there were in 2014. Nearly half of North Carolina’s 100 counties are shutting down polling places, in part because of the new law. Poorer rural counties, often strapped for resources to begin with, are having a particularly difficult time adjusting to the new requirement.
The closure of polling locations increases the time it takes for voters to travel to the polls, and it could result in lower turnout, making matters worse for a state already dealing with Hurricane Florence. Early voting in North Carolina begins on Oct. 17.
We interviewed more than two dozen county election officials across North Carolina. None said they were in favor of the new law, and none said they were contacted by state lawmakers for counsel on the legislation. Some referred to the policy as “overkill,” a waste of resources and an “unfunded mandate,” particularly burdensome for cash-strapped counties.
“We know our county. We know when most people go to vote early. The 12-hour, 7-a.m.-to-7-p.m. requirement just ties our hands when coming up with a catered approach that fits our county best,” said Steve Stone, the Republican chair of the Robeson County Board of Elections.
Republican state lawmakers, who championed the new law, argue that the consistency it provides will eliminate uncertainty among voters and expand early voting by increasing hours and allowing those who work full-time jobs to vote before or after work.
“The purpose of the uniformity is to make it easier and more convenient and more accessible for the voter to participate,” said David Lewis, a state representative who supported the bill. “I think that access to the polls, access to the ballots in a uniform fashion, is more important than poll worker or election worker convenience.”
Lewis says the law has led to an increase in the number of aggregate polling hours across the state. Indeed, polls for early voting will be open 49,696 hours in 2018, a substantial jump from the 25,887 hours offered in 2014, according to a preliminary analysis from the North Carolina State Board of Elections & Ethics Enforcement.
But according to Robert Stein, a professor of political science at Rice University, aggregate hours are not nearly as important a factor to voter access as the number of early voting locations offered by a county.
“There is a lot of good research to suggest that when it comes to having a positive effect on early voting turnout, the important things are not the hours of operation but the location of the polling place and the distance and travel time it takes a voter to get there,” Stein said.
For many counties, the trade-off for more polling hours is fewer early voting locations. Take Gaston County, near Charlotte. In 2014, the county opened one main polling place at 8 a.m. and three additional ones at 10 a.m. According to Adam Ragan, the county’s nonpartisan director of elections, there are very few voters in the county eager to cast ballots early in the morning. The county, therefore, typically maximizes its resources by staggering voting hours across multiple locations.
“In elections administration, we have what we consider ‘non-usable hours,’” Ragan explained. “There are some locations where people won’t come at 7 a.m. or 8 a.m. That’s why we’ve always opened our auxiliary sites at 10 a.m.”
The county originally planned to open five early voting locations, but with the new policy it can now only afford to operate three.
While county election officials from both parties have expressed near uniform discontent over the new requirements, state lawmakers were split along partisan lines on the measure, with support coming exclusively from GOP lawmakers.
“It will put a strain on local boards,” Democratic Rep. Marcia Morey said on the floor of the North Carolina House of Representatives. “We need local flexibility, not the strong arm of the state for political purposes to suppress the vote.”
North Carolina’s Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper originally vetoed the bill, writing in a statement that “we should be making it easier for people to vote, not harder,” but GOP state lawmakers have veto-proof majorities in both chambers of the General Assembly and handily overrode the veto.
In addition to setting uniform polling hours, the original legislation also eliminated the final Saturday of early voting, a day that historically attracts a large number of black voters, opening legislators up to further charges of voter suppression.
Republican lawmakers subsequently backed off on this and restored the popular voting day. Lewis acknowledged the move was a mistake, though he said it had been proposed to give counties more time prepare for Election Day. Still, given the sordid history of voting rights violations in North Carolina, many Democrats remain skeptical of GOP lawmakers’ dedication to expanding access to early voting.
“I do not see it as an isolated event, but rather a part of a larger voter suppression effort,” said Al Daniels, a Democratic member of the Bladen County Board of Elections, of the uniform-hours law. “I see it as anti-voter, period.”
In 2013, the GOP-led General Assembly passed far-reaching legislation in the name of combating voter fraud that cut back on early voting, established a photo ID requirement and did away with pre-registration of high school students, same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting. A federal appeals court struck down the law, labeling it an unconstitutional attempt to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
The 2013 law was passed in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which weakened a provision of the Voting Rights Act that had required a handful of jurisdictions — including parts of North Carolina — to submit voting law changes to the federal government to determine whether those changes had a discriminatory effect or purpose. Now, laws like North Carolina’s uniform-voting legislation don’t need to be given preclearance from the federal government before they can take effect.
“Given the context of the GOP legislature, it makes you want to raise your eyebrows that this just wasn’t some neutral requirement to have consistent voting hours around the state,” said Philip Lehman, the Democratic vice chair of Durham County’s Board of Elections and a former member of the state’s General Assembly.
Other arguments in favor of the law have only advanced suspicion of lawmakers’ motives. State Sen. Ralph Hise, one of a dozen Republican sponsors of the bill, said in an interview with ProPublica that the law was meant, in part, to rein in partisan maneuvering on county election boards. He said that, in previous elections, certain counties would strategically leave specific early voting sites open for longer to “impact the election.” When asked to provide an example of such conduct, during the interview and subsequently, however, Hise did not do so.
The new law came as a surprise to many local election officials who had already finalized their budgets. Elections in North Carolina, unlike some other states, are funded entirely at the county level, leaving some administrators scrambling to figure out how to work within the confines of their budgets while accommodating the new law.
“I’m a full-fledged Republican and a Republican supporter, and I’m just disappointed in the General Assembly for not reaching out to election officials in the state and asking, ‘What do you think would work well for this early voting law?’” said Stone, the chair of the Robeson County Board of Elections.
The law appears to have exacerbated the divide between urban and rural counties, putting a greater strain on poorer, less populous counties, which often have smaller budgets, fewer full-time employees and an older voting population that is less willing to volunteer for what could be a 12-hour poll worker shift.
Take Bladen County. When it approved its operating budget this year, election officials set aside funds for four early voting sites. Though sparsely populated, Bladen County is large — the state’s fourth biggest by area — and local election administrators wanted to provide ample access to voters across the region.
Their plan had precedent. In every statewide election over the past decade, Bladen voters could cast their ballots at one of four early voting locations spread out across the county. Now, with the strict hours requirement, Bladen County can only afford to staff and operate one early voting site.
“We’re a small county and the law has affected us pretty badly,” said Bobby Ludlum, the GOP chair of Bladen County’s Board of Elections.
Wealthier, more populous counties appear to be doing better at weathering the changes. Still, election officials acknowledged that the law may adversely affect their rural counterparts.
“One size does not necessarily fit all,” said Michael Dickerson, the nonpartisan director of elections in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina’s most populous. “I’m very fortunate in this county. I’ve got over a million people living here, so we can find poll workers.”
The legislation has contributed to an already chaotic and uncertain year for election administrators in North Carolina. In addition to the difficulties they will encounter getting elections up and running in a state dealing with a major natural disaster, election officials are still scrambling to deal with man-made crises. A federal court in late August ruled that the state’s congressional maps were unconstitutionally gerrymandered and ordered they be redrawn immediately, sparking widespread confusion among election officials on whether the general election would move forward as planned. The court later clarified that the current maps should be used for the coming election.
A separate series of court battles over ballot language delayed the preparation and printing of election ballots, and the reduced timeline has left little flexibility in case ballots need to be reprinted. Adding to all of this, federal prosecutors in early September issued subpoenas to 44 county election boards asking that millions of voter records be handed over to immigration authorities by the end of the month.
While North Carolina has a handful of consequential congressional races in this fall’s election — the Cook Political Report rates four as competitive — most officials who spoke to ProPublica worry about how the early-voting changes and other laws might affect 2020, when the swing state will vote for president, governor and senator.
“It seems that every time we have an election, the rules are different,” said Jake Quinn, a Democratic member of the Buncombe County Board of Elections.
“We’re looking at different district boundaries, or we have to have voter IDs, or you can’t vote out of precinct, or the hours have to be changed. This is a problem. When you change the rules for voting every single election, some people are going to get discouraged by that,” he said. “All of this is very destabilizing.”
But with the start of early voting only weeks away, county election officials across the state — who previously had control over setting polling hours in their jurisdictions — say the new law has hamstrung their ability to best serve voters. Some officials in rural counties say they’ve had to shrink the number of early voting locations to accommodate the law’s longer hour requirements and stay within their budgets.
A ProPublica analysis of polling locations shows that North Carolina’s 2018 midterm election will have nearly 20 percent fewer early voting locations than there were in 2014. Nearly half of North Carolina’s 100 counties are shutting down polling places, in part because of the new law. Poorer rural counties, often strapped for resources to begin with, are having a particularly difficult time adjusting to the new requirement.
The closure of polling locations increases the time it takes for voters to travel to the polls, and it could result in lower turnout, making matters worse for a state already dealing with Hurricane Florence. Early voting in North Carolina begins on Oct. 17.
We interviewed more than two dozen county election officials across North Carolina. None said they were in favor of the new law, and none said they were contacted by state lawmakers for counsel on the legislation. Some referred to the policy as “overkill,” a waste of resources and an “unfunded mandate,” particularly burdensome for cash-strapped counties.
“We know our county. We know when most people go to vote early. The 12-hour, 7-a.m.-to-7-p.m. requirement just ties our hands when coming up with a catered approach that fits our county best,” said Steve Stone, the Republican chair of the Robeson County Board of Elections.
Republican state lawmakers, who championed the new law, argue that the consistency it provides will eliminate uncertainty among voters and expand early voting by increasing hours and allowing those who work full-time jobs to vote before or after work.
“The purpose of the uniformity is to make it easier and more convenient and more accessible for the voter to participate,” said David Lewis, a state representative who supported the bill. “I think that access to the polls, access to the ballots in a uniform fashion, is more important than poll worker or election worker convenience.”
Lewis says the law has led to an increase in the number of aggregate polling hours across the state. Indeed, polls for early voting will be open 49,696 hours in 2018, a substantial jump from the 25,887 hours offered in 2014, according to a preliminary analysis from the North Carolina State Board of Elections & Ethics Enforcement.
But according to Robert Stein, a professor of political science at Rice University, aggregate hours are not nearly as important a factor to voter access as the number of early voting locations offered by a county.
“There is a lot of good research to suggest that when it comes to having a positive effect on early voting turnout, the important things are not the hours of operation but the location of the polling place and the distance and travel time it takes a voter to get there,” Stein said.
For many counties, the trade-off for more polling hours is fewer early voting locations. Take Gaston County, near Charlotte. In 2014, the county opened one main polling place at 8 a.m. and three additional ones at 10 a.m. According to Adam Ragan, the county’s nonpartisan director of elections, there are very few voters in the county eager to cast ballots early in the morning. The county, therefore, typically maximizes its resources by staggering voting hours across multiple locations.
“In elections administration, we have what we consider ‘non-usable hours,’” Ragan explained. “There are some locations where people won’t come at 7 a.m. or 8 a.m. That’s why we’ve always opened our auxiliary sites at 10 a.m.”
The county originally planned to open five early voting locations, but with the new policy it can now only afford to operate three.
While county election officials from both parties have expressed near uniform discontent over the new requirements, state lawmakers were split along partisan lines on the measure, with support coming exclusively from GOP lawmakers.
“It will put a strain on local boards,” Democratic Rep. Marcia Morey said on the floor of the North Carolina House of Representatives. “We need local flexibility, not the strong arm of the state for political purposes to suppress the vote.”
North Carolina’s Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper originally vetoed the bill, writing in a statement that “we should be making it easier for people to vote, not harder,” but GOP state lawmakers have veto-proof majorities in both chambers of the General Assembly and handily overrode the veto.
In addition to setting uniform polling hours, the original legislation also eliminated the final Saturday of early voting, a day that historically attracts a large number of black voters, opening legislators up to further charges of voter suppression.
Republican lawmakers subsequently backed off on this and restored the popular voting day. Lewis acknowledged the move was a mistake, though he said it had been proposed to give counties more time prepare for Election Day. Still, given the sordid history of voting rights violations in North Carolina, many Democrats remain skeptical of GOP lawmakers’ dedication to expanding access to early voting.
“I do not see it as an isolated event, but rather a part of a larger voter suppression effort,” said Al Daniels, a Democratic member of the Bladen County Board of Elections, of the uniform-hours law. “I see it as anti-voter, period.”
In 2013, the GOP-led General Assembly passed far-reaching legislation in the name of combating voter fraud that cut back on early voting, established a photo ID requirement and did away with pre-registration of high school students, same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting. A federal appeals court struck down the law, labeling it an unconstitutional attempt to “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”
The 2013 law was passed in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which weakened a provision of the Voting Rights Act that had required a handful of jurisdictions — including parts of North Carolina — to submit voting law changes to the federal government to determine whether those changes had a discriminatory effect or purpose. Now, laws like North Carolina’s uniform-voting legislation don’t need to be given preclearance from the federal government before they can take effect.
“Given the context of the GOP legislature, it makes you want to raise your eyebrows that this just wasn’t some neutral requirement to have consistent voting hours around the state,” said Philip Lehman, the Democratic vice chair of Durham County’s Board of Elections and a former member of the state’s General Assembly.
Other arguments in favor of the law have only advanced suspicion of lawmakers’ motives. State Sen. Ralph Hise, one of a dozen Republican sponsors of the bill, said in an interview with ProPublica that the law was meant, in part, to rein in partisan maneuvering on county election boards. He said that, in previous elections, certain counties would strategically leave specific early voting sites open for longer to “impact the election.” When asked to provide an example of such conduct, during the interview and subsequently, however, Hise did not do so.
The new law came as a surprise to many local election officials who had already finalized their budgets. Elections in North Carolina, unlike some other states, are funded entirely at the county level, leaving some administrators scrambling to figure out how to work within the confines of their budgets while accommodating the new law.
“I’m a full-fledged Republican and a Republican supporter, and I’m just disappointed in the General Assembly for not reaching out to election officials in the state and asking, ‘What do you think would work well for this early voting law?’” said Stone, the chair of the Robeson County Board of Elections.
The law appears to have exacerbated the divide between urban and rural counties, putting a greater strain on poorer, less populous counties, which often have smaller budgets, fewer full-time employees and an older voting population that is less willing to volunteer for what could be a 12-hour poll worker shift.
Take Bladen County. When it approved its operating budget this year, election officials set aside funds for four early voting sites. Though sparsely populated, Bladen County is large — the state’s fourth biggest by area — and local election administrators wanted to provide ample access to voters across the region.
Their plan had precedent. In every statewide election over the past decade, Bladen voters could cast their ballots at one of four early voting locations spread out across the county. Now, with the strict hours requirement, Bladen County can only afford to staff and operate one early voting site.
“We’re a small county and the law has affected us pretty badly,” said Bobby Ludlum, the GOP chair of Bladen County’s Board of Elections.
Wealthier, more populous counties appear to be doing better at weathering the changes. Still, election officials acknowledged that the law may adversely affect their rural counterparts.
“One size does not necessarily fit all,” said Michael Dickerson, the nonpartisan director of elections in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina’s most populous. “I’m very fortunate in this county. I’ve got over a million people living here, so we can find poll workers.”
The legislation has contributed to an already chaotic and uncertain year for election administrators in North Carolina. In addition to the difficulties they will encounter getting elections up and running in a state dealing with a major natural disaster, election officials are still scrambling to deal with man-made crises. A federal court in late August ruled that the state’s congressional maps were unconstitutionally gerrymandered and ordered they be redrawn immediately, sparking widespread confusion among election officials on whether the general election would move forward as planned. The court later clarified that the current maps should be used for the coming election.
A separate series of court battles over ballot language delayed the preparation and printing of election ballots, and the reduced timeline has left little flexibility in case ballots need to be reprinted. Adding to all of this, federal prosecutors in early September issued subpoenas to 44 county election boards asking that millions of voter records be handed over to immigration authorities by the end of the month.
While North Carolina has a handful of consequential congressional races in this fall’s election — the Cook Political Report rates four as competitive — most officials who spoke to ProPublica worry about how the early-voting changes and other laws might affect 2020, when the swing state will vote for president, governor and senator.
“It seems that every time we have an election, the rules are different,” said Jake Quinn, a Democratic member of the Buncombe County Board of Elections.
“We’re looking at different district boundaries, or we have to have voter IDs, or you can’t vote out of precinct, or the hours have to be changed. This is a problem. When you change the rules for voting every single election, some people are going to get discouraged by that,” he said. “All of this is very destabilizing.”
Thousands at risk from rightwing push to purge eligible voters from US rolls
Conservative groups such as Pilf publish voters’ details online in what experts say amounts to ‘insidious modern-day intimidation’
Ed Pilkington in New York
the guardian
Sun 23 Sep 2018 01.00 EDT
In June last year, Luis, a resident of Virginia, was astonished to discover that his name and personal details, including home address, had been posted on the internet by a group known as the Public Interest Legal Foundation (Pilf).
Luis’s data had been released by the group, along with hundreds of other names, as an appendix to Pilf’s two-part report called “Alien Invasion”. The front cover showed a UFO hovering ominously over a billboard on which the famous tourism slogan “Virginia is for lovers” had been photoshopped to read: “Virginia is for aliens”.
In lurid language, Pilf claimed that it had uncovered proof that “large numbers of ineligible aliens are registering to vote and casting ballots”. It warned its readers: “Your vote is at risk. New alien voters are being added to the rolls month after month, and swift changes must be made to ensure that only Americans are choosing American leaders.”
The only problem was that Luis, in common with dozens of other Virginians on the list posted by Pilf, was not in fact an “alien”. He was born in Los Angeles and has always enjoyed US citizenship, with full rights to vote since the age of 18.
He also happens to be a federal employee of the US immigration service. Yet here he was, his name attached to a report in which Pilf claimed to have discovered more than 5,000 non-citizens in Virginia who had cast 7,474 votes – every one a criminal act amounting to a felony.
The insinuation was deeply troubling to Luis. As a federal worker he could face intense scrutiny as a result of any suggestion of illegal activity (for the same reason he asked the Guardian to use only his first name).
Luis was also disturbed on behalf of hundreds of other people who also had their personal details – names, addresses and in some cases even home phone numbers – posted in the appendices of the Pilf reports. “I thought if my name is on the list, and I’m a US citizen, how many others were wrongly accused of being illegal ‘alien’ voters?”
Alien Invasion is one of the more startling examples of a growing rightwing push to pressurize election officials across the country to purge large numbers of people from the registered voter rolls. With the midterm elections rapidly approaching, and with so much riding at both national and state level on voter turnout, the stakes could not be higher.
Voting rights experts warn that hundreds of thousands of eligible voters could face hurdles as they try to get to polling stations in November. African American, Hispanic or other minority communities, as well as young voters, are especially vulnerable to purges as they more frequently experience the kind of bureaucratic hiccups that can lead them to them being mistakenly ruled ineligible.
A recent study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that since 2013, when the US supreme court drastically reduced federal controls against discriminatory behavior by largely southern states, there has been a dramatic uptick in voter purges. The numbers affected are breathtaking: between 2014 and 2016 alone, 16 million people nationwide were removed from register rolls.
The US Department of Justice, which has the task of protecting the voting rights of Americans, has increasingly switched its focus under Donald Trump from policing purges to encouraging them. The president has personally championed conspiracy theories about “alien” voters, claiming that 3m illegal votes were cast in the 2016 presidential election – conveniently, precisely the number by which his rival Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.
In June, the US supreme court lent its weight to the wave of purges sweeping the country when it ruled in favor of Ohio’s tough stance in which citizens can be thrown off voter lists simply for missing an election and then fail to respond to official correspondence. Should other states follow in Ohio’s footsteps, the Washington Post estimates that millions of legitimate American citizens who should be fully entitled to participate in the democratic process will be in peril of being cast adrift.
Pilf and its president, J Christian Adams, a former senior official in the DoJ, are at the forefront of the wave. Justin Levitt, one of the country’s foremost election experts who was a senior official in the civil rights division of the justice department and is now a professor of election law at Loyola in Los Angeles, said: “Pilf wants to sweep people off the lists in ways that are unreliable, and poor and transient people are more likely to get knocked off the rolls and then find it harder to get back on.”
Chiraag Bains of the advocacy group Demos that has monitored the activity of Pilf and its allied groups for several years, said: “Their aim is not to ensure the security of our elections, but to intimidate people from going to the polls. They are promoting purges that prevent eligible voters from participating in our democracy.”
Pilf and Adams are now being sued for defamation and voter intimidation over Alien Invasion. The case, lodged with a federal court in Richmond, Virginia, has been brought in the names of three plaintiffs: Eliud Bonilla, Luciania Freeman and Abby Jo Gearhart. The three were among Pilf’s “alien” names yet, like Luis, turn out to be US citizens born in this country with full voting rights.
Pilf drew its information for Alien Invasion from Virginia’s “declared non-citizen” registry, into which people whose eligibility to vote is uncertain are put for verification. Election supervisors have pointed out that individuals can be put into that category for a variety of reasons including failure to respond to official letters or clerical errors – in other words, inclusion in the pile is not confirmation that you are a non-citizen.
In the case of Luciania Freeman, for instance, a state official appears to have mistakenly assumed she lacked citizenship by misreading a motor vehicle form.
The lawsuit argues that the three citizens were defamed under Virginia law by being negligently depicted as “aliens” engaging in criminal voting. The suit also invokes a rarely used section of the Ku Klux Klan Act that was originally designed as a way of preventing KKK night riders from intimidating African Americans from going to the polls.
“Voter intimidation looks different today – nobody needs to wear white hoods or burn crosses,” said Allison Riggs from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice who is lead counsel on the case. “Instead, you accuse people of crimes when they’ve done nothing wrong and put their names out there for the rabid masses to fixate on: that’s insidious modern-day intimidation.”
AdvertisementPilf declined to tell the Guardian what steps it had taken, if any, to verify the status of the people whose names it posted. But Adams insisted in an email that voter fraud was widespread in US elections, and thus his Alien Invasion investigation was justified.
He said: “People who deny that voter fraud is occurring and that aliens are voting in sizeable and unacceptable numbers are flat-earthers.”
Leading academics, however, disagree with him. Studies have concluded that “by any measure, voter fraud is extraordinarily rare”.
Last month Adams attempted to persuade a federal district judge to dismiss the Alien Invasion lawsuit, but failed. In court documents, Pilf said all the names attached to the reports had come from public voting records.
J Christian Adams denied that Pilf is in the business of voter purges. “We’ve never done ‘purges’. We encourage states and election officials to use all the tools available to keep lists accurate,” he told the Guardian.
But Pilf, often working in tandem with similar-minded rightwing organisations such as the American Civil Rights Union, Judicial Watch and True the Vote, has targeted hundreds of electoral jurisdictions in recent years. Last September it sent out a letter threatening legal action to 248 election supervisors, accusing them of managing bloated voter lists.
With the clock ticking to the midterm elections, attempts to block people from voting through purges are likely to grow more intense. Adams himself scoffed when the Guardian asked him whether the lawsuit had put him off similar efforts in future.
“Are we dissuaded?” he said. “Hardly. More [Pilf] reports are coming, and so are more efforts to improve voter rolls across the country. No chance that is stopping.”
As for Luis, he too scoffed when the Guardian asked him whether Alien Invasion had put him off trying to vote. “On the contrary, I want to vote now more than ever,” he said. “Usually I don’t vote in midterms, but after what they did to me – this year I definitely will.”
Luis’s data had been released by the group, along with hundreds of other names, as an appendix to Pilf’s two-part report called “Alien Invasion”. The front cover showed a UFO hovering ominously over a billboard on which the famous tourism slogan “Virginia is for lovers” had been photoshopped to read: “Virginia is for aliens”.
In lurid language, Pilf claimed that it had uncovered proof that “large numbers of ineligible aliens are registering to vote and casting ballots”. It warned its readers: “Your vote is at risk. New alien voters are being added to the rolls month after month, and swift changes must be made to ensure that only Americans are choosing American leaders.”
The only problem was that Luis, in common with dozens of other Virginians on the list posted by Pilf, was not in fact an “alien”. He was born in Los Angeles and has always enjoyed US citizenship, with full rights to vote since the age of 18.
He also happens to be a federal employee of the US immigration service. Yet here he was, his name attached to a report in which Pilf claimed to have discovered more than 5,000 non-citizens in Virginia who had cast 7,474 votes – every one a criminal act amounting to a felony.
The insinuation was deeply troubling to Luis. As a federal worker he could face intense scrutiny as a result of any suggestion of illegal activity (for the same reason he asked the Guardian to use only his first name).
Luis was also disturbed on behalf of hundreds of other people who also had their personal details – names, addresses and in some cases even home phone numbers – posted in the appendices of the Pilf reports. “I thought if my name is on the list, and I’m a US citizen, how many others were wrongly accused of being illegal ‘alien’ voters?”
Alien Invasion is one of the more startling examples of a growing rightwing push to pressurize election officials across the country to purge large numbers of people from the registered voter rolls. With the midterm elections rapidly approaching, and with so much riding at both national and state level on voter turnout, the stakes could not be higher.
Voting rights experts warn that hundreds of thousands of eligible voters could face hurdles as they try to get to polling stations in November. African American, Hispanic or other minority communities, as well as young voters, are especially vulnerable to purges as they more frequently experience the kind of bureaucratic hiccups that can lead them to them being mistakenly ruled ineligible.
A recent study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that since 2013, when the US supreme court drastically reduced federal controls against discriminatory behavior by largely southern states, there has been a dramatic uptick in voter purges. The numbers affected are breathtaking: between 2014 and 2016 alone, 16 million people nationwide were removed from register rolls.
The US Department of Justice, which has the task of protecting the voting rights of Americans, has increasingly switched its focus under Donald Trump from policing purges to encouraging them. The president has personally championed conspiracy theories about “alien” voters, claiming that 3m illegal votes were cast in the 2016 presidential election – conveniently, precisely the number by which his rival Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.
In June, the US supreme court lent its weight to the wave of purges sweeping the country when it ruled in favor of Ohio’s tough stance in which citizens can be thrown off voter lists simply for missing an election and then fail to respond to official correspondence. Should other states follow in Ohio’s footsteps, the Washington Post estimates that millions of legitimate American citizens who should be fully entitled to participate in the democratic process will be in peril of being cast adrift.
Pilf and its president, J Christian Adams, a former senior official in the DoJ, are at the forefront of the wave. Justin Levitt, one of the country’s foremost election experts who was a senior official in the civil rights division of the justice department and is now a professor of election law at Loyola in Los Angeles, said: “Pilf wants to sweep people off the lists in ways that are unreliable, and poor and transient people are more likely to get knocked off the rolls and then find it harder to get back on.”
Chiraag Bains of the advocacy group Demos that has monitored the activity of Pilf and its allied groups for several years, said: “Their aim is not to ensure the security of our elections, but to intimidate people from going to the polls. They are promoting purges that prevent eligible voters from participating in our democracy.”
Pilf and Adams are now being sued for defamation and voter intimidation over Alien Invasion. The case, lodged with a federal court in Richmond, Virginia, has been brought in the names of three plaintiffs: Eliud Bonilla, Luciania Freeman and Abby Jo Gearhart. The three were among Pilf’s “alien” names yet, like Luis, turn out to be US citizens born in this country with full voting rights.
Pilf drew its information for Alien Invasion from Virginia’s “declared non-citizen” registry, into which people whose eligibility to vote is uncertain are put for verification. Election supervisors have pointed out that individuals can be put into that category for a variety of reasons including failure to respond to official letters or clerical errors – in other words, inclusion in the pile is not confirmation that you are a non-citizen.
In the case of Luciania Freeman, for instance, a state official appears to have mistakenly assumed she lacked citizenship by misreading a motor vehicle form.
The lawsuit argues that the three citizens were defamed under Virginia law by being negligently depicted as “aliens” engaging in criminal voting. The suit also invokes a rarely used section of the Ku Klux Klan Act that was originally designed as a way of preventing KKK night riders from intimidating African Americans from going to the polls.
“Voter intimidation looks different today – nobody needs to wear white hoods or burn crosses,” said Allison Riggs from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice who is lead counsel on the case. “Instead, you accuse people of crimes when they’ve done nothing wrong and put their names out there for the rabid masses to fixate on: that’s insidious modern-day intimidation.”
AdvertisementPilf declined to tell the Guardian what steps it had taken, if any, to verify the status of the people whose names it posted. But Adams insisted in an email that voter fraud was widespread in US elections, and thus his Alien Invasion investigation was justified.
He said: “People who deny that voter fraud is occurring and that aliens are voting in sizeable and unacceptable numbers are flat-earthers.”
Leading academics, however, disagree with him. Studies have concluded that “by any measure, voter fraud is extraordinarily rare”.
Last month Adams attempted to persuade a federal district judge to dismiss the Alien Invasion lawsuit, but failed. In court documents, Pilf said all the names attached to the reports had come from public voting records.
J Christian Adams denied that Pilf is in the business of voter purges. “We’ve never done ‘purges’. We encourage states and election officials to use all the tools available to keep lists accurate,” he told the Guardian.
But Pilf, often working in tandem with similar-minded rightwing organisations such as the American Civil Rights Union, Judicial Watch and True the Vote, has targeted hundreds of electoral jurisdictions in recent years. Last September it sent out a letter threatening legal action to 248 election supervisors, accusing them of managing bloated voter lists.
With the clock ticking to the midterm elections, attempts to block people from voting through purges are likely to grow more intense. Adams himself scoffed when the Guardian asked him whether the lawsuit had put him off similar efforts in future.
“Are we dissuaded?” he said. “Hardly. More [Pilf] reports are coming, and so are more efforts to improve voter rolls across the country. No chance that is stopping.”
As for Luis, he too scoffed when the Guardian asked him whether Alien Invasion had put him off trying to vote. “On the contrary, I want to vote now more than ever,” he said. “Usually I don’t vote in midterms, but after what they did to me – this year I definitely will.”
Red State Victory for Voting Rights: Federal Court Blocks a Massive Potential Voter Suppression Tactic
Missouri’s state motor vehicle agency was stonewalling, which is still happening in Arizona.
By Steven Rosenfeld / Independent Media Institute - alternet
September 21, 2018, 1:15 PM GMT
Voting rights advocates won a major victory in Missouri late on Friday, when a federal district court ordered the state’s Driver License Bureau to promptly forward address change information for an estimated 200,000 people who recently moved to election officials to update voter rolls before the midterm election.
This technical snafu—where one state agency has not been sharing its latest information with another; in this case, the driver bureau not sharing the latest address information with statewide election officials—is not simply bureaucratic bungling.
It is willfully turning what should be a simple matter—transferring data—into a potential voter suppression tactic. That’s because it could complicate the process for hundreds of thousands of people in states with close races, starting with U.S. Senate contests.
Slightly different variations of this problem have surfaced in Missouri and Arizona.
In Arizona, civil rights groups have been frustrated by its state Motor Vehicle Division refusal to forwarded address changes for an estimated 384,000 people to election offices. That number comes from people who did not check a box on a form agreeing to forward the change of address information, a Secretary of State spokesman said Friday, adding officials were going to fix that problem after the November 2018 election.
Unlike Missouri, voting rights activists in Arizona did not win a court order after suing. As a result, the affected individuals could face a more arduous task of casting a ballot that would be counted—as their voter information on file will not be accurate—unless they take proactive steps between now and the state’s close of voter registration. But, of course, these individuals are probably not aware there’s even a potential problem.
At issue in Missouri, where Democratic U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill faces a tough re-election bid, is whether or not a sizeable number of the estimated 580,000 voters who move within the state every year will have their voting credentials updated as part of getting news driver’s licenses. A 1993 federal law, the National Voter Registration Act, called the motor voter law, requires state agencies to offer voter registration services.
“Specifically, the lawsuit alleges that DOR [Missouri Department of Revenue that oversees driver’s licenses] is failing to provide Missouri residents with the opportunity to register and update their registration information during various license and identification card transactions,” the voting rights attorneys said this spring.
“Over 580,000 Missourians move within the state each year—approximately 200,000 of who move to a new electoral jurisdiction,” they explained. “When a voter’s registration information does not reflect their current address no matter whether they have moved within the county or not, the voter must cast a provisional ballot; and, if a voter has moved to a different election jurisdiction, their vote is discarded entirely.”
Late on Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Brian C. Wimes ordered the driver agency to fulfill the NVRA’s voter registration obligations, and ordered the state to send voter applications to people who got a new license in the past year.
“There is no dispute among the parties that ‘ensuring qualified voters exercise their right to vote is always in the public interest,’” the court held. “While the Court is cognizant of the extreme nature of preliminary injunctive relief, the circumstances of this case suggest the public’s interests in the right to vote, and ensuring that state processes follow federal law, outweigh the public costs for Defendants to comply with a preliminary injunction.”
The court ordered the state to act quickly, citing an October 10 voter registration deadline in Missouri for the November 6 election. In contrast, in Arizona, organizations like Mi Familia Vota will be scrambling to urge people to check and possibly update their voter registration information before that state’s October 9 close of registration.
This technical snafu—where one state agency has not been sharing its latest information with another; in this case, the driver bureau not sharing the latest address information with statewide election officials—is not simply bureaucratic bungling.
It is willfully turning what should be a simple matter—transferring data—into a potential voter suppression tactic. That’s because it could complicate the process for hundreds of thousands of people in states with close races, starting with U.S. Senate contests.
Slightly different variations of this problem have surfaced in Missouri and Arizona.
In Arizona, civil rights groups have been frustrated by its state Motor Vehicle Division refusal to forwarded address changes for an estimated 384,000 people to election offices. That number comes from people who did not check a box on a form agreeing to forward the change of address information, a Secretary of State spokesman said Friday, adding officials were going to fix that problem after the November 2018 election.
Unlike Missouri, voting rights activists in Arizona did not win a court order after suing. As a result, the affected individuals could face a more arduous task of casting a ballot that would be counted—as their voter information on file will not be accurate—unless they take proactive steps between now and the state’s close of voter registration. But, of course, these individuals are probably not aware there’s even a potential problem.
At issue in Missouri, where Democratic U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill faces a tough re-election bid, is whether or not a sizeable number of the estimated 580,000 voters who move within the state every year will have their voting credentials updated as part of getting news driver’s licenses. A 1993 federal law, the National Voter Registration Act, called the motor voter law, requires state agencies to offer voter registration services.
“Specifically, the lawsuit alleges that DOR [Missouri Department of Revenue that oversees driver’s licenses] is failing to provide Missouri residents with the opportunity to register and update their registration information during various license and identification card transactions,” the voting rights attorneys said this spring.
“Over 580,000 Missourians move within the state each year—approximately 200,000 of who move to a new electoral jurisdiction,” they explained. “When a voter’s registration information does not reflect their current address no matter whether they have moved within the county or not, the voter must cast a provisional ballot; and, if a voter has moved to a different election jurisdiction, their vote is discarded entirely.”
Late on Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Brian C. Wimes ordered the driver agency to fulfill the NVRA’s voter registration obligations, and ordered the state to send voter applications to people who got a new license in the past year.
“There is no dispute among the parties that ‘ensuring qualified voters exercise their right to vote is always in the public interest,’” the court held. “While the Court is cognizant of the extreme nature of preliminary injunctive relief, the circumstances of this case suggest the public’s interests in the right to vote, and ensuring that state processes follow federal law, outweigh the public costs for Defendants to comply with a preliminary injunction.”
The court ordered the state to act quickly, citing an October 10 voter registration deadline in Missouri for the November 6 election. In contrast, in Arizona, organizations like Mi Familia Vota will be scrambling to urge people to check and possibly update their voter registration information before that state’s October 9 close of registration.
Republicans Bar African-Americans And Other Minorities From Voting
Congress Won’t Update the Voting Rights Act While States Revive Jim Crow Era Tactics
By Sarah Okeson - dc report
9/18/18
The Republican Congress has bottled up bills that could prevent disenfranchisement of African-Americans and other minorities as part of their effort to retain control of Congress.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which recently documented elections where voter rolls were purged and other measures were taken to keep minorities from voting, has urged Congress to update the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.
“Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people, are being barred from participating in electing individuals who control their lives and who control their communities,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
The Voting Rights Advancement Act, H.R.2978, sponsored by Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.) would mandate that states and local governments with a history of voting rights violations have changes in election procedures approved beforehand by the Department of Justice. A similar bill in the Senate, S.1419, is sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)
Thirteen states – Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia – would be scrutinized because of their histories of violations, under Sewell’s bill.
The House has bottled up Sewell’s bill in the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice since July 2017. Leahy’s bill has been stalled in the Committee on the Judiciary since June 2017.
Both bills would restore a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that was struck down in 2013 by the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the 5-4 opinion, saying the formula for determining which states had to submit proposed election laws to the federal government was outdated.
At least 23 states have passed newly restrictive statewide voter laws since the Shelby County decision, according to the Commission on Civil Rights.
Within two hours of the Supreme Court decision, Greg Abbott, then the Texas attorney general, tweeted that Texas would reinstitute a strict photo ID law which disproportionately affected African-American and Hispanic voters.
A court previously found that the Texas photo ID law, the strictest in the country, imposed “strict, unforgiving burdens on the poor, and racial minorities.” After Abbott reinstated the law, a Texas federal court found the costs of complying with the law were an unconstitutional poll tax, but the Supreme Court later threw out a preliminary injunction that had blocked the law from taking effect. Implementation of the law was not blocked until 2016.
Texas voters elected Abbott governor in 2014. They also elected a U.S. senator, all 36 members of the Texas delegation to the U.S. House, an attorney general, controller, four justices of the Texas Supreme Court and other officials while the I.D. lawsuit was pending.
In North Carolina, the General Assembly amended a bill the day after the Shelby County decision to make the state’s voter ID law stricter. North Carolina counties cut 158 early voting sites in the 40 counties that had been covered under the Voting Rights Act.
State Republican party executive director, Dallas Woodhouse, told county election officials to end early voting on Sundays when African-American churches often provided transportation to polls.
“Many of our folks are angry and are opposed to Sunday voting for a host of reasons including respect for voter’s religious preferences, protection of our families and allowing the fine election staff a day off,” Woodhouse wrote.
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which recently documented elections where voter rolls were purged and other measures were taken to keep minorities from voting, has urged Congress to update the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.
“Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people, are being barred from participating in electing individuals who control their lives and who control their communities,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
The Voting Rights Advancement Act, H.R.2978, sponsored by Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.) would mandate that states and local governments with a history of voting rights violations have changes in election procedures approved beforehand by the Department of Justice. A similar bill in the Senate, S.1419, is sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)
Thirteen states – Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia – would be scrutinized because of their histories of violations, under Sewell’s bill.
The House has bottled up Sewell’s bill in the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice since July 2017. Leahy’s bill has been stalled in the Committee on the Judiciary since June 2017.
Both bills would restore a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that was struck down in 2013 by the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the 5-4 opinion, saying the formula for determining which states had to submit proposed election laws to the federal government was outdated.
At least 23 states have passed newly restrictive statewide voter laws since the Shelby County decision, according to the Commission on Civil Rights.
Within two hours of the Supreme Court decision, Greg Abbott, then the Texas attorney general, tweeted that Texas would reinstitute a strict photo ID law which disproportionately affected African-American and Hispanic voters.
A court previously found that the Texas photo ID law, the strictest in the country, imposed “strict, unforgiving burdens on the poor, and racial minorities.” After Abbott reinstated the law, a Texas federal court found the costs of complying with the law were an unconstitutional poll tax, but the Supreme Court later threw out a preliminary injunction that had blocked the law from taking effect. Implementation of the law was not blocked until 2016.
Texas voters elected Abbott governor in 2014. They also elected a U.S. senator, all 36 members of the Texas delegation to the U.S. House, an attorney general, controller, four justices of the Texas Supreme Court and other officials while the I.D. lawsuit was pending.
In North Carolina, the General Assembly amended a bill the day after the Shelby County decision to make the state’s voter ID law stricter. North Carolina counties cut 158 early voting sites in the 40 counties that had been covered under the Voting Rights Act.
State Republican party executive director, Dallas Woodhouse, told county election officials to end early voting on Sundays when African-American churches often provided transportation to polls.
“Many of our folks are angry and are opposed to Sunday voting for a host of reasons including respect for voter’s religious preferences, protection of our families and allowing the fine election staff a day off,” Woodhouse wrote.
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.[...]