TO COMMENT CLICK HERE
welcome to reality ~ triva
election news and items of interest
february 11, 2019
Noam chomsky: “Voting should not be viewed as a form of personal self-expression or moral judgement directed in retaliation towards major party candidates who fail to reflect our values, or of a corrupt system designed to limit choices to those acceptable to corporate elites,”
what kind of democracy condones vote suppression?
The Informed American Voter
headlines
*Texas County Failed To Give Any Contact Info In Voter Purge Notices
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Georgia's 127,000 Missing Votes--Disproportionate Vote Loss in African American Neighborhoods
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Texas: civil rights groups sue to stop 'unlawful purge' of thousands of voters
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*‘SOMEONE DID NOT DO THEIR DUE DILIGENCE’: HOW AN ATTEMPT TO REVIEW TEXAS’ VOTER ROLLS TURNED INTO A DEBACLE
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Some Texas voters are already being asked to prove their citizenship following state’s announcement
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*New Mexico advances ambitious voting rights bill to abolish felon disenfranchisement
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*1.4 MILLION FLORIDIANS GET THEIR VOTING RIGHTS BACK TODAY, WHETHER REPUBLICANS LIKE IT OR NOT
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*ABSENTEE-BALLOT FRAUD SCANDAL SPEAKS TO WIDER ISSUE OF RACISM IN NORTH CAROLINA
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*A woman says she was paid to collect absentee ballots by a convicted felon with ties to GOP campaign
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Republican Candidate May Have Literally Stolen Ballots From Elderly Black Voters
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Celebrates Eight-Year Sentence Against Woman Who Accidentally Voted Illegally(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Latino turnout up 174% in 2018 midterms elections, Democrats say
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*WTF White Women?
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Deadlocked House race in Maine will be the first decided by ranked-choice voting
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*HERE’S YOUR MIDTERM ANALYSIS: AMERICA IS BEING HELD HOSTAGE BY ANGRY OLD WHITE GUYS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*While America Voted, Many Chose Not to (or Couldn't)
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*From Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Ilhan Omar, 2018 Was the Year of Women of Color
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*HERE IS HOW TO ‘FOLLOW THE MONEY’ AND LOOK FOR CORRUPTION WHEN IT COMES TO POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The Hidden Money Funding the Midterms
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*WHAT'S IN A NAME? ONE-THIRD OF U.S. VOTERS DON'T KNOW CANDIDATES: REUTERS/IPSOS POLL
(ARTICLE BELOW)
MAP OF THE HYPOCRITES!!!
THE DAILY KOS ELECTIONS GUIDE TO THE NATION'S RELIGIOUS POPULATIONS, BY CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT(ARTICLE BELOW)
funnies(at the end)
*MAP PORN: IF "DID NOT VOTE" WAS A CANDIDATE...( article below)
The Political Punchline
Putting the Mock in Democracy
voter suppression texas style!!!
Texas County Failed To Give Any Contact Info In Voter Purge Notices
By Tierney Sneed - tpm
February 11, 2019 1:18 pm
The confusion and chaos caused by Texas’ bombastic voter fraud allegations has manifested in almost every element of the fallout.
The latest example is a voter purge notice sent out by one Texas county that lacked basic contact information or even an official letterhead.
The notice left one citizen mistakenly flagged by the stake feeling “very worried” and a “sense of fear,” according to court documents filed Monday.
The episode is one of many that have prompted civil rights groups to sue Texas over a list released last month purporting to show that tens of thousands of noncitizens were illegally registered to vote. The list went out with instructions that local election officials purge from the rolls any individuals who don’t respond to notices seeking confirmation of their citizenship.
In Wood County, those notices went out with the space left blank where the phone number of the local elections office should have been. The notices also lacked the response form the recipients were asked to use to reply, and there was no letterhead on the notices.
A woman in the court docs known as “Jane Doe #2” — who received the notice despite being naturalized in March 2018 and voting legally in that year — recounted in a declaration her frustration and her “sense of fear,” given that she could not tell if the letter was fake or real.
“I questioned whether I had done something wrong, or if somebody was trying to prank me.” Jane Doe #2 wrote in the declaration. “I did not know where to go or who to cal to receive answers to my questions.”
She first tried to call the county clerk’s office, where the staff member who answered her call said the letter might be fake and that the person whose name was on the notice didn’t work for the county clerk, according to Jane Doe #2’s statement. She finally got in touch with the county elections administrator, Lisa Wise, who explained that the notices had been sent out without the contact information by mistake. Jane Doe #2 eventually traveled to meet Wise in person and showed Wise a copy of her naturalization certificate.
Wise told TPM that the lack of contact information in the notices was an “honest mistake” and that the county has decided to not remove anyone from its voter lists while it awaits further instructions from the state. Two other people in Wood County came to her office and showed that they were legal voters, Wise said.
According to the court filings, 11 Wood County voters in total were flagged by the state on its controversial list, which purported to show that 95,000 noncitizens were potentially illegally registered and that 58,000 may have voted. President Trump was quick to jump on — and mischaracterize — those numbers.
Monday’s filings were in a lawsuit brought against Texas by the Mexican Education and Legal Defend Fund. It was one of three federal lawsuits that have been brought in reaction to the list.
Wood County is not the only county to have sent out notices based on the the list. Smith County also sent out the notices, but only after election officials checked to see if they could themselves confirm that any of the people flagged were actually citizens, according to the filing. Travis County is following a similar process, according to the MALDEF court filings. Meanwhile, in Galveston County, followed up their notices with retraction letters to some of the individuals initially flagged, as the county worked with the state to narrow its list, according to the filings.
“As a result of these arbitrary and disparate standards, Plaintiffs are being treated differently depending on the county in which they reside,” the lawsuit said.
The latest example is a voter purge notice sent out by one Texas county that lacked basic contact information or even an official letterhead.
The notice left one citizen mistakenly flagged by the stake feeling “very worried” and a “sense of fear,” according to court documents filed Monday.
The episode is one of many that have prompted civil rights groups to sue Texas over a list released last month purporting to show that tens of thousands of noncitizens were illegally registered to vote. The list went out with instructions that local election officials purge from the rolls any individuals who don’t respond to notices seeking confirmation of their citizenship.
In Wood County, those notices went out with the space left blank where the phone number of the local elections office should have been. The notices also lacked the response form the recipients were asked to use to reply, and there was no letterhead on the notices.
A woman in the court docs known as “Jane Doe #2” — who received the notice despite being naturalized in March 2018 and voting legally in that year — recounted in a declaration her frustration and her “sense of fear,” given that she could not tell if the letter was fake or real.
“I questioned whether I had done something wrong, or if somebody was trying to prank me.” Jane Doe #2 wrote in the declaration. “I did not know where to go or who to cal to receive answers to my questions.”
She first tried to call the county clerk’s office, where the staff member who answered her call said the letter might be fake and that the person whose name was on the notice didn’t work for the county clerk, according to Jane Doe #2’s statement. She finally got in touch with the county elections administrator, Lisa Wise, who explained that the notices had been sent out without the contact information by mistake. Jane Doe #2 eventually traveled to meet Wise in person and showed Wise a copy of her naturalization certificate.
Wise told TPM that the lack of contact information in the notices was an “honest mistake” and that the county has decided to not remove anyone from its voter lists while it awaits further instructions from the state. Two other people in Wood County came to her office and showed that they were legal voters, Wise said.
According to the court filings, 11 Wood County voters in total were flagged by the state on its controversial list, which purported to show that 95,000 noncitizens were potentially illegally registered and that 58,000 may have voted. President Trump was quick to jump on — and mischaracterize — those numbers.
Monday’s filings were in a lawsuit brought against Texas by the Mexican Education and Legal Defend Fund. It was one of three federal lawsuits that have been brought in reaction to the list.
Wood County is not the only county to have sent out notices based on the the list. Smith County also sent out the notices, but only after election officials checked to see if they could themselves confirm that any of the people flagged were actually citizens, according to the filing. Travis County is following a similar process, according to the MALDEF court filings. Meanwhile, in Galveston County, followed up their notices with retraction letters to some of the individuals initially flagged, as the county worked with the state to narrow its list, according to the filings.
“As a result of these arbitrary and disparate standards, Plaintiffs are being treated differently depending on the county in which they reside,” the lawsuit said.
american democracy: another stolen election!!!
Georgia's 127,000 Missing Votes--Disproportionate Vote Loss in African American Neighborhoods
diva77 - demo underground
Coalition for Good Governance
Marilyn Marks, Executive Director
Atlanta—As previously reported by the Coalition for Good Governance, more than 127,000 votes appear to be missing in November’s election for Lieutenant Governor. Today, the Coalition released a preliminary report revealing the disproportionate loss of votes in heavily African American neighborhood precincts. The findings are a result of the Coalition’s analyses of publicly reported results and demographics of voters in the 2018 mid-term election. The Coalition’s report contains detailed findings and statistical analyses.
The report findings are summarized as follows:
--Approximately 127,000 fewer votes were recorded in the 2018 Lt. Governor’s contest than experts estimate should have been cast.
--Statistical analyses and experts’ reports expose a dramatically increased number of missing votes (undervotes or drop-off in votes compared to the top-of-the-ballot contest) for the Lt. Governor’s contest in primarily African American neighborhood precincts.
--Voting machine defects and misprogramming are the likely culprits responsible for the significant number of missing votes. Some voters reported touchscreen machines that did not properly display the Lt. Governor’s contest, and others reported machine screen malfunction and “vote flipping” when they attempted to vote. [bold type added for emphasis]
--The extreme drop-off in votes in the Lt. Governor’s contest when compared to the Governor’s contest is significantly out of line with historic patterns and does not appear in any other 2018 statewide contest, including those contests that were much further “down ballot” than the Lt. Governor’s race. The drop-off indicates that 63,718 fewer votes were recorded for Lt. Governor than for the Commissioner of Agriculture, the statewide contest with the second-lowest participation rate.
--The extreme pattern of missing Lt. Governor’s contest votes only occurred in votes cast on the touchscreen machines. The larger-than-average number of undervotes did not occur in votes cast on paper ballots. Mail-in ballot voters voted down the ballot in typical historical voting patterns.
--There is no meaningful correlation between new voters and the Lt. Governor undervote, debunking officials’ excuse that newly registered voters were confused about the need to vote separately for Governor and Lt. Governor.
--Forensic examinations of the machine programming must be promptly undertaken to obtain answers, locate the source of the errors, and, if appropriate, hold officials accountable.
--Electronic voting systems must be immediately abandoned and paper ballots adopted so that no future elections are conducted on Georgia’s unauditable machines.
--Governor Kemp, Secretary Raffensperger, and legislative leaders must abandon their plan to adopt a new ballot-marking-device electronic voting system that, like the current system, is unauditable and vulnerable to problems of the type experienced in November’s election.
Marilyn Marks, Executive Director for the Coalition for Good Governance, said, “The findings are deeply disturbing and difficult to accept, but the statistics and evidence show an undeniable pattern of extreme numbers of missing votes, concentrated in precincts in predominately African American neighborhoods. It is imperative that voters, voting rights advocates, and civic leaders demand clear and factual answers. Our pending lawsuits are poised to obtain the technical answers through the discovery process, but the public deserves more immediate answers. Georgia’s voters must also call for an immediate halt to electronic touchscreen voting, including the proposed unauditable touchscreen system that Governor Kemp and Secretary Raffensperger are promoting despite warnings from the nation’s leading experts in voting system security.”
Bruce Brown, Atlanta-based attorney for the Coalition and other plaintiffs in two election security lawsuits added: “It clearly is in the public interest to get to the bottom of this—to figure out what caused the votes to go missing when cast on electronic voting machines but not when the votes were cast on paper ballots. The Secretary of State should be leading the effort to figure this out, but instead is resisting every effort to get to the truth.”
Coalition for Good Governance is a small, volunteer-run, nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization focused on election transparency and verifiability, currently devoting its resources to addressing Georgia’s failed election system.
The report findings are summarized as follows:
--Approximately 127,000 fewer votes were recorded in the 2018 Lt. Governor’s contest than experts estimate should have been cast.
--Statistical analyses and experts’ reports expose a dramatically increased number of missing votes (undervotes or drop-off in votes compared to the top-of-the-ballot contest) for the Lt. Governor’s contest in primarily African American neighborhood precincts.
--Voting machine defects and misprogramming are the likely culprits responsible for the significant number of missing votes. Some voters reported touchscreen machines that did not properly display the Lt. Governor’s contest, and others reported machine screen malfunction and “vote flipping” when they attempted to vote. [bold type added for emphasis]
--The extreme drop-off in votes in the Lt. Governor’s contest when compared to the Governor’s contest is significantly out of line with historic patterns and does not appear in any other 2018 statewide contest, including those contests that were much further “down ballot” than the Lt. Governor’s race. The drop-off indicates that 63,718 fewer votes were recorded for Lt. Governor than for the Commissioner of Agriculture, the statewide contest with the second-lowest participation rate.
--The extreme pattern of missing Lt. Governor’s contest votes only occurred in votes cast on the touchscreen machines. The larger-than-average number of undervotes did not occur in votes cast on paper ballots. Mail-in ballot voters voted down the ballot in typical historical voting patterns.
--There is no meaningful correlation between new voters and the Lt. Governor undervote, debunking officials’ excuse that newly registered voters were confused about the need to vote separately for Governor and Lt. Governor.
--Forensic examinations of the machine programming must be promptly undertaken to obtain answers, locate the source of the errors, and, if appropriate, hold officials accountable.
--Electronic voting systems must be immediately abandoned and paper ballots adopted so that no future elections are conducted on Georgia’s unauditable machines.
--Governor Kemp, Secretary Raffensperger, and legislative leaders must abandon their plan to adopt a new ballot-marking-device electronic voting system that, like the current system, is unauditable and vulnerable to problems of the type experienced in November’s election.
Marilyn Marks, Executive Director for the Coalition for Good Governance, said, “The findings are deeply disturbing and difficult to accept, but the statistics and evidence show an undeniable pattern of extreme numbers of missing votes, concentrated in precincts in predominately African American neighborhoods. It is imperative that voters, voting rights advocates, and civic leaders demand clear and factual answers. Our pending lawsuits are poised to obtain the technical answers through the discovery process, but the public deserves more immediate answers. Georgia’s voters must also call for an immediate halt to electronic touchscreen voting, including the proposed unauditable touchscreen system that Governor Kemp and Secretary Raffensperger are promoting despite warnings from the nation’s leading experts in voting system security.”
Bruce Brown, Atlanta-based attorney for the Coalition and other plaintiffs in two election security lawsuits added: “It clearly is in the public interest to get to the bottom of this—to figure out what caused the votes to go missing when cast on electronic voting machines but not when the votes were cast on paper ballots. The Secretary of State should be leading the effort to figure this out, but instead is resisting every effort to get to the truth.”
Coalition for Good Governance is a small, volunteer-run, nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization focused on election transparency and verifiability, currently devoting its resources to addressing Georgia’s failed election system.
Texas: civil rights groups sue to stop 'unlawful purge' of thousands of voters
Officials accused of compiling flawed list of voters that could see thousands of naturalized citizens wrongly expunged from rolls
Tom Dart in Houston
the guardian
Tue 5 Feb 2019 09.36 EST
Civil rights groups have launched lawsuits accusing Texas officials of compiling a flawed list of voters that could see thousands of naturalized citizens wrongly expunged from electoral rolls, sparking a fierce political fight over alleged voter suppression.
Four Texas-based organisations are plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed on Monday that asks a federal court to stop the state from enacting an “unlawful purge” based on the flagging of about 95,000 people as potentially illegally registered to vote.
It follows legal action initiated last week by Hispanic rights groups who contend the state is pursuing a voter suppression tactic that is likely to have a strong impact on minorities’ democratic rights.
“This list is simply a way to target US citizens who are foreign-born as opposed to being any genuine effort to identify non-US citizens on the voter rolls,” said Nina Perales, vice-president of litigation for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
As part of an eleven-months long effort by the office of the Texas secretary of state and the Texas department of public safety to identify suspected voter fraud, officials produced a list of names by cross-referencing voter registration information with the details of people who said they were not US citizens when obtaining a drivers’ license. Of 95,000 names, 58,000 people had voted as long ago as 1996, the state said.
The state sent the data to counties for investigation along with an advisory on 25 January cautioning them that the records “will need to be treated as WEAK matches”.
It swiftly became clear that many were wrongly flagged, but not before leading Texas Republicans seized on the list and insinuated that it signified criminality on a massive scale. The Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, trumpeted the news with a Twitter post that began: “VOTER FRAUD ALERT”
“Thanks to Attorney General Paxton and the secretary of state for uncovering and investigating this illegal vote registration. I support prosecution where appropriate,” replied the governor, Greg Abbott.
Misleading headlines soon attracted the attention of Donald Trump in a tweet that incorrectly interpreted the data.
“58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote. These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID! @foxandfriends”
President Trump has made oft-repeated and oft-debunked allegations of widespread cheating in the 2016 presidential election, in which his Democratic rival won the popular vote.
“The fact that somebody used to be a non-US citizen and then later registers to vote is not evidence that the person is fraudulently registered. It’s evidence that the person has naturalised,” Perales said. “When you look at who is naturalizing in Texas, approximately half are Latino and 25% more are Asian American. And so this is a very targeted attack on voters of color.”
Registered voters who receive letters querying their citizenship have 30 days to respond with proof of eligibility, raising the possibility that some will not reply and be struck from the rolls.
Some civil rights advocates suspect the list’s accuracy is of less concern to Republicans than its potential to feed anti-immigrant prejudices and, in a state with a long history of voter suppression, intimidate the growing pool of non-white voters.
“This exercise is a thinly veiled attempt to advance the voter fraud myth to justify restrictive voter requirements and suppress voting rights,” Sophia Lakin, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, said in a statement.
Spokespeople for Paxton and David Whitley, the Texas secretary of state, did not respond to requests for comment.
Julieta Garibay, 38, a naturalised US citizen in Austin who is originally from Mexico, said she contacted officials who told her she is on the list. “I refuse to stay quiet. I’m not going to be bullied out of voting. It is my right and my duty to go out and vote,” she said. She decided to join one of the lawsuits as a plaintiff. “It’s outrageous that someone will come out and say ‘you committed voter fraud’,” she said. “I’m more than insulted – I feel mad.”
Texas’s electoral practices have frequently become mired in litigation, from the way it draws its electoral boundaries to the strict voter ID law passed in 2011.
Like Trump, influential Texas politicians have frequently alleged that voter fraud is rampant while failing to provide proof. The handful of illegal voting cases to emerge have been zealously prosecuted, even when it appears that they were unwitting.
Four Texas-based organisations are plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed on Monday that asks a federal court to stop the state from enacting an “unlawful purge” based on the flagging of about 95,000 people as potentially illegally registered to vote.
It follows legal action initiated last week by Hispanic rights groups who contend the state is pursuing a voter suppression tactic that is likely to have a strong impact on minorities’ democratic rights.
“This list is simply a way to target US citizens who are foreign-born as opposed to being any genuine effort to identify non-US citizens on the voter rolls,” said Nina Perales, vice-president of litigation for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
As part of an eleven-months long effort by the office of the Texas secretary of state and the Texas department of public safety to identify suspected voter fraud, officials produced a list of names by cross-referencing voter registration information with the details of people who said they were not US citizens when obtaining a drivers’ license. Of 95,000 names, 58,000 people had voted as long ago as 1996, the state said.
The state sent the data to counties for investigation along with an advisory on 25 January cautioning them that the records “will need to be treated as WEAK matches”.
It swiftly became clear that many were wrongly flagged, but not before leading Texas Republicans seized on the list and insinuated that it signified criminality on a massive scale. The Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, trumpeted the news with a Twitter post that began: “VOTER FRAUD ALERT”
“Thanks to Attorney General Paxton and the secretary of state for uncovering and investigating this illegal vote registration. I support prosecution where appropriate,” replied the governor, Greg Abbott.
Misleading headlines soon attracted the attention of Donald Trump in a tweet that incorrectly interpreted the data.
“58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote. These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID! @foxandfriends”
President Trump has made oft-repeated and oft-debunked allegations of widespread cheating in the 2016 presidential election, in which his Democratic rival won the popular vote.
“The fact that somebody used to be a non-US citizen and then later registers to vote is not evidence that the person is fraudulently registered. It’s evidence that the person has naturalised,” Perales said. “When you look at who is naturalizing in Texas, approximately half are Latino and 25% more are Asian American. And so this is a very targeted attack on voters of color.”
Registered voters who receive letters querying their citizenship have 30 days to respond with proof of eligibility, raising the possibility that some will not reply and be struck from the rolls.
Some civil rights advocates suspect the list’s accuracy is of less concern to Republicans than its potential to feed anti-immigrant prejudices and, in a state with a long history of voter suppression, intimidate the growing pool of non-white voters.
“This exercise is a thinly veiled attempt to advance the voter fraud myth to justify restrictive voter requirements and suppress voting rights,” Sophia Lakin, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, said in a statement.
Spokespeople for Paxton and David Whitley, the Texas secretary of state, did not respond to requests for comment.
Julieta Garibay, 38, a naturalised US citizen in Austin who is originally from Mexico, said she contacted officials who told her she is on the list. “I refuse to stay quiet. I’m not going to be bullied out of voting. It is my right and my duty to go out and vote,” she said. She decided to join one of the lawsuits as a plaintiff. “It’s outrageous that someone will come out and say ‘you committed voter fraud’,” she said. “I’m more than insulted – I feel mad.”
Texas’s electoral practices have frequently become mired in litigation, from the way it draws its electoral boundaries to the strict voter ID law passed in 2011.
Like Trump, influential Texas politicians have frequently alleged that voter fraud is rampant while failing to provide proof. The handful of illegal voting cases to emerge have been zealously prosecuted, even when it appears that they were unwitting.
‘Someone did not do their due diligence’: How an attempt to review Texas’ voter rolls turned into a debacle
Texas Tribune - raw story
04 FEB 2019 AT 07:21 ET
State Rep. Rafael Anchia had been alarmed by the actions of the Texas secretary of state’s office for days by the time the agency’s chief, David Whitley, walked into the Dallas Democrat’s Capitol office on Monday.
The Friday before, Whitley’s staff had issued a bombshell press release calling into question the citizenship of 95,000 registered voters in Texas. Soon after, Democratic lawmakers and advocacy groups were raising serious questions about how many people on that list were actually non-citizens who are ineligible to vote.
But before those doubts emerged, Whitley, the top election officer in the state, had handed over information about those registered voters to the Texas attorney general, which has the jurisdiction to prosecute them for felony crimes.
So as Anchia sat at the end of his green, glass-topped conference table, he wanted to know: Did Whitley know for sure that any of the names on his list had committed crimes by voting as noncitizens?
“No,” Whitley answered, according to Anchia.
“And I said, ‘Well, isn’t it the protocol that you investigate and, if you find facts, you turn it over to the AG?”
“I do not have an answer for that,” Whitley responded, according to Anchia’s recollection of the Monday meeting.
By then, Whitley’s press release had already been signal-boosted by top Republican officials — including President Donald Trump — who slapped on unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and illegal voter registration and pointed to it as proof that voter rolls needed to be purged. And county election officials across the state had gone to work parsing through the records of thousands of registered voters whose citizenship status the state now said they should consider verifying. Some counties were even in the process of sending letters to voters ordering them to prove they were citizens.
Soon after, the citizenship review effort would buckle, revealing itself as a ham-handed exercise that threatened to jeopardize the votes of thousands of legitimate voters across the state. The secretary of state’s office would eventually walk back its initial findings after embarrassing errors in the data revealed that tens of thousands of the voters the state flagged were actually citizens. At least one lawsuit would be filed to halt the review, and others were likely in the pipeline. And a week into the review, no evidence of large-scale voter fraud would emerge.
But at their Monday meeting, Whitley argued that his office was following the normal course of upkeep of the voter rolls. That didn’t make Anchia — who chairs the Texas House’s Mexican American Legislative Caucus — feel much better.
“What they have set in motion is going to disenfranchise U.S. citizens and it’s going to infringe on their right to vote,” he said days later. “The damage that this is doing … to legitimate U.S. voters is substantial.”
“Lawful presence list”
The citizenship check effort went public this week, but the seeds for it were planted in 2013. That year, Texas lawmakers quietly passed a law granting the secretary of state’s office access to personal information maintained by the Department of Public Safety.
During legislative hearings at the time, Keith Ingram, director of elections for the secretary of state’s office, told lawmakers that the information would help his office verify the voter rolls. The state had had a recent misstep when it tried to remove dead people from the rolls and ended up sending “potential deceased” notices to Texans who were still alive.
One of the DPS records the secretary of state’s office was granted access to under the 2013 law was a list of people who had turned in documentation — such as a green card or a work visa — that indicated they weren’t citizens when they obtained a driver’s license or a state ID card.
But it appears that the secretary of state’s office held off for years before comparing that list with its list of registered voters. Former Secretary of State Carlos Cascos, a self-proclaimed skeptic of Republican claims of rampant voter fraud, said he had no memory of even considering using the DPS data when he served from 2015 to 2017.
“I don’t recall it ever coming to my desk,” Cascos said. “I don’t even recall having any informal discussions of that.”
And there was reason to be careful with the “lawful presence list.” Driver’s licenses don’t have to be renewed for several years. In between renewals, Texans aren’t required to notify DPS about a change in citizenship status. That means many of the people on the list could have become citizens and registered to vote without DPS knowing.
Other states learned the hard way that basing similar checks on driver’s license data was risky.
In 2012, Florida officials drew up a list of about 180,000 possible noncitizens. It was later culled to about 2,600 names, but even then that data was found to include errors. Ultimately, only about 85 voters were nixed from the rolls.
Around the same time, officials in Colorado started with a list of 11,805 individuals on the voter rolls who they said were noncitizens when they got their driver’s licenses. In the end, state officials said they had found about 141 noncitizens on the rolls — 35 of whom had a voting history — but that those still needed to be verified by local election officials.
But it was under the helm of former Secretary of State Rolando Pablos, who took over in 2017, that Texas began processing the DPS list. That happened even though at least some people in the office knew the risk. Officials in the secretary of state’s office early last year told The Texas Tribune that similar checks in other states using driver’s license data had run into issues with naturalized citizens. Pablos didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Still, on Dec. 5, Betsy Schonhoff, voter registration manager for the secretary of state’s office, told local officials that her office had been working with DPS “this past year” to “evaluate information regarding individuals identified by DPS to not be citizens.” In a mass email sent to Texas counties — and obtained by the Tribune — Schonhoff informed them that the secretary of state’s office would be obtaining additional information from DPS in monthly files and sending out lists of matches starting in mid-January.
The next day, Pablos announced he would resign after two years in office. In his place, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott appointed Whitley, a longtime Abbott aide who at the time served as the governor’s deputy chief of staff.
“VOTER FRAUD ALERT”
Last Friday, Williamson County Elections Administrator Chris Davis had just wrapped up a staff retreat when he got back to his office in Georgetown. By then, news of the state’s list of 95,000 registered voters flagged for review was spreading.
A secretary of state’s advisory about the list had landed in his inbox earlier that day, but it didn’t include any numbers. He knew the reported total of 95,000 likely included naturalized citizens from the get-go.
But misinformation spread quickly. Some of the statements being released about the list were misleading. Others were downright inaccurate. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, took to Twitter within the hour and prefaced the news with the words “VOTER FRAUD ALERT.” At that point, none of the counties had any data to verify.
Also on Twitter, Abbott thanked Paxton and Whitley “for uncovering and investigating this illegal vote registration.” Later that afternoon, the Republican Party of Texas sent out a fundraising email with the subject line that read “BREAKING: 95,000 Non-Citizens Registered to Vote?!”
The next day, the president chimed in, claiming on Twitter that “58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas” and adding the unsupported claim that “voter fraud is rampant” across the country.
But when El Paso County’s election administrator, Lisa Wise, examined the list of 4,152 names she got from the state on Monday morning, she knew something was wrong. Included on the list was one of her staff members — a naturalized citizen since 2017.
“We had a naturalization party for her,” Wise said. “She had gone and gotten her driver’s license, I think, four years ago.”
The errors didn’t end there. By Tuesday morning, secretary of state officials had started calling counties across the state to inform them that they had made a mistake. The office had incorrectly included some voters who had submitted their voting registration applications at DPS offices and who since then had been confirmed to be citizens, county officials said.
Things grew even more confusing for Remi Garza, elections administrator in Cameron County. He had originally received a list with just more than 1,600 people to review. When someone from the secretary of state’s office called on Tuesday, Garza was told that weeding out applications labeled as “source code 64” — the code that indicates the origin of the application was a DPS office — would remove “well over” 1,500 names from his list, leaving him with just 30 individuals to investigate.
But his staff was only able to find 300 people whose applications were labeled as such, Garza said. After another call with the secretary of state’s office, Garza said he was told that the 1,500 number had also been incorrect. Now, he said he’s left with about 85 percent of his list.
“That’s a level of accuracy I’m not comfortable with,” Garza said on Tuesday. “We’re going to be moving through it very cautiously and slowly. We’re talking about the franchise and, I’m not in any way going to jeopardize someone’s ability to vote unless I have a very serious concern.”
Following the secretary of state’s calls, the number of registered voters flagged by the state began to plummet. In Harris County alone, the state’s flub translated to about 18,000 voters — about 60 percent of the original list — whose citizenship status shouldn’t have been questioned.
In Travis County, officials dropped 634 voters off their original list of 4,558. Dallas County’s original list of 9,938 dropped by more than 1,700 voters. In Tarrant County, it was about 1,100 voters cleared from the original 5,800.
The secretary of state’s office told the McLennan County elections office to disregard its entire list of 366 voters, the Waco-Tribune Herald reported.
But the state’s calls came a day too late in Galveston County, where Cheryl Johnson, who oversees the voter rolls as the county’s tax assessor-collector, had already sent off the first batch of “proof of citizenship” letters to voters who were on her initial list of more than 830 people.
On Monday, her office had mailed 92 notices, which told voters their registration would be canceled if they didn’t prove their citizenship within 30 days. That warning even applied to citizens who missed the notice in the mail or didn’t gather their documentation in time. On Tuesday, she learned from the state that 62 of those never should have been sent out. She spent Wednesday preparing follow-up letters to inform those voters that their registration was safe.
“I don’t even have words”For the better part of 26 years, Julieta Garibay, a Mexican immigrant, was regularly reminded that she better not vote: “‘It’s fraud. You would never be allowed to become a citizen.’ This was ingrained in my mind.”
When she finally took her oath of citizenship in a federal building in San Antonio last April, she let only two days go by before registering to vote in Austin, her adopted hometown. She excitedly cast a ballot last November.
But she’s been stewing since last Friday when she heard about the secretary of state’s announcement. Garibay last renewed her driver’s license in 2017 — before she became a U.S. citizen — so she was sure she was on the list. A Travis County official called her to confirm her suspicions on Wednesday, after Garibay had reached out.
Travis County election officials suspected people like Garibay would be on their list. And state officials confirmed to them on Tuesday that the records they provided may include voters who were not citizens when they applied for a driver’s license but have since become naturalized citizens, said Bruce Elfant, the county’s tax-assessor-collector and voter registrar.
But the secretary of state’s office has not confirmed that publicly, and it has not responded to questions about whether it will send updates to the attorney general’s office to clear individuals who were on the original list.
Amid the silence, civil rights groups and members of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus have raised questions about whether the secretary of state’s office publicized its numbers knowing naturalized citizens would be included — or worse that they published them because naturalized citizens could be purged from the rolls in the process.
For Cascos, a Republican who said he long struggled to toe the party line when it came supporting claims that voter fraud was “rampant,” it’s been problematic to watch how the secretary of state’s initial announcement seemed to confirm the beliefs of many Republicans.
“I think there’s a problem here, and the problem is that, in my opinion, someone did not do their due diligence before they let these numbers out,” Cascos said.
On Thursday, Abbott — whose initial reaction to the numbers went as far as vowing a legislative fix — attempted to recast the secretary of state’s announcement as a work in progress.
“They were reaching out to counties saying, ‘Listen, this isn’t a hard-and-fast list,” Abbott said at an unrelated press conference. “This is a list that we need to work on together to make sure that those who do not have the legal authority to vote are not going to be able to vote.”
But while some election officials are looking for ways to clear naturalized citizens without asking them to verify their citizenship, others are unlikely to follow suit. For instance, Johnson in Galveston County says she has no other way to determine whether the people on her list are citizens other than sending them a notice that starts the 30-day clock for them to provide proof to avoid getting kicked off the rolls.
“They said, ‘Use other resources,’ and I said, ‘What resources are that?’” Johnson said. “They said, ‘Well, see if you have any other ways to determine the information.’ I really don’t.”
Secretary of state officials, in conversations with county officials, have gone so far as to express interest in how locals were identifying naturalized citizens on the list.
On Tuesday, the civil rights group League of United Latin American Citizens filed a lawsuit that argued that forcing naturalized citizens to prove they are legitimate voters amounts to a “witch hunt” and a “plan carefully calibrated to intimidate legitimate registered voters from continuing to participate in the election process.”
To Democratic state Rep. Victoria Neave of Dallas — who is on the Mexican American Legislative Caucus committee created to scrutinize the citizenship review — the whole effort is “nothing short of a political attack on Latino naturalized citizens.”
But Garibay, the Mexican immigrant, sums it up as irresponsible and frustrating.
“I think to many of us, especially when the journey has been so long … [voting] is something so important,” Garibay said. “For someone to say you did something wrong when it’s your right to do it, I don’t even have words.”
The Friday before, Whitley’s staff had issued a bombshell press release calling into question the citizenship of 95,000 registered voters in Texas. Soon after, Democratic lawmakers and advocacy groups were raising serious questions about how many people on that list were actually non-citizens who are ineligible to vote.
But before those doubts emerged, Whitley, the top election officer in the state, had handed over information about those registered voters to the Texas attorney general, which has the jurisdiction to prosecute them for felony crimes.
So as Anchia sat at the end of his green, glass-topped conference table, he wanted to know: Did Whitley know for sure that any of the names on his list had committed crimes by voting as noncitizens?
“No,” Whitley answered, according to Anchia.
“And I said, ‘Well, isn’t it the protocol that you investigate and, if you find facts, you turn it over to the AG?”
“I do not have an answer for that,” Whitley responded, according to Anchia’s recollection of the Monday meeting.
By then, Whitley’s press release had already been signal-boosted by top Republican officials — including President Donald Trump — who slapped on unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and illegal voter registration and pointed to it as proof that voter rolls needed to be purged. And county election officials across the state had gone to work parsing through the records of thousands of registered voters whose citizenship status the state now said they should consider verifying. Some counties were even in the process of sending letters to voters ordering them to prove they were citizens.
Soon after, the citizenship review effort would buckle, revealing itself as a ham-handed exercise that threatened to jeopardize the votes of thousands of legitimate voters across the state. The secretary of state’s office would eventually walk back its initial findings after embarrassing errors in the data revealed that tens of thousands of the voters the state flagged were actually citizens. At least one lawsuit would be filed to halt the review, and others were likely in the pipeline. And a week into the review, no evidence of large-scale voter fraud would emerge.
But at their Monday meeting, Whitley argued that his office was following the normal course of upkeep of the voter rolls. That didn’t make Anchia — who chairs the Texas House’s Mexican American Legislative Caucus — feel much better.
“What they have set in motion is going to disenfranchise U.S. citizens and it’s going to infringe on their right to vote,” he said days later. “The damage that this is doing … to legitimate U.S. voters is substantial.”
“Lawful presence list”
The citizenship check effort went public this week, but the seeds for it were planted in 2013. That year, Texas lawmakers quietly passed a law granting the secretary of state’s office access to personal information maintained by the Department of Public Safety.
During legislative hearings at the time, Keith Ingram, director of elections for the secretary of state’s office, told lawmakers that the information would help his office verify the voter rolls. The state had had a recent misstep when it tried to remove dead people from the rolls and ended up sending “potential deceased” notices to Texans who were still alive.
One of the DPS records the secretary of state’s office was granted access to under the 2013 law was a list of people who had turned in documentation — such as a green card or a work visa — that indicated they weren’t citizens when they obtained a driver’s license or a state ID card.
But it appears that the secretary of state’s office held off for years before comparing that list with its list of registered voters. Former Secretary of State Carlos Cascos, a self-proclaimed skeptic of Republican claims of rampant voter fraud, said he had no memory of even considering using the DPS data when he served from 2015 to 2017.
“I don’t recall it ever coming to my desk,” Cascos said. “I don’t even recall having any informal discussions of that.”
And there was reason to be careful with the “lawful presence list.” Driver’s licenses don’t have to be renewed for several years. In between renewals, Texans aren’t required to notify DPS about a change in citizenship status. That means many of the people on the list could have become citizens and registered to vote without DPS knowing.
Other states learned the hard way that basing similar checks on driver’s license data was risky.
In 2012, Florida officials drew up a list of about 180,000 possible noncitizens. It was later culled to about 2,600 names, but even then that data was found to include errors. Ultimately, only about 85 voters were nixed from the rolls.
Around the same time, officials in Colorado started with a list of 11,805 individuals on the voter rolls who they said were noncitizens when they got their driver’s licenses. In the end, state officials said they had found about 141 noncitizens on the rolls — 35 of whom had a voting history — but that those still needed to be verified by local election officials.
But it was under the helm of former Secretary of State Rolando Pablos, who took over in 2017, that Texas began processing the DPS list. That happened even though at least some people in the office knew the risk. Officials in the secretary of state’s office early last year told The Texas Tribune that similar checks in other states using driver’s license data had run into issues with naturalized citizens. Pablos didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Still, on Dec. 5, Betsy Schonhoff, voter registration manager for the secretary of state’s office, told local officials that her office had been working with DPS “this past year” to “evaluate information regarding individuals identified by DPS to not be citizens.” In a mass email sent to Texas counties — and obtained by the Tribune — Schonhoff informed them that the secretary of state’s office would be obtaining additional information from DPS in monthly files and sending out lists of matches starting in mid-January.
The next day, Pablos announced he would resign after two years in office. In his place, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott appointed Whitley, a longtime Abbott aide who at the time served as the governor’s deputy chief of staff.
“VOTER FRAUD ALERT”
Last Friday, Williamson County Elections Administrator Chris Davis had just wrapped up a staff retreat when he got back to his office in Georgetown. By then, news of the state’s list of 95,000 registered voters flagged for review was spreading.
A secretary of state’s advisory about the list had landed in his inbox earlier that day, but it didn’t include any numbers. He knew the reported total of 95,000 likely included naturalized citizens from the get-go.
But misinformation spread quickly. Some of the statements being released about the list were misleading. Others were downright inaccurate. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, took to Twitter within the hour and prefaced the news with the words “VOTER FRAUD ALERT.” At that point, none of the counties had any data to verify.
Also on Twitter, Abbott thanked Paxton and Whitley “for uncovering and investigating this illegal vote registration.” Later that afternoon, the Republican Party of Texas sent out a fundraising email with the subject line that read “BREAKING: 95,000 Non-Citizens Registered to Vote?!”
The next day, the president chimed in, claiming on Twitter that “58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas” and adding the unsupported claim that “voter fraud is rampant” across the country.
But when El Paso County’s election administrator, Lisa Wise, examined the list of 4,152 names she got from the state on Monday morning, she knew something was wrong. Included on the list was one of her staff members — a naturalized citizen since 2017.
“We had a naturalization party for her,” Wise said. “She had gone and gotten her driver’s license, I think, four years ago.”
The errors didn’t end there. By Tuesday morning, secretary of state officials had started calling counties across the state to inform them that they had made a mistake. The office had incorrectly included some voters who had submitted their voting registration applications at DPS offices and who since then had been confirmed to be citizens, county officials said.
Things grew even more confusing for Remi Garza, elections administrator in Cameron County. He had originally received a list with just more than 1,600 people to review. When someone from the secretary of state’s office called on Tuesday, Garza was told that weeding out applications labeled as “source code 64” — the code that indicates the origin of the application was a DPS office — would remove “well over” 1,500 names from his list, leaving him with just 30 individuals to investigate.
But his staff was only able to find 300 people whose applications were labeled as such, Garza said. After another call with the secretary of state’s office, Garza said he was told that the 1,500 number had also been incorrect. Now, he said he’s left with about 85 percent of his list.
“That’s a level of accuracy I’m not comfortable with,” Garza said on Tuesday. “We’re going to be moving through it very cautiously and slowly. We’re talking about the franchise and, I’m not in any way going to jeopardize someone’s ability to vote unless I have a very serious concern.”
Following the secretary of state’s calls, the number of registered voters flagged by the state began to plummet. In Harris County alone, the state’s flub translated to about 18,000 voters — about 60 percent of the original list — whose citizenship status shouldn’t have been questioned.
In Travis County, officials dropped 634 voters off their original list of 4,558. Dallas County’s original list of 9,938 dropped by more than 1,700 voters. In Tarrant County, it was about 1,100 voters cleared from the original 5,800.
The secretary of state’s office told the McLennan County elections office to disregard its entire list of 366 voters, the Waco-Tribune Herald reported.
But the state’s calls came a day too late in Galveston County, where Cheryl Johnson, who oversees the voter rolls as the county’s tax assessor-collector, had already sent off the first batch of “proof of citizenship” letters to voters who were on her initial list of more than 830 people.
On Monday, her office had mailed 92 notices, which told voters their registration would be canceled if they didn’t prove their citizenship within 30 days. That warning even applied to citizens who missed the notice in the mail or didn’t gather their documentation in time. On Tuesday, she learned from the state that 62 of those never should have been sent out. She spent Wednesday preparing follow-up letters to inform those voters that their registration was safe.
“I don’t even have words”For the better part of 26 years, Julieta Garibay, a Mexican immigrant, was regularly reminded that she better not vote: “‘It’s fraud. You would never be allowed to become a citizen.’ This was ingrained in my mind.”
When she finally took her oath of citizenship in a federal building in San Antonio last April, she let only two days go by before registering to vote in Austin, her adopted hometown. She excitedly cast a ballot last November.
But she’s been stewing since last Friday when she heard about the secretary of state’s announcement. Garibay last renewed her driver’s license in 2017 — before she became a U.S. citizen — so she was sure she was on the list. A Travis County official called her to confirm her suspicions on Wednesday, after Garibay had reached out.
Travis County election officials suspected people like Garibay would be on their list. And state officials confirmed to them on Tuesday that the records they provided may include voters who were not citizens when they applied for a driver’s license but have since become naturalized citizens, said Bruce Elfant, the county’s tax-assessor-collector and voter registrar.
But the secretary of state’s office has not confirmed that publicly, and it has not responded to questions about whether it will send updates to the attorney general’s office to clear individuals who were on the original list.
Amid the silence, civil rights groups and members of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus have raised questions about whether the secretary of state’s office publicized its numbers knowing naturalized citizens would be included — or worse that they published them because naturalized citizens could be purged from the rolls in the process.
For Cascos, a Republican who said he long struggled to toe the party line when it came supporting claims that voter fraud was “rampant,” it’s been problematic to watch how the secretary of state’s initial announcement seemed to confirm the beliefs of many Republicans.
“I think there’s a problem here, and the problem is that, in my opinion, someone did not do their due diligence before they let these numbers out,” Cascos said.
On Thursday, Abbott — whose initial reaction to the numbers went as far as vowing a legislative fix — attempted to recast the secretary of state’s announcement as a work in progress.
“They were reaching out to counties saying, ‘Listen, this isn’t a hard-and-fast list,” Abbott said at an unrelated press conference. “This is a list that we need to work on together to make sure that those who do not have the legal authority to vote are not going to be able to vote.”
But while some election officials are looking for ways to clear naturalized citizens without asking them to verify their citizenship, others are unlikely to follow suit. For instance, Johnson in Galveston County says she has no other way to determine whether the people on her list are citizens other than sending them a notice that starts the 30-day clock for them to provide proof to avoid getting kicked off the rolls.
“They said, ‘Use other resources,’ and I said, ‘What resources are that?’” Johnson said. “They said, ‘Well, see if you have any other ways to determine the information.’ I really don’t.”
Secretary of state officials, in conversations with county officials, have gone so far as to express interest in how locals were identifying naturalized citizens on the list.
On Tuesday, the civil rights group League of United Latin American Citizens filed a lawsuit that argued that forcing naturalized citizens to prove they are legitimate voters amounts to a “witch hunt” and a “plan carefully calibrated to intimidate legitimate registered voters from continuing to participate in the election process.”
To Democratic state Rep. Victoria Neave of Dallas — who is on the Mexican American Legislative Caucus committee created to scrutinize the citizenship review — the whole effort is “nothing short of a political attack on Latino naturalized citizens.”
But Garibay, the Mexican immigrant, sums it up as irresponsible and frustrating.
“I think to many of us, especially when the journey has been so long … [voting] is something so important,” Garibay said. “For someone to say you did something wrong when it’s your right to do it, I don’t even have words.”
the witch hunt begins!!!
Some Texas voters are already being asked to prove their citizenship following state’s announcement
Texas Tribune - raw story
29 JAN 2019 AT 08:17 ET
Following the state’s announcement that it was flagging tens of thousands of registered voters for possible citizenship checks, some Texas voters could be receiving requests to prove their citizenship this week.
Local election officials have received lists of individuals whose citizenship status the state says counties should consider checking. Officials in some of Texas’ biggest counties said Monday they were still parsing through thousands of records and deciding how best to verify the citizenship status of those flagged by the state. But in Galveston County, the first batch of “proof of citizenship” letters were scheduled to be dropped in the mail Monday afternoon.
Those notices start a 30-day countdown for a voter to provide proof of citizenship such as a birth certificate, a U.S. passport or a certificate of naturalization. Voters who don’t respond will have their voter registration canceled.
The Texas Tribune reached out to 13 of the 15 counties with the most registered voters on Monday; Galveston was the only one that indicated it would immediately send out letters, even as more than a dozen civil rights groups warned the state and local election officials that they risked violating federal law by scrutinizing the voters flagged by the state.
Cheryl Johnson, who oversees the voter rolls in Galveston County as its tax assessor-collector, said she was simply following state law by starting to send letters to the more than 830 people the state flagged.
Those voters are among the approximately 95,000 registered voters who the state said provided the Texas Department of Safety with some form of documentation, such as a green card or a work visa, that showed they were not citizens when obtained a driver license or ID card.
It’s unclear exactly how many of them are not actually U.S. citizens. Legal permanent residents, also known as green card holders, who become naturalized citizens after obtaining driver licenses are not required to update DPS on their citizenship status, according to voting rights lawyers.
Past reviews of the voter rolls by other states ultimately found that a much smaller number of the thousands of voters initially flagged were actually non-citizens. Civil rights groups have pointed to Florida, where a similar methodology was used to create a list of approximately 180,000 registered voters that officials claimed were non-citizens — the number was ultimately reduced to about 85 voters. Amid a court fight, Florida eventually agreed to reinstate 2,600 voters who were mistakenly removed from the rolls because the state classified them as non-citizens.
Bruce Elfant, Travis County’s tax assessor-collector and voter registrar, indicated he was concerned about the accuracy of the data because the county has previously received data from DPS that was “less than pristine.” County officials vowed to review the list of 4,547 registered voters they received but were still trying to convert the data into a usable format.
He said he also wanted more information about the methodology the Texas Secretary of State’s office used to compile the list, pointing out that naturalized citizens may have obtained their driver licenses before becoming citizens.
“The state is responsible for vetting for citizenship” during the voter registration process, Elfant said. “I would be surprised if that many people got through it.”
Other county officials echoed Elfant’s point about naturalized citizens. Collin County’s election administrator, Bruce Sherbert, said they had received a list of approximately 4,700 names and would consider them on a case-by-case basis, checking for cases in which a voter might have already provided some form of proof they are citizens.
“It can be a process that takes several months to go through,” Sherbert said. “We’re just at the front side of it.”
Facing a list of 2,033 individuals, Williamson County officials said they were considering ways in which they could determine citizenship without sending notices to voters. Chris Davis, the county’s election administrator, said some naturalized citizens could have registered to vote at naturalization ceremonies in other counties, so their files might indicate their registration applications were mailed in from there.
“We want to try to avoid sending notices to folks if we can find proof of their citizenship, thereby they don’t have to come in and prove it themselves or mail it,” Davis said.
Election officials in Fort Bend County said they had received a list of about 8,400 voters, though they noted some may be duplicates. El Paso County officials said their list included 4,152 voters.
Harris County officials did not provide a count of voters the state flagged on its rolls, but Douglas Ray, a special assistant county attorney, said they were treading carefully because of previous missteps by the state.
“To be quite frank, several years ago the secretary of state did something very similar claiming there were people who were deceased,” Ray said. “They sent us a list and the voter registrar sent confirmation notices and it turned out a lot of people identified on the list were misidentified. A lot of the people who received notices were very much alive.”
Ray said the county plans to examine the identities of voters on the list, reviewing registration information on file and proceeding with the confirmation process if they have “serious questions” about a voter.
“We don’t want non-citizens voting any more than anyone else does,” Ray said. “What we’re skeptical of is the quality of information we’re being given.”
Election officials in Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar, Hidalgo, Montgomery and Cameron counties did not respond to questions about the lists they received. The state declined to provide specifics about the list on Friday and directed the Tribune to file an open records request.
Local election officials have received lists of individuals whose citizenship status the state says counties should consider checking. Officials in some of Texas’ biggest counties said Monday they were still parsing through thousands of records and deciding how best to verify the citizenship status of those flagged by the state. But in Galveston County, the first batch of “proof of citizenship” letters were scheduled to be dropped in the mail Monday afternoon.
Those notices start a 30-day countdown for a voter to provide proof of citizenship such as a birth certificate, a U.S. passport or a certificate of naturalization. Voters who don’t respond will have their voter registration canceled.
The Texas Tribune reached out to 13 of the 15 counties with the most registered voters on Monday; Galveston was the only one that indicated it would immediately send out letters, even as more than a dozen civil rights groups warned the state and local election officials that they risked violating federal law by scrutinizing the voters flagged by the state.
Cheryl Johnson, who oversees the voter rolls in Galveston County as its tax assessor-collector, said she was simply following state law by starting to send letters to the more than 830 people the state flagged.
Those voters are among the approximately 95,000 registered voters who the state said provided the Texas Department of Safety with some form of documentation, such as a green card or a work visa, that showed they were not citizens when obtained a driver license or ID card.
It’s unclear exactly how many of them are not actually U.S. citizens. Legal permanent residents, also known as green card holders, who become naturalized citizens after obtaining driver licenses are not required to update DPS on their citizenship status, according to voting rights lawyers.
Past reviews of the voter rolls by other states ultimately found that a much smaller number of the thousands of voters initially flagged were actually non-citizens. Civil rights groups have pointed to Florida, where a similar methodology was used to create a list of approximately 180,000 registered voters that officials claimed were non-citizens — the number was ultimately reduced to about 85 voters. Amid a court fight, Florida eventually agreed to reinstate 2,600 voters who were mistakenly removed from the rolls because the state classified them as non-citizens.
Bruce Elfant, Travis County’s tax assessor-collector and voter registrar, indicated he was concerned about the accuracy of the data because the county has previously received data from DPS that was “less than pristine.” County officials vowed to review the list of 4,547 registered voters they received but were still trying to convert the data into a usable format.
He said he also wanted more information about the methodology the Texas Secretary of State’s office used to compile the list, pointing out that naturalized citizens may have obtained their driver licenses before becoming citizens.
“The state is responsible for vetting for citizenship” during the voter registration process, Elfant said. “I would be surprised if that many people got through it.”
Other county officials echoed Elfant’s point about naturalized citizens. Collin County’s election administrator, Bruce Sherbert, said they had received a list of approximately 4,700 names and would consider them on a case-by-case basis, checking for cases in which a voter might have already provided some form of proof they are citizens.
“It can be a process that takes several months to go through,” Sherbert said. “We’re just at the front side of it.”
Facing a list of 2,033 individuals, Williamson County officials said they were considering ways in which they could determine citizenship without sending notices to voters. Chris Davis, the county’s election administrator, said some naturalized citizens could have registered to vote at naturalization ceremonies in other counties, so their files might indicate their registration applications were mailed in from there.
“We want to try to avoid sending notices to folks if we can find proof of their citizenship, thereby they don’t have to come in and prove it themselves or mail it,” Davis said.
Election officials in Fort Bend County said they had received a list of about 8,400 voters, though they noted some may be duplicates. El Paso County officials said their list included 4,152 voters.
Harris County officials did not provide a count of voters the state flagged on its rolls, but Douglas Ray, a special assistant county attorney, said they were treading carefully because of previous missteps by the state.
“To be quite frank, several years ago the secretary of state did something very similar claiming there were people who were deceased,” Ray said. “They sent us a list and the voter registrar sent confirmation notices and it turned out a lot of people identified on the list were misidentified. A lot of the people who received notices were very much alive.”
Ray said the county plans to examine the identities of voters on the list, reviewing registration information on file and proceeding with the confirmation process if they have “serious questions” about a voter.
“We don’t want non-citizens voting any more than anyone else does,” Ray said. “What we’re skeptical of is the quality of information we’re being given.”
Election officials in Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar, Hidalgo, Montgomery and Cameron counties did not respond to questions about the lists they received. The state declined to provide specifics about the list on Friday and directed the Tribune to file an open records request.
New Mexico advances ambitious voting rights bill to abolish felon disenfranchisement
Elections matter.
AMANDA MICHELLE GOMEZ - thinkprogress
JAN 26, 2019, 12:09 PM
New Mexico lawmakers advanced two major voting rights bills on Friday, illustrating a growing nationwide trend as lawmakers are prioritizing the issue following rampant problems at the polls during the 2018 midterm elections.
New Mexico could join Maine and Vermont as the only states in the country that allow people convicted of felonies to cast a ballot from behind bars. State lawmakers took a critical first step on Friday by moving HB 57, legislation that would completely abolish felony disenfranchisement, out of a key committee.
“We want the people who are in prison to be engaged in their communities, we want them to participate, we want them to care about what happens,” said the bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Gail Chasey (D), during a hearing to discuss the legislation, according to the New Mexico Political Report.
The House Government, Elections, and Indian Affairs Committee passed the bill despite the fact that another Democrat, who wants to narrow the measure’s scope by only allowing the formerly incarcerated to vote, indicated he wanted to keep working on the language. HB 57 now moves to the Judiciary Committee.
Under current state law, New Mexico residents who are convicted of a felony are removed from the voting rolls. Their voting rights are supposed to be automatically restored once they’ve completed their sentence, probation, or parole. But according to New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, it doesn’t usually work that way in practice. The state’s corrections department doesn’t always give elections officials updated data.
The committee also passed an automatic voter registration bill on Friday. Eligible voters in New Mexico can already register when they apply for a driver’s license or another form of state identification. But the bill would make this process automatic by creating an “opt-out” process for those who don’t want to register to vote, instead of an “opt-in” process.
The automatic voter registration bill is expected to pass the Democratic-controlled legislature. The chances of fully abolishing felon disenfranchisement are less clear, however. A few state Democrats are skeptical of the measure, arguing that allowing incarcerated people to vote while they’re serving out their time goes too far.
New Mexico lawmakers also want to pass a separate bill allowing for same-day voter registration, which they didn’t have time to debate on Friday.
The legislature’s advancement of the voting rights measures on Friday gave hope to voting rights activists.
“This has been more than a year and a half of planting seed,” Millions for Prisoners organizer Selinda Guerrero told the Appeal on Friday, after the hearing. “I cannot believe that we are here, this is so incredible.”
New Mexico could join Maine and Vermont as the only states in the country that allow people convicted of felonies to cast a ballot from behind bars. State lawmakers took a critical first step on Friday by moving HB 57, legislation that would completely abolish felony disenfranchisement, out of a key committee.
“We want the people who are in prison to be engaged in their communities, we want them to participate, we want them to care about what happens,” said the bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Gail Chasey (D), during a hearing to discuss the legislation, according to the New Mexico Political Report.
The House Government, Elections, and Indian Affairs Committee passed the bill despite the fact that another Democrat, who wants to narrow the measure’s scope by only allowing the formerly incarcerated to vote, indicated he wanted to keep working on the language. HB 57 now moves to the Judiciary Committee.
Under current state law, New Mexico residents who are convicted of a felony are removed from the voting rolls. Their voting rights are supposed to be automatically restored once they’ve completed their sentence, probation, or parole. But according to New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, it doesn’t usually work that way in practice. The state’s corrections department doesn’t always give elections officials updated data.
The committee also passed an automatic voter registration bill on Friday. Eligible voters in New Mexico can already register when they apply for a driver’s license or another form of state identification. But the bill would make this process automatic by creating an “opt-out” process for those who don’t want to register to vote, instead of an “opt-in” process.
The automatic voter registration bill is expected to pass the Democratic-controlled legislature. The chances of fully abolishing felon disenfranchisement are less clear, however. A few state Democrats are skeptical of the measure, arguing that allowing incarcerated people to vote while they’re serving out their time goes too far.
New Mexico lawmakers also want to pass a separate bill allowing for same-day voter registration, which they didn’t have time to debate on Friday.
The legislature’s advancement of the voting rights measures on Friday gave hope to voting rights activists.
“This has been more than a year and a half of planting seed,” Millions for Prisoners organizer Selinda Guerrero told the Appeal on Friday, after the hearing. “I cannot believe that we are here, this is so incredible.”
with a fool as governor, the fight starts!!!
1.4 MILLION FLORIDIANS GET THEIR VOTING RIGHTS BACK TODAY, WHETHER REPUBLICANS LIKE IT OR NOT
Alice Speri - the intercept
January 8 2019, 5:00 a.m.
MORE THAN 1 million Florida residents will become eligible to vote on Tuesday as the newly amended state constitution restores voting rights to most of its previously disenfranchised felons. That’s the largest number of people to gain access to the ballot all at once since American women won the right to vote in 1920.
Last November, Florida residents voted in favor of an amendment to the state constitution, known as Amendment 4, that restores voting rights to roughly 1.4 million felons in the state who have completed their sentences. (Individuals convicted of murder or sex offenses were excluded from the amendment.) But while the measure was approved by nearly 65 percent of the state’s voters, some Republicans — including Gov.-elect Ron DeSantis — have sought to sow confusion about its immediate validity.
DeSantis, who opposed the amendment during the campaign, indicated that its implementation would be delayed until lawmakers can write it into law during the next legislative session. “They’re going to be able to do that in March,” he told the Palm Beach Post. Some local elections in Florida are scheduled for as early as February, before the next legislature meets.
DeSantis’s comments followed slow-walking on the amendment by other state officials, like Ken Detzner, the Republican secretary of state, who indicated in December that he believed the ballot language was unclear and would require state legislators’ review. “We need to get some direction from them as far as implementation and definitions — all the kind of things that the supervisors were asking,” Detzner said then. “It would be inappropriate for us to charge off without direction from them.”
Lack of direction from the state department — and from exiting Gov. Rick Scott — also led to confusion among election officials across the state, with the Division of Elections director saying that “the state is putting a pause button on our felon identification files . … We need this time to research it, to be sure we are providing the appropriate guidance.”
Asked for clarification, the Florida Department of State sent a somewhat equivocal statement to The Intercept, noting both that the amendment is now officially law and that the department would follow the legislature’s directive — a seeming contradiction. “Unless otherwise specifically provided for elsewhere in this constitution, if the proposed amendment or revision is approved by vote of at least sixty percent of the electors voting on the measure, it shall be effective as an amendment to or revision of the constitution of the state on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in January following the election,” a spokesperson for the department wrote, citing the state constitution. But then she added, “The Florida Department of State will abide by any future direction from the Executive Clemency Board or the Florida Legislature regarding necessary action or implementing legislation to ensure full compliance with the law.”
That ambiguity, critics say, is deliberate and unnecessary. The amendment’s language makes clear that the change is self-executing, meaning that it became part of the state constitution the moment it won voters’ support and that it must be implemented without delay or legislators’ input. The amendment’s language was cleared by the state Supreme Court before the vote, and supporters collected more than a million signatures to get it on the ballot.
“It was designed so that there would be no requirement for involvement by any legislators, politicians, the governor, or anyone,” said Melba Pearson, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, one of the groups that drafted the amendment. “There is no role for the governor or any legislator in this amendment. Their only role is to make sure that the constitution is upheld and that the will of the voters is respected.”
A Deliberate Mess
Republicans’ belated questions about the amendment’s clarity and immediate validity were met with a barrage of criticism and stinging rebukes from many of the state’s editorial boards. “About the only thing worse than making a mess is making a mess unnecessarily,” a columnist for the Palm Beach Post wrote. “But here we are anyway, because Secretary of State Ken Detzner — who reports to Scott and whose department oversees statewide elections — won’t do his job.”
Andrew Gillum, who lost to DeSantis in November by a narrow 33,000 votes, also slammed officials who are creating unnecessary obstacles to the amendment’s implementation. “The people spoke & voted for #Amendment4 with an overwhelming majority,” he tweeted in December. “Those who fight the will of the voters are fighting democracy itself.”
The backlash only intensified after DeSantis’s comments added fuel to the confusion — an unsubtle effort at intimidating newly eligible voters, critics said.
“The reality is even though he does not agree with the amendment, it is his duty as the governor, the incoming governor of the state, to uphold the will of the people. Period, end of story,” said Melba. “Amendment 4 is now law in the state of Florida, so he needs to uphold it as is. Politicians or elected officials don’t get to pick and choose in that manner.”
Melba called on all new eligible voters to register on Tuesday and invited anyone experiencing issues to report them on the ACLU’s website. She said she hoped that no obstruction would arise to warrant litigation, but that the group was “prepared for the worst. … No options are off the table.”
Groups of formerly incarcerated “returning citizens” who drove the effort to pass the measure will be out on the streets once again this week, this time to register new voters, and several groups would run voter education campaigns, Melba added. “All people need to do on January 8 is register to vote, either online or at their local Supervisor of Elections office in their county,” she said. “There’s nothing confusing about it.”
A spokesperson for DeSantis, who is also to be sworn in on Tuesday, did not respond to a request for comment, but his office told other publications that “the Governor-elect intends for the will of the voters to be implemented but will look to the Legislature to clarify the various questions that have been raised.”
Before the amendment passed, Florida was the largest of three states that disenfranchised felons for life. As The Intercept reported in November, 1.68 million residents of the state were ineligible to vote because of a felony conviction: 10 percent of the state’s adult population and 1 in 5 African-Americans. Across the country, more than 6 million people can’t vote because of felony convictions, though most states restore voting rights at some point between release and the end of probation.
In Florida, a regular swing state where it’s not unusual for elections like DeSantis’s to be decided by extremely narrow margins, many believe that re-enfranchising felons has the potential to significantly tip the state’s political scales. But those who led the yearslong effort to pass Amendment 4, and particularly a diverse coalition of individuals with felony convictions, rejected the politicization of their effort and noted that the issue impacted people across the state and the political spectrum.
“We are not pawns for any partisan gamesmanship, we’re not pawns for any partisan bickering,” Desmond Meade, president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, told The Intercept. “We are human beings, we are people over politics. And we are citizens of the state and of this country that want to be able to participate in the democratic process without being set up like we’re just a token for a political party.”
Meade, one of the earliest leaders of the voter re-enfranchisement movement in the state, said he would finally register to vote on Tuesday.
“And when I go to register, I’ll be doing so under the authority of the highest law in the state of Florida, and this law is over any legislature, it’s over any political or public servant,” he added. “We’re going forward fully expecting that every public servant that serves the systems of Florida is going to number one, respect the rule of the law, and number two, respect the wishes of its citizens.”
Last November, Florida residents voted in favor of an amendment to the state constitution, known as Amendment 4, that restores voting rights to roughly 1.4 million felons in the state who have completed their sentences. (Individuals convicted of murder or sex offenses were excluded from the amendment.) But while the measure was approved by nearly 65 percent of the state’s voters, some Republicans — including Gov.-elect Ron DeSantis — have sought to sow confusion about its immediate validity.
DeSantis, who opposed the amendment during the campaign, indicated that its implementation would be delayed until lawmakers can write it into law during the next legislative session. “They’re going to be able to do that in March,” he told the Palm Beach Post. Some local elections in Florida are scheduled for as early as February, before the next legislature meets.
DeSantis’s comments followed slow-walking on the amendment by other state officials, like Ken Detzner, the Republican secretary of state, who indicated in December that he believed the ballot language was unclear and would require state legislators’ review. “We need to get some direction from them as far as implementation and definitions — all the kind of things that the supervisors were asking,” Detzner said then. “It would be inappropriate for us to charge off without direction from them.”
Lack of direction from the state department — and from exiting Gov. Rick Scott — also led to confusion among election officials across the state, with the Division of Elections director saying that “the state is putting a pause button on our felon identification files . … We need this time to research it, to be sure we are providing the appropriate guidance.”
Asked for clarification, the Florida Department of State sent a somewhat equivocal statement to The Intercept, noting both that the amendment is now officially law and that the department would follow the legislature’s directive — a seeming contradiction. “Unless otherwise specifically provided for elsewhere in this constitution, if the proposed amendment or revision is approved by vote of at least sixty percent of the electors voting on the measure, it shall be effective as an amendment to or revision of the constitution of the state on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in January following the election,” a spokesperson for the department wrote, citing the state constitution. But then she added, “The Florida Department of State will abide by any future direction from the Executive Clemency Board or the Florida Legislature regarding necessary action or implementing legislation to ensure full compliance with the law.”
That ambiguity, critics say, is deliberate and unnecessary. The amendment’s language makes clear that the change is self-executing, meaning that it became part of the state constitution the moment it won voters’ support and that it must be implemented without delay or legislators’ input. The amendment’s language was cleared by the state Supreme Court before the vote, and supporters collected more than a million signatures to get it on the ballot.
“It was designed so that there would be no requirement for involvement by any legislators, politicians, the governor, or anyone,” said Melba Pearson, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, one of the groups that drafted the amendment. “There is no role for the governor or any legislator in this amendment. Their only role is to make sure that the constitution is upheld and that the will of the voters is respected.”
A Deliberate Mess
Republicans’ belated questions about the amendment’s clarity and immediate validity were met with a barrage of criticism and stinging rebukes from many of the state’s editorial boards. “About the only thing worse than making a mess is making a mess unnecessarily,” a columnist for the Palm Beach Post wrote. “But here we are anyway, because Secretary of State Ken Detzner — who reports to Scott and whose department oversees statewide elections — won’t do his job.”
Andrew Gillum, who lost to DeSantis in November by a narrow 33,000 votes, also slammed officials who are creating unnecessary obstacles to the amendment’s implementation. “The people spoke & voted for #Amendment4 with an overwhelming majority,” he tweeted in December. “Those who fight the will of the voters are fighting democracy itself.”
The backlash only intensified after DeSantis’s comments added fuel to the confusion — an unsubtle effort at intimidating newly eligible voters, critics said.
“The reality is even though he does not agree with the amendment, it is his duty as the governor, the incoming governor of the state, to uphold the will of the people. Period, end of story,” said Melba. “Amendment 4 is now law in the state of Florida, so he needs to uphold it as is. Politicians or elected officials don’t get to pick and choose in that manner.”
Melba called on all new eligible voters to register on Tuesday and invited anyone experiencing issues to report them on the ACLU’s website. She said she hoped that no obstruction would arise to warrant litigation, but that the group was “prepared for the worst. … No options are off the table.”
Groups of formerly incarcerated “returning citizens” who drove the effort to pass the measure will be out on the streets once again this week, this time to register new voters, and several groups would run voter education campaigns, Melba added. “All people need to do on January 8 is register to vote, either online or at their local Supervisor of Elections office in their county,” she said. “There’s nothing confusing about it.”
A spokesperson for DeSantis, who is also to be sworn in on Tuesday, did not respond to a request for comment, but his office told other publications that “the Governor-elect intends for the will of the voters to be implemented but will look to the Legislature to clarify the various questions that have been raised.”
Before the amendment passed, Florida was the largest of three states that disenfranchised felons for life. As The Intercept reported in November, 1.68 million residents of the state were ineligible to vote because of a felony conviction: 10 percent of the state’s adult population and 1 in 5 African-Americans. Across the country, more than 6 million people can’t vote because of felony convictions, though most states restore voting rights at some point between release and the end of probation.
In Florida, a regular swing state where it’s not unusual for elections like DeSantis’s to be decided by extremely narrow margins, many believe that re-enfranchising felons has the potential to significantly tip the state’s political scales. But those who led the yearslong effort to pass Amendment 4, and particularly a diverse coalition of individuals with felony convictions, rejected the politicization of their effort and noted that the issue impacted people across the state and the political spectrum.
“We are not pawns for any partisan gamesmanship, we’re not pawns for any partisan bickering,” Desmond Meade, president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, told The Intercept. “We are human beings, we are people over politics. And we are citizens of the state and of this country that want to be able to participate in the democratic process without being set up like we’re just a token for a political party.”
Meade, one of the earliest leaders of the voter re-enfranchisement movement in the state, said he would finally register to vote on Tuesday.
“And when I go to register, I’ll be doing so under the authority of the highest law in the state of Florida, and this law is over any legislature, it’s over any political or public servant,” he added. “We’re going forward fully expecting that every public servant that serves the systems of Florida is going to number one, respect the rule of the law, and number two, respect the wishes of its citizens.”
Absentee-ballot fraud scandal speaks to wider issue of racism in North Carolina
The state elections board will not certify results in the ninth congressional race after reports of ‘ballot harvesters’ emerged
Khushbu Shahin Bladenboro, North Carolina
the guardian
Wed 12 Dec 2018 06.00 EST
One night last October, Jerry Ward, 49, was gathered with about a dozen other people at a relative’s house in downtown Bladenboro, a small city of just 1,700 souls in rural North Carolina. Then a young, white woman came to the door, asking about getting people inside to vote early in the upcoming and fiercely contested midterm elections.
“It was a whole house full of us and the girl came after dark and she was like saying that we could vote early and we was about to fill in them papers but we didn’t. She said, ‘I’ll fill them out for you’,” said Ward who, like the other voters quoted in this story, is African American.
The comment raised suspicions among those gathered, not least because in North Carolina, like much of the rural south, memories still linger about the fight for voting rights for black residents – and the equally fierce fight to resist them.
The group decided not to accept the woman’s offer. In the end, Ward voted in person. So did everyone else in the house that night.
They were right to be suspicious. After election day, which saw a narrow win for the Republican candidate, the North Carolina state board of elections announced it would not certify the results in the ninth congressional district in which Bladenboro sits. Within days, it emerged “ballot harvesters” had been hired by a veteran political operative, Leslie McCrae Dowless, to pick up absentee ballots in Bladen county, the local news station WSOC-TV reported. Some of those ballots never turned up.
It emerged Dowless worked for the Republican candidate, Mark Harris, who beat his Democratic opponent, Dan McCready, by just 905 votes. Shortly after, McCready recanted his concession of the contest.
In an interview with WSOC-TV, one of the women involved in picking up ballots said Dowless “paid her $75 to $100 a week to go around and pick up finished absentee ballots”.
An analysis by the News & Observer found that the ballots of minority voters went unreturned to counting stations at a disproportionate rate. More than four out of 10 ballots requested by African Americans did not make it back to election officials, the analysis showed. That number jumps to more than 60% for Native American voters. In comparison, white voters’ ballots non-return rate was just 17%.
The news from Bladenboro and other towns in the district has sent shock waves throughout the country. Usually fights over voter suppression involve complex arguments over voter ID laws, how to register street addresses or disenfranchising felons. But the apparently brazen “harvesting” of ballots which then disappear without being counted has stunned many in the district and left them shaken.
Ward’s neighbor, Judy Willis, is upset about someone potentially trying to cancel votes. “It’s like you’re not a person any more,” she began, adding: “Some people have no conscience.” She is clearly rattled. “Stealing a vote? That means I can’t trust you to go and get a glass of water out of my kitchen.”
In the Ward’s house, family members have come to a consensus there should be another election. The state board of elections says an “investigation into claims of absentee voting irregularities is ongoing”, according to a press release on its website.
“They’ve been doing this for years,” said Ward’s sister-in-law Tiajuana Mock, 63, as she walked into the kitchen and made a cup of coffee. “I’m not surprised this happened in Bladenboro, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this happened anywhere. There are race issues here, definitely. People give you a look if you go into some of these restaurants where only white people work.”
A few streets over, Jeneva Legions, 30, stood outside her apartment door draped in a “Happy Holidays” sash at the Village Oaks Apartments, cigarette in hand. She said two women came by, a couple of days after she got her absentee ballot, instructed her on filling it out. A little while later, one of them returned and said they’d take care of it for her.
“This is the first time I did [absentee voting] and next thing I know, someone came by and said they could pick it up. She said, ‘Just don’t worry about it, I’ll take care of it.’”
In North Carolina, according to the state board of elections’ website, “Only the voter or the voter’s near relative (spouse, brother, sister, parent, grandparent, child, grandchild, mother-in-law, father-in-law, daughter-in-law, son-in-law, stepparent, stepchild or qualified legal guardian) may deliver an absentee ballot in person.”
Legions’s ballot, according to the state’s voter lookup website, was not returned to be counted.
“This was my first time using an absentee ballot. Now I know to just go in and do it myself,” she said.
Her neighbor, Jessica Locklear, 26, was at a friend’s apartment, when a woman came up to the door at the neighboring apartment complex in the afternoon. The woman told her friend she’d be happy to take her ballot back for her, but that made the friend uncomfortable. In the end, when the woman came back, her friend told her she had ripped up the ballot and would go vote in person. Locklear watched her rip up the ballot.
“There’s too much weird stuff going on around here,” she said.
That’s the way the world operates, Mock said, back across town. The ballot fraud and the resulting investigation is just one part of the bigger racism issue going on in town, she added.
“They’re trying to get rid of us,” Mock said, referring to the disappearing absentee ballots. “But where are we going? We’re American.”
“It was a whole house full of us and the girl came after dark and she was like saying that we could vote early and we was about to fill in them papers but we didn’t. She said, ‘I’ll fill them out for you’,” said Ward who, like the other voters quoted in this story, is African American.
The comment raised suspicions among those gathered, not least because in North Carolina, like much of the rural south, memories still linger about the fight for voting rights for black residents – and the equally fierce fight to resist them.
The group decided not to accept the woman’s offer. In the end, Ward voted in person. So did everyone else in the house that night.
They were right to be suspicious. After election day, which saw a narrow win for the Republican candidate, the North Carolina state board of elections announced it would not certify the results in the ninth congressional district in which Bladenboro sits. Within days, it emerged “ballot harvesters” had been hired by a veteran political operative, Leslie McCrae Dowless, to pick up absentee ballots in Bladen county, the local news station WSOC-TV reported. Some of those ballots never turned up.
It emerged Dowless worked for the Republican candidate, Mark Harris, who beat his Democratic opponent, Dan McCready, by just 905 votes. Shortly after, McCready recanted his concession of the contest.
In an interview with WSOC-TV, one of the women involved in picking up ballots said Dowless “paid her $75 to $100 a week to go around and pick up finished absentee ballots”.
An analysis by the News & Observer found that the ballots of minority voters went unreturned to counting stations at a disproportionate rate. More than four out of 10 ballots requested by African Americans did not make it back to election officials, the analysis showed. That number jumps to more than 60% for Native American voters. In comparison, white voters’ ballots non-return rate was just 17%.
The news from Bladenboro and other towns in the district has sent shock waves throughout the country. Usually fights over voter suppression involve complex arguments over voter ID laws, how to register street addresses or disenfranchising felons. But the apparently brazen “harvesting” of ballots which then disappear without being counted has stunned many in the district and left them shaken.
Ward’s neighbor, Judy Willis, is upset about someone potentially trying to cancel votes. “It’s like you’re not a person any more,” she began, adding: “Some people have no conscience.” She is clearly rattled. “Stealing a vote? That means I can’t trust you to go and get a glass of water out of my kitchen.”
In the Ward’s house, family members have come to a consensus there should be another election. The state board of elections says an “investigation into claims of absentee voting irregularities is ongoing”, according to a press release on its website.
“They’ve been doing this for years,” said Ward’s sister-in-law Tiajuana Mock, 63, as she walked into the kitchen and made a cup of coffee. “I’m not surprised this happened in Bladenboro, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this happened anywhere. There are race issues here, definitely. People give you a look if you go into some of these restaurants where only white people work.”
A few streets over, Jeneva Legions, 30, stood outside her apartment door draped in a “Happy Holidays” sash at the Village Oaks Apartments, cigarette in hand. She said two women came by, a couple of days after she got her absentee ballot, instructed her on filling it out. A little while later, one of them returned and said they’d take care of it for her.
“This is the first time I did [absentee voting] and next thing I know, someone came by and said they could pick it up. She said, ‘Just don’t worry about it, I’ll take care of it.’”
In North Carolina, according to the state board of elections’ website, “Only the voter or the voter’s near relative (spouse, brother, sister, parent, grandparent, child, grandchild, mother-in-law, father-in-law, daughter-in-law, son-in-law, stepparent, stepchild or qualified legal guardian) may deliver an absentee ballot in person.”
Legions’s ballot, according to the state’s voter lookup website, was not returned to be counted.
“This was my first time using an absentee ballot. Now I know to just go in and do it myself,” she said.
Her neighbor, Jessica Locklear, 26, was at a friend’s apartment, when a woman came up to the door at the neighboring apartment complex in the afternoon. The woman told her friend she’d be happy to take her ballot back for her, but that made the friend uncomfortable. In the end, when the woman came back, her friend told her she had ripped up the ballot and would go vote in person. Locklear watched her rip up the ballot.
“There’s too much weird stuff going on around here,” she said.
That’s the way the world operates, Mock said, back across town. The ballot fraud and the resulting investigation is just one part of the bigger racism issue going on in town, she added.
“They’re trying to get rid of us,” Mock said, referring to the disappearing absentee ballots. “But where are we going? We’re American.”
A woman says she was paid to collect absentee ballots by a convicted felon with ties to GOP campaign
She also says she didn't mail in the ballots she collected, delivering them directly to the GOP operative instead.
ADAM PECK - thinkprogress
DEC 4, 2018, 9:52 AM
As investigators continue to figure out what exactly transpired on Election Day in North Carolina’s 9th congressional district — where Republican candidate Mark Harris increasingly appears to be the beneficiary of one of the largest cases of election fraud in U.S. history — one name keeps coming up: Leslie McCrae Dowless Jr.
Dowless, who goes by McCrae, is a fixture in local North Carolina politics. He was elected vice chair of the Bladen County Soil and Water Conservation District, and has been attached to numerous Republican campaigns throughout the years, including the Harris campaign in 2018.
But Dowless is also a well-known convict. He served a six month prison sentence in the 1990s for a felony fraud conviction, and was indicted for perjury. His criminal record stretches back to the 1980s, and he has been implicated in previous schemes to illegally collect unreturned absentee ballots, most recently in 2016.
On Monday, local television station WSOCTV caught up with Ginger Eason, one of the canvassers whose signature frequently appeared on accepted absentee ballots as a witness. She told a reporter that she was paid between $75 and $100 per week by Dowless to pick up absentee ballots from around Bladen County.
“I was helping McCrae pick up ballots,” Eason told the network.
Eason also admitted to not mailing in the absentee ballots she collected. Instead, she delivered them directly to Dowless.
The station also tracked down Dowless himself, but he refused to answer any questions about his role in the unfolding scandal.
Harris has denied any wrongdoing, and continues to demand the state’s board of elections certify the results of Election Day. The nine-member panel has thus far refused, and will conduct an evidentiary hearing in two weeks to determine how to proceed. Though rare, the state could call for a new election entirely.
RELATED: Shady North Carolina election just got even shadier: Republican candidate knew suspected vote-rigger
Mark Harris reportedly even recommended his campaign's "independent contractor" to other politicians.
Dowless, who goes by McCrae, is a fixture in local North Carolina politics. He was elected vice chair of the Bladen County Soil and Water Conservation District, and has been attached to numerous Republican campaigns throughout the years, including the Harris campaign in 2018.
But Dowless is also a well-known convict. He served a six month prison sentence in the 1990s for a felony fraud conviction, and was indicted for perjury. His criminal record stretches back to the 1980s, and he has been implicated in previous schemes to illegally collect unreturned absentee ballots, most recently in 2016.
On Monday, local television station WSOCTV caught up with Ginger Eason, one of the canvassers whose signature frequently appeared on accepted absentee ballots as a witness. She told a reporter that she was paid between $75 and $100 per week by Dowless to pick up absentee ballots from around Bladen County.
“I was helping McCrae pick up ballots,” Eason told the network.
Eason also admitted to not mailing in the absentee ballots she collected. Instead, she delivered them directly to Dowless.
The station also tracked down Dowless himself, but he refused to answer any questions about his role in the unfolding scandal.
Harris has denied any wrongdoing, and continues to demand the state’s board of elections certify the results of Election Day. The nine-member panel has thus far refused, and will conduct an evidentiary hearing in two weeks to determine how to proceed. Though rare, the state could call for a new election entirely.
RELATED: Shady North Carolina election just got even shadier: Republican candidate knew suspected vote-rigger
Mark Harris reportedly even recommended his campaign's "independent contractor" to other politicians.
Republican Candidate May Have Literally Stolen Ballots From Elderly Black Voters
Jack Crosbie - splinternews.com
11/30/18 4:16pm
On Thursday, we wrote about the extremely weird goings on in North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District, where Republican Mark Harris beat Democrat Dan McCready by as few as 905 votes, according to unofficial returns. McCready conceded the race the day after the election, but state election officials quickly started to throw up red flags. On Tuesday, the elections board voted unanimously to not certify the results of the election; today, it voted to continue investigating and to hold a meeting on December 21 to “assess allegations of fraud,” according to the Washington Post.
The Post has more detail on those allegations today, and they’re absolutely shocking. From the Post:
The board is collecting sworn statements from voters in rural Bladen County, near the South Carolina border, who described people coming to their doors and urging them to hand over their absentee ballots, sometimes without filling them out. Others described receiving absentee ballots by mail that they had not requested. It is illegal to take someone else’s ballot and turn it in.
Among the allegations is that an individual who worked for the Harris campaign coordinated the effort to fill in, or discard, the ballots of Democratic voters who might have otherwise voted for McCready. Several of the affidavits come from elderly African-American voters.
What... the fuck. If these allegations are true, this is about as blatant as election tampering can get. Political operatives coming to the doors of elderly black voters and telling them to hand over their ballots, then discarding them if they were voting Democrat or filling them out for the Republican? Absolutely wild, and despicable.
We’re still waiting on a response from either the Harris or McCready campaigns, but we did get one from Rep. Robert Pittinger, the Republican incumbent congressman from the district who was primaried by Harris, a right-wing Baptist pastor, earlier this year. (As my colleague Nick Martin wrote yesterday, that election was also rife with weirdness.) Pittinger referred Splinter to an interview he did with a Raleigh news channel, in which he said there were “some pretty unsavory people out there, particularly in Bladen County,” when asked about irregularities in the election.
“Pretty unsavory” seems like an understatement. Local reporters are already starting to collect some of the affidavits as they come in:
If Harris pulled something like this in both the primary and the general, I’m honestly not sure what happens next. Per Gerry Cohen, a former special counsel to the NC general assembly, there could be “other remedies” involved, including the possibility of calling a whole new election, which would start over completely with a primary for both parties.
Who knows if that’ll happen, but a total election re-do would be a hell of a thing to see. We’re assuming that Harris would not be allowed to try to allegedly fraud the whole thing up again.
The Post has more detail on those allegations today, and they’re absolutely shocking. From the Post:
The board is collecting sworn statements from voters in rural Bladen County, near the South Carolina border, who described people coming to their doors and urging them to hand over their absentee ballots, sometimes without filling them out. Others described receiving absentee ballots by mail that they had not requested. It is illegal to take someone else’s ballot and turn it in.
Among the allegations is that an individual who worked for the Harris campaign coordinated the effort to fill in, or discard, the ballots of Democratic voters who might have otherwise voted for McCready. Several of the affidavits come from elderly African-American voters.
What... the fuck. If these allegations are true, this is about as blatant as election tampering can get. Political operatives coming to the doors of elderly black voters and telling them to hand over their ballots, then discarding them if they were voting Democrat or filling them out for the Republican? Absolutely wild, and despicable.
We’re still waiting on a response from either the Harris or McCready campaigns, but we did get one from Rep. Robert Pittinger, the Republican incumbent congressman from the district who was primaried by Harris, a right-wing Baptist pastor, earlier this year. (As my colleague Nick Martin wrote yesterday, that election was also rife with weirdness.) Pittinger referred Splinter to an interview he did with a Raleigh news channel, in which he said there were “some pretty unsavory people out there, particularly in Bladen County,” when asked about irregularities in the election.
“Pretty unsavory” seems like an understatement. Local reporters are already starting to collect some of the affidavits as they come in:
If Harris pulled something like this in both the primary and the general, I’m honestly not sure what happens next. Per Gerry Cohen, a former special counsel to the NC general assembly, there could be “other remedies” involved, including the possibility of calling a whole new election, which would start over completely with a primary for both parties.
Who knows if that’ll happen, but a total election re-do would be a hell of a thing to see. We’re assuming that Harris would not be allowed to try to allegedly fraud the whole thing up again.
justice in a shithole!!!
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Celebrates Eight-Year Sentence Against Woman Who Accidentally Voted Illegally
By MARK JOSEPH STERN - slate
NOV 29, 20185:16 PM
Earlier this month, the Texas 2nd Court of Appeals affirmed Rosa Maria Ortega’s eight-year prison sentence for illegal voting. Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated the decision in a triumphant press release boasting of Ortega’s draconian punishment. But there is nothing just about the fact that Ortega may spend the next eight years languishing behind bars for unknowingly casting illegal ballots. To the contrary, her sentence is wildly out of proportion with her crime—the possible result of prosecutorial chicanery during closing arguments that has no place in a courtroom. And it’s yet another example of prosecutors using isolated cases of illegal voting to intimidate legitimate voters out of casting a ballot.
Although Paxton has presented Ortega’s conduct as evidence that voter fraud is a genuine problem in Texas, her case bears no resemblance to the paranoid myth of immigrants covertly swinging elections. Ortega is a lawful permanent resident who was brought to the United States as a baby. She has a sixth-grade education and did not know that she could not legally vote. In October 2014, she sent a voter-registration application to the Tarrant County Elections Administration, in which she indicated that she was not a citizen. When the office sent her a rejection letter, she called to ask why. An employee, Delores Stevens, explained that Ortega had checked the “No” box for citizenship and could not register unless she checked “Yes.” Ortega mailed in a new application, this time checking the “Yes” box to indicate U.S. citizenship.
The office was fully aware of the discrepancies between her two applications. It still registered her to vote.
Shortly thereafter, the Texas attorney general received a tip that Ortega was voting illegally. An investigator with the attorney general’s office began to examine her case and discovered that she had voted in Dallas County in 2012 and 2014. Official paperwork revealed that Ortega presented her resident alien card and Social Security card to register, acknowledging that she was not a citizen. For some reason, Dallas County registered her anyway. (She registered as a Republican.)
Investigators then interrogated Ortega at her house. She stated that she was not a citizen but had checked “Yes” on the citizenship box in Tarrant County because Dallas County had previously allowed her to vote. Three months later, prosecutors obtained an arrest warrant, charging Ortega with illegal voting. Ortega insisted that she had simply made an innocent mistake and rejected a plea deal, believing no reasonable jury would convict her. Instead, after a trial, a Tarrant County jury found her guilty on two counts of illegal voting. It sentenced her to eight years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. Ortega promptly lost custody of her four children and will likely be deported once her sentence is finished.
By any measure, this punishment is extraordinarily harsh. Eight years imprisonment for a nonviolent crime—committed by an individual who did not realize she was breaking the law—is grossly disproportionate. The jury could have instead sentenced her to two years community supervision and no prison. Why did it choose to lock her away for 96 months instead?
On appeal, Ortega argued that prosecutors had biased the jury through inflammatory statements at the punishment phase of the trial. In urging the jury to impose a stringent sentence, one prosecutor declared:
And I just want to throw out one thought to you. You came back with the right verdict, that if you hadn’t, if you’d come back with a not guilty, can you imagine the floodgates that would be open to illegal voting in this county?
As civil rights attorney Sasha Samberg-Champion has noted, this admonition is totally inappropriate. Rather than encourage the jury to focus on fair punishment for Ortega’s offense, the prosecutors exhorted jurors to use her as an example, warning that a light sentence would directly increase “illegal voting.” It is, as Samberg-Champion put it, “conviction by Fox News fearmongering,” raising grave due process concerns. Ortega’s lawyers recognized the problem, quickly objecting that “that’s an improper argument here at sentencing.”
But the trial court overruled the objection. So Ortega asked the appeals court to overturn the sentence, alleging, quite sensibly, that it was impermissibly tainted by this “improper and inflammatory jury argument.” The court declined—not because it found the prosecutor’s statement to be permissible but because, it insisted, her attorney had not objected correctly. Clark Birdsall, Ortega’s defense counsel, should have said he objected because it was “outside the record,” the appeals court wrote. By failing to state “the specific grounds” for his objection at trial, Birdsall forfeited his ability to raise this claim on appeal.
Here, then, is the upshot of the 2nd Court of Appeals’ ruling: Prosecutors may well have unlawfully biased the jury, resulting in an unduly severe sentence, but there is nothing she can do about it because her lawyer failed to use three magic words--outside the record—when he objected. Ortega’s case will now go to the staunchly conservative Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
In his press release, Paxton said that his office would “hold those accountable who falsely claim eligibility and purposely subvert the election process in Texas.” But as he should recognize that Ortega did not intend to “subvert” anything, and her galling sentence will do nothing to boost public trust in the integrity of Texas’ elections. This case is about one thing: intimidating Americans into forfeiting their right to vote for fear that one mistake could land them in prison. The aggressive prosecution of voting is a potent form of voter suppressionmeant to deter people uncertain about their eligibility from casting a ballot. Ortega’s sentence does not affirm “the hallowed principle that every citizen’s vote must count,” as Paxton stated. It proves that vote thieves like Paxton won’t hesitate to destroy a hapless woman’s life in their ongoing quest to suppress minority suffrage.
Although Paxton has presented Ortega’s conduct as evidence that voter fraud is a genuine problem in Texas, her case bears no resemblance to the paranoid myth of immigrants covertly swinging elections. Ortega is a lawful permanent resident who was brought to the United States as a baby. She has a sixth-grade education and did not know that she could not legally vote. In October 2014, she sent a voter-registration application to the Tarrant County Elections Administration, in which she indicated that she was not a citizen. When the office sent her a rejection letter, she called to ask why. An employee, Delores Stevens, explained that Ortega had checked the “No” box for citizenship and could not register unless she checked “Yes.” Ortega mailed in a new application, this time checking the “Yes” box to indicate U.S. citizenship.
The office was fully aware of the discrepancies between her two applications. It still registered her to vote.
Shortly thereafter, the Texas attorney general received a tip that Ortega was voting illegally. An investigator with the attorney general’s office began to examine her case and discovered that she had voted in Dallas County in 2012 and 2014. Official paperwork revealed that Ortega presented her resident alien card and Social Security card to register, acknowledging that she was not a citizen. For some reason, Dallas County registered her anyway. (She registered as a Republican.)
Investigators then interrogated Ortega at her house. She stated that she was not a citizen but had checked “Yes” on the citizenship box in Tarrant County because Dallas County had previously allowed her to vote. Three months later, prosecutors obtained an arrest warrant, charging Ortega with illegal voting. Ortega insisted that she had simply made an innocent mistake and rejected a plea deal, believing no reasonable jury would convict her. Instead, after a trial, a Tarrant County jury found her guilty on two counts of illegal voting. It sentenced her to eight years imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. Ortega promptly lost custody of her four children and will likely be deported once her sentence is finished.
By any measure, this punishment is extraordinarily harsh. Eight years imprisonment for a nonviolent crime—committed by an individual who did not realize she was breaking the law—is grossly disproportionate. The jury could have instead sentenced her to two years community supervision and no prison. Why did it choose to lock her away for 96 months instead?
On appeal, Ortega argued that prosecutors had biased the jury through inflammatory statements at the punishment phase of the trial. In urging the jury to impose a stringent sentence, one prosecutor declared:
And I just want to throw out one thought to you. You came back with the right verdict, that if you hadn’t, if you’d come back with a not guilty, can you imagine the floodgates that would be open to illegal voting in this county?
As civil rights attorney Sasha Samberg-Champion has noted, this admonition is totally inappropriate. Rather than encourage the jury to focus on fair punishment for Ortega’s offense, the prosecutors exhorted jurors to use her as an example, warning that a light sentence would directly increase “illegal voting.” It is, as Samberg-Champion put it, “conviction by Fox News fearmongering,” raising grave due process concerns. Ortega’s lawyers recognized the problem, quickly objecting that “that’s an improper argument here at sentencing.”
But the trial court overruled the objection. So Ortega asked the appeals court to overturn the sentence, alleging, quite sensibly, that it was impermissibly tainted by this “improper and inflammatory jury argument.” The court declined—not because it found the prosecutor’s statement to be permissible but because, it insisted, her attorney had not objected correctly. Clark Birdsall, Ortega’s defense counsel, should have said he objected because it was “outside the record,” the appeals court wrote. By failing to state “the specific grounds” for his objection at trial, Birdsall forfeited his ability to raise this claim on appeal.
Here, then, is the upshot of the 2nd Court of Appeals’ ruling: Prosecutors may well have unlawfully biased the jury, resulting in an unduly severe sentence, but there is nothing she can do about it because her lawyer failed to use three magic words--outside the record—when he objected. Ortega’s case will now go to the staunchly conservative Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
In his press release, Paxton said that his office would “hold those accountable who falsely claim eligibility and purposely subvert the election process in Texas.” But as he should recognize that Ortega did not intend to “subvert” anything, and her galling sentence will do nothing to boost public trust in the integrity of Texas’ elections. This case is about one thing: intimidating Americans into forfeiting their right to vote for fear that one mistake could land them in prison. The aggressive prosecution of voting is a potent form of voter suppressionmeant to deter people uncertain about their eligibility from casting a ballot. Ortega’s sentence does not affirm “the hallowed principle that every citizen’s vote must count,” as Paxton stated. It proves that vote thieves like Paxton won’t hesitate to destroy a hapless woman’s life in their ongoing quest to suppress minority suffrage.
Latino turnout up 174% in 2018 midterms elections, Democrats say
Hispanic community will have record level of representation in Congress with at least 42 members: 34 Democrats and eight Republicans
Lauren Gambino in Washington and agencies
the guardian
Wed 14 Nov 2018 06.00 EST
The Democratic party says a $30m investment in engaging Latino and other minority voters helped it achieve a net gain of 34 House seats and improve on 2014 turnout.
Ben Ray Luján, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said that compared to the previous midterm election, Latinos increased their participation by 174% in 2018. Pacific Islanders increased their numbers by 218% and African Americans by 157%.
“Latino voters played a pivotal role in taking back the House,” Luján said on a conference call hosted by the Latino Victory Fund, a political action committee. He said the Latino vote was especially consequential in a handful of House races across demographically diverse Sun Belt battlegrounds: Nevada, Arizona, Florida and Texas.
Luján, the first Latino to serve as DCCC chair, attributed high turnout among the Democratic base – which includes Latinos, millennials, African Americans, Asians and women – to the “unprecedented” $30m investment.
“Evidence is clear,” he said. “Early and active and robust outreach to communities of color — in this case, into the Hispanic community — clearly pays off.
“Latinos showed up to the polls because we talked to them, we listened to them, our candidates connected with their personal stories, we knocked on their doors and we reached out to them online.”
Luján said the engagement effort included an investment of at least $21m in Latino candidates and in 17 Spanish-language district-specific ads. His office also launched the first multi-state Spanish-language TV ad, in the last week before the election in the aim of getting out the vote.
The Democrats targeted 111 Republican House districts, 29 of which had at least a 10% Hispanic electorate.
Dan Sena, DCCC executive director, said the polling company Latino Decisions conducted nationwide focus groups to better identify the needs of Latino voters and to tailor a proper message.
As Donald Trump roiled his base with warnings about a migrant caravan and gang violence, Senasaid his group honed in on a positive message: trying to create an environment in which Latinos had something to vote for, rather than against.
“We wanted voting to feel good rather than simply what is at stake and kids in cages and Trump,” he said. “So we spent a fair amount of time really studying how to create urgency without making it feel overly heavy and overly sad.”
Sena added that the strength of the Latino vote was no longer a hypothetical.
“The proof is in the pudding,” he said, adding that investing in communities of color was “necessary to the longterm success of the party”.
In 2018, Latinos voted for Democrats by a margin of nearly three to one, according to Matt Barreto, co-founder of Latino Decisions. His polling found that 73% of Latinos voted Democratic while only 23% voted for Republicans.
Barreto said Latinos identified healthcare as the most important issue, followed by immigration. Latino voters said they were “tired of the discussion of immigrants in such a negative and racist” overtones, which Barreto said was how the respondents characterized the commentary from Trump and Republicans.
During the campaign, Trump kept up a drumbeat of warnings about a caravan of “bad thugs” and potential terrorists supposedly intent on invading the US from Mexico. He suggested sending up to 15,000 troops to the border.
Luján highlighted the victory of Antonio Delgado in New York as an example of how a Latino candidate won, he said, by keeping a positive message even when facing racist attacks.
“Antonio did not get distracted by any of that,” Luján said. “What he did was he talked to the American people and the people of the 19th district of New York about the economic challenges that they are facing every day.”
The Hispanic community will have a record level of representation on Capitol Hill, with at least 34 Democrats and eight Republicans in both chambers. One House race featuring a Hispanic candidate has yet to be decided.
Ben Ray Luján, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said that compared to the previous midterm election, Latinos increased their participation by 174% in 2018. Pacific Islanders increased their numbers by 218% and African Americans by 157%.
“Latino voters played a pivotal role in taking back the House,” Luján said on a conference call hosted by the Latino Victory Fund, a political action committee. He said the Latino vote was especially consequential in a handful of House races across demographically diverse Sun Belt battlegrounds: Nevada, Arizona, Florida and Texas.
Luján, the first Latino to serve as DCCC chair, attributed high turnout among the Democratic base – which includes Latinos, millennials, African Americans, Asians and women – to the “unprecedented” $30m investment.
“Evidence is clear,” he said. “Early and active and robust outreach to communities of color — in this case, into the Hispanic community — clearly pays off.
“Latinos showed up to the polls because we talked to them, we listened to them, our candidates connected with their personal stories, we knocked on their doors and we reached out to them online.”
Luján said the engagement effort included an investment of at least $21m in Latino candidates and in 17 Spanish-language district-specific ads. His office also launched the first multi-state Spanish-language TV ad, in the last week before the election in the aim of getting out the vote.
The Democrats targeted 111 Republican House districts, 29 of which had at least a 10% Hispanic electorate.
Dan Sena, DCCC executive director, said the polling company Latino Decisions conducted nationwide focus groups to better identify the needs of Latino voters and to tailor a proper message.
As Donald Trump roiled his base with warnings about a migrant caravan and gang violence, Senasaid his group honed in on a positive message: trying to create an environment in which Latinos had something to vote for, rather than against.
“We wanted voting to feel good rather than simply what is at stake and kids in cages and Trump,” he said. “So we spent a fair amount of time really studying how to create urgency without making it feel overly heavy and overly sad.”
Sena added that the strength of the Latino vote was no longer a hypothetical.
“The proof is in the pudding,” he said, adding that investing in communities of color was “necessary to the longterm success of the party”.
In 2018, Latinos voted for Democrats by a margin of nearly three to one, according to Matt Barreto, co-founder of Latino Decisions. His polling found that 73% of Latinos voted Democratic while only 23% voted for Republicans.
Barreto said Latinos identified healthcare as the most important issue, followed by immigration. Latino voters said they were “tired of the discussion of immigrants in such a negative and racist” overtones, which Barreto said was how the respondents characterized the commentary from Trump and Republicans.
During the campaign, Trump kept up a drumbeat of warnings about a caravan of “bad thugs” and potential terrorists supposedly intent on invading the US from Mexico. He suggested sending up to 15,000 troops to the border.
Luján highlighted the victory of Antonio Delgado in New York as an example of how a Latino candidate won, he said, by keeping a positive message even when facing racist attacks.
“Antonio did not get distracted by any of that,” Luján said. “What he did was he talked to the American people and the people of the 19th district of New York about the economic challenges that they are facing every day.”
The Hispanic community will have a record level of representation on Capitol Hill, with at least 34 Democrats and eight Republicans in both chambers. One House race featuring a Hispanic candidate has yet to be decided.
WTF White Women?
by Laura Flanders | the smirking chimp
November 11, 2018 - 6:56am
2016 was bad. 2018 was worse. While fifty-two percent of white women voted for Donald Trump and Mike Pence in 2016, in 2018, seventy-six percent of white women voted for Brian Kemp.
This Tuesday, seventy-six percent of white female voters in Georgia cast their ballots against Stacey Abrams becoming this nation’s first black female governor. Fifty-nine percent in Texas voted for Republican Ted Cruz against Latino Democrat Beto O’Rourke. Fifty-one percent opposed Andrew Gillum becoming the first African American governor of the Sunshine State.
White women rained all over that new day dawning. Did they vote on the issues? Statistically, there aren’t enough anti-choice, anti-healthcare, anti-minimum wage, gun-mad voters out there to blame just conservative women.
So white women are either stupid or spoiled. I say spoiled.
We reap plenty of spoils from white supremacy. To name a few: we get to be race-less, sexy, vulnerable and at least relatively safe.
Structurally, the system’s set up such that white women earn more, own more, and live significantly longer than anyone else (except for our brothers and fathers and husbands and sons).
Single white women have, on average, 5 times more wealth than single black women, and white households have a staggering 13 times more wealth than black households.
Our life expectancy is above the national average, while the life expectancy of black women falls below.
We’re more likely to be cared for than killed when we’re having a mental health crisis and cops come to our door.
We’re more likely to be counseled than kicked out when we act up in school.
We’re way more likely to be hired and way, way less likely to be incarcerated. That’s in no small part because we’re more likely to be seen as beautiful and loved (in advertising, magazines and Hollywood), and far less likely to be seen as scary or a threat.
White supremacy spoils us, white women. It’s undeniable. Patriarchy, not so much. The particular patriarchs whom white women have put in office this November are on the record as anti-female. They’re even anti-white-female if you happen to be pregnant or foreign-born or poor or in imperfect health.
In 2016, I sought refuge in my superior, smart, anti-capitalist, queer difference. LGBTQ, young, non-christian, unmarried white women tend to know which end is up.
My sisters of color, however, are made to account for every last messed-up, stupid thing men of their same race do. (And yes, I know race is a phony concept, but its impacts are real.)
Accepting responsibility for my screwed-up het, cis, married, white, christian sisters is the least I can do in solidarity.
So what the hell, white women? Talk. Not too loudly, or everywhere, all the time, or remorsefully to your one girlfriend-of-color, but to me, or a white woman like me.
We don’t want 2020 to roll around and wish that one hundred years ago we’d never given white women the vote.
This Tuesday, seventy-six percent of white female voters in Georgia cast their ballots against Stacey Abrams becoming this nation’s first black female governor. Fifty-nine percent in Texas voted for Republican Ted Cruz against Latino Democrat Beto O’Rourke. Fifty-one percent opposed Andrew Gillum becoming the first African American governor of the Sunshine State.
White women rained all over that new day dawning. Did they vote on the issues? Statistically, there aren’t enough anti-choice, anti-healthcare, anti-minimum wage, gun-mad voters out there to blame just conservative women.
So white women are either stupid or spoiled. I say spoiled.
We reap plenty of spoils from white supremacy. To name a few: we get to be race-less, sexy, vulnerable and at least relatively safe.
Structurally, the system’s set up such that white women earn more, own more, and live significantly longer than anyone else (except for our brothers and fathers and husbands and sons).
Single white women have, on average, 5 times more wealth than single black women, and white households have a staggering 13 times more wealth than black households.
Our life expectancy is above the national average, while the life expectancy of black women falls below.
We’re more likely to be cared for than killed when we’re having a mental health crisis and cops come to our door.
We’re more likely to be counseled than kicked out when we act up in school.
We’re way more likely to be hired and way, way less likely to be incarcerated. That’s in no small part because we’re more likely to be seen as beautiful and loved (in advertising, magazines and Hollywood), and far less likely to be seen as scary or a threat.
White supremacy spoils us, white women. It’s undeniable. Patriarchy, not so much. The particular patriarchs whom white women have put in office this November are on the record as anti-female. They’re even anti-white-female if you happen to be pregnant or foreign-born or poor or in imperfect health.
In 2016, I sought refuge in my superior, smart, anti-capitalist, queer difference. LGBTQ, young, non-christian, unmarried white women tend to know which end is up.
My sisters of color, however, are made to account for every last messed-up, stupid thing men of their same race do. (And yes, I know race is a phony concept, but its impacts are real.)
Accepting responsibility for my screwed-up het, cis, married, white, christian sisters is the least I can do in solidarity.
So what the hell, white women? Talk. Not too loudly, or everywhere, all the time, or remorsefully to your one girlfriend-of-color, but to me, or a white woman like me.
We don’t want 2020 to roll around and wish that one hundred years ago we’d never given white women the vote.
Deadlocked House race in Maine will be the first decided by ranked-choice voting
Second-choice voters are likely to decide the winner in Maine’s 2nd district — and then it may wind up in court
IGOR DERYSH - salon
NOVEMBER 9, 2018 11:00AM (UTC)
An undecided U.S. House seat in Maine will likely become the first in the country to be decided through ranked-choice voting.
With 92 percent of precincts reporting, Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin leads Democrat Jared Golden by a 46.1 to 45.8 margin in Maine's largely rural 2nd district – a difference of just 702 votes, the Bangor Daily News reports. Another 8 percent of the vote went to independent candidates in the race.
Voters in Maine are allowed to rank candidates on their ballots under a set of recent voting reforms. Since neither candidate in the race received a majority of the vote, the contest is almost certain to go to an "instant runoff," in which the second choices of voters who backed independent or third-party candidates will be reallocated to the two leading contenders until one of them crosses the 50 percent threshold.
Here's how it works: First the last-place finisher's votes are allocated, then those of the candidate who finished next t0 last, and so on. If neither of the top candidates breaks the 50 percent, the process continues until all of the votes are assigned to the top two vote-getters.
The race featured two left-leaning independent candidates, attorney Tiffany Bond, who received nearly 6 percent of the vote, and teacher William Hoar, who got more than 2 percent of the vote. So it is highly plausible, although by no means certain, that Golden -- a 36-year-old Marine combat veteran -- will overtake Poliquin.
Secretary of State Matt Dunlap's office said that it is impossible to know how long the process will take, since this is the first time ranked-choice voting has been implemented in Maine. Indeed, it has never been used in a congressional race anywhere in the country. Dunlap spokeswoman Kristen Muszynski told the Bangor Daily News it could take around two weeks to sort through the ballots.
Golden, who is assistant majority leader in the Maine legislature, has said he will accept the results of the ranked-choice election. Poliquin, the Republican incumbent, has declined to comment on whether he would do the same. The method has not been court-tested in the general election, though the state's Supreme Court and a federal court allowed it to proceed in the state's primaries.
Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats, and Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Democrat who represents Maine's 1st district, easily won their elections in the first round, getting the majorities they needed to avoid the allocation of second-choice votes.
Outgoing Maine Gov. Paul LePage has urged Poliquin to challenge the results of the election if he wins the first round but loses the ranked-choice count, arguing that the method is unconstitutional.
That remains to be determined. Maine's Supreme Court issued an advisory opinion last year saying it was unconstitutional to require state general elections to be won by majorities rather than pluralities of the vote, but it did not rule on federal elections like this House race. No other state has attempted ranked-choice voting in state or federal elections, though a number of cities, including San Francisco, have used the method in mayoral races.
The system was approved by Maine voters in 2016 after a series of elections in which winning gubernatorial candidates failed to get a majority of the vote. Supporters of the method argue that it allows voters to choose the candidate they prefer most without worrying that their choice will have a spoiler effect. Ironically, the system was not used in Tuesday's gubernatorial or state legislative races because of the court's opinion that it would violate the Maine constitution.
With 92 percent of precincts reporting, Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin leads Democrat Jared Golden by a 46.1 to 45.8 margin in Maine's largely rural 2nd district – a difference of just 702 votes, the Bangor Daily News reports. Another 8 percent of the vote went to independent candidates in the race.
Voters in Maine are allowed to rank candidates on their ballots under a set of recent voting reforms. Since neither candidate in the race received a majority of the vote, the contest is almost certain to go to an "instant runoff," in which the second choices of voters who backed independent or third-party candidates will be reallocated to the two leading contenders until one of them crosses the 50 percent threshold.
Here's how it works: First the last-place finisher's votes are allocated, then those of the candidate who finished next t0 last, and so on. If neither of the top candidates breaks the 50 percent, the process continues until all of the votes are assigned to the top two vote-getters.
The race featured two left-leaning independent candidates, attorney Tiffany Bond, who received nearly 6 percent of the vote, and teacher William Hoar, who got more than 2 percent of the vote. So it is highly plausible, although by no means certain, that Golden -- a 36-year-old Marine combat veteran -- will overtake Poliquin.
Secretary of State Matt Dunlap's office said that it is impossible to know how long the process will take, since this is the first time ranked-choice voting has been implemented in Maine. Indeed, it has never been used in a congressional race anywhere in the country. Dunlap spokeswoman Kristen Muszynski told the Bangor Daily News it could take around two weeks to sort through the ballots.
Golden, who is assistant majority leader in the Maine legislature, has said he will accept the results of the ranked-choice election. Poliquin, the Republican incumbent, has declined to comment on whether he would do the same. The method has not been court-tested in the general election, though the state's Supreme Court and a federal court allowed it to proceed in the state's primaries.
Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats, and Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Democrat who represents Maine's 1st district, easily won their elections in the first round, getting the majorities they needed to avoid the allocation of second-choice votes.
Outgoing Maine Gov. Paul LePage has urged Poliquin to challenge the results of the election if he wins the first round but loses the ranked-choice count, arguing that the method is unconstitutional.
That remains to be determined. Maine's Supreme Court issued an advisory opinion last year saying it was unconstitutional to require state general elections to be won by majorities rather than pluralities of the vote, but it did not rule on federal elections like this House race. No other state has attempted ranked-choice voting in state or federal elections, though a number of cities, including San Francisco, have used the method in mayoral races.
The system was approved by Maine voters in 2016 after a series of elections in which winning gubernatorial candidates failed to get a majority of the vote. Supporters of the method argue that it allows voters to choose the candidate they prefer most without worrying that their choice will have a spoiler effect. Ironically, the system was not used in Tuesday's gubernatorial or state legislative races because of the court's opinion that it would violate the Maine constitution.
Here’s your midterm analysis: America is being held hostage by angry old white guys
Republican power is built on resentful white men who think the last good music was Skynyrd and Led Zep
AMANDA MARCOTTE - salon
NOVEMBER 7, 2018 7:15PM (UTC)
America is being held hostage by older white people — especially older white men. That, above all other things, is the moral of the 2018 elections. The CNN exit polls coming out of the midterm elections are stark in many ways, particularly tracking the growing gender and education gaps among voters, but what is most startling is how white people over 45 are heavily Republican and no one else is.
Since pollster Steve Koczela posted that screenshot, the exit polls adjusted slightly, showing that white people ages 30-44 are evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. But considering the age trend lines, it's nearly certain that's only because the over-40 crowd was pulling heavily to the right. Everyone else — black people, Latinos, white people under 30 — is overwhelmingly Democratic.
A huge, diverse nation is being controlled by a bunch of people who think the last good music was Led Zeppelin. The answer to why this is happening is complicated. Part of it is that older voters simply turn out in disproportionate numbers. Part of it, however, is the lingering effects of the baby boom, and the fact that there were just a whole lot of people born between 1946 and 1964. Part of it is the result of our increasingly outdated electoral system, which give a disproportionate share of power to votes in suburban and rural areas. That's how Democrats wound up losing several seats in the Senate this year, despite winning the popular vote by 15 percentage points.
And this is no doubt why Republicans continue to believe that as long as they hang onto the votes of middle-aged and elderly white people, the rest of the country's wishes don't matter. As has been evident for the last three years, Donald Trump believes the trick to keeping that voting bloc engaged and active is to be really, really racist. Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday morning to declare victory for his way of doing politics.
Despite the usual Trumpian triumphalism, realities on the ground do not suggest that race-baiting is as clear-cut an electoral strategy as he would like to believe. A number of candidates that embraced Trump's racist tactics lost their electoral bids Tuesday night. Rep. John Faso, an upstate New York Republican, lost his seat in a purple district after trying to stigmatize his Democratic opponent, Antonio Delgado, for having put out a single hip-hop record a decade ago. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who made a name for himself leading efforts to create new Jim Crow laws to keep people of color from voting, was defeated by Democrat Laura Kelly in that state's gubernatorial race. Rep. Dave Brat of Virginia, a Tea Party-style Republican whose previous victories were based on scare-mongering about immigration, lost to Democratic challenger Abigail Spanberger in the upscale suburbs of Richmond.
But Trump isn't entirely wrong to believe that his tactics likely helped push some Republicans over the top. In the Florida gubernatorial race, Republican Ron DeSantis won with an overtly racist campaign, starting with an ad in which he bragged about indoctrinating his children into bigotry before they can even read and continuing with the on-air suggestion that Florida voters would "monkey" up the state if they elected his Democratic opponent, Andrew Gillum, who is black. DeSantis, who has spoken at white nationalist conferences, also had Trump pitch in by tarring Gillum with racist stereotypes about black criminality.
Gillum was leading by nearly four points in the polls going into Tuesday -- which suggests, unfortunately, that a lot of people who wouldn't admit their racist beliefs to a pollster expressed them in the privacy of the voting booth on Election Day.
Unabashed white nationalist Rep. Steve King also won re-election in Iowa. Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, despite being under indictment for using campaign funds to live the high life, also won by running a campaign based largely on accusing his Democratic opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, of being an Islamic terrorist. (Campa-Najjar, who worked in the Obama administration, has had security clearance — something Hunter's indictment would block him from getting.)
These wins were not slam-dunks, with King and DeSantis, in particular, skating in on razor-thin margins. But it's likely that most Republicans, like Trump, will see this race as a vindication of using overtly racist appeals to turn out the aging white voters who, by dint of geography, have more power per vote than the more diverse and liberal voters packed into urban areas.
The fact that there was high turnout in many parts of the country will only fuel this belief. No doubt much of that turnout came from liberal voters eager to repudiate Trump, but it's also clear from the numbers that a lot of it was due to conservative enthusiasm, as well. The likely conclusion Republican strategists will draw is that racism activates a lot of white voters, and sadly, they may not be wrong.
All of which means that things are likely to get worse on the racial relations front in this country. Trump, emboldened by what he's decided is a big win, will double down on the appeals to bigotry, and many Republican politicians will follow suit. Once the 2020 campaign starts heating up, fear-mongering, racist ads will almost certainly flood the airwaves again. But even before that, we can expect Trump to return to the well of demonizing immigrants, black athletes and other people of color every time he feels the need to rally his base in the face of unflattering news.
And the news will only get worse for Trump. As David Corn at Mother Jones reports, House Democrats are already compiling a list of dozens of issues where they will consider opening investigations. As we get into 2019, it's reasonable to expect that a whole bunch of currently hidden information about Trump's corruption and criminality will start to become public, creating even more incentive for Trump to change the subject.
The results of all this extend well beyond bitter and divisive electoral politics. The rising tide of racial animosity is leading to a surge of right-wing terrorism, as evidenced by the "MAGAbomber," the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and other violent attacks in the weeks leading up to the election. While this is difficult to measure, significant anecdotal evidence suggest that white bigots are really feeling it themselves these days, and are more prone than ever to racist diatribes in public and efforts to use the police to intimidate people of color. All the fear and tension in American daily life will probably get worse before it gets better.
Despite all this, it's still a very promising sign that Democrats managed to eke out a victory in the House of Representatives. It's not just that they can offer a check on a rapidly deteriorating system. It's also that their victory was built on flipping a significant number of suburban districts from red to blue. That, along with the strong Democratic showing among white voters under 30, suggests that racial attitudes may finally be shifting among younger white people. It will be slow going — way, way too slow — but the movement seems to be, ever so haltingly, in the right direction.
Since pollster Steve Koczela posted that screenshot, the exit polls adjusted slightly, showing that white people ages 30-44 are evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. But considering the age trend lines, it's nearly certain that's only because the over-40 crowd was pulling heavily to the right. Everyone else — black people, Latinos, white people under 30 — is overwhelmingly Democratic.
A huge, diverse nation is being controlled by a bunch of people who think the last good music was Led Zeppelin. The answer to why this is happening is complicated. Part of it is that older voters simply turn out in disproportionate numbers. Part of it, however, is the lingering effects of the baby boom, and the fact that there were just a whole lot of people born between 1946 and 1964. Part of it is the result of our increasingly outdated electoral system, which give a disproportionate share of power to votes in suburban and rural areas. That's how Democrats wound up losing several seats in the Senate this year, despite winning the popular vote by 15 percentage points.
And this is no doubt why Republicans continue to believe that as long as they hang onto the votes of middle-aged and elderly white people, the rest of the country's wishes don't matter. As has been evident for the last three years, Donald Trump believes the trick to keeping that voting bloc engaged and active is to be really, really racist. Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday morning to declare victory for his way of doing politics.
Despite the usual Trumpian triumphalism, realities on the ground do not suggest that race-baiting is as clear-cut an electoral strategy as he would like to believe. A number of candidates that embraced Trump's racist tactics lost their electoral bids Tuesday night. Rep. John Faso, an upstate New York Republican, lost his seat in a purple district after trying to stigmatize his Democratic opponent, Antonio Delgado, for having put out a single hip-hop record a decade ago. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who made a name for himself leading efforts to create new Jim Crow laws to keep people of color from voting, was defeated by Democrat Laura Kelly in that state's gubernatorial race. Rep. Dave Brat of Virginia, a Tea Party-style Republican whose previous victories were based on scare-mongering about immigration, lost to Democratic challenger Abigail Spanberger in the upscale suburbs of Richmond.
But Trump isn't entirely wrong to believe that his tactics likely helped push some Republicans over the top. In the Florida gubernatorial race, Republican Ron DeSantis won with an overtly racist campaign, starting with an ad in which he bragged about indoctrinating his children into bigotry before they can even read and continuing with the on-air suggestion that Florida voters would "monkey" up the state if they elected his Democratic opponent, Andrew Gillum, who is black. DeSantis, who has spoken at white nationalist conferences, also had Trump pitch in by tarring Gillum with racist stereotypes about black criminality.
Gillum was leading by nearly four points in the polls going into Tuesday -- which suggests, unfortunately, that a lot of people who wouldn't admit their racist beliefs to a pollster expressed them in the privacy of the voting booth on Election Day.
Unabashed white nationalist Rep. Steve King also won re-election in Iowa. Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, despite being under indictment for using campaign funds to live the high life, also won by running a campaign based largely on accusing his Democratic opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, of being an Islamic terrorist. (Campa-Najjar, who worked in the Obama administration, has had security clearance — something Hunter's indictment would block him from getting.)
These wins were not slam-dunks, with King and DeSantis, in particular, skating in on razor-thin margins. But it's likely that most Republicans, like Trump, will see this race as a vindication of using overtly racist appeals to turn out the aging white voters who, by dint of geography, have more power per vote than the more diverse and liberal voters packed into urban areas.
The fact that there was high turnout in many parts of the country will only fuel this belief. No doubt much of that turnout came from liberal voters eager to repudiate Trump, but it's also clear from the numbers that a lot of it was due to conservative enthusiasm, as well. The likely conclusion Republican strategists will draw is that racism activates a lot of white voters, and sadly, they may not be wrong.
All of which means that things are likely to get worse on the racial relations front in this country. Trump, emboldened by what he's decided is a big win, will double down on the appeals to bigotry, and many Republican politicians will follow suit. Once the 2020 campaign starts heating up, fear-mongering, racist ads will almost certainly flood the airwaves again. But even before that, we can expect Trump to return to the well of demonizing immigrants, black athletes and other people of color every time he feels the need to rally his base in the face of unflattering news.
And the news will only get worse for Trump. As David Corn at Mother Jones reports, House Democrats are already compiling a list of dozens of issues where they will consider opening investigations. As we get into 2019, it's reasonable to expect that a whole bunch of currently hidden information about Trump's corruption and criminality will start to become public, creating even more incentive for Trump to change the subject.
The results of all this extend well beyond bitter and divisive electoral politics. The rising tide of racial animosity is leading to a surge of right-wing terrorism, as evidenced by the "MAGAbomber," the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and other violent attacks in the weeks leading up to the election. While this is difficult to measure, significant anecdotal evidence suggest that white bigots are really feeling it themselves these days, and are more prone than ever to racist diatribes in public and efforts to use the police to intimidate people of color. All the fear and tension in American daily life will probably get worse before it gets better.
Despite all this, it's still a very promising sign that Democrats managed to eke out a victory in the House of Representatives. It's not just that they can offer a check on a rapidly deteriorating system. It's also that their victory was built on flipping a significant number of suburban districts from red to blue. That, along with the strong Democratic showing among white voters under 30, suggests that racial attitudes may finally be shifting among younger white people. It will be slow going — way, way too slow — but the movement seems to be, ever so haltingly, in the right direction.
real citizens???
While America Voted, Many Chose Not to (or Couldn't)
DAVID GOLDMAN / The Associated Press - truthdig
NOV 07, 2018
ATLANTA — For some, it’s a privilege lost. Others are disillusioned by a system they say does nothing for them. Others still are turned off by the anger and divisiveness they see as ripping the country apart.
As Americans on Tuesday voted in midterm elections largely seen as a referendum of President Donald Trump’s first two years in office, many people stayed home.
According to AP VoteCast, a national survey of the electorate, nonvoters said the biggest reasons for them not voting were they didn’t like politics generally and they don’t know enough about the candidates’ positions. Few said it was because they did not know where to vote, it takes too much time or they didn’t have the required identification.
Nationally, 70 percent of registered voters who chose not to vote in the midterm election were younger than 45. A wide share of those who did not vote — around 8 in 10 — did not have a college degree. About as many nonvoters were Democrats (32 percent) as Republicans (32 percent).
The Associated Press spoke to some who either chose not to vote or were not able to:
Truth Graf, 57, wasn’t able to vote after being convicted of arson and cocaine possession for what she calls “an act of desperation.” She burned her house down during the housing crisis to avoid foreclosure, and her right to vote won’t be restored until she’s off probation in 2040. “I’ll be 80 when I can vote again. It’s devastating to me to be sitting here on Election Day,” Graf said, as she rested her elbows on her kitchen table in Woodstock, Georgia. “I believe so strongly in the process of having a voice and my voice has been taken away.”
___
Debbie Key, 58, doesn’t believe her vote will make a difference. “I’m a little disillusioned,” she said as she walked out of the cooler while at work at Brenda’s House of Flowers in Woodstock, Georgia. “I am not educated enough on policy.” She added: “And what is presented to me through commercials, TV ads, forget it. It’s just not enough for me to have an opinion. I’m pretty much ambivalent. Nothing lights me up.”
___
Oscar Ramirez, 61, emigrated from Cuba and has voted in past elections, but the divisive political climate has given him pause. “I thank God and this country every day for what they gave me,” Ramirez said as he unloaded spices to be delivered to a market in Woodstock, Georgia. “It makes me sick the way they go at each other.” He added: “Republicans and Democrats, they just go at each other and all we get are promises. They worry more about each other than us. I see from the past once they get up there they forget about the little people.”
___
Charles Shields, 71, didn’t feel like he will get a fair deal, no matter who wins. “I didn’t see a reason to vote. I feel like if I vote, it really does no good,” he said as he stood on his porch with his dogs at his home in Atlanta. “I feel like a new man going in is a good man, but when he gets in there, that’s when he turns into a different person. I’ve heard just about everything they could say.” Still, he said, he contributes in other ways. “What I usually do is get a sign of who I like and ride around with it on my car so I feel like that is helping.”
___
Georgia State University student Ebony Short, 22, spent part of Tuesday studying in their room. “Neoliberalism is just as bad as conservatism. Capitalism is perpetuating the globalization of fascism, and that’s another reason why I’m not going to vote,” said Short, who has voted on local city council elections but sees higher-level races as furthering the cause of imperialism. “I’m not going to shame people for voting, but I want people to understand that you also on that same token shouldn’t shame someone who is using not voting as a tactic as well. How can you be upset at people who are demanding more from the system?”
___
Emory University student Omar Hernandez, 20, simply ran out of time. “I would have had to file an absentee ballot because I’m from Florida, and with exams and school, I’ve been just overwhelmed,” said Hernandez, who was studying organic chemistry on his laptop as he waited for a haircut in Atlanta. “In all honesty, I feel like voting is a place where everyone can feel like they’re making a contribution to society, just a way of keeping hope for the masses, like making them feel they have a say in the government and they really don’t.”
___
Jay Philbert, 38, said he decided never to vote again after voting for President George W. Bush and then for President Barack Obama. “Democrats, Republicans, same thing. Left wing, right wing. I don’t have time for it. I don’t know that my vote really counts,” Philbert said as he worked on a car at Intown Auto Care in Decatur, Georgia. “The Affordable Care Act is not affordable. I have a motto I live by. If it doesn’t make my life better, I don’t do it. Drinking don’t make my life better, I quit drinking. Smoking don’t make my life better, I quit smoking. Voting don’t make my life better, I quit voting.”
___
Justin Lee, 25, said he has never voted. “My friends told me I need to, and I know Georgia has a small Asian population, so it actually matters if I vote or not, to voice our population’s best interest. They tell me my vote counts and I think I should (vote),” said Lee who owns D92 Korean BBQ and said he works seven days a week, sometimes 12 or 13 hours a day. “I’m not well educated in politics, I spend all my time working. I wish it was easier to vote, like on the phone.”
As Americans on Tuesday voted in midterm elections largely seen as a referendum of President Donald Trump’s first two years in office, many people stayed home.
According to AP VoteCast, a national survey of the electorate, nonvoters said the biggest reasons for them not voting were they didn’t like politics generally and they don’t know enough about the candidates’ positions. Few said it was because they did not know where to vote, it takes too much time or they didn’t have the required identification.
Nationally, 70 percent of registered voters who chose not to vote in the midterm election were younger than 45. A wide share of those who did not vote — around 8 in 10 — did not have a college degree. About as many nonvoters were Democrats (32 percent) as Republicans (32 percent).
The Associated Press spoke to some who either chose not to vote or were not able to:
Truth Graf, 57, wasn’t able to vote after being convicted of arson and cocaine possession for what she calls “an act of desperation.” She burned her house down during the housing crisis to avoid foreclosure, and her right to vote won’t be restored until she’s off probation in 2040. “I’ll be 80 when I can vote again. It’s devastating to me to be sitting here on Election Day,” Graf said, as she rested her elbows on her kitchen table in Woodstock, Georgia. “I believe so strongly in the process of having a voice and my voice has been taken away.”
___
Debbie Key, 58, doesn’t believe her vote will make a difference. “I’m a little disillusioned,” she said as she walked out of the cooler while at work at Brenda’s House of Flowers in Woodstock, Georgia. “I am not educated enough on policy.” She added: “And what is presented to me through commercials, TV ads, forget it. It’s just not enough for me to have an opinion. I’m pretty much ambivalent. Nothing lights me up.”
___
Oscar Ramirez, 61, emigrated from Cuba and has voted in past elections, but the divisive political climate has given him pause. “I thank God and this country every day for what they gave me,” Ramirez said as he unloaded spices to be delivered to a market in Woodstock, Georgia. “It makes me sick the way they go at each other.” He added: “Republicans and Democrats, they just go at each other and all we get are promises. They worry more about each other than us. I see from the past once they get up there they forget about the little people.”
___
Charles Shields, 71, didn’t feel like he will get a fair deal, no matter who wins. “I didn’t see a reason to vote. I feel like if I vote, it really does no good,” he said as he stood on his porch with his dogs at his home in Atlanta. “I feel like a new man going in is a good man, but when he gets in there, that’s when he turns into a different person. I’ve heard just about everything they could say.” Still, he said, he contributes in other ways. “What I usually do is get a sign of who I like and ride around with it on my car so I feel like that is helping.”
___
Georgia State University student Ebony Short, 22, spent part of Tuesday studying in their room. “Neoliberalism is just as bad as conservatism. Capitalism is perpetuating the globalization of fascism, and that’s another reason why I’m not going to vote,” said Short, who has voted on local city council elections but sees higher-level races as furthering the cause of imperialism. “I’m not going to shame people for voting, but I want people to understand that you also on that same token shouldn’t shame someone who is using not voting as a tactic as well. How can you be upset at people who are demanding more from the system?”
___
Emory University student Omar Hernandez, 20, simply ran out of time. “I would have had to file an absentee ballot because I’m from Florida, and with exams and school, I’ve been just overwhelmed,” said Hernandez, who was studying organic chemistry on his laptop as he waited for a haircut in Atlanta. “In all honesty, I feel like voting is a place where everyone can feel like they’re making a contribution to society, just a way of keeping hope for the masses, like making them feel they have a say in the government and they really don’t.”
___
Jay Philbert, 38, said he decided never to vote again after voting for President George W. Bush and then for President Barack Obama. “Democrats, Republicans, same thing. Left wing, right wing. I don’t have time for it. I don’t know that my vote really counts,” Philbert said as he worked on a car at Intown Auto Care in Decatur, Georgia. “The Affordable Care Act is not affordable. I have a motto I live by. If it doesn’t make my life better, I don’t do it. Drinking don’t make my life better, I quit drinking. Smoking don’t make my life better, I quit smoking. Voting don’t make my life better, I quit voting.”
___
Justin Lee, 25, said he has never voted. “My friends told me I need to, and I know Georgia has a small Asian population, so it actually matters if I vote or not, to voice our population’s best interest. They tell me my vote counts and I think I should (vote),” said Lee who owns D92 Korean BBQ and said he works seven days a week, sometimes 12 or 13 hours a day. “I’m not well educated in politics, I spend all my time working. I wish it was easier to vote, like on the phone.”
Here is how to ‘follow the money’ and look for corruption when it comes to political campaigns
Pro Publica - raw story
20 OCT 2018 AT 10:12 ET
Why do we care about money in politics?
There’s a phrase that pops up a lot when investigative journalists talk about politics: Follow the money. It won’t lead you to uncover large-scale corruption (but if you do, please holler at us). It will get you better acquainted with which industries are donating to the races you care about, and how your candidates are spending the money they raise. Get more information like this by signing up for ProPublica’s User’s Guide to Democracy.
Money in politics gets a rap for being shady. But campaign finance isn’t just about the bad stuff.For the times when it is, we have campaign finance laws. A quick history lesson: After the Watergate scandal (which, in addition to a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, involved campaign funds used toward the scheme), Congress passed a law requiring federal campaigns to report their political contributions and spending to the Federal Election Commission. This was designed as a check against corruption but also to empower voters and keep you reasonably informed about money in politics.
Let’s take a look at what money does in a campaign. Seeing where a candidate’s money comes from, as well as which groups are spending on behalf of (or against) their campaign, helps you understand their beliefs, the advice they’re getting and the kinds of policies they’re likely to support.
What does a donation get you?
If you’re a candidate… Receiving donations can help you win an election. It’s not the only factor, but by and large, donations get spent on the day-to-day expenses of running a campaign. Take a look at how your candidates are spending their funds this season here, using ProPublica’s FEC Itemizer.
It’s probably garden-variety stuff: lunch, plane tickets, campaign ads, hotel rooms and venue rentals for campaign events. The choices candidates make tell you something about their priorities: where they’re spending their time, which voters they’re trying hardest to win over (older voters with TV ads or younger folks online) and how much they pay their staff.
Of course, sometimes candidates try to get creative in describing their campaign expenses, like California Rep. Duncan Hunter, who, along with his wife, is under indictment for spending donations on family trips to Hawaii and Italy and private school for their children.
If you see something suspicious in your candidates’ spending, or have questions, let us know at itemizer@propublica.org!
If you’re a donor to a candidate… My colleague Justin Elliott recently reported on a major donor to Donald Trump, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who contributed $20 million to Trump’s campaign and an additional $5 million for inauguration festivities. Since then, the Trump administration has helped advance some of his financial interests. For example, Trump reportedly raised Adelson’s bid to build a casino in Japan during Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Mar-a-Lago, and his tax plan included new benefits to companies like Adelson’s.
But this is not the norm.
Most of the time, campaign donors don’t see a “return” on their investment. If you donate to a candidate, chances are you’re getting one of two things:
Campaign donations are not supposed to be transactional — that’s considered bribery, and it’s a crime. But they are a way of establishing a relationship and opening the door to conversations between the donor and the government. This is why, for example, defense industry PACs give to candidates who sit on the Armed Services Committee. They have an interest in talking to the people who help govern their industry. Conversely, when Rep. Charles Rangel stepped aside from the powerful House Ways and Means Committee for ethics violations, his once-stalwart campaign donors disappeared because he no longer had an important role for their interests.
Yes, it’s murky.
But, thanks to the post-Watergate Congressional Class of ’74, we can at least see what’s behind the curtains. If you give $200 or more to a candidate, the campaign is required to report your name, address and employer or occupation to the Federal Election Commision. Based on these FEC filings, along with similar disclosures from political action committees, the Center for Responsive Politics (through their site OpenSecrets.org) determines which industries are funding the candidates in your race.
Take a close look at the types of sectors and interest groups donating to your candidates. These can signal who has their ear.
If you’re a donor to a super PAC… Mostly what you get are negative campaign ads. Some of the biggest players in the campaign landscape are super PACs. These are political action committees that don’t give directly to the candidate but spend independently in support of (or in opposition to) them. This outside spending is completely uncapped, freeing super PACs to raise any amount of money to influence any given race — typically for negative advertising. (You may balk at this, but, even if people claim to hate them, attack ads work.)
Think about the negative ads you’ve seen lately. Chances are they were funded by a super PAC, believing certain voters can be activated based on their message. Knowing who these groups are can help you better understand their motives (and better assess whether you buy what they’re selling). Here’s where you can find out more about independent expenditures in your state’s races.
Super PACs tend to represent three main categories:
Outside spending from super PACs can have a big impact on an election. ProPublica and Politico recently reported on Mountain Families PAC, a super PAC set up by allies of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to intervene in this year’s West Virginia Republican primary. The group spent $1.3 million against Don Blankenship, a former coal baron who was considered the wild-card candidate, in a three-way race. Blankenship finished third, and Mountain Families shut down in May. Mission accomplished.
HomeworkProPublica has a tool called FEC Itemizer, which lets you browse electronic campaign finance filings from the commission. Until very recently, Senate candidates kicked it old school by only filing these reports on paper. That changed on Oct. 15, and now you can use the FEC Itemizer to follow the money in your Senate race, too.
Stay up on how the midterm election is going for voters like you across the nation, check out the latest from Electionland.
To get a personalized version of the User’s Guide to Democracy delivered to your inbox weekly through the midterm elections, sign up here.
There’s a phrase that pops up a lot when investigative journalists talk about politics: Follow the money. It won’t lead you to uncover large-scale corruption (but if you do, please holler at us). It will get you better acquainted with which industries are donating to the races you care about, and how your candidates are spending the money they raise. Get more information like this by signing up for ProPublica’s User’s Guide to Democracy.
Money in politics gets a rap for being shady. But campaign finance isn’t just about the bad stuff.For the times when it is, we have campaign finance laws. A quick history lesson: After the Watergate scandal (which, in addition to a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, involved campaign funds used toward the scheme), Congress passed a law requiring federal campaigns to report their political contributions and spending to the Federal Election Commission. This was designed as a check against corruption but also to empower voters and keep you reasonably informed about money in politics.
Let’s take a look at what money does in a campaign. Seeing where a candidate’s money comes from, as well as which groups are spending on behalf of (or against) their campaign, helps you understand their beliefs, the advice they’re getting and the kinds of policies they’re likely to support.
What does a donation get you?
If you’re a candidate… Receiving donations can help you win an election. It’s not the only factor, but by and large, donations get spent on the day-to-day expenses of running a campaign. Take a look at how your candidates are spending their funds this season here, using ProPublica’s FEC Itemizer.
It’s probably garden-variety stuff: lunch, plane tickets, campaign ads, hotel rooms and venue rentals for campaign events. The choices candidates make tell you something about their priorities: where they’re spending their time, which voters they’re trying hardest to win over (older voters with TV ads or younger folks online) and how much they pay their staff.
Of course, sometimes candidates try to get creative in describing their campaign expenses, like California Rep. Duncan Hunter, who, along with his wife, is under indictment for spending donations on family trips to Hawaii and Italy and private school for their children.
If you see something suspicious in your candidates’ spending, or have questions, let us know at itemizer@propublica.org!
If you’re a donor to a candidate… My colleague Justin Elliott recently reported on a major donor to Donald Trump, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who contributed $20 million to Trump’s campaign and an additional $5 million for inauguration festivities. Since then, the Trump administration has helped advance some of his financial interests. For example, Trump reportedly raised Adelson’s bid to build a casino in Japan during Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Mar-a-Lago, and his tax plan included new benefits to companies like Adelson’s.
But this is not the norm.
Most of the time, campaign donors don’t see a “return” on their investment. If you donate to a candidate, chances are you’re getting one of two things:
- The satisfaction of backing a potential winner.
- Lunch. Or something like lunch, with a chance to share your perspective with the candidate once he or she has taken office.
Campaign donations are not supposed to be transactional — that’s considered bribery, and it’s a crime. But they are a way of establishing a relationship and opening the door to conversations between the donor and the government. This is why, for example, defense industry PACs give to candidates who sit on the Armed Services Committee. They have an interest in talking to the people who help govern their industry. Conversely, when Rep. Charles Rangel stepped aside from the powerful House Ways and Means Committee for ethics violations, his once-stalwart campaign donors disappeared because he no longer had an important role for their interests.
Yes, it’s murky.
But, thanks to the post-Watergate Congressional Class of ’74, we can at least see what’s behind the curtains. If you give $200 or more to a candidate, the campaign is required to report your name, address and employer or occupation to the Federal Election Commision. Based on these FEC filings, along with similar disclosures from political action committees, the Center for Responsive Politics (through their site OpenSecrets.org) determines which industries are funding the candidates in your race.
Take a close look at the types of sectors and interest groups donating to your candidates. These can signal who has their ear.
If you’re a donor to a super PAC… Mostly what you get are negative campaign ads. Some of the biggest players in the campaign landscape are super PACs. These are political action committees that don’t give directly to the candidate but spend independently in support of (or in opposition to) them. This outside spending is completely uncapped, freeing super PACs to raise any amount of money to influence any given race — typically for negative advertising. (You may balk at this, but, even if people claim to hate them, attack ads work.)
Think about the negative ads you’ve seen lately. Chances are they were funded by a super PAC, believing certain voters can be activated based on their message. Knowing who these groups are can help you better understand their motives (and better assess whether you buy what they’re selling). Here’s where you can find out more about independent expenditures in your state’s races.
Super PACs tend to represent three main categories:
- Single-Issue Groups: Think advocacy groups that focus on abortion, or the environment, or taxes.
- Partisan Groups: These are super PACs formed at the direction of key House and Senate leaders, like the Congressional Leadership Fund (affiliated with House Republican leaders) and the Senate Majority PAC (connected with Senate Democratic leadership). While lawmakers themselves are restricted from soliciting unlimited donations to the super PACs they’re tied to, the people running these groups can do so on their behalf.
- Family Interests: Basically, this is when a wealthy family member comes through (like Kansas House candidate Steve Watkins’ loaded dad).
Outside spending from super PACs can have a big impact on an election. ProPublica and Politico recently reported on Mountain Families PAC, a super PAC set up by allies of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to intervene in this year’s West Virginia Republican primary. The group spent $1.3 million against Don Blankenship, a former coal baron who was considered the wild-card candidate, in a three-way race. Blankenship finished third, and Mountain Families shut down in May. Mission accomplished.
HomeworkProPublica has a tool called FEC Itemizer, which lets you browse electronic campaign finance filings from the commission. Until very recently, Senate candidates kicked it old school by only filing these reports on paper. That changed on Oct. 15, and now you can use the FEC Itemizer to follow the money in your Senate race, too.
Stay up on how the midterm election is going for voters like you across the nation, check out the latest from Electionland.
To get a personalized version of the User’s Guide to Democracy delivered to your inbox weekly through the midterm elections, sign up here.
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.”
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
|
|
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.[...]