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welcome to reality ~ triva
election news and items of interest
dec 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
*REPUBLICANS WIN IN EFFORT TO LIMIT STUDENT VOTE AHEAD OF KEY 2020 RACES
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*THE MYTH OF VOTER FRAUD – AND THE TRUTH ABOUT WHAT’S THREATENING OUR ELECTIONS
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*More Students Are Voting — But Republicans Are Trying to Get in Their Way
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*The Way America Votes Is Broken. In One Rural County, a Nonprofit Showed a Way Forward.(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Off-year Election Day in Kentucky, Virginia and elsewhere: Big impact, bad for democracy(ARTICLE BELOW)
*‘It makes elections fair’: New York to vote on system that may curb polarized politics
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*The Long Fight to Use Student IDs to Vote in North Carolina
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*GERRYMANDER GURU'S SECRET FILES: HE USED RACIAL DATA TO DISENFRANCHISE BLACK VOTERS(ARTICLE BELOW)
*‘DEMOCRACY FOR SOME, BUT NOT FOR ALL’: REPORT REVEALS NEARLY 1,700 POLLING PLACES CLOSED SINCE SUPREME COURT WEAKENED VOTING RIGHTS ACT(ARTICLE BELOW)
*OHIO WILL PURGE MORE THAN 200,000 VOTERS — FROM A LIST RIDDLED WITH ERRORS
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*MAJOR VICTORY AGAINST GOP GERRYMANDERING: STATE COURT STRIKES DOWN NORTH CAROLINA'S LEGISLATIVE MAPS(ARTICLE BELOW)
*REVEALED: GEORGIA REPUBLICANS USE POWER OF STATE TO SUPPRESS MINORITY VOTE
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*Tennessee Voting Rights Activists Fight New Registration Restrictions
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*Voters say touchscreen machines switched their votes in nine Mississippi counties
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*Mystery of missing votes deepens as Congress investigates Georgia
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*Dan Bishop’s harsh history of discrimination
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*Court Upholds North Dakota Law Stripping Voting Rights From Native Americans
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*'The selling of an election': how private firms compromised midterms security
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*Georgia election officials deny evidence destruction
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*No, both sides are not the same
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*Political Fundraising Has a Big, Nasty Secret
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*A List -- Why A Majority of Whites No Longer Vote Democratic at the Presidential Level
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*Leaked voting machine passwords add to North Carolina's growing tally of election security woes
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*Did software firm's flaws expose North Carolina to election hacking?
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*LAWSUIT CALLS MISSISSIPPI'S WAY OF CHOOSING GOVERNORS RACIST
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*WHITE WOMEN ARE HELPING STATES PASS ABORTION RESTRICTIONS
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*Republican Keller wins Pennsylvania special election
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*How Gerrymandering and Voter Suppression Paved the Way for Abortion Bans
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MAP OF THE HYPOCRITES!!!
THE DAILY KOS ELECTIONS GUIDE TO THE NATION'S RELIGIOUS POPULATIONS, BY CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT(ARTICLE BELOW)
funnies(at the end)
*PART 1: GOP RACIAL GERRYMANDERING MASTERMIND PARTICIPATED IN REDISTRICTING IN MORE STATES THAN PREVIOUSLY KNOWN, FILES REVEAL
THOMAS HOFELLER AND GOP STRATEGISTS EXPERIMENTED WITH USING RACE AS THE PRIMARY FACTOR IN DRAWING DISTRICTS IN ALABAMA, FLORIDA, AND WEST VIRGINIA.
*PART 2“WORTH THIS INVESTMENT”: MEMOS REVEAL THE SCOPE AND RACIAL ANIMUS OF GOP GERRYMANDERING AMBITIONS
IN A TROVE OF NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED MEMOS AND EMAILS, HOWEVER, GOP LEADERS COME CLEAN: THEIR NATIONWIDE ADVANTAGE IN STATE LEGISLATURES AND CONGRESS IS BUILT ON GERRYMANDERING. AND TOP REPUBLICAN STRATEGISTS AND POLITICAL OPERATIVES ADMIT TO WEAPONIZING RACIAL DATA AND THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT IN ORDER TO FLIP THE SOUTH RED AND TILT ELECTORAL MAPS IN THEIR DIRECTION.
*Status of National Popular Vote Bill in Each State
*MAP PORN: IF "DID NOT VOTE" WAS A CANDIDATE...( article below)
The Political Punchline
Putting the Mock in Democracy
The fight to vote
New Hampshire
Republicans win in effort to limit student vote ahead of key 2020 races
‘They are kids voting liberal,’ a New Hampshire Republican said in 2011 as legal battle over student voting in the state continues
Sam Levine in New York
Thu 5 Dec 2019 06.00 EST
Maggie Flaherty grew up in a small town in California, but after she moved to New Hampshire to attend Dartmouth College, she registered to vote in the state where she would be spending at least four years.
Now she is embroiled in a fight against Republicans in the state that is being watched across the country.
Flaherty and a fellow student are challenging a Republican-backed law that is making it harder for many out-of-state students and other temporary residents to cast a ballot in a state with outsized national influence.
The lawsuit has been endorsed by the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and other Democratic presidential hopefuls. But last week, Flaherty and her colleague Caroline Casey hit another obstacle when the US district judge Joseph LaPlante denied a request to block the law just months before the primary elections.
New Hampshire is a small swing state where both local and state-wide races can be decided by razor-thin margins. Donald Trump lost the state to Hillary Clinton by just 2,736 votes in 2016. The same year, Maggie Hassan, also a Democrat, defeated Kelly Ayotte for a Senate seat by just 1,017 votes. The Democratic primary in February and general election in November are expected to be closely fought.
Republicans in the state have complained about college students voting before. “They are kids voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience,” William O’Brien, a Republican and then the New Hampshire house speaker, said in 2011. There are nationwide efforts to restrict the surging student vote, but the party says the new law is merely intended to bring New Hampshire in line with other states.
The law, which went into effect on 1 July, mandates that anyone who has registered to vote and intends to drive while living in the state must obtain a New Hampshire driver’s license and register their vehicle within 60 days of signing up.
The ACLU of New Hampshire, which is bringing the suit, contends that in fact many states allow out-of-state students and other transient people, such as military personnel, to vote and exempts them from the requirement to get an in-state license, said the ACLU lawyer Gilles Bissonnette.
It may seem like a benign change, but critics of the law say it has created mass confusion and imposes an unfair burden on college students, and amounts to a “poll tax” on voting because of the costs involved in getting a license. “There’s nothing that’s really gained by this, there’s no way to really enforce it, so what’s the point of it?” said Kate Corriveau, the New Hampshire director of America Votes, an advocacy group. “The point of it, as we’ve kind of seen, is that it’s confusing. And it’s a little bit intimidating.”
It is also not clear how New Hampshire officials will check and enforce whether new voters with out-of-state documents get an in-state license. That uncertainty could deter students from signing up to get on the voter rolls, said Joseph Ramirez, a senior at the University of New Hampshire who has worked to educate people about the new law. “It’s almost like a scare tactic,” he said. “I’ve heard things like if you’re going to get pulled over, then they might fine you” if you have an out-of-state license, he said.
Warren’s campaign said in a court filing that the law was so confusing that her campaign could not advise college students on what they should do if they have an out-of-state license and want to vote in New Hampshire.
“We’re here to say two things: principle, everybody ought to be able to vote, but the second part is to say we have evidence that it’s causing a great deal of confusion,” Warren told New Hampshire Public Radio in November. “And when you’ve got confusion, you suppress voting.”
Michael Herron, a Dartmouth professor retained as an expert by the ACLU in the court case, found that the law would impact the young and transient population the most. While 1% of the total number people who cast a ballot in New Hampshire in the 2016 general election used an out-of-state ID, at least 36% of the college students who voted used one.
In his Wednesday ruling, LaPlante denied that the law was confusing and pointed to a November memo from New Hampshire officials outlining how it would work. Still, LaPlante asked the New Hampshire supreme court to clarify several aspects of the law, only adding to the uncertainty. The court could interpret the law in a way that is less restrictive to the students.
Flaherty, who is hoping to help students register to vote regardless of the decision, said students shouldn’t be penalized for wanting to vote.
“We fall into this unique category of wanting to be engaged, being informed people that are getting a higher education, but also we don’t know where we’re going to be,” she said. “We’re in kind of a limbo.”
Now she is embroiled in a fight against Republicans in the state that is being watched across the country.
Flaherty and a fellow student are challenging a Republican-backed law that is making it harder for many out-of-state students and other temporary residents to cast a ballot in a state with outsized national influence.
The lawsuit has been endorsed by the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and other Democratic presidential hopefuls. But last week, Flaherty and her colleague Caroline Casey hit another obstacle when the US district judge Joseph LaPlante denied a request to block the law just months before the primary elections.
New Hampshire is a small swing state where both local and state-wide races can be decided by razor-thin margins. Donald Trump lost the state to Hillary Clinton by just 2,736 votes in 2016. The same year, Maggie Hassan, also a Democrat, defeated Kelly Ayotte for a Senate seat by just 1,017 votes. The Democratic primary in February and general election in November are expected to be closely fought.
Republicans in the state have complained about college students voting before. “They are kids voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience,” William O’Brien, a Republican and then the New Hampshire house speaker, said in 2011. There are nationwide efforts to restrict the surging student vote, but the party says the new law is merely intended to bring New Hampshire in line with other states.
The law, which went into effect on 1 July, mandates that anyone who has registered to vote and intends to drive while living in the state must obtain a New Hampshire driver’s license and register their vehicle within 60 days of signing up.
The ACLU of New Hampshire, which is bringing the suit, contends that in fact many states allow out-of-state students and other transient people, such as military personnel, to vote and exempts them from the requirement to get an in-state license, said the ACLU lawyer Gilles Bissonnette.
It may seem like a benign change, but critics of the law say it has created mass confusion and imposes an unfair burden on college students, and amounts to a “poll tax” on voting because of the costs involved in getting a license. “There’s nothing that’s really gained by this, there’s no way to really enforce it, so what’s the point of it?” said Kate Corriveau, the New Hampshire director of America Votes, an advocacy group. “The point of it, as we’ve kind of seen, is that it’s confusing. And it’s a little bit intimidating.”
It is also not clear how New Hampshire officials will check and enforce whether new voters with out-of-state documents get an in-state license. That uncertainty could deter students from signing up to get on the voter rolls, said Joseph Ramirez, a senior at the University of New Hampshire who has worked to educate people about the new law. “It’s almost like a scare tactic,” he said. “I’ve heard things like if you’re going to get pulled over, then they might fine you” if you have an out-of-state license, he said.
Warren’s campaign said in a court filing that the law was so confusing that her campaign could not advise college students on what they should do if they have an out-of-state license and want to vote in New Hampshire.
“We’re here to say two things: principle, everybody ought to be able to vote, but the second part is to say we have evidence that it’s causing a great deal of confusion,” Warren told New Hampshire Public Radio in November. “And when you’ve got confusion, you suppress voting.”
Michael Herron, a Dartmouth professor retained as an expert by the ACLU in the court case, found that the law would impact the young and transient population the most. While 1% of the total number people who cast a ballot in New Hampshire in the 2016 general election used an out-of-state ID, at least 36% of the college students who voted used one.
In his Wednesday ruling, LaPlante denied that the law was confusing and pointed to a November memo from New Hampshire officials outlining how it would work. Still, LaPlante asked the New Hampshire supreme court to clarify several aspects of the law, only adding to the uncertainty. The court could interpret the law in a way that is less restrictive to the students.
Flaherty, who is hoping to help students register to vote regardless of the decision, said students shouldn’t be penalized for wanting to vote.
“We fall into this unique category of wanting to be engaged, being informed people that are getting a higher education, but also we don’t know where we’re going to be,” she said. “We’re in kind of a limbo.”
The myth of voter fraud – and the truth about what’s threatening our elections
November 24, 2019
By Robert Reich - raw story
Donald Trump and his enablers have been making claims of widespread voter fraud, alleging millions of people are voting illegally in order to rig our elections.
Baloney. Let’s look at the facts and debunk their myths once and for all.
They claim millions of Americans are voting twice, using multiple registrations in different districts.
So how often does double voting really occur? An analysis of the 2012 presidential election found that out of 129 million votes cast, 0.02% – that’s two one hundredths of one percent – were double votes – which were likely the result of measurement error. This is a far cry from Donald Trump’s claims that millions of people were registered in two different states in the 2016 presidential election.
Trump and his enablers claim non-citizens are voting in droves. Trump himself said that thousands of undocumented immigrants voted in 2016.
Another lie. According to the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice, of 23.5 million votes cast in districts with high populations of non-citizens only 30 – I repeat, thirty – possible incidents of improper non-citizen voting were referred for further investigation.
They claim voter impersonation is rampant at the polls.
False. A 12-year study of election data found only 10 cases of voter impersonation out of 146 million registered voters. Ten.
So if voter fraud really isn’t a problem, why do Trump, Republicans in Congress, and their allies at Fox News keep perpetuating this myth? For one simple reason: To enact restrictive voting laws intended to keep voters from the polls.
Policies established in the name of election security – including voter ID laws, needless registration deadlines, limited access to polling places, and purges of the voter rolls – make it harder for Americans to vote. It is the same tactic that has been used throughout our history to disenfranchise low-income Americans and people of color.
Luckily, many of these laws have been struck down in the courts. In 2016, a district judge in Wisconsin found “utterly no evidence” of widespread voter fraud justifying its voter ID law. In Texas, another judge found their voter ID law violated the Voting Rights Act, making it harder for African-Americans and Latinos to vote.
But many of these laws are still on the books because in 2013 the Supreme Court gutted crucial aspects of the Voting Rights Act.
Congress needs to update the Act to prevent states from suppressing votes.
Meanwhile, Trump and Republicans in Congress are turning a blind eye to the real threats facing our democracy: election fraud, and foreign interference.
In 2018, a Republican operative stole votes from Democrats in a North Carolina congressional race with a quote, “coordinated, unlawful, and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme.” After the ballots were counted, the Republican candidate appeared to have won by about 900 votes. But the fraud was so glaring that the state board of elections refused to certify the results and called for a special election.
The other real threat is foreign interference in our elections, as Russia did in 2016.
We now know for a fact that Trump is encouraging foreign leaders to interfere in our elections — asking the President of Ukraine to investigate his political opponents in exchange for military aid and publicly calling on Russia and China to also interfere.
In the Senate, Mitch McConnell continues to block common-sense legislation to protect our elections against future foreign interference, such as requiring all voting machines to have backup paper ballots and imposing automatic sanctions for nations that interfere in elections. To have safe and secure elections in 2020 and beyond, we need to pass this legislation.
The next time you hear Trump and his enablers claim widespread voter fraud, know the truth. Their lies are intended to make it harder for millions of Americans to vote, while they ignore the real threats to our democracy.
Baloney. Let’s look at the facts and debunk their myths once and for all.
They claim millions of Americans are voting twice, using multiple registrations in different districts.
So how often does double voting really occur? An analysis of the 2012 presidential election found that out of 129 million votes cast, 0.02% – that’s two one hundredths of one percent – were double votes – which were likely the result of measurement error. This is a far cry from Donald Trump’s claims that millions of people were registered in two different states in the 2016 presidential election.
Trump and his enablers claim non-citizens are voting in droves. Trump himself said that thousands of undocumented immigrants voted in 2016.
Another lie. According to the non-partisan Brennan Center for Justice, of 23.5 million votes cast in districts with high populations of non-citizens only 30 – I repeat, thirty – possible incidents of improper non-citizen voting were referred for further investigation.
They claim voter impersonation is rampant at the polls.
False. A 12-year study of election data found only 10 cases of voter impersonation out of 146 million registered voters. Ten.
So if voter fraud really isn’t a problem, why do Trump, Republicans in Congress, and their allies at Fox News keep perpetuating this myth? For one simple reason: To enact restrictive voting laws intended to keep voters from the polls.
Policies established in the name of election security – including voter ID laws, needless registration deadlines, limited access to polling places, and purges of the voter rolls – make it harder for Americans to vote. It is the same tactic that has been used throughout our history to disenfranchise low-income Americans and people of color.
Luckily, many of these laws have been struck down in the courts. In 2016, a district judge in Wisconsin found “utterly no evidence” of widespread voter fraud justifying its voter ID law. In Texas, another judge found their voter ID law violated the Voting Rights Act, making it harder for African-Americans and Latinos to vote.
But many of these laws are still on the books because in 2013 the Supreme Court gutted crucial aspects of the Voting Rights Act.
Congress needs to update the Act to prevent states from suppressing votes.
Meanwhile, Trump and Republicans in Congress are turning a blind eye to the real threats facing our democracy: election fraud, and foreign interference.
In 2018, a Republican operative stole votes from Democrats in a North Carolina congressional race with a quote, “coordinated, unlawful, and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme.” After the ballots were counted, the Republican candidate appeared to have won by about 900 votes. But the fraud was so glaring that the state board of elections refused to certify the results and called for a special election.
The other real threat is foreign interference in our elections, as Russia did in 2016.
We now know for a fact that Trump is encouraging foreign leaders to interfere in our elections — asking the President of Ukraine to investigate his political opponents in exchange for military aid and publicly calling on Russia and China to also interfere.
In the Senate, Mitch McConnell continues to block common-sense legislation to protect our elections against future foreign interference, such as requiring all voting machines to have backup paper ballots and imposing automatic sanctions for nations that interfere in elections. To have safe and secure elections in 2020 and beyond, we need to pass this legislation.
The next time you hear Trump and his enablers claim widespread voter fraud, know the truth. Their lies are intended to make it harder for millions of Americans to vote, while they ignore the real threats to our democracy.
More Students Are Voting — But Republicans Are Trying to Get in Their Way
BY Candice Bernd, Truthout
PUBLISHED November 25, 2019
Students at the historically Black Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas, lost their on-campus polling place this semester after the Republican-dominated state legislature outlawed polling places that do not stay open for the entire 12-day, early-voting period — commonly referred to as “pop-up” polls. The new law took effect in September, and Huston-Tillotson students who voted on November 5 had to trek over to the Austin Public Library’s Carver Branch a half-mile away.
“The way I see it is disenfranchisement upon students of color,” says Jared Breckenridge, a senior majoring in education and the former president of the university’s NAACP chapter. The loss of the campus polling place, he says, comes on top of other barriers Huston-Tillotson students regularly face as they navigate the state’s voter ID law, which doesn’t allow them to use their student ID cards to cast a ballot.
The university’s NAACP regularly organizes student registration and education efforts on campus, and is working on formulating what its new voter engagement strategy will look like now with the loss of the school’s polling place, Breckenridge says.
Along with Huston-Tillotson’s polling place, Austin Community College, which has a diverse student body of 72,000 mostly low-income students, lost polling places across nine of its 11 campuses. Other campuses across the state also took major hits, with six polling places shuttered at colleges in Fort Worth, and two shuttered in the border town of Brownsville.
It’s not only happening in Texas. Republican lawmakers across the country are erecting new barriers to keep students from the voting booth precisely because young people, who lean heavily to the left, are beginning to flex their electoral power in force: College student turnout more than doubled from 2014 to 2018, according to numbers tracked by Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy & Higher Education.
Issues like the climate emergency and Trump’s attacks on vulnerable communities motivated 40.3 percent of 10 million students tracked by Tufts to vote during the 2018 midterm election, surpassing even the overall increase in the national turnout rate. With 20 million students enrolled at colleges and universities across the U.S., this young and diverse population is emerging as a crucial voting bloc that could potentially determine the outcome of the 2020 general election.
Republican lawmakers are taking these numbers seriously. In response, they are impeding voting eligibility for out-of-state students, outlawing pop-up and early voting sites, and enacting increasingly strict requirements on student IDs under the guise of preventing “electoral fraud” (which is practically nonexistent) in Republican-controlled, presidential battleground states.
Republicans in Texas argue their new ban on pop-up polls is intended to prevent abuse in school bond elections. Voting rights advocates, however, point out that the new law was crafted just broadly enough to outlaw the routine practice of moving polling places to reach as many voters as possible during the early voting period.
In the broader right-wing effort to keep poor people, people of color, immigrants, and incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people from the ballot, students are just the latest population to become a target of increased suppression efforts.
Voting Barriers Spread Ahead of 2020
Florida is adopting Texas’s strategy: The state legislature reinstated a 2014 ban on early-voting sites at state universities this year after a federal court overturned the ban in 2018. Republicans there effectively skirted the court’s ruling by adding a clause into a new elections law requiring densely packed campus voting sites to offer “sufficient non-permitted parking.”
In New Hampshire, where six in 10 college students come from outside the state, a Republican-backed law now requires newly registered voters who drive to secure expensive New Hampshire driver’s licenses and auto registrations. (Students who don’t drive can still obtain a state ID without these requirements.)
Republicans in North Carolina and Wisconsin are cracking down on student IDs. Wisconsin now requires student IDs to have signatures in order to function as voter identification, even as many schools are removing such signatures as they issue updated IDs that also serve as debit cards and dorm room keys. The IDs must expire within two years in order to be used for voter identification, but most college IDs expire in four. Even IDs that meet these stringent standards aren’t enough: Students must also show proof of enrollment in their educational institution before being allowed to vote.
After the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down North Carolina’s voter ID law as racially discriminatory in 2016, Republicans enacted a voter ID law last year that allowed student IDs but mandated that universities attest under penalty of perjury that their ID cards are issued only after a student’s citizenship status, Social Security number and birthday have been verified. A later revision eliminated the mention of perjury, but confusion remains over the law’s new requirement that schools submit “documentation satisfactory to the State Board of Elections,” proving that the ID requirements have been met.
Iowa recently passed a voter ID law that excludes student IDs while imposing new restrictions and requirements on registration, early voting and absentee voting. Arkansas codified its voter ID requirements in the state’s constitution during the 2018 elections. Lastly, Arizona recently passed a new law that extends its voter ID requirements, which exclude student IDs, to early voting.
But these new restrictions aren’t being enacted without a fight. Back in Texas, state Democrats and the Democratic campaign arms for the U.S. House and Senate are suing the state over its move to end temporary polling places, arguing the new law is unconstitutional because it discriminates against young voters.
“It’s not the first time we’ve seen a tactic like this used against us on this campus,” Huston-Tillotson’s Breckenridge says. “We’re just going to have to fight against it.” And that’s exactly what many students are doing.
Students Surmount Suppression Efforts
Young people on college campuses are finding creative ways to get around these barriers and register more of their peers in advance of the 2020 election. At the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, the nonpartisan voter education group TX Votes, which doesn’t engage in advocacy work, has vastly increased turnout through its registration efforts by engaging dozens of student organizations and professors. According to a Tufts report, undergraduate turnout at UT increased from 17.6 percent in 2014 to 54.8 percent during the 2018 midterm election — one of the largest turnout increases at any university in the nation.
Kassie Phebillo, a political communications Ph.D. student at UT and coordinator of TX Votes said the organization, in coalition with other student groups, has registered more than 5,000 UT students so far this year. The group’s student registrars canvassed more than 200 classrooms during this month’s early voting period, reaching out to professors directly for an invitation. They also make sure to hit on-campus events and campus move-in dates.
“We have this goal of student organizations across campus creating a tradition around voting, so that they do the same thing for every election, and that’s something that they know they’re going to do together, because we know we just have to get people into that habit of voting,” Phebillo tells Truthout.
The ball really got rolling in 2016, she says, when the organization grew to about 20 members, reflecting a larger national trend in student turnout and engagement in the electoral process. This year, she says, the group has ballooned to 62 members. “We were shocked. We were actually really not prepared for that,” Phebillo says of the explosion in interest.
UT’s two polling sites are permanent, meaning they operate for the entirety of the early voting period and on Election Day, so the campus wasn’t impacted by the new ban on pop-up polls. Still, Phebillo says she has encountered problems at the polls before, thanks to the state’s ID law. TX Votes aims to help students figure out the ID process ahead of voting.
The group’s tight partnership with Travis County election officials has made all the difference in its success rates. The county tax assessor, who oversees voter registration, and the county clerk provide the group every assistance they can. Their support helped UT students win a second on-campus polling site in March of 2018. County officials even hold deputy registrar trainings on campus for the group’s organizers.
“The open communication that we have with their office and also with the county elections office is super helpful,” Phebillo says. “So, if something weird does happen at a polling location, I can email our county clerk and say, ‘Hey, I want you to know this happened,’ … and then the problem gets fixed immediately.”
Phebillo says the group hopes to work with other universities in the county to potentially facilitate a space for students from other campuses to vote at UT’s permanent polling spots. The idea is still in its beginning stages, Phebillo says, but with enough backing, could make a difference as mobile polling places are shuttered across the state. “We can certainly make our campus a more welcoming space to other college students if we can figure out how to get them to us,” she says.
Moreover, TX Votes is networking with universities and colleges in other states through a network of national organizations that provide funds, share information and help students develop their voter engagement plans. The network is already paying off, Phebillo says: A new student voter education group at the University of Oklahoma is adopting the TX Votes model.
“We’re incredibly effective at what we’re doing, … where we just understand the law incredibly well, make sure no one’s breaking it, and still find ways to turn out students to vote,” Phebillo says.
A robust student turnout could easily tip the scales in favor of Democrats in many close contests throughout the country, including in states like Texas where Republican control is beginning to erode. In the 2018 U.S. Senate race in Texas, Rep. Beto O’Rourke performed best in counties with a high percentage of young voters, whose turnout in the state tripled between 2014 and 2018. UT’s registration efforts could represent just the beginning of a student engagement model that could eventually help unseat entrenched Republican stalwarts like Sen. Ted Cruz, as O’Rourke’s close challenge shows.
Other close contests across the country could be determined by the population of a single college or university alone. Donald Trump carried the state of Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes; if more than 170,000 University of Wisconsin students voted en masse in 2020, they could make an election-deciding impact. North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper was elected in 2016 by about 10,000 votes in a state with nearly 500,000 undergraduates. New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan was likewise elected in 2016 by just 1,017 votes over her Republican rival, incumbent Kelly Ayotte.
High school students could also make a significant dent in such contests, but likewise find themselves locked out of the process: Texas doesn’t allow high school students to register to vote until two months before their 18th birthday, for instance, even though many other states allow students to preregister at 16 or 17, and vote in primaries if they turn 18 by Election Day. Moreover, while Texas law requires high school teachers to distribute voter registration forms to their students, that requirement is simply bypassed by most of the state’s secondary schools.
For advocates like Phebillo, the solution is simple, even if a state’s voting requirements are complex and difficult. “If we treated young people as the smart and driven individuals that many of them are, they wouldn’t kind of rebel against voting in the first place,” she said. “I like to think that we’re seeing that start to happen, where people are starting to give the voter back their agency in the process.”
“The way I see it is disenfranchisement upon students of color,” says Jared Breckenridge, a senior majoring in education and the former president of the university’s NAACP chapter. The loss of the campus polling place, he says, comes on top of other barriers Huston-Tillotson students regularly face as they navigate the state’s voter ID law, which doesn’t allow them to use their student ID cards to cast a ballot.
The university’s NAACP regularly organizes student registration and education efforts on campus, and is working on formulating what its new voter engagement strategy will look like now with the loss of the school’s polling place, Breckenridge says.
Along with Huston-Tillotson’s polling place, Austin Community College, which has a diverse student body of 72,000 mostly low-income students, lost polling places across nine of its 11 campuses. Other campuses across the state also took major hits, with six polling places shuttered at colleges in Fort Worth, and two shuttered in the border town of Brownsville.
It’s not only happening in Texas. Republican lawmakers across the country are erecting new barriers to keep students from the voting booth precisely because young people, who lean heavily to the left, are beginning to flex their electoral power in force: College student turnout more than doubled from 2014 to 2018, according to numbers tracked by Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy & Higher Education.
Issues like the climate emergency and Trump’s attacks on vulnerable communities motivated 40.3 percent of 10 million students tracked by Tufts to vote during the 2018 midterm election, surpassing even the overall increase in the national turnout rate. With 20 million students enrolled at colleges and universities across the U.S., this young and diverse population is emerging as a crucial voting bloc that could potentially determine the outcome of the 2020 general election.
Republican lawmakers are taking these numbers seriously. In response, they are impeding voting eligibility for out-of-state students, outlawing pop-up and early voting sites, and enacting increasingly strict requirements on student IDs under the guise of preventing “electoral fraud” (which is practically nonexistent) in Republican-controlled, presidential battleground states.
Republicans in Texas argue their new ban on pop-up polls is intended to prevent abuse in school bond elections. Voting rights advocates, however, point out that the new law was crafted just broadly enough to outlaw the routine practice of moving polling places to reach as many voters as possible during the early voting period.
In the broader right-wing effort to keep poor people, people of color, immigrants, and incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people from the ballot, students are just the latest population to become a target of increased suppression efforts.
Voting Barriers Spread Ahead of 2020
Florida is adopting Texas’s strategy: The state legislature reinstated a 2014 ban on early-voting sites at state universities this year after a federal court overturned the ban in 2018. Republicans there effectively skirted the court’s ruling by adding a clause into a new elections law requiring densely packed campus voting sites to offer “sufficient non-permitted parking.”
In New Hampshire, where six in 10 college students come from outside the state, a Republican-backed law now requires newly registered voters who drive to secure expensive New Hampshire driver’s licenses and auto registrations. (Students who don’t drive can still obtain a state ID without these requirements.)
Republicans in North Carolina and Wisconsin are cracking down on student IDs. Wisconsin now requires student IDs to have signatures in order to function as voter identification, even as many schools are removing such signatures as they issue updated IDs that also serve as debit cards and dorm room keys. The IDs must expire within two years in order to be used for voter identification, but most college IDs expire in four. Even IDs that meet these stringent standards aren’t enough: Students must also show proof of enrollment in their educational institution before being allowed to vote.
After the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down North Carolina’s voter ID law as racially discriminatory in 2016, Republicans enacted a voter ID law last year that allowed student IDs but mandated that universities attest under penalty of perjury that their ID cards are issued only after a student’s citizenship status, Social Security number and birthday have been verified. A later revision eliminated the mention of perjury, but confusion remains over the law’s new requirement that schools submit “documentation satisfactory to the State Board of Elections,” proving that the ID requirements have been met.
Iowa recently passed a voter ID law that excludes student IDs while imposing new restrictions and requirements on registration, early voting and absentee voting. Arkansas codified its voter ID requirements in the state’s constitution during the 2018 elections. Lastly, Arizona recently passed a new law that extends its voter ID requirements, which exclude student IDs, to early voting.
But these new restrictions aren’t being enacted without a fight. Back in Texas, state Democrats and the Democratic campaign arms for the U.S. House and Senate are suing the state over its move to end temporary polling places, arguing the new law is unconstitutional because it discriminates against young voters.
“It’s not the first time we’ve seen a tactic like this used against us on this campus,” Huston-Tillotson’s Breckenridge says. “We’re just going to have to fight against it.” And that’s exactly what many students are doing.
Students Surmount Suppression Efforts
Young people on college campuses are finding creative ways to get around these barriers and register more of their peers in advance of the 2020 election. At the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, the nonpartisan voter education group TX Votes, which doesn’t engage in advocacy work, has vastly increased turnout through its registration efforts by engaging dozens of student organizations and professors. According to a Tufts report, undergraduate turnout at UT increased from 17.6 percent in 2014 to 54.8 percent during the 2018 midterm election — one of the largest turnout increases at any university in the nation.
Kassie Phebillo, a political communications Ph.D. student at UT and coordinator of TX Votes said the organization, in coalition with other student groups, has registered more than 5,000 UT students so far this year. The group’s student registrars canvassed more than 200 classrooms during this month’s early voting period, reaching out to professors directly for an invitation. They also make sure to hit on-campus events and campus move-in dates.
“We have this goal of student organizations across campus creating a tradition around voting, so that they do the same thing for every election, and that’s something that they know they’re going to do together, because we know we just have to get people into that habit of voting,” Phebillo tells Truthout.
The ball really got rolling in 2016, she says, when the organization grew to about 20 members, reflecting a larger national trend in student turnout and engagement in the electoral process. This year, she says, the group has ballooned to 62 members. “We were shocked. We were actually really not prepared for that,” Phebillo says of the explosion in interest.
UT’s two polling sites are permanent, meaning they operate for the entirety of the early voting period and on Election Day, so the campus wasn’t impacted by the new ban on pop-up polls. Still, Phebillo says she has encountered problems at the polls before, thanks to the state’s ID law. TX Votes aims to help students figure out the ID process ahead of voting.
The group’s tight partnership with Travis County election officials has made all the difference in its success rates. The county tax assessor, who oversees voter registration, and the county clerk provide the group every assistance they can. Their support helped UT students win a second on-campus polling site in March of 2018. County officials even hold deputy registrar trainings on campus for the group’s organizers.
“The open communication that we have with their office and also with the county elections office is super helpful,” Phebillo says. “So, if something weird does happen at a polling location, I can email our county clerk and say, ‘Hey, I want you to know this happened,’ … and then the problem gets fixed immediately.”
Phebillo says the group hopes to work with other universities in the county to potentially facilitate a space for students from other campuses to vote at UT’s permanent polling spots. The idea is still in its beginning stages, Phebillo says, but with enough backing, could make a difference as mobile polling places are shuttered across the state. “We can certainly make our campus a more welcoming space to other college students if we can figure out how to get them to us,” she says.
Moreover, TX Votes is networking with universities and colleges in other states through a network of national organizations that provide funds, share information and help students develop their voter engagement plans. The network is already paying off, Phebillo says: A new student voter education group at the University of Oklahoma is adopting the TX Votes model.
“We’re incredibly effective at what we’re doing, … where we just understand the law incredibly well, make sure no one’s breaking it, and still find ways to turn out students to vote,” Phebillo says.
A robust student turnout could easily tip the scales in favor of Democrats in many close contests throughout the country, including in states like Texas where Republican control is beginning to erode. In the 2018 U.S. Senate race in Texas, Rep. Beto O’Rourke performed best in counties with a high percentage of young voters, whose turnout in the state tripled between 2014 and 2018. UT’s registration efforts could represent just the beginning of a student engagement model that could eventually help unseat entrenched Republican stalwarts like Sen. Ted Cruz, as O’Rourke’s close challenge shows.
Other close contests across the country could be determined by the population of a single college or university alone. Donald Trump carried the state of Wisconsin by fewer than 23,000 votes; if more than 170,000 University of Wisconsin students voted en masse in 2020, they could make an election-deciding impact. North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper was elected in 2016 by about 10,000 votes in a state with nearly 500,000 undergraduates. New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan was likewise elected in 2016 by just 1,017 votes over her Republican rival, incumbent Kelly Ayotte.
High school students could also make a significant dent in such contests, but likewise find themselves locked out of the process: Texas doesn’t allow high school students to register to vote until two months before their 18th birthday, for instance, even though many other states allow students to preregister at 16 or 17, and vote in primaries if they turn 18 by Election Day. Moreover, while Texas law requires high school teachers to distribute voter registration forms to their students, that requirement is simply bypassed by most of the state’s secondary schools.
For advocates like Phebillo, the solution is simple, even if a state’s voting requirements are complex and difficult. “If we treated young people as the smart and driven individuals that many of them are, they wouldn’t kind of rebel against voting in the first place,” she said. “I like to think that we’re seeing that start to happen, where people are starting to give the voter back their agency in the process.”
The Way America Votes Is Broken. In One Rural County, a Nonprofit Showed a Way Forward.
In Mississippi last week, a seamless performance by a new set of voting machines took place amid widespread anxiety about election integrity.
by Jessica Huseman - pro publica
Nov. 12, 5 a.m. EST
ACKERMAN, Miss. — Choctaw County’s election centers opened at 7 a.m. last Tuesday, and voters were greeted by poll workers who’d just set up brand-new voting machines.
“If you need any help, just holler,” poll worker Albert Friddle told a voter as he walked her through the new system.
She didn’t holler. Using a machine the size of a briefcase, she selected her choices, printed and double-checked her ballot, and dropped it into a secured blue box provided by the county.
Indeed, the day went without anyone hollering.
“Everything went just fine,” said Amy Burdine, Choctaw County circuit clerk. “Just as expected.”
The scene in Mississippi, if modest in its particulars, was seen by some as a telling moment at a time of great anxiety about the accuracy and security of the nation’s voting systems.
Mississippi is one of only a few states in the country to allow the use of voting machines that have not been certified by federal authorities, and the state has no certification process of its own. As a result, the machines at work for the first time in Choctaw County last week were built by VotingWorks — a small nonprofit organization founded by Ben Adida and Matt Pasternack. Adida and Pasternack selected the state both for its regulatory environment and because many counties in the state continue to use paperless voting systems, allowing the company, Adida said, to “very quickly improve the security of voting in Mississippi by reintroducing paper.”
The machines, VotingWorks said, were inexpensive to make, easy to fix and no problem to set up and take down. The hope, the organization said, was to produce shorter lines and more reliable results, a wish that seemed realized on Nov. 5.
“To be on the ground floor of something like this as one of the poorest counties in the state, that’s pretty exciting,” said Wayne McLeod, an election commissioner in Choctaw County.
For VotingWorks and the election officials in Mississippi, the fact that the machines had not been federally certified was a plus, not a risk. Set up nearly two decades ago to try and improve the reliability of voting systems, the federal certification process is today seen by many as an impediment to the kind of technological progress urgently needed in the field.
The process — overseen by the federal Election Assistance Commission — is both lengthy and costly. And the long track record over the years of election scandals and controversies makes clear it hasn’t been all that effective.
“Certification can be a double-edged sword,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “On the one hand, we want and need minimum standards for access and integrity in our voting machines. But on the other hand, certification can be a significant barrier to innovation.”
Experts and election officials across the country have argued that the certification process has helped the small handful of major voting systems companies to dominate without a great incentive to invest in more effective and trustworthy technology.
Last Tuesday, machines made by ES&S, the nation’s largest voting machine company, were at the center of yet another controversy.
In Northampton County, Pennsylvania, voters suffered through long lines only to learn that the voting results were severely inaccurate, forcing a count of paper ballots.
“I’m shaking here. I have no idea if these numbers are right,” Lee Snover, head of the Northampton County Republican Party, told local media last week. The county executive described the situation as a “three-alarm, raging fire.”
The ES&S machines deployed in Northampton County went through more than two years of development and testing before the episode on Election Day. ES&S did not respond to requests for comment or written questions on how it plans to proceed in Northampton.
Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure said that it may be several weeks before the cause of the problem is determined. “It wasn’t great,” he said. “We must fix it.”
In an interview last month, Ben Hovland — vice chairman of the federal voting assistance agency — recognized that the certification process was often too slow to spark innovation. The standards are currently being updated (a process that has dragged on since 2015), which he says is allowing the agency to rethink a variety of issues.
“I think it’s a great time to really step back and look at the process as a whole and see if there are ways that we can make it better make it more efficient,” he said.
Adida and Pasternack, the VotingWorks officials, said its machines were first tested in Mississippi in a single precinct in Choctaw County during the state’s primaries, monitoring for problems and features that confused voters and poll workers. After the initial trial and a second user test at a retirees potluck lunch, the county election commissioners enthusiastically allowed the company to test the machines countywide during the general election on Tuesday.
“When the other commissioners saw these machines, they said, ‘We want these in November,’” said McLeod, the Choctaw County election commissioner.
VotingWorks machines are housed in a black case, light and easily carried by poll workers, many of whom can be older. The case contains a simple touch-screen tablet that can be purchased off the shelf and that has custom software installed on it. Voters are given a card by a poll worker that has a chip in it loaded with the appropriate ballot, and they install it in a card reader so that their ballot pops up on the touch-screen device. When they finish, they take the card to a separate station and print the ballot. The printing station erases the data on the card, and the voter reviews the ballot for accuracy before inserting it into a thick blue cloth ballot box that can be sealed.
Unlike most voting machines, they did not come with a stand and are meant to be propped up on tables. At polling places in Choctaw County — mostly volunteer fire stations — the machines were sitting on top of folding tables. In others, they were on desks. The machines took poll workers less than two minutes to fully construct, shortening lines and keeping voters calm. Poll workers uniformly said they loved this feature, as it made the machines easier to maneuver and take down.
Adida said the company hasn’t ignored existing standards. “We’ve looked at the aspects of certification that we think are meaningful,” he said.
“The certification process would not have helped us with building something that works for poll workers,” said Adida, who said VotingWorks set out to build a product that poll workers with little training could manage securely and set up easily.
Adida and Pasternack recognize that there is justified trepidation around proceeding with machines that haven’t been formally certified, but they said that they are confident that their process will result in a more secure, affordable and user-friendly machine.
“I’ve never seen any technology product built that’s great for users if the users don’t get to touch it for the first two years of development,” Pasternack said.
“If you need any help, just holler,” poll worker Albert Friddle told a voter as he walked her through the new system.
She didn’t holler. Using a machine the size of a briefcase, she selected her choices, printed and double-checked her ballot, and dropped it into a secured blue box provided by the county.
Indeed, the day went without anyone hollering.
“Everything went just fine,” said Amy Burdine, Choctaw County circuit clerk. “Just as expected.”
The scene in Mississippi, if modest in its particulars, was seen by some as a telling moment at a time of great anxiety about the accuracy and security of the nation’s voting systems.
Mississippi is one of only a few states in the country to allow the use of voting machines that have not been certified by federal authorities, and the state has no certification process of its own. As a result, the machines at work for the first time in Choctaw County last week were built by VotingWorks — a small nonprofit organization founded by Ben Adida and Matt Pasternack. Adida and Pasternack selected the state both for its regulatory environment and because many counties in the state continue to use paperless voting systems, allowing the company, Adida said, to “very quickly improve the security of voting in Mississippi by reintroducing paper.”
The machines, VotingWorks said, were inexpensive to make, easy to fix and no problem to set up and take down. The hope, the organization said, was to produce shorter lines and more reliable results, a wish that seemed realized on Nov. 5.
“To be on the ground floor of something like this as one of the poorest counties in the state, that’s pretty exciting,” said Wayne McLeod, an election commissioner in Choctaw County.
For VotingWorks and the election officials in Mississippi, the fact that the machines had not been federally certified was a plus, not a risk. Set up nearly two decades ago to try and improve the reliability of voting systems, the federal certification process is today seen by many as an impediment to the kind of technological progress urgently needed in the field.
The process — overseen by the federal Election Assistance Commission — is both lengthy and costly. And the long track record over the years of election scandals and controversies makes clear it hasn’t been all that effective.
“Certification can be a double-edged sword,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “On the one hand, we want and need minimum standards for access and integrity in our voting machines. But on the other hand, certification can be a significant barrier to innovation.”
Experts and election officials across the country have argued that the certification process has helped the small handful of major voting systems companies to dominate without a great incentive to invest in more effective and trustworthy technology.
Last Tuesday, machines made by ES&S, the nation’s largest voting machine company, were at the center of yet another controversy.
In Northampton County, Pennsylvania, voters suffered through long lines only to learn that the voting results were severely inaccurate, forcing a count of paper ballots.
“I’m shaking here. I have no idea if these numbers are right,” Lee Snover, head of the Northampton County Republican Party, told local media last week. The county executive described the situation as a “three-alarm, raging fire.”
The ES&S machines deployed in Northampton County went through more than two years of development and testing before the episode on Election Day. ES&S did not respond to requests for comment or written questions on how it plans to proceed in Northampton.
Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure said that it may be several weeks before the cause of the problem is determined. “It wasn’t great,” he said. “We must fix it.”
In an interview last month, Ben Hovland — vice chairman of the federal voting assistance agency — recognized that the certification process was often too slow to spark innovation. The standards are currently being updated (a process that has dragged on since 2015), which he says is allowing the agency to rethink a variety of issues.
“I think it’s a great time to really step back and look at the process as a whole and see if there are ways that we can make it better make it more efficient,” he said.
Adida and Pasternack, the VotingWorks officials, said its machines were first tested in Mississippi in a single precinct in Choctaw County during the state’s primaries, monitoring for problems and features that confused voters and poll workers. After the initial trial and a second user test at a retirees potluck lunch, the county election commissioners enthusiastically allowed the company to test the machines countywide during the general election on Tuesday.
“When the other commissioners saw these machines, they said, ‘We want these in November,’” said McLeod, the Choctaw County election commissioner.
VotingWorks machines are housed in a black case, light and easily carried by poll workers, many of whom can be older. The case contains a simple touch-screen tablet that can be purchased off the shelf and that has custom software installed on it. Voters are given a card by a poll worker that has a chip in it loaded with the appropriate ballot, and they install it in a card reader so that their ballot pops up on the touch-screen device. When they finish, they take the card to a separate station and print the ballot. The printing station erases the data on the card, and the voter reviews the ballot for accuracy before inserting it into a thick blue cloth ballot box that can be sealed.
Unlike most voting machines, they did not come with a stand and are meant to be propped up on tables. At polling places in Choctaw County — mostly volunteer fire stations — the machines were sitting on top of folding tables. In others, they were on desks. The machines took poll workers less than two minutes to fully construct, shortening lines and keeping voters calm. Poll workers uniformly said they loved this feature, as it made the machines easier to maneuver and take down.
Adida said the company hasn’t ignored existing standards. “We’ve looked at the aspects of certification that we think are meaningful,” he said.
“The certification process would not have helped us with building something that works for poll workers,” said Adida, who said VotingWorks set out to build a product that poll workers with little training could manage securely and set up easily.
Adida and Pasternack recognize that there is justified trepidation around proceeding with machines that haven’t been formally certified, but they said that they are confident that their process will result in a more secure, affordable and user-friendly machine.
“I’ve never seen any technology product built that’s great for users if the users don’t get to touch it for the first two years of development,” Pasternack said.
today's iq test!!!
Off-year Election Day in Kentucky, Virginia and elsewhere: Big impact, bad for democracy
Elections in odd-numbered years often mean abysmal turnout. So results this week could measure enthusiasm
SOPHIA TESFAYE - salon
NOVEMBER 5, 2019 11:00AM (UTC)
Nearly every state in the union is set to vote on Tuesday. If you haven't heard about it, you're not alone.
Voters in Kentucky and Mississippi will decide on statewide offices like governor, attorney general and secretary of state. In Virginia, the entire state legislature is up for election. Democrats in New Jersey are seeking to retain their supermajority in the lower house of the state legislature, while special elections in Texas could bring Democrats even closer to taking control of the state House for the first time in modern history. These off-year elections for state legislature will play a crucial role in the redistricting that will follow the 2020 Census.
In San Francisco, there’s a high-profile four-way race for district attorney. New York City’s ballot includes ranked-choice voting, an election system in which voters mark not only their first choice in a race, but also who they’d prefer to win if their top candidate doesn’t make the cut.
Voters in Tucson may decide to make their hometown Arizona’s first so-called sanctuary city. And progressive cities like Seattle, Boulder, Colorado, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, will vote on zoning laws that have exacerbated the growing housing crisis. Tuesday will also decides whether at least 140,000 Americans have their voting rights restored.
With such impactful measures and offices on the ballot across the country, however, the prevailing coverage leading up to Tuesday’s election has barely existed, ignoring most of this in favor of polls and predictions about the national election in 2020 — just under a year away. Off-year elections can have high stakes, but it has long been evident that when compared to presidential and even midterm elections, they result in far lower voter turnout across the board. Yet most U.S. cities continue to hold local elections separate from federal and state elections, which tends to mean that local representation is less demographically reflective of the electorate. The voting population already skews older and whiter than the population as a whole, and this is even more disproportionate in off-year elections.
On Friday, a federal district court declined to stop the country’s most egregious example of such disenfranchisement. Mississippi has the largest population of African American voters in the nation, yet no African American has won statewide office there in more than 130 years. That’s because of a Jim Crow-era provision that makes Mississippi the only state in the nation where candidates for statewide office must win a majority of the popular vote and a majority of the House districts in the state. If no candidate manages that, the Republican-controlled state House would pick the winner.
While Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood, the only statewide elected Democrat in Mississippi, is running a surprisingly strong race to replace a retiring Republican governor, he has little chance of carrying a majority of House seats. So even if Hood were to win the most votes statewide, the GOP-controlled House could still install Republican candidate Tate Reeves as governor. Black people are 37 percent of Mississippi's population and overwhelmingly vote Democratic. But thanks to the widely dispersed white majority, which overwhelmingly votes Republican, it’s all but impossible for a Democrat to win a statewide election.
In Kentucky 300,000 voters, including more than one in four of all African-American voters, can't vote in Tuesday's closely-watched governor’s race because of past felony convictions. Republican Gov. Matt Bevin, who is up for re-election against Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear, recently reversed a policy restoring rights to nonviolent ex-offenders. The two candidates are tied in the latest Mason-Dixon survey, and several polls have shown that Bevin is deeply unpopular in the Bluegrass State — despite his evident affinity for President Trump. Beshear is the son of Kentucky’s last Democratic governor, but this disenfranchisement could be enough for Republican defeat in a state, where Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 30 points in 2016.
In Texas, Democrats need to flip just nine seats to take control of Texas' state House in 2020. One big reason for that was Beto O'Rourke's unsuccessful 2018 Senate run, which dramatically increased turnout and helped beat back GOP voter suppression efforts. A special election pits one Democrat on the same ballot as six Republicans vying for the same state House seat. The race will result in a likely runoff, but if Democrat Eliz Markowitz finishes in the top two today it could prove critical to stopping the GOP from gerrymandering the congressional map after the 2020 census.
Heading into 2020, Tuesday’s elections could dramatically help Democrats. But low turnout may prove to be worse for democracy than the long lines we are almost guaranteed to see next year.
Voters in Kentucky and Mississippi will decide on statewide offices like governor, attorney general and secretary of state. In Virginia, the entire state legislature is up for election. Democrats in New Jersey are seeking to retain their supermajority in the lower house of the state legislature, while special elections in Texas could bring Democrats even closer to taking control of the state House for the first time in modern history. These off-year elections for state legislature will play a crucial role in the redistricting that will follow the 2020 Census.
In San Francisco, there’s a high-profile four-way race for district attorney. New York City’s ballot includes ranked-choice voting, an election system in which voters mark not only their first choice in a race, but also who they’d prefer to win if their top candidate doesn’t make the cut.
Voters in Tucson may decide to make their hometown Arizona’s first so-called sanctuary city. And progressive cities like Seattle, Boulder, Colorado, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, will vote on zoning laws that have exacerbated the growing housing crisis. Tuesday will also decides whether at least 140,000 Americans have their voting rights restored.
With such impactful measures and offices on the ballot across the country, however, the prevailing coverage leading up to Tuesday’s election has barely existed, ignoring most of this in favor of polls and predictions about the national election in 2020 — just under a year away. Off-year elections can have high stakes, but it has long been evident that when compared to presidential and even midterm elections, they result in far lower voter turnout across the board. Yet most U.S. cities continue to hold local elections separate from federal and state elections, which tends to mean that local representation is less demographically reflective of the electorate. The voting population already skews older and whiter than the population as a whole, and this is even more disproportionate in off-year elections.
On Friday, a federal district court declined to stop the country’s most egregious example of such disenfranchisement. Mississippi has the largest population of African American voters in the nation, yet no African American has won statewide office there in more than 130 years. That’s because of a Jim Crow-era provision that makes Mississippi the only state in the nation where candidates for statewide office must win a majority of the popular vote and a majority of the House districts in the state. If no candidate manages that, the Republican-controlled state House would pick the winner.
While Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood, the only statewide elected Democrat in Mississippi, is running a surprisingly strong race to replace a retiring Republican governor, he has little chance of carrying a majority of House seats. So even if Hood were to win the most votes statewide, the GOP-controlled House could still install Republican candidate Tate Reeves as governor. Black people are 37 percent of Mississippi's population and overwhelmingly vote Democratic. But thanks to the widely dispersed white majority, which overwhelmingly votes Republican, it’s all but impossible for a Democrat to win a statewide election.
In Kentucky 300,000 voters, including more than one in four of all African-American voters, can't vote in Tuesday's closely-watched governor’s race because of past felony convictions. Republican Gov. Matt Bevin, who is up for re-election against Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear, recently reversed a policy restoring rights to nonviolent ex-offenders. The two candidates are tied in the latest Mason-Dixon survey, and several polls have shown that Bevin is deeply unpopular in the Bluegrass State — despite his evident affinity for President Trump. Beshear is the son of Kentucky’s last Democratic governor, but this disenfranchisement could be enough for Republican defeat in a state, where Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 30 points in 2016.
In Texas, Democrats need to flip just nine seats to take control of Texas' state House in 2020. One big reason for that was Beto O'Rourke's unsuccessful 2018 Senate run, which dramatically increased turnout and helped beat back GOP voter suppression efforts. A special election pits one Democrat on the same ballot as six Republicans vying for the same state House seat. The race will result in a likely runoff, but if Democrat Eliz Markowitz finishes in the top two today it could prove critical to stopping the GOP from gerrymandering the congressional map after the 2020 census.
Heading into 2020, Tuesday’s elections could dramatically help Democrats. But low turnout may prove to be worse for democracy than the long lines we are almost guaranteed to see next year.
‘It makes elections fair’: New York to vote on system that may curb polarized politics
Advocates see ranked-choice voting as effective way to ensure winning candidate received true majority of electorate’s support
Lauren Aratani in New York
the guardian
Sat 26 Oct 2019 07.00 EDT
When most Americans cast their ballots, their vote counts for one candidate a race. The person who gets more votes than any other competitor wins, even if they do not get a majority of votes.
But New York City could become the biggest city in the country to change this age-old system altogether. Starting 26 October, voters have the option of switching to ranked-choice voting (RCV). In this scenario, even if someone’s top-choice candidate fails to get enough votes, their vote can still count.
Advocates of RCV see it as an effective way to ensure a winning candidate has received a true majority of the electorate’s support. They argue that it may encourage candidates to run on platforms that appeal to a broader range of people, without any worry of splitting the vote. In an era when Donald Trump failed to win a majority of voters, this could change the way American politicians think of their campaigns.
Under RCV, voters can rank candidates, from one to four if there are four candidates, for example. If no candidate is the top choice of a majority of voters, an “instant runoff” takes place. The candidate with the fewest No 1 votes is eliminated, and their supporters’ votes will automatically go to whoever was listed as their second choice. The process continues until one candidate has a majority of the votes. Voters can opt out of ranking and vote for just one candidate.
“[It] makes our elections more fair. It helps voters hold politicians accountable to all communities, and it saves taxpayers money and voters time,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, a nonpartisan grassroots organization that led the push to get RCV on New York City’s ballot.
If implemented, RCV could address a problem that has long plagued New York City, which is that long lists of candidates will run for the same role. The last election for public advocate – first in line to succeed the mayor – had 17 candidates run. More candidates, despite giving voters multiple options, can lead to the “spoiler effect” – which happens when a vote is split between multiple candidates with similar ideologies, leading to a candidate with an opposing platform to win.
Maine voters saw that during the state’s 2010 gubernatorial race. Paul LePage, a member of the state’s conservative Tea Party movement (who has gone on to say that he was “Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular”), was up against two other major candidates – an independent and a Democrat. LePage won with just over 38% of the vote – 61% of the electorate voted for other candidates.
“There was a political sensibility that said here’s this person who was never terribly popular, wins with two pluralities, extremely extemporaneous governor and candidate, and yet he wins,” said Amy Fried, political science department chair at the University of Maine.
Fried said many voters were upset that LePage won without a majority, which happened again during LePage’s re-election in 2014. Utilizing that anger, good government activists convinced voters that elections did not have to be that way. They introduced RCV to the electorate, a majority of which voted in support of the system during the state’s 2016 election.
RCV was used in Maine congressional races for the first time during the 2018 midterms, and it will be used for the state’s 2020 presidential general election.
In 2018, the system ended up having a huge impact on one US representative in the state. Democrat Jared Golden edged his Republican competitor, incumbent Bruce Poliquin, with RCV. Initially, Poliquin received 46.2% of the vote, while Golden got a close 45.5% of the electorate. The state announced that ranked-choice voting procedures would take place, and over a week later, Golden was announced the winner with get 50.5% of the vote with RCV, while Poliquin received 49.5% of the vote.
In response, Golden filed a lawsuit against the state, testing the constitutionality of RCV. The federal judge Lance Walker dismissed the case, saying that ranked-choice voting “actually encourages first amendment expression” by encouraging third-party and independents to participate in elections.
While RCV is relatively new to the US, it has been largely popular in places that have taken the system up. Australians use RCV to elect members of their House of Representatives, and the system has been used for local elections in Canada, New Zealand and Hong Kong.
Other cities in the US such as San Francisco, Minneapolis and Santa Fe have used RCV in their elections for years, but New York, a city of 8 million people, would still be the largest. The main challenge is getting voters used to a new system.
Lerner said that Common Cause and other advocacy organizations have been trying to educate New York voters on RCV by going to local events and asking people to rank their favorite ice-cream flavor or beer brands. If passed in New York, RCV will be used in local elections beginning in 2021.
“It’s not going to solve everything that people dislike about our election, but I think it is going to address some things that bother New York City voters,” Lerner said.
But New York City could become the biggest city in the country to change this age-old system altogether. Starting 26 October, voters have the option of switching to ranked-choice voting (RCV). In this scenario, even if someone’s top-choice candidate fails to get enough votes, their vote can still count.
Advocates of RCV see it as an effective way to ensure a winning candidate has received a true majority of the electorate’s support. They argue that it may encourage candidates to run on platforms that appeal to a broader range of people, without any worry of splitting the vote. In an era when Donald Trump failed to win a majority of voters, this could change the way American politicians think of their campaigns.
Under RCV, voters can rank candidates, from one to four if there are four candidates, for example. If no candidate is the top choice of a majority of voters, an “instant runoff” takes place. The candidate with the fewest No 1 votes is eliminated, and their supporters’ votes will automatically go to whoever was listed as their second choice. The process continues until one candidate has a majority of the votes. Voters can opt out of ranking and vote for just one candidate.
“[It] makes our elections more fair. It helps voters hold politicians accountable to all communities, and it saves taxpayers money and voters time,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, a nonpartisan grassroots organization that led the push to get RCV on New York City’s ballot.
If implemented, RCV could address a problem that has long plagued New York City, which is that long lists of candidates will run for the same role. The last election for public advocate – first in line to succeed the mayor – had 17 candidates run. More candidates, despite giving voters multiple options, can lead to the “spoiler effect” – which happens when a vote is split between multiple candidates with similar ideologies, leading to a candidate with an opposing platform to win.
Maine voters saw that during the state’s 2010 gubernatorial race. Paul LePage, a member of the state’s conservative Tea Party movement (who has gone on to say that he was “Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular”), was up against two other major candidates – an independent and a Democrat. LePage won with just over 38% of the vote – 61% of the electorate voted for other candidates.
“There was a political sensibility that said here’s this person who was never terribly popular, wins with two pluralities, extremely extemporaneous governor and candidate, and yet he wins,” said Amy Fried, political science department chair at the University of Maine.
Fried said many voters were upset that LePage won without a majority, which happened again during LePage’s re-election in 2014. Utilizing that anger, good government activists convinced voters that elections did not have to be that way. They introduced RCV to the electorate, a majority of which voted in support of the system during the state’s 2016 election.
RCV was used in Maine congressional races for the first time during the 2018 midterms, and it will be used for the state’s 2020 presidential general election.
In 2018, the system ended up having a huge impact on one US representative in the state. Democrat Jared Golden edged his Republican competitor, incumbent Bruce Poliquin, with RCV. Initially, Poliquin received 46.2% of the vote, while Golden got a close 45.5% of the electorate. The state announced that ranked-choice voting procedures would take place, and over a week later, Golden was announced the winner with get 50.5% of the vote with RCV, while Poliquin received 49.5% of the vote.
In response, Golden filed a lawsuit against the state, testing the constitutionality of RCV. The federal judge Lance Walker dismissed the case, saying that ranked-choice voting “actually encourages first amendment expression” by encouraging third-party and independents to participate in elections.
While RCV is relatively new to the US, it has been largely popular in places that have taken the system up. Australians use RCV to elect members of their House of Representatives, and the system has been used for local elections in Canada, New Zealand and Hong Kong.
Other cities in the US such as San Francisco, Minneapolis and Santa Fe have used RCV in their elections for years, but New York, a city of 8 million people, would still be the largest. The main challenge is getting voters used to a new system.
Lerner said that Common Cause and other advocacy organizations have been trying to educate New York voters on RCV by going to local events and asking people to rank their favorite ice-cream flavor or beer brands. If passed in New York, RCV will be used in local elections beginning in 2021.
“It’s not going to solve everything that people dislike about our election, but I think it is going to address some things that bother New York City voters,” Lerner said.
The Long Fight to Use Student IDs to Vote in North Carolina
BY Rebekah Barber, Facing South - truthout
PUBLISHED October 25, 2019
When North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature passed the nation’s most suppressive state voting law in 2013, college students were among the most vocal opponents. They viewed it as discriminatory because it required voters to show identification at the polls but excluded student IDs from the acceptable forms.
The law set off a legal and political fight over using student IDs to vote that’s finally nearing a resolution. Critical deadlines are now looming for the state’s schools in advance of the 2020 election, in which North Carolina voters will have to show an ID to cast a ballot.
The state is among the 35 nationwide with voter ID laws on the books. Of those states, 18 allow voters who lack an acceptable form of ID to sign an affidavit and vote using a provisional ballot. Of the 17 states that reject ballots if the voter lacks acceptable ID, seven do not accept student IDs, including South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. Another five states including Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia have strict voter ID laws but accept all student IDs. And five states — among them Georgia, Kentucky, and North Carolina — accept student IDs if the issuing institutions meet certain requirements.
Three years after North Carolina lawmakers passed the voter ID law that excluded student IDs, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck it down as racially discriminatory. But GOP lawmakers almost immediately began devising a plan to put a new voter ID law on the books through the state constitutional amendment process. Last November, despite a campaign waged against it by voting rights advocates, North Carolina voters passed an amendment that mandated voters show some form of ID when they cast ballots starting in 2020.
Lawmakers released an early draft of the voter ID requirements the following month — and once again students were among those expected to be most impacted. The measure initially banned students at the state’s private colleges from using their student IDs to vote, though that provision was removed from the bill as it moved through the legislature.
However, the version that ultimately passed still presented challenges for both private and public schools. For example, it required that the photo used on the student ID be taken by the university itself, even though many schools allow students to submit their own photos for ID cards. It also mandated that universities submit an attestation letter under penalty of perjury that said the student IDs were issued following a verification of students’ citizenship status, Social Security number, and birthdates.
Many North Carolina schools were unable to meet the requirements. Some schools did not even bother to apply with the state elections board by the March 2019 deadline because they knew they could not qualify. Of the 850 colleges, universities, state and local employers and tribal entities eligible to submit requests to use their IDs for voting, only about 80 did. While all of the 17 schools in the University of North Carolina system applied for approval, only five qualified: Appalachian State, Elizabeth City State, North Carolina Central, North Carolina State, and the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
In response to the confusion and controversy surrounding the student ID requirements for voting, a bipartisan group of North Carolina state House members including two freshmen Democrats and two GOP leaders began working on a remedy earlier this year in the form of House Bill 646. It says the photo on the student ID no longer has to be taken by the school, which must instead detail the process used to attain it. It also strikes the mention of a penalty of perjury but requires the school to submit “documentation satisfactory to the State Board of Elections” that the requirements have been met. The measure passed the state House and Senate overwhelmingly and was signed into law by Gov. Roy Cooper (D) in June.
The law’s deadlines for submitting that documentation are now looming. Schools that did not previously apply to have their student IDs qualify as voter ID have until Oct. 26 to do so, and the state elections board has until Nov. 1 to issue a ruling. Schools that previously applied but had their applications denied — including the 12 schools in the UNC system — have until Nov. 15 to resubmit their applications, and the board has until Dec. 1 to make a decision in those cases.
Students at institutions whose applications are denied will not be able to use their student IDs to vote in 2020. According to Rep. Zack Hawkins, a Durham Democrat and one of the primary sponsors of HB646, over 900,000 students could be affected.
The law set off a legal and political fight over using student IDs to vote that’s finally nearing a resolution. Critical deadlines are now looming for the state’s schools in advance of the 2020 election, in which North Carolina voters will have to show an ID to cast a ballot.
The state is among the 35 nationwide with voter ID laws on the books. Of those states, 18 allow voters who lack an acceptable form of ID to sign an affidavit and vote using a provisional ballot. Of the 17 states that reject ballots if the voter lacks acceptable ID, seven do not accept student IDs, including South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. Another five states including Alabama, Mississippi, and Virginia have strict voter ID laws but accept all student IDs. And five states — among them Georgia, Kentucky, and North Carolina — accept student IDs if the issuing institutions meet certain requirements.
Three years after North Carolina lawmakers passed the voter ID law that excluded student IDs, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck it down as racially discriminatory. But GOP lawmakers almost immediately began devising a plan to put a new voter ID law on the books through the state constitutional amendment process. Last November, despite a campaign waged against it by voting rights advocates, North Carolina voters passed an amendment that mandated voters show some form of ID when they cast ballots starting in 2020.
Lawmakers released an early draft of the voter ID requirements the following month — and once again students were among those expected to be most impacted. The measure initially banned students at the state’s private colleges from using their student IDs to vote, though that provision was removed from the bill as it moved through the legislature.
However, the version that ultimately passed still presented challenges for both private and public schools. For example, it required that the photo used on the student ID be taken by the university itself, even though many schools allow students to submit their own photos for ID cards. It also mandated that universities submit an attestation letter under penalty of perjury that said the student IDs were issued following a verification of students’ citizenship status, Social Security number, and birthdates.
Many North Carolina schools were unable to meet the requirements. Some schools did not even bother to apply with the state elections board by the March 2019 deadline because they knew they could not qualify. Of the 850 colleges, universities, state and local employers and tribal entities eligible to submit requests to use their IDs for voting, only about 80 did. While all of the 17 schools in the University of North Carolina system applied for approval, only five qualified: Appalachian State, Elizabeth City State, North Carolina Central, North Carolina State, and the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
In response to the confusion and controversy surrounding the student ID requirements for voting, a bipartisan group of North Carolina state House members including two freshmen Democrats and two GOP leaders began working on a remedy earlier this year in the form of House Bill 646. It says the photo on the student ID no longer has to be taken by the school, which must instead detail the process used to attain it. It also strikes the mention of a penalty of perjury but requires the school to submit “documentation satisfactory to the State Board of Elections” that the requirements have been met. The measure passed the state House and Senate overwhelmingly and was signed into law by Gov. Roy Cooper (D) in June.
The law’s deadlines for submitting that documentation are now looming. Schools that did not previously apply to have their student IDs qualify as voter ID have until Oct. 26 to do so, and the state elections board has until Nov. 1 to issue a ruling. Schools that previously applied but had their applications denied — including the 12 schools in the UNC system — have until Nov. 15 to resubmit their applications, and the board has until Dec. 1 to make a decision in those cases.
Students at institutions whose applications are denied will not be able to use their student IDs to vote in 2020. According to Rep. Zack Hawkins, a Durham Democrat and one of the primary sponsors of HB646, over 900,000 students could be affected.
Gerrymander guru's secret files: He used racial data to disenfranchise black voters
Former Salon editor David Daley reveals Thomas Hofeller's plans to stop black people and students from voting
IGOR DERYSH - salon
SEPTEMBER 11, 2019 10:00AM (UTC)
Secret files found on a longtime Republican operative’s computer after his death revealed that he compiled racial data to help his party draw new political maps and impose voter ID laws.
Thomas Hofeller, who is considered the master of modern gerrymandering, left behind at least 70,000 files that were found by his estranged daughter after his death in August 2018. Some of those files have already been used to successfully challenge North Carolina’s gerrymander and the Trump administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the census, which Hofeller argued would help “Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”
More files, obtained by former Salon editor David Daley at The New Yorker, show that Hofeller and his race research played a key role in Republican gerrymandering efforts in North Carolina and other states, as well as other efforts intended to make it harder for African-Americans and college students to vote.
Though North Carolina Republicans have argued that their maps discriminate based on partisanship and not race, Hofeller’s files show that he compiled maps with overlays of the black voting-age population by district, suggesting that racial data was a key part of the gerrymander, which is at the center of a years-long legal battle.
The files contradict claims Republicans have long used to defend their maps in court. Republicans had long denied that a congressional-district line that cuts right down the middle of the largest historically black college in the United States, North Carolina A&T State University, was intentionally drawn to dilute the black vote, even though it effectively guaranteed two Republican districts. But Hofeller’s files show that the effort clearly focused on the race of students.
Hofeller created “giant databases that detailed the racial makeup, voting patterns, and residence halls of more than a thousand North Carolina A&T students,” Daley reported. “He also collected similar data that tracked the race, voting patterns, and addresses of tens of thousands of other North Carolina college students. Some spreadsheets have more than fifty different fields with precise racial, gender, and geographic details on thousands of college voters.”
A spreadsheet found on Hofeller’s computer shows that the operative sorted students by the residence halls they lived in along with racial data and voting status information.
Hofeller also had dozens of “intensely detailed studies” of the racial makeup of North Carolina college students that was cross-referenced with driver’s license files to determine whether these students likely had a proper ID to vote, according to the report.
Emails on his computer also show that Hofeller billed North Carolina Republicans tens of thousands of dollars for his work. Federal Election Commission filings also show that the national Republican Party paid Hofeller more than $2 million for his work.
Other files show that Hofeller, a key player in the Trump administration’s push to add a citizenship question to the census, compiled data on the citizen voting-age population in North Carolina, Texas, Arizona and other states going back to 2011. In memos, Hofeller argued that drawing maps based on the number of citizens rather than the population would “clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and help “non-Hispanic whites.”
Hofeller also submitted memos to the Trump administration urging them to justify the census question with the dubious argument that it was necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act. The New Yorker report shows that he also worked for a Massachusetts Republican who wanted to use the Voting Rights Act to turn Boston into a single district, so Republicans could contend for suburban Massachusetts congressional seats. Though Hofeller’s efforts were unsuccessful in Massachusetts, the files show he also compiled data on states like Virginia, Mississippi and Alabama.
Emails found on Hofeller’s computer also show that he advised top Republicans in Florida on gerrymandering effort, despite a state constitutional amendment that bars partisan gerrymandering. Florida officials have denied that Hofeller played any official role in the effort but a state judge later ruled that the Republicans “conducted a stealth redistricting operation that snuck partisan maps into the public process and made a ‘mockery’ of the state’s constitutional amendments,” The New Yorker reported.
The files show that Hofeller also traveled around the country to educate Republicans about redistricting and urged them to push for prison gerrymandering, which allows inmates to be counted as residents of the area where the prison is located, often helping Republican lawmakers.
Hofeller’s emails also show that he grew concerned that his maps would be undone by the anti-Trump wave that followed his election.
“Meanwhile the GOP continues to bury its collective heads in the sand or in other higher places. Trump is only a product to this stupidity,” he wrote to a Republican consultant in 2016. “Do not worry about us in North Carolina in terms of redistricting. Even in the coming political bloodbath we should still maintain majority control of the General Assembly. The Governor cannot veto a redistricting map, so the Democrats hope is that the Obamista judiciary will come to their rescue.”
Last week, a North Carolina court struck down the state’s legislative maps that Hofeller helped create, ruling that they violated the Constitution. The new map had been drawn after the Supreme Court struck down North Carolina's previous map as a racial gerrymander.
The court ruled that Hofeller’s maps “deliberately minimized the effectiveness of the votes of citizens with whom they disagree,” arguing that the map amounted to “viewpoint discrimination” against Democrats and an effort to “retaliate against voters” for voting for Democrats.
The court said that the files on Hofeller’s computer showed evidence of “predominant focus on maximizing Republican partisan advantage in creating the 2017 Plans.”
“The evidence establishes that Dr. Hofeller drew the 2017 Plans very precisely to create as many ‘safe’ Republican districts as possible, so that Republicans would maintain their supermajorities, or at least majorities even in a strong election year for Democrats,” the court said. “Hofeller drew the maps with an intent to preserve Republicans’ control of the House and Senate.”
The court gave state lawmakers two weeks to draw nonpartisan maps. Republicans have sued to try to get a court to seal or destroy the files, arguing that they should remain confidential because they were obtained from his daughter and not from him.
The files could be a treasure trove for voting rights groups as they seek to challenge years of Republican efforts to gerrymander districts in order to gain an unfair advantage, as well as to impose voter ID laws to make it harder for certain populations to vote.
“We’ve already seen that these files have been instrumental in exposing lies around the effort to add a citizenship question to the census and around subverting a court’s order to redraw gerrymandered lines,” Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director of Common Cause, told The New York Times. “The Hofeller files are important because they’re the only thing that will allow the American people to know the truth behind the efforts to rig redistricting and elections.”
The files show only a fraction of the work Hofeller did, which stretches back to the 1980s. Files obtained by The New Yorker show that Hofeller continued to work to help Republicans even after he was diagnosed with lung cancer.
“I still have time to bedevil the Democrats with more redistricting plans before I exit,” he wrote to a friend. “Look my name up on the Internet and you can follow the damage.”
Thomas Hofeller, who is considered the master of modern gerrymandering, left behind at least 70,000 files that were found by his estranged daughter after his death in August 2018. Some of those files have already been used to successfully challenge North Carolina’s gerrymander and the Trump administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the census, which Hofeller argued would help “Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.”
More files, obtained by former Salon editor David Daley at The New Yorker, show that Hofeller and his race research played a key role in Republican gerrymandering efforts in North Carolina and other states, as well as other efforts intended to make it harder for African-Americans and college students to vote.
Though North Carolina Republicans have argued that their maps discriminate based on partisanship and not race, Hofeller’s files show that he compiled maps with overlays of the black voting-age population by district, suggesting that racial data was a key part of the gerrymander, which is at the center of a years-long legal battle.
The files contradict claims Republicans have long used to defend their maps in court. Republicans had long denied that a congressional-district line that cuts right down the middle of the largest historically black college in the United States, North Carolina A&T State University, was intentionally drawn to dilute the black vote, even though it effectively guaranteed two Republican districts. But Hofeller’s files show that the effort clearly focused on the race of students.
Hofeller created “giant databases that detailed the racial makeup, voting patterns, and residence halls of more than a thousand North Carolina A&T students,” Daley reported. “He also collected similar data that tracked the race, voting patterns, and addresses of tens of thousands of other North Carolina college students. Some spreadsheets have more than fifty different fields with precise racial, gender, and geographic details on thousands of college voters.”
A spreadsheet found on Hofeller’s computer shows that the operative sorted students by the residence halls they lived in along with racial data and voting status information.
Hofeller also had dozens of “intensely detailed studies” of the racial makeup of North Carolina college students that was cross-referenced with driver’s license files to determine whether these students likely had a proper ID to vote, according to the report.
Emails on his computer also show that Hofeller billed North Carolina Republicans tens of thousands of dollars for his work. Federal Election Commission filings also show that the national Republican Party paid Hofeller more than $2 million for his work.
Other files show that Hofeller, a key player in the Trump administration’s push to add a citizenship question to the census, compiled data on the citizen voting-age population in North Carolina, Texas, Arizona and other states going back to 2011. In memos, Hofeller argued that drawing maps based on the number of citizens rather than the population would “clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and help “non-Hispanic whites.”
Hofeller also submitted memos to the Trump administration urging them to justify the census question with the dubious argument that it was necessary to enforce the Voting Rights Act. The New Yorker report shows that he also worked for a Massachusetts Republican who wanted to use the Voting Rights Act to turn Boston into a single district, so Republicans could contend for suburban Massachusetts congressional seats. Though Hofeller’s efforts were unsuccessful in Massachusetts, the files show he also compiled data on states like Virginia, Mississippi and Alabama.
Emails found on Hofeller’s computer also show that he advised top Republicans in Florida on gerrymandering effort, despite a state constitutional amendment that bars partisan gerrymandering. Florida officials have denied that Hofeller played any official role in the effort but a state judge later ruled that the Republicans “conducted a stealth redistricting operation that snuck partisan maps into the public process and made a ‘mockery’ of the state’s constitutional amendments,” The New Yorker reported.
The files show that Hofeller also traveled around the country to educate Republicans about redistricting and urged them to push for prison gerrymandering, which allows inmates to be counted as residents of the area where the prison is located, often helping Republican lawmakers.
Hofeller’s emails also show that he grew concerned that his maps would be undone by the anti-Trump wave that followed his election.
“Meanwhile the GOP continues to bury its collective heads in the sand or in other higher places. Trump is only a product to this stupidity,” he wrote to a Republican consultant in 2016. “Do not worry about us in North Carolina in terms of redistricting. Even in the coming political bloodbath we should still maintain majority control of the General Assembly. The Governor cannot veto a redistricting map, so the Democrats hope is that the Obamista judiciary will come to their rescue.”
Last week, a North Carolina court struck down the state’s legislative maps that Hofeller helped create, ruling that they violated the Constitution. The new map had been drawn after the Supreme Court struck down North Carolina's previous map as a racial gerrymander.
The court ruled that Hofeller’s maps “deliberately minimized the effectiveness of the votes of citizens with whom they disagree,” arguing that the map amounted to “viewpoint discrimination” against Democrats and an effort to “retaliate against voters” for voting for Democrats.
The court said that the files on Hofeller’s computer showed evidence of “predominant focus on maximizing Republican partisan advantage in creating the 2017 Plans.”
“The evidence establishes that Dr. Hofeller drew the 2017 Plans very precisely to create as many ‘safe’ Republican districts as possible, so that Republicans would maintain their supermajorities, or at least majorities even in a strong election year for Democrats,” the court said. “Hofeller drew the maps with an intent to preserve Republicans’ control of the House and Senate.”
The court gave state lawmakers two weeks to draw nonpartisan maps. Republicans have sued to try to get a court to seal or destroy the files, arguing that they should remain confidential because they were obtained from his daughter and not from him.
The files could be a treasure trove for voting rights groups as they seek to challenge years of Republican efforts to gerrymander districts in order to gain an unfair advantage, as well as to impose voter ID laws to make it harder for certain populations to vote.
“We’ve already seen that these files have been instrumental in exposing lies around the effort to add a citizenship question to the census and around subverting a court’s order to redraw gerrymandered lines,” Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director of Common Cause, told The New York Times. “The Hofeller files are important because they’re the only thing that will allow the American people to know the truth behind the efforts to rig redistricting and elections.”
The files show only a fraction of the work Hofeller did, which stretches back to the 1980s. Files obtained by The New Yorker show that Hofeller continued to work to help Republicans even after he was diagnosed with lung cancer.
“I still have time to bedevil the Democrats with more redistricting plans before I exit,” he wrote to a friend. “Look my name up on the Internet and you can follow the damage.”
‘Democracy for some, but not for all’: Report reveals nearly 1,700 polling places closed since Supreme Court weakened Voting Rights Act
September 10, 2019
By Common Dreams - raw story
Civil rights advocates said Tuesday that The U.S. Supreme Court must restore a key provision of the Voting Rights Act after a sweeping new report showed how the court’s decision led to the closure of nearly 1,700 polling places across the American South.
The Leadership Conference Education Fund’s study, “Democracy Diverted,” revealed Tuesday that nearly 1,200 of the polling places were closed between the 2014 and 2018 midterm elections, “underscoring the scale of this assault on U.S. democracy.”
The group is the research and education arm of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Under Law, the nation’s largest coalition of civil rights groups.
“We must recognize that closures are taking place at alarming speed amid broader efforts to prevent people of color from voting,” said Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference. “And meanwhile, states are under no obligation to evaluate the discriminatory impacts of such closures. This is exactly why we need to restore the Voting Rights Act and all of its protections.”
In its 2013 ruling on Shelby County vs. Holder, the Supreme Court invalidated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The provision mandated that voting precincts and counties with a history of racial discrimination must seek “preclearance” or approval of any changes in voting rules that could affect minority voters’ access to the polls.
Gupta testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday hours after the report was released, explaining Shelby County vs. Holder’s far-reaching impact on marginalized communities, especially under the Trump administration.
“Restoring preclearance is all the more important under an administration that refuses to challenge discriminatory voting measures,” Gupta said. “Not a single case has been opened, including barriers to registration, restrictive voter ID requirements, and polling place closures.”
States across the South have shuttered hundreds of polling locations in the wake of the decision, with many of the closures in counties heavily populated by black and Latinx voters.
Texas, Arizona, and Georgia were the worst offenders between 2012 and 2018, the Leadership Conference revealed.
Texas alone closed 750 locations, and 13 out 15 counties in Arizona—a state where 30 percent of the population is Latinox—shuttered polling places. Maricopa County, where 31 percent of residents are Latinx, closed more locations than any of the 757 counties the Leadership Conference examined.
“Without Section 5 of the VRA, we cannot assess the impact these mass closures have on communities of color,” the group said.
In Georgia, where nearly a third of the population is African American, seven counties were left with a single polling place. Voters in Warren County, which is 61 percent black, saw 83 percent of their polling locations shut down while Lumpkin County closed 89 percent of its polling places.
On social media, Heather Hargreaves, manager for Democrat Tom Steyer’s 2020 presidential campaign, suggested the closure of nearly 2,000 polling places across the South—like Republicans’ opposition to laws expanding access to the polls for all Americans—reveals the party’s fear of a true democracy.
The Supreme Court’s failure to defend all Americans’ right to participate in the democratic process, said Gupta, “will only lead to more of the same: a democracy for some, but not for all.”
The Leadership Conference Education Fund’s study, “Democracy Diverted,” revealed Tuesday that nearly 1,200 of the polling places were closed between the 2014 and 2018 midterm elections, “underscoring the scale of this assault on U.S. democracy.”
The group is the research and education arm of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Under Law, the nation’s largest coalition of civil rights groups.
“We must recognize that closures are taking place at alarming speed amid broader efforts to prevent people of color from voting,” said Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference. “And meanwhile, states are under no obligation to evaluate the discriminatory impacts of such closures. This is exactly why we need to restore the Voting Rights Act and all of its protections.”
In its 2013 ruling on Shelby County vs. Holder, the Supreme Court invalidated Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. The provision mandated that voting precincts and counties with a history of racial discrimination must seek “preclearance” or approval of any changes in voting rules that could affect minority voters’ access to the polls.
Gupta testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday hours after the report was released, explaining Shelby County vs. Holder’s far-reaching impact on marginalized communities, especially under the Trump administration.
“Restoring preclearance is all the more important under an administration that refuses to challenge discriminatory voting measures,” Gupta said. “Not a single case has been opened, including barriers to registration, restrictive voter ID requirements, and polling place closures.”
States across the South have shuttered hundreds of polling locations in the wake of the decision, with many of the closures in counties heavily populated by black and Latinx voters.
Texas, Arizona, and Georgia were the worst offenders between 2012 and 2018, the Leadership Conference revealed.
Texas alone closed 750 locations, and 13 out 15 counties in Arizona—a state where 30 percent of the population is Latinox—shuttered polling places. Maricopa County, where 31 percent of residents are Latinx, closed more locations than any of the 757 counties the Leadership Conference examined.
“Without Section 5 of the VRA, we cannot assess the impact these mass closures have on communities of color,” the group said.
In Georgia, where nearly a third of the population is African American, seven counties were left with a single polling place. Voters in Warren County, which is 61 percent black, saw 83 percent of their polling locations shut down while Lumpkin County closed 89 percent of its polling places.
On social media, Heather Hargreaves, manager for Democrat Tom Steyer’s 2020 presidential campaign, suggested the closure of nearly 2,000 polling places across the South—like Republicans’ opposition to laws expanding access to the polls for all Americans—reveals the party’s fear of a true democracy.
The Supreme Court’s failure to defend all Americans’ right to participate in the democratic process, said Gupta, “will only lead to more of the same: a democracy for some, but not for all.”
Ohio will purge more than 200,000 voters — from a list riddled with errors
Journalists and voting rights groups have identified numerous errors, but the GOP secretary of state will go ahead
IGOR DERYSH - salon
SEPTEMBER 9, 2019 9:00AM (UTC)
Ohio is set to purge nearly a quarter-million people from its voter rolls Friday despite journalists and voting rights groups finding repeated mistakes on the state’s list.
Republican Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose published a list in August targeting 235,000 voters the state says are inactive, meaning voters who have not voted for the past six years that the state was unable to contact.
The list of voters was fraught with errors. The secretary of state’s office announced hundreds of changes to the list almost immediately. Two weeks later, voting rights groups discovered that 4,000 people had been erroneously added to the list, the Columbus Dispatch reported. The paper reported days later that another 1,600 people had been incorrectly added to the list because of an error by a software vendor.
The list also included thousands of people who were apparently unaware they had bee targeted for removal, even though the state is required to attempt to contact them. More than 11,800 people included on the list have updated their voter registrations so they won’t be canceled, HuffPost reported.
Ohio removes people from the rolls if the state suspects they have moved or died. The list includes people who have not responded to an address confirmation mailing and people who have not voted or participated in any board of elections activity for six years. But voting rights groups say the purge lists are filled with errors that could disenfranchise thousands of legitimate voters. Ohio has already purged 265,000 voter registrations this year, and at least 17 million people have been purged from voter rolls around the country since the 2016 election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
The Ohio Democratic Party sued to try to stop the state from carrying out the purge, citing the repeated errors on the list. LaRose’s office argued that the errors had been fixed and that the office was taking additional steps to contact people on the list. A federal judge on Tuesday rejected the Democrats’ lawsuit seeking to halt the purge, despite acknowledging problems with past purges. The Supreme Court last year ruled that Ohio’s “supplemental process” that targets voters it suspects have moved or died was legal despite putting eligible voters at risk.
“As we prepare to finalize this process, we’re confident that there has never been a more intensive review of Ohio’s voting rolls, and we’re satisfied that the proper safeguards are in place to ensure any eligible voter will have the opportunity to have their voice heard,” LaRose spokeswoman Maggie Sheehan said in a statement to HuffPost.
But Democrats say that the dubious process all but guarantees that eligible voters will be removed.
“Someone asked me on a call today, 'Well, what’s the margin of error that’s acceptable in this purging?' And I said, this isn’t a poll. This is voting. You should not ever be limiting people from the rolls by government error,” Ohio Democratic Party chairman David Pepper told WOSU.
The party’s executive director, Greg Beswick, told Cleveland.com that it was “disturbing” that LaRose planned to go forward with the purge despite admitting to “errors that resulted in thousands of Ohio voters being improperly … and unlawfully flagged to be removed from the rolls.”
“The specter that any active voters are purged due to government error, and no fault of their own, is unacceptable,” he added.
With no legal recourse left, voting rights groups like All Voting is Local are scrambling to contact as many people as possible to encourage them to update their registrations.
“Thousands of voters at risk of being purged have already alerted the state that they are still very much alive and wish to vote,” Mick Brickner, the group’s Ohio state director, said in a statement. “This shows how deeply broken the purge process is and the need for voter registration modernization now.”
Republican Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose published a list in August targeting 235,000 voters the state says are inactive, meaning voters who have not voted for the past six years that the state was unable to contact.
The list of voters was fraught with errors. The secretary of state’s office announced hundreds of changes to the list almost immediately. Two weeks later, voting rights groups discovered that 4,000 people had been erroneously added to the list, the Columbus Dispatch reported. The paper reported days later that another 1,600 people had been incorrectly added to the list because of an error by a software vendor.
The list also included thousands of people who were apparently unaware they had bee targeted for removal, even though the state is required to attempt to contact them. More than 11,800 people included on the list have updated their voter registrations so they won’t be canceled, HuffPost reported.
Ohio removes people from the rolls if the state suspects they have moved or died. The list includes people who have not responded to an address confirmation mailing and people who have not voted or participated in any board of elections activity for six years. But voting rights groups say the purge lists are filled with errors that could disenfranchise thousands of legitimate voters. Ohio has already purged 265,000 voter registrations this year, and at least 17 million people have been purged from voter rolls around the country since the 2016 election, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.
The Ohio Democratic Party sued to try to stop the state from carrying out the purge, citing the repeated errors on the list. LaRose’s office argued that the errors had been fixed and that the office was taking additional steps to contact people on the list. A federal judge on Tuesday rejected the Democrats’ lawsuit seeking to halt the purge, despite acknowledging problems with past purges. The Supreme Court last year ruled that Ohio’s “supplemental process” that targets voters it suspects have moved or died was legal despite putting eligible voters at risk.
“As we prepare to finalize this process, we’re confident that there has never been a more intensive review of Ohio’s voting rolls, and we’re satisfied that the proper safeguards are in place to ensure any eligible voter will have the opportunity to have their voice heard,” LaRose spokeswoman Maggie Sheehan said in a statement to HuffPost.
But Democrats say that the dubious process all but guarantees that eligible voters will be removed.
“Someone asked me on a call today, 'Well, what’s the margin of error that’s acceptable in this purging?' And I said, this isn’t a poll. This is voting. You should not ever be limiting people from the rolls by government error,” Ohio Democratic Party chairman David Pepper told WOSU.
The party’s executive director, Greg Beswick, told Cleveland.com that it was “disturbing” that LaRose planned to go forward with the purge despite admitting to “errors that resulted in thousands of Ohio voters being improperly … and unlawfully flagged to be removed from the rolls.”
“The specter that any active voters are purged due to government error, and no fault of their own, is unacceptable,” he added.
With no legal recourse left, voting rights groups like All Voting is Local are scrambling to contact as many people as possible to encourage them to update their registrations.
“Thousands of voters at risk of being purged have already alerted the state that they are still very much alive and wish to vote,” Mick Brickner, the group’s Ohio state director, said in a statement. “This shows how deeply broken the purge process is and the need for voter registration modernization now.”
Major victory against GOP gerrymandering: State court strikes down North Carolina's legislative maps
Stephen Wolf for Daily Kos Elections
Daily Kos Staff
Tuesday September 03, 2019 · 1:02 PM PDT
On Tuesday, a three-judge panel delivered a major blow against Republican gerrymandering when it struck down North Carolina's state Senate and state House districts for violating the rights of Democratic voters. In the Senate, 21 of 50 districts must be redrawn, and 56 of 120 House districts were also invalidated.
The state court ruled that these maps, designed to entrench Republican rule, ran afoul of the state constitution’s guarantee of free and fair elections. These illegal districts were so extreme that they helped Republicans to maintain their legislative majorities in 2018's elections even though Democratic candidates won more votes statewide. If fairer districts are implemented for 2020, they could put Democrats in striking distance of a majority in one or both chambers.
Importantly, because this case was litigated solely under North Carolina’s state constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this year that the U.S. Constitution prohibits challenges to partisan gerrymandering did not present an obstacle to the plaintiffs. And for the same reason, this decision should be insulated from federal review, much like a ruling from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court last year that replaced a Republican congressional gerrymander with a much fairer map.
Republican legislative leaders unexpectedly announced they will not appeal the ruling, meaning North Carolina will soon have new legislative maps. The lower court gave the GOP-run legislature until Sept. 18 to draw legal districts for use in 2020, but ever since they gained full control of state government in 2013, Republicans have demonstrated a flagrant disregard for the rule of law that should weigh heavily as the courts decide whether to grant the GOP another shot.
In handing down their ruling, the judges announced that they would immediately appoint a nonpartisan expert to assist them in reviewing any replacement maps to ensure they pass muster—or to draw maps of their own should the GOP’s efforts prove unconstitutional yet again.
In fact, during the past six years, Republicans have lost nearly two dozen lawsuits due to their undemocratic attempts to seize power from the public, including repeated losses in cases concerning gerrymandering. Those defeats even include a previous lawsuit over these very same legislative maps, which were redrawn for the 2018 election cycle after they were twice struck for discriminating against black voters.
Following that case, newly revealed unveiled documents from a deceased GOP redistricting consultant showed that Republicans lied to a federal court to hide their discriminatory intent when they redrew the legislative maps in 2017. Unsurprisingly, the plaintiffs in this latest case had previously said they will petition the courts not to give Republican legislators a third crack at drawing the lines due to their ongoing deception, and it's possible that, on appeal, they could ask the appellate courts to require court-drawn maps. (Also note that under the state constitution, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper would not be able to veto any new maps passed by the legislature.)
The GOP's decision not to appeal comes in the context of North Carolina's Supreme Court having a 6-1 Democratic majority thanks to Democratic gains following the 2016 and 2018 elections, meaning they would have been very unlikely to succeed. Consequently, Tuesday's decision will remain in place, and if Republicans try to draw new replacement gerrymanders, those maps would likely run into the same state Supreme Court that appears very hostile to the GOP's gerrymanders.
While this case only concerns the maps in one state, every state constitution has provisions similar to North Carolina's that could be used to challenge partisan gerrymanders so long as there’s a receptive and fair-minded state Supreme Court majority to hear such a case. This ruling therefore underscores the importance of supreme court elections in key swing states next year, including Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Progressive victories in these races would go a long way toward blocking the GOP's lopsided control over redistricting as we head into the next round of redistricting following the 2020 census.
The state court ruled that these maps, designed to entrench Republican rule, ran afoul of the state constitution’s guarantee of free and fair elections. These illegal districts were so extreme that they helped Republicans to maintain their legislative majorities in 2018's elections even though Democratic candidates won more votes statewide. If fairer districts are implemented for 2020, they could put Democrats in striking distance of a majority in one or both chambers.
Importantly, because this case was litigated solely under North Carolina’s state constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling earlier this year that the U.S. Constitution prohibits challenges to partisan gerrymandering did not present an obstacle to the plaintiffs. And for the same reason, this decision should be insulated from federal review, much like a ruling from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court last year that replaced a Republican congressional gerrymander with a much fairer map.
Republican legislative leaders unexpectedly announced they will not appeal the ruling, meaning North Carolina will soon have new legislative maps. The lower court gave the GOP-run legislature until Sept. 18 to draw legal districts for use in 2020, but ever since they gained full control of state government in 2013, Republicans have demonstrated a flagrant disregard for the rule of law that should weigh heavily as the courts decide whether to grant the GOP another shot.
In handing down their ruling, the judges announced that they would immediately appoint a nonpartisan expert to assist them in reviewing any replacement maps to ensure they pass muster—or to draw maps of their own should the GOP’s efforts prove unconstitutional yet again.
In fact, during the past six years, Republicans have lost nearly two dozen lawsuits due to their undemocratic attempts to seize power from the public, including repeated losses in cases concerning gerrymandering. Those defeats even include a previous lawsuit over these very same legislative maps, which were redrawn for the 2018 election cycle after they were twice struck for discriminating against black voters.
Following that case, newly revealed unveiled documents from a deceased GOP redistricting consultant showed that Republicans lied to a federal court to hide their discriminatory intent when they redrew the legislative maps in 2017. Unsurprisingly, the plaintiffs in this latest case had previously said they will petition the courts not to give Republican legislators a third crack at drawing the lines due to their ongoing deception, and it's possible that, on appeal, they could ask the appellate courts to require court-drawn maps. (Also note that under the state constitution, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper would not be able to veto any new maps passed by the legislature.)
The GOP's decision not to appeal comes in the context of North Carolina's Supreme Court having a 6-1 Democratic majority thanks to Democratic gains following the 2016 and 2018 elections, meaning they would have been very unlikely to succeed. Consequently, Tuesday's decision will remain in place, and if Republicans try to draw new replacement gerrymanders, those maps would likely run into the same state Supreme Court that appears very hostile to the GOP's gerrymanders.
While this case only concerns the maps in one state, every state constitution has provisions similar to North Carolina's that could be used to challenge partisan gerrymanders so long as there’s a receptive and fair-minded state Supreme Court majority to hear such a case. This ruling therefore underscores the importance of supreme court elections in key swing states next year, including Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Progressive victories in these races would go a long way toward blocking the GOP's lopsided control over redistricting as we head into the next round of redistricting following the 2020 census.
Revealed: Georgia Republicans use power of state to suppress minority vote
Top Republicans Brad Raffensperger and David Emadi are issuing subpoenas to opponents without showing evidence of wrongdoing
Jordan Wilkie
The Guardian
Mon 2 Sep 2019 02.02 EDT
Top Georgia Republicans continue to use the power of the state to investigate political rivals, executing a strategy that voting rights activists say is designed to intimidate voting rights organizations and activists serving minority communities.
Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, and David Emadi, executive secretary of the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission, are investigating and issuing subpoenas to political opponents, without publicly showing evidence there was wrongdoing by those parties.
Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, pioneered the tactic as secretary of state, where he used his authority to investigate political opponents, liberal political groups and get out the vote (GOTV) organizers working in racial minority communities.
To date, none of the investigations, subpoenas, arrests or prosecutions against political opponents and minority GOTV organizers have led to convictions, meaning that Kemp’s – and now Raffensperger and Emadi’s – political rivals remain innocent of charges brought against them.
But voting rights activists say there is a trend in Georgia of Republicans using the power of an elected office to investigate political opponents as a voter intimidation tactic.
Voter intimidation has changed its nature since the billy club and water hose violence of the 1960s, according to Carol Anderson, a historian studying public policy and race at Emory University.
Because voter intimidation is no longer exercised through violence, and is instead exercised through subpoenas and investigations, Anderson argues the practice does not register as strongly with the public. Voter intimidation by the state, however, remains closely tied to race. In today’s politics, race and party are almost indistinguishable, Anderson said, blurring the lines between what is politically or racially motivated.
“Because we don’t see the night stick, because we don’t see the teargas, it doesn’t register for us as intimidation. But it is just as powerful, just as malignant, just as malevolent … the whole point is that blacks get hurt worse than whites,” said Anderson.
The governor’s and secretary of state’s offices have not responded to requests for comment.
In 2019, after Kemp won the gubernatorial election, he appointed a political ally and contributor to his campaign, Emadi, to head a commission overseeing campaign finance. Emadi quickly opened an investigation into Stacey Abrams’ campaign, alleging Kemp’s rival exceeded maximum contribution limits.
Emadi issued subpoenas seeking banking and financial records. The subpoenas also seek extensive communications between the campaign and a network of political groups that are run by or are focused on people of color, which has sparked accusations of racial and political motivations behind the investigation.
Emadi has denied any racial or political motivations.
The Guardian obtained communications between attorneys for the campaign and Emadi which show that the commission did not provide any evidence of their allegations, or the “basis for the finding of probable cause”, as required in the commission rules.
Emadi said he could not comment on open investigations.
In 2019, Raffensperger opened an investigation into an alleged 4,700 missing absentee ballot requests in DeKalb county, coming from voters the Abrams campaign targeted, from November’s midterm elections. Using absentee ballots as a way to increase voter turnout among unlikely or first-time voters was a primary strategy of the Abrams campaign, which led to Abrams outperforming Kemp in mail-in ballots by 53,709 votes.
One of the first calls from investigators was to the mail-processing vendor the Abrams campaign used, according to Lauren Groh-Wargo, Abrams’ former campaign manager. She now runs Fair Fight, an organization started by Abrams to challenge current voting laws and procedures in Georgia.
The investigation remains open, with no conclusion as to what happened to the ballot applications.
Opening investigations against Democratic candidates, the state Democratic party or liberal political groups that report issues to the secretary of state’s office, only to have the mechanism of the state turned against them, has become a political trend in Georgia.
These types of investigations could have a chilling effect on people or groups interested in organizing in their communities.
“If you’re going to open up a shop organizing Latinos or Asian Americans or whatever the group may be, you need to be prepared in Georgia for the power of the state to come down on you and your folks,” Groh-Wargo said. “Your folks need to be ready that they could be literally criminalized for this type of activity, and that you need to have lawyers on the ready.”
The power of opening investigations and keeping them open for years has a big impact, Groh-Wargo said.
It shuts the work of organizers down – which has not yet happened due to any of the investigations – and shuts the funding of the organization down. It is more difficult, Groh-Wargo said, to raise money when your organization is being investigated for a crime.
“To show that there is actually no wrongdoing is an incredible burden for an organization to have to manage a board through that, or for the board to have to explain it to its funders,” Groh-Wargo said.
Raffensperger’s office is also exercising the power of the subpoena. Secretary of state lawyers used a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Georgia’s election system to issue subpoenas for extensive financial and communication records from a number of left-leaning civil rights groups and churches – when none of those organizations are party to the case.
Responding to the subpoenas will cost each organization time and thousands of dollars.
The most extreme example of an investigation on false pretenses came on 4 November 2018, two days before the midterm election. The secretary of state’s office knowingly falsely accused the Democratic party of Georgia of attempting to hack the election. The initial round of media coverage reflected the accusation, before the facts were available that the accusation was fabricated.
“That was weaponizing and using the office of the secretary of state to accuse the political party,” said Sara Ghazal, the voter protection director for the Democratic party of Georgia.
The Guardian interviewed voter registration organizers in Asian American and black communities, and leaders from Fair Fight and the Democratic party of Georgia. Each independently asserted the investigations were politically motivated.
“These weaponized investigations are used to change the entire political narrative, not only around political campaigns and individuals, but around issues,” Ghazal said. “Voter protection, voter integrity, election integrity, should never be a political issue. And yet, you’ve got debates now that are wholly politicized.”
That investigation into the Democratic party of Georgia has not concluded. No officials have been questioned or related subpoenas issued. Like each of the others, it has yet to produce any prosecutions, additional evidence, or convictions.
Ghazal runs the largest voter protection project in the country and has records of tens of thousands of voter complaints over the last couple years.
Given the recent history of investigations being turned against political opponents, Ghazal is purposely avoiding the secretary of state’s office for fear of “inadvertently giving them something else that can be weaponized against an individual voter or against the party”.
Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, and David Emadi, executive secretary of the Georgia Government Transparency and Campaign Finance Commission, are investigating and issuing subpoenas to political opponents, without publicly showing evidence there was wrongdoing by those parties.
Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, pioneered the tactic as secretary of state, where he used his authority to investigate political opponents, liberal political groups and get out the vote (GOTV) organizers working in racial minority communities.
To date, none of the investigations, subpoenas, arrests or prosecutions against political opponents and minority GOTV organizers have led to convictions, meaning that Kemp’s – and now Raffensperger and Emadi’s – political rivals remain innocent of charges brought against them.
But voting rights activists say there is a trend in Georgia of Republicans using the power of an elected office to investigate political opponents as a voter intimidation tactic.
Voter intimidation has changed its nature since the billy club and water hose violence of the 1960s, according to Carol Anderson, a historian studying public policy and race at Emory University.
Because voter intimidation is no longer exercised through violence, and is instead exercised through subpoenas and investigations, Anderson argues the practice does not register as strongly with the public. Voter intimidation by the state, however, remains closely tied to race. In today’s politics, race and party are almost indistinguishable, Anderson said, blurring the lines between what is politically or racially motivated.
“Because we don’t see the night stick, because we don’t see the teargas, it doesn’t register for us as intimidation. But it is just as powerful, just as malignant, just as malevolent … the whole point is that blacks get hurt worse than whites,” said Anderson.
The governor’s and secretary of state’s offices have not responded to requests for comment.
In 2019, after Kemp won the gubernatorial election, he appointed a political ally and contributor to his campaign, Emadi, to head a commission overseeing campaign finance. Emadi quickly opened an investigation into Stacey Abrams’ campaign, alleging Kemp’s rival exceeded maximum contribution limits.
Emadi issued subpoenas seeking banking and financial records. The subpoenas also seek extensive communications between the campaign and a network of political groups that are run by or are focused on people of color, which has sparked accusations of racial and political motivations behind the investigation.
Emadi has denied any racial or political motivations.
The Guardian obtained communications between attorneys for the campaign and Emadi which show that the commission did not provide any evidence of their allegations, or the “basis for the finding of probable cause”, as required in the commission rules.
Emadi said he could not comment on open investigations.
In 2019, Raffensperger opened an investigation into an alleged 4,700 missing absentee ballot requests in DeKalb county, coming from voters the Abrams campaign targeted, from November’s midterm elections. Using absentee ballots as a way to increase voter turnout among unlikely or first-time voters was a primary strategy of the Abrams campaign, which led to Abrams outperforming Kemp in mail-in ballots by 53,709 votes.
One of the first calls from investigators was to the mail-processing vendor the Abrams campaign used, according to Lauren Groh-Wargo, Abrams’ former campaign manager. She now runs Fair Fight, an organization started by Abrams to challenge current voting laws and procedures in Georgia.
The investigation remains open, with no conclusion as to what happened to the ballot applications.
Opening investigations against Democratic candidates, the state Democratic party or liberal political groups that report issues to the secretary of state’s office, only to have the mechanism of the state turned against them, has become a political trend in Georgia.
These types of investigations could have a chilling effect on people or groups interested in organizing in their communities.
“If you’re going to open up a shop organizing Latinos or Asian Americans or whatever the group may be, you need to be prepared in Georgia for the power of the state to come down on you and your folks,” Groh-Wargo said. “Your folks need to be ready that they could be literally criminalized for this type of activity, and that you need to have lawyers on the ready.”
The power of opening investigations and keeping them open for years has a big impact, Groh-Wargo said.
It shuts the work of organizers down – which has not yet happened due to any of the investigations – and shuts the funding of the organization down. It is more difficult, Groh-Wargo said, to raise money when your organization is being investigated for a crime.
“To show that there is actually no wrongdoing is an incredible burden for an organization to have to manage a board through that, or for the board to have to explain it to its funders,” Groh-Wargo said.
Raffensperger’s office is also exercising the power of the subpoena. Secretary of state lawyers used a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Georgia’s election system to issue subpoenas for extensive financial and communication records from a number of left-leaning civil rights groups and churches – when none of those organizations are party to the case.
Responding to the subpoenas will cost each organization time and thousands of dollars.
The most extreme example of an investigation on false pretenses came on 4 November 2018, two days before the midterm election. The secretary of state’s office knowingly falsely accused the Democratic party of Georgia of attempting to hack the election. The initial round of media coverage reflected the accusation, before the facts were available that the accusation was fabricated.
“That was weaponizing and using the office of the secretary of state to accuse the political party,” said Sara Ghazal, the voter protection director for the Democratic party of Georgia.
The Guardian interviewed voter registration organizers in Asian American and black communities, and leaders from Fair Fight and the Democratic party of Georgia. Each independently asserted the investigations were politically motivated.
“These weaponized investigations are used to change the entire political narrative, not only around political campaigns and individuals, but around issues,” Ghazal said. “Voter protection, voter integrity, election integrity, should never be a political issue. And yet, you’ve got debates now that are wholly politicized.”
That investigation into the Democratic party of Georgia has not concluded. No officials have been questioned or related subpoenas issued. Like each of the others, it has yet to produce any prosecutions, additional evidence, or convictions.
Ghazal runs the largest voter protection project in the country and has records of tens of thousands of voter complaints over the last couple years.
Given the recent history of investigations being turned against political opponents, Ghazal is purposely avoiding the secretary of state’s office for fear of “inadvertently giving them something else that can be weaponized against an individual voter or against the party”.
Tennessee Voting Rights Activists Fight New Registration Restrictions
BY Rebekah Barber, Facing South - truthout
PUBLISHED September 2, 2019
Young people have the power to greatly impact the 2020 election. In many states, they showed this power in 2018, when youth voter turnout rose 16 percentage points from the previous midterm election, marking the highest level in midterm participation among youth in the past quarter century. In states like Tennessee — which has historically low youth voter turnout rates — young voters, and particularly young voters of color, were inspired to come out in record numbers.
This uptick in turnout came about thanks to the work of groups like the Equity Alliance and the Tennessee Black Voter Project, which registered massive numbers of young Black voters outside of churches, laundromats, and nightclubs. Meanwhile, campus organizers with groups like the Andrew Goodman Foundation made sure their classmates were registered at the state’s HBCUs and other colleges. In all, the groups registered over 91,000 new voters in the state.
But following this effort to engage young Black voters, Tennessee implemented new restrictions on voter registration drives.
In April, less than a year after the major voter registration push, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a bill penalizing organizations and individuals that turn in incomplete voter registration forms, and Gov. Bill Lee (R) signed it in May. Under the new law, Tennessee can fine groups that submit 100 or more voter registration forms missing a name, address, date of birth, declaration of eligibility, or signature. Penalties can reach $10,000 per county where violations occur if more than 500 incomplete forms are submitted. The law also bans out-of-state poll watchers.
The measure makes Tennessee the first state in the nation to threaten voter registration activists with civil penalties for submitting incomplete forms.
A coalition of advocacy groups including the state NAACP, Equity Alliance, Andrew Goodman Foundation, and Democracy Nashville-Democratic Communities sued over the law, calling it an onerous attack on activists that’s meant to keep new voters away from the polls. And earlier this month, the same coalition filed a motion seeking a preliminary injunction to prevent the law from going into effect as scheduled on Oct. 1.
“This law is an intentional and unconstitutional assault on voting rights,” David Goodman said in a statement announcing the injunction request. “It is designed to discourage organizations from registering voters by employing intimidation tactics and imposing vague and excessive barriers.”
Goodman serves as the president of the Andrew Goodman Foundation, which was named for his brother who was murdered 55 years ago along with James Chaney and Michael Schwerner while working to register disenfranchised Blacks in rural Mississippi during Freedom Summer. The foundation works to train a new generation of young voting rights activists and has a presence on dozens of campuses nationwide, including schools in Tennessee.
For example, organizers with the Andrew Goodman Foundation recently held a massive voter registration drive at Tennessee State University — the largest and only state-funded public HBCU in state — as students headed back to campus to begin the new school year.
Because a big part of the Andrew Goodman Foundation’s mission involves registering students to vote, it would be among those directly impacted by the new law, which is why it’s seeking an injunction. Yael Bromberg, the group’s chief counsel for voting rights, noted in an interview with Facing South that the controversial registration law “comes on the heels of all these regressive laws that are already in place in Tennessee.”
For example, Tennessee already has one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country. And while voters in the state can use a faculty ID as an acceptable form of identification at the polls, students can’t use their state-issued student ID. As a consequence of these barriers, Tennessee currently ranks 45th in voter registration and 49th in voter turnout.
Bromberg said that another concern about the Tennessee law is that it could inspire copycat bills in other states. Earlier this year, for instance, a bill was introduced in the Texas legislature that would have imposed criminal penalties on people who fill out a voter registration form improperly. However, it failed to pass.
“People are really looking at what is going to happen in Tennessee,” Bromberg said.
This uptick in turnout came about thanks to the work of groups like the Equity Alliance and the Tennessee Black Voter Project, which registered massive numbers of young Black voters outside of churches, laundromats, and nightclubs. Meanwhile, campus organizers with groups like the Andrew Goodman Foundation made sure their classmates were registered at the state’s HBCUs and other colleges. In all, the groups registered over 91,000 new voters in the state.
But following this effort to engage young Black voters, Tennessee implemented new restrictions on voter registration drives.
In April, less than a year after the major voter registration push, Tennessee’s Republican-controlled legislature passed a bill penalizing organizations and individuals that turn in incomplete voter registration forms, and Gov. Bill Lee (R) signed it in May. Under the new law, Tennessee can fine groups that submit 100 or more voter registration forms missing a name, address, date of birth, declaration of eligibility, or signature. Penalties can reach $10,000 per county where violations occur if more than 500 incomplete forms are submitted. The law also bans out-of-state poll watchers.
The measure makes Tennessee the first state in the nation to threaten voter registration activists with civil penalties for submitting incomplete forms.
A coalition of advocacy groups including the state NAACP, Equity Alliance, Andrew Goodman Foundation, and Democracy Nashville-Democratic Communities sued over the law, calling it an onerous attack on activists that’s meant to keep new voters away from the polls. And earlier this month, the same coalition filed a motion seeking a preliminary injunction to prevent the law from going into effect as scheduled on Oct. 1.
“This law is an intentional and unconstitutional assault on voting rights,” David Goodman said in a statement announcing the injunction request. “It is designed to discourage organizations from registering voters by employing intimidation tactics and imposing vague and excessive barriers.”
Goodman serves as the president of the Andrew Goodman Foundation, which was named for his brother who was murdered 55 years ago along with James Chaney and Michael Schwerner while working to register disenfranchised Blacks in rural Mississippi during Freedom Summer. The foundation works to train a new generation of young voting rights activists and has a presence on dozens of campuses nationwide, including schools in Tennessee.
For example, organizers with the Andrew Goodman Foundation recently held a massive voter registration drive at Tennessee State University — the largest and only state-funded public HBCU in state — as students headed back to campus to begin the new school year.
Because a big part of the Andrew Goodman Foundation’s mission involves registering students to vote, it would be among those directly impacted by the new law, which is why it’s seeking an injunction. Yael Bromberg, the group’s chief counsel for voting rights, noted in an interview with Facing South that the controversial registration law “comes on the heels of all these regressive laws that are already in place in Tennessee.”
For example, Tennessee already has one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country. And while voters in the state can use a faculty ID as an acceptable form of identification at the polls, students can’t use their state-issued student ID. As a consequence of these barriers, Tennessee currently ranks 45th in voter registration and 49th in voter turnout.
Bromberg said that another concern about the Tennessee law is that it could inspire copycat bills in other states. Earlier this year, for instance, a bill was introduced in the Texas legislature that would have imposed criminal penalties on people who fill out a voter registration form improperly. However, it failed to pass.
“People are really looking at what is going to happen in Tennessee,” Bromberg said.
Fair elections, republican style!!!
Voters say touchscreen machines switched their votes in nine Mississippi counties
Numerous voting machines in Mississippi reportedly "jumped" votes — but Mitch says we don't need election security
IGOR DERYSH - Salon
AUGUST 29, 2019 10:00AM (UTC)
A viral video published on Facebook showed a voter baffled as a touchscreen voting machine repeatedly switched his vote in Tuesday’s Mississippi gubernatorial runoff race.
“It is not letting me vote for who I want to vote for,” the voter in the video is heard saying as he repeatedly tried to vote for former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Bill Waller Jr. but continued to see Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves’ name marked on the machine.
“How can that happen?” a woman in the background is heard asking.
https://www.facebook.com/sally.k.walker/videos/10104625407917316/
The malfunction happened at a voting precinct in Oxford, The Clarion Ledger reported. Anna Moak, spokesperson for the secretary of state's office, told the outlet that 19 votes were cast on the machine before the error was detected and it was taken out of service. Moak added that the "machines are county-owned and tested by local officials" and "to our knowledge, only one machine was malfunctioning."
State officials, however, confirmed at least two other machines in Calhoun County also “jumped.” One voter reported similarly voting for Waller but having the machine change his vote to Reeves.
Though state officials only confirmed problems with three machines in two counties, the Waller campaign told the Ledger that it received reports of the same issue in Leflore, Lamar, Pearl River, Lincoln, Washington, Forrest and Scott counties.
Reeves won the runoff with about 54 percent of the vote, The Associated Press reported.
The machine errors sparked new concerns about electronic voting machines heading into the 2020 election. Many election security experts have pushed for mandatory paper backups for all voting machines, but earlier this month the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law warned that 12 percent of all 2020 ballots would be cast on paperless machines.
“We should replace antiquated equipment, and paperless equipment in particular, as soon as possible,” the report warned.
Paperless voting machines are also more susceptible to hacking, the Brennan Center said in an earlier report. Former special counsel Robert Mueller found that Russian hackers were able to penetrate multiple voting systems during the 2016 election and warned Congress last month that “they expect to do it in the next campaign” as well.
A Senate Intelligence Committee report also found that Russian hackers likely targeted election systems in all 50 states and warned that paperless machines were especially “vulnerable to exploitation by a committed adversary.”
---
McConnell has argued that election security issues should be left up to individual states. Mississippi is one of 11 states where counties still primarily rely on electronic machines, according to the Brennan Center report. The state received a “D” grade for election security from the Center for American Progress, a liberal group allied with the Democratic Party.
Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., rejected McConnell’s argument after touring a Las Vegas convention where hackers easily broke into electronic voting machines.
“No state has a right to have voting machines that can be easily hacked,” Lieu told Politico, adding that the federal government “has a responsibility to make sure we have strong election security all over America.”
“It is not letting me vote for who I want to vote for,” the voter in the video is heard saying as he repeatedly tried to vote for former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Bill Waller Jr. but continued to see Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves’ name marked on the machine.
“How can that happen?” a woman in the background is heard asking.
https://www.facebook.com/sally.k.walker/videos/10104625407917316/
The malfunction happened at a voting precinct in Oxford, The Clarion Ledger reported. Anna Moak, spokesperson for the secretary of state's office, told the outlet that 19 votes were cast on the machine before the error was detected and it was taken out of service. Moak added that the "machines are county-owned and tested by local officials" and "to our knowledge, only one machine was malfunctioning."
State officials, however, confirmed at least two other machines in Calhoun County also “jumped.” One voter reported similarly voting for Waller but having the machine change his vote to Reeves.
Though state officials only confirmed problems with three machines in two counties, the Waller campaign told the Ledger that it received reports of the same issue in Leflore, Lamar, Pearl River, Lincoln, Washington, Forrest and Scott counties.
Reeves won the runoff with about 54 percent of the vote, The Associated Press reported.
The machine errors sparked new concerns about electronic voting machines heading into the 2020 election. Many election security experts have pushed for mandatory paper backups for all voting machines, but earlier this month the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law warned that 12 percent of all 2020 ballots would be cast on paperless machines.
“We should replace antiquated equipment, and paperless equipment in particular, as soon as possible,” the report warned.
Paperless voting machines are also more susceptible to hacking, the Brennan Center said in an earlier report. Former special counsel Robert Mueller found that Russian hackers were able to penetrate multiple voting systems during the 2016 election and warned Congress last month that “they expect to do it in the next campaign” as well.
A Senate Intelligence Committee report also found that Russian hackers likely targeted election systems in all 50 states and warned that paperless machines were especially “vulnerable to exploitation by a committed adversary.”
---
McConnell has argued that election security issues should be left up to individual states. Mississippi is one of 11 states where counties still primarily rely on electronic machines, according to the Brennan Center report. The state received a “D” grade for election security from the Center for American Progress, a liberal group allied with the Democratic Party.
Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., rejected McConnell’s argument after touring a Las Vegas convention where hackers easily broke into electronic voting machines.
“No state has a right to have voting machines that can be easily hacked,” Lieu told Politico, adding that the federal government “has a responsibility to make sure we have strong election security all over America.”
Mystery of missing votes deepens as Congress investigates Georgia
By Mark Niesse, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
8/28/19
To find a clue about what might have gone wrong with Georgia’s election last fall, look no further than voting machine No. 3 at the Winterville Train Depot outside Athens.
On machine No. 3, Republicans won every race. On each of the other six machines in that precinct, Democrats won every race.
The odds of an anomaly that large are less than 1 in 1 million, according to a statistician’s analysis in court documents. The strange results would disappear if votes for Democratic and Republican candidates were flipped on machine No. 3.
It just so happens that this occurred in Republican Brian Kemp’s home precinct, where he initially had a problem voting when his yellow voter access card didn’t work because a poll worker forgot to activate it. At the time, Kemp was secretary of state — Georgia’s top election official — and running for governor in a tight contest with Democrat Stacey Abrams.
The suspicious results in Winterville are evidence in the ongoing mystery of whether errors with voting machines contributed to a stark drop-off in votes recorded in the race for Georgia lieutenant governor between Republican Geoff Duncan, who ended up winning, and Democrat Sarah Riggs Amico.
Even though it was the second race on the ballot, fewer votes were counted for lieutenant governor than for labor commissioner, insurance commissioner and every other statewide contest lower on the ballot. Roughly 80,000 fewer votes were counted for lieutenant governor than in other down-ballot elections.
The potential voting irregularities were included among 15,500 pages of documents obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that have also been turned over to the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee, which is looking into Georgia’s elections. The documents, provided under the Georgia Open Records Act, offer details of alleged voting irregularities but no answers.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office has refused to open an investigation. State election officials say the low number of votes could have been caused by low interest in the lieutenant governor’s race or where that contest appeared on the ballot.
The Georgia Supreme Court is also considering a challenge to the lieutenant governor’s race. Duncan won by 123,000 votes, but the plaintiffs contend missing votes could have changed the result.
The unresolved questions about the election have contributed to mistrust in the state’s electronic voting system and questions about election officials’ commitment to investigating complaints in a thorough and nonpartisan manner.
State election officials say they have looked into the lieutenant governor’s race but found no indication of problems with election equipment or vote counts.
A sharp decline
There were 159,000 fewer votes in the lieutenant governor’s race than the 3.9 million votes cast for the governor’s race, a 4% drop-off rate. Other statewide races had about 2% fewer votes than the governor’s race. It’s not unusual for voters to skip down-ballot races, but normally there’s a steady decline rather than an exceptional drop in the second-most-prominent contest.
“Voters deserve to know what happened,” said Amico, who is not involved in the court challenge and announced Tuesday that she’s running for the U.S. Senate. “There was insufficient action taken to secure the most foundational and basic element of our government: the right to vote. They don’t want to look.”
The decline in votes showed up on ballots cast on the state’s electronic voting machines in 101 of Georgia’s 159 counties. On paper absentee ballots, there wasn’t a significant decline in votes cast for lieutenant governor.
In addition, the drop-off in votes grew more extreme in precincts with large African American populations, according to an analysis by TargetSmart, a data-tracking firm affiliated with the Democratic Party.
“Was this completely voter behavior and confusion, or was there something in the machine software or hardware to cause this to happen?” asked Chris Brill, a senior data analyst for TargetSmart. “I’ve never seen a drop-off pattern like this, ever.”
Georgia’s 17-year-old electronic voting system is already riddled with potential vulnerabilities to hacking, tampering and malfunctions, according to plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit who want voters to use hand-marked paper ballots. In a ruling this month, U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg called the voting system “unsecure, unreliable and grossly outdated.”
The state’s electronic machines lack a paper ballot that could be used to double-check the accuracy of digital results.
Election officials purchased a $107 million voting system this month that will add computer-printed paper ballots to the voting process. The new system, which is scheduled for statewide use in the March 24 presidential primary, combines touchscreens with printers that create a ballot that voters can review before inserting into scanners for tabulation.
On Election Day last year, the Secretary of State’s Office conducted testing that mirrored the circumstances of the actual election, said Ryan Germany, the general counsel for the office. People cast randomized, videotaped mock votes in the office throughout the day. The results and video verified that votes exactly matched those recorded by the voting machines.
Voters may have skipped the lieutenant governor’s race because it appeared on the same screen as the governor’s race, unlike in most years when there’s also a U.S. Senate race alongside the governor’s race, he said.
“I think some people thought they were voting as a ticket for governor and lieutenant governor, which happens in some states. It doesn’t happen in Georgia,” Germany said. “Some bug (in voting machines) from our perspective would have had to appear in the checks that we did.”
Unanswered questions
Still, satisfying explanations are hard to come by.
Why would voters skip the lieutenant governor’s race on electronic voting machines but not on paper absentee ballots? Why would African American voters be disproportionately affected? If votes disappeared, could they have changed the results of the lieutenant governor’s race?
So far, state officials haven’t dug more deeply to find out.
Robyn Crittenden, who filled in as secretary of state for a few weeks after Kemp’s election as governor, declined Amico’s request for a recount because she didn’t identify any specific errors in the elections process. Crittenden wrote in a Nov. 17 letter that it’s not unusual for voters to skip races, and voters aren’t obligated to vote in every contest.
A judge in January dismissed a case contesting Duncan’s election, saying the plaintiffs didn’t prove specific problems with the recording of ballots that would alter the outcome of the contest. That’s the case now pending with the Georgia Supreme Court.
“There is a real wall up and real obstacles to prevent sunshine from coming in and having any kind of election transparency,” said Marilyn Marks, the executive director for the Coalition for Good Governance, an election security group that filed the lawsuit. “Let’s find some facts. It’s crazy to think that the paper-ballot voters felt one way about the candidates and the machine voters felt another way.”
Coding for voting machines could have been incorrect on touchscreens, so that votes for the lieutenant governor’s race showed up in another contest, she said. The race could have been missing from some electronic ballots. Or there could have been other malfunctions or programming errors.
In the Winterville precinct where one machine showed aberrant results, the elections director said she wasn’t aware of the issue, but it didn’t raise a concern to her.
“I’ve never heard of a flipped vote under direct-recording electronic machines,” said Charlotte Sosebee, the elections director for Athens-Clarke County. “As for one candidate or one party getting more votes than another on the machines, that’s not something that we track or is considered a red flag.”
County election officials ensure that the number of voters matches the number of ballots cast, Sosebee said. They also conduct logic and accuracy testing to ensure voting machines work correctly. They don’t look for out-of-the-ordinary results.
“The most plausible explanation (in the Winterville case) is that misconfiguration caused votes for Republican candidates to be recorded as votes for Democratic candidates, and vice-versa,” according to a paper published last month by Kellie Ottoboni and Philip Stark of the University of California, Berkeley, Department of Statistics.
The racial disparity in the undervote rate is harder to explain. Electronic voting machines have been marketed as a way to help people of different education and disabilities vote correctly, but the higher undervote rates for African American voters suggests that electronic voting harms historically disadvantaged groups, according to the findings of Ottoboni and Stark.
Without more information, it’s difficult to determine what could have gone wrong in the lieutenant governor’s race.
Critics of Georgia’s voting machines fear the possibility of hacking, but it’s unclear why a hack would target the relatively low-profile lieutenant governor’s race rather than the heated race for governor, which Kemp won by nearly 55,000 votes, a margin of 1.4 percentage points. There were no reported allegations of erroneous results in the governor’s race.
Another possibility is that there was a computer error at some point in the election process, said Eddie Perez of the Open Source Election Technology Institute, which recommends hand-marked paper ballots.
Election officials should check whether each race was coded correctly so that votes on touchscreens were correctly recorded on electronic ballots, he said. They should also look into the election programming process to ensure some races weren’t left off some machines.
“I don’t know why the state of Georgia appears to be resisting an examination,” Perez said. “They’re not getting any closer to the truth. This really is unusual, and it begs explanation.”
On machine No. 3, Republicans won every race. On each of the other six machines in that precinct, Democrats won every race.
The odds of an anomaly that large are less than 1 in 1 million, according to a statistician’s analysis in court documents. The strange results would disappear if votes for Democratic and Republican candidates were flipped on machine No. 3.
It just so happens that this occurred in Republican Brian Kemp’s home precinct, where he initially had a problem voting when his yellow voter access card didn’t work because a poll worker forgot to activate it. At the time, Kemp was secretary of state — Georgia’s top election official — and running for governor in a tight contest with Democrat Stacey Abrams.
The suspicious results in Winterville are evidence in the ongoing mystery of whether errors with voting machines contributed to a stark drop-off in votes recorded in the race for Georgia lieutenant governor between Republican Geoff Duncan, who ended up winning, and Democrat Sarah Riggs Amico.
Even though it was the second race on the ballot, fewer votes were counted for lieutenant governor than for labor commissioner, insurance commissioner and every other statewide contest lower on the ballot. Roughly 80,000 fewer votes were counted for lieutenant governor than in other down-ballot elections.
The potential voting irregularities were included among 15,500 pages of documents obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that have also been turned over to the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee, which is looking into Georgia’s elections. The documents, provided under the Georgia Open Records Act, offer details of alleged voting irregularities but no answers.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office has refused to open an investigation. State election officials say the low number of votes could have been caused by low interest in the lieutenant governor’s race or where that contest appeared on the ballot.
The Georgia Supreme Court is also considering a challenge to the lieutenant governor’s race. Duncan won by 123,000 votes, but the plaintiffs contend missing votes could have changed the result.
The unresolved questions about the election have contributed to mistrust in the state’s electronic voting system and questions about election officials’ commitment to investigating complaints in a thorough and nonpartisan manner.
State election officials say they have looked into the lieutenant governor’s race but found no indication of problems with election equipment or vote counts.
A sharp decline
There were 159,000 fewer votes in the lieutenant governor’s race than the 3.9 million votes cast for the governor’s race, a 4% drop-off rate. Other statewide races had about 2% fewer votes than the governor’s race. It’s not unusual for voters to skip down-ballot races, but normally there’s a steady decline rather than an exceptional drop in the second-most-prominent contest.
“Voters deserve to know what happened,” said Amico, who is not involved in the court challenge and announced Tuesday that she’s running for the U.S. Senate. “There was insufficient action taken to secure the most foundational and basic element of our government: the right to vote. They don’t want to look.”
The decline in votes showed up on ballots cast on the state’s electronic voting machines in 101 of Georgia’s 159 counties. On paper absentee ballots, there wasn’t a significant decline in votes cast for lieutenant governor.
In addition, the drop-off in votes grew more extreme in precincts with large African American populations, according to an analysis by TargetSmart, a data-tracking firm affiliated with the Democratic Party.
“Was this completely voter behavior and confusion, or was there something in the machine software or hardware to cause this to happen?” asked Chris Brill, a senior data analyst for TargetSmart. “I’ve never seen a drop-off pattern like this, ever.”
Georgia’s 17-year-old electronic voting system is already riddled with potential vulnerabilities to hacking, tampering and malfunctions, according to plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit who want voters to use hand-marked paper ballots. In a ruling this month, U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg called the voting system “unsecure, unreliable and grossly outdated.”
The state’s electronic machines lack a paper ballot that could be used to double-check the accuracy of digital results.
Election officials purchased a $107 million voting system this month that will add computer-printed paper ballots to the voting process. The new system, which is scheduled for statewide use in the March 24 presidential primary, combines touchscreens with printers that create a ballot that voters can review before inserting into scanners for tabulation.
On Election Day last year, the Secretary of State’s Office conducted testing that mirrored the circumstances of the actual election, said Ryan Germany, the general counsel for the office. People cast randomized, videotaped mock votes in the office throughout the day. The results and video verified that votes exactly matched those recorded by the voting machines.
Voters may have skipped the lieutenant governor’s race because it appeared on the same screen as the governor’s race, unlike in most years when there’s also a U.S. Senate race alongside the governor’s race, he said.
“I think some people thought they were voting as a ticket for governor and lieutenant governor, which happens in some states. It doesn’t happen in Georgia,” Germany said. “Some bug (in voting machines) from our perspective would have had to appear in the checks that we did.”
Unanswered questions
Still, satisfying explanations are hard to come by.
Why would voters skip the lieutenant governor’s race on electronic voting machines but not on paper absentee ballots? Why would African American voters be disproportionately affected? If votes disappeared, could they have changed the results of the lieutenant governor’s race?
So far, state officials haven’t dug more deeply to find out.
Robyn Crittenden, who filled in as secretary of state for a few weeks after Kemp’s election as governor, declined Amico’s request for a recount because she didn’t identify any specific errors in the elections process. Crittenden wrote in a Nov. 17 letter that it’s not unusual for voters to skip races, and voters aren’t obligated to vote in every contest.
A judge in January dismissed a case contesting Duncan’s election, saying the plaintiffs didn’t prove specific problems with the recording of ballots that would alter the outcome of the contest. That’s the case now pending with the Georgia Supreme Court.
“There is a real wall up and real obstacles to prevent sunshine from coming in and having any kind of election transparency,” said Marilyn Marks, the executive director for the Coalition for Good Governance, an election security group that filed the lawsuit. “Let’s find some facts. It’s crazy to think that the paper-ballot voters felt one way about the candidates and the machine voters felt another way.”
Coding for voting machines could have been incorrect on touchscreens, so that votes for the lieutenant governor’s race showed up in another contest, she said. The race could have been missing from some electronic ballots. Or there could have been other malfunctions or programming errors.
In the Winterville precinct where one machine showed aberrant results, the elections director said she wasn’t aware of the issue, but it didn’t raise a concern to her.
“I’ve never heard of a flipped vote under direct-recording electronic machines,” said Charlotte Sosebee, the elections director for Athens-Clarke County. “As for one candidate or one party getting more votes than another on the machines, that’s not something that we track or is considered a red flag.”
County election officials ensure that the number of voters matches the number of ballots cast, Sosebee said. They also conduct logic and accuracy testing to ensure voting machines work correctly. They don’t look for out-of-the-ordinary results.
“The most plausible explanation (in the Winterville case) is that misconfiguration caused votes for Republican candidates to be recorded as votes for Democratic candidates, and vice-versa,” according to a paper published last month by Kellie Ottoboni and Philip Stark of the University of California, Berkeley, Department of Statistics.
The racial disparity in the undervote rate is harder to explain. Electronic voting machines have been marketed as a way to help people of different education and disabilities vote correctly, but the higher undervote rates for African American voters suggests that electronic voting harms historically disadvantaged groups, according to the findings of Ottoboni and Stark.
Without more information, it’s difficult to determine what could have gone wrong in the lieutenant governor’s race.
Critics of Georgia’s voting machines fear the possibility of hacking, but it’s unclear why a hack would target the relatively low-profile lieutenant governor’s race rather than the heated race for governor, which Kemp won by nearly 55,000 votes, a margin of 1.4 percentage points. There were no reported allegations of erroneous results in the governor’s race.
Another possibility is that there was a computer error at some point in the election process, said Eddie Perez of the Open Source Election Technology Institute, which recommends hand-marked paper ballots.
Election officials should check whether each race was coded correctly so that votes on touchscreens were correctly recorded on electronic ballots, he said. They should also look into the election programming process to ensure some races weren’t left off some machines.
“I don’t know why the state of Georgia appears to be resisting an examination,” Perez said. “They’re not getting any closer to the truth. This really is unusual, and it begs explanation.”
Dan Bishop’s harsh history of discrimination
the Editorial Board, Charlotte Observer - Yahoo News
August 14, 2019
Republican congressional candidate Dan Bishop went on the offensive this week about his past, threatening media members if they broadcast an ad highlighting his 2017 investment in a web site frequented by white nationalists. But if the state senator from Mecklenburg wants to outrun his harsh history of discrimination, he’s going to need some durable shoes.
The ad in question, from a group called Stand Up Republic, comes a month before the 9th Congressional District special election between Bishop and Democrat Dan McCready. As the Charlotte Observer reported, the ad says: “Remember when neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville and killed a young woman? ... When they were banned from social media, Dan Bishop took their side. In fact, he invested in a social media website because it welcomed the white supremacists.”
Bishop threatened a lawsuit to any media that published or broadcast the ad. It was his latest attempt to dodge the damning investment he made in Gab, a website Bishop has claimed some ignorance about. But regardless of whether or not Bishop invested in Gab “because” it welcomed white supremacists, the evidence shows he knew what he was investing in. As the Observer editorial board wrote last November, the Washington Post report he cited when announcing his investment detailed how tech companies were taking action on hate-filled sites like Gab.
What was most striking about the news of Bishop’s investment, however, was that it wasn’t that much of a surprise. After all, the state senator has a history of discrimination that stretches back at least a decade.
Most notable was his authorship of HB2, the discriminatory 2016 legislation that cost North Carolina dearly in economic investment. The so-called “bathroom bill” was not only about transgender people — or “a cross-dresser’s liberty,” as Bishop once sneered. HB2 also blocked cities from enacting non-discrimination ordinances, and it included language that made it harder for workers who were fired because of race, gender or religion to seek redress.
When Bishop and other lawmakers looked for a way out of the damage HB2 inflicted on his state and city, he worked with an official of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a group that works to discriminate against the LGBTQ community.
Bishop, too, has worked against gay and lesbian efforts toward equality. He was a public advocate for North Carolina’s Amendment 1, which in 2012 made our state the last in the country to ban gay marriage before a court overturned the law. Seven years earlier, as a Mecklenburg commissioner, he spoke out against a county measure to ban discrimination against gays, calling it “either a political stunt or a serious dagger at the heart of marriage.”
Bishop doesn’t seem to want to talk much about that history these days. When asked in May if he would have done anything differently with HB2, he told WFAE that ”every piece of legislation is imperfect and everything could be improved,” then pivoted to criticize “the endless controversy that has been mostly media manufactured.”
Voters should see through the dodges. Dan Bishop has supported discrimination against gays and lesbians. He authored one of the most discriminatory, destructive laws in our state’s history. And now, he would like voters to think he didn’t know a web site he invested in catered to hate — despite citing an article then that said so. Keep running, Mr. Bishop. Your past is right behind you.
The ad in question, from a group called Stand Up Republic, comes a month before the 9th Congressional District special election between Bishop and Democrat Dan McCready. As the Charlotte Observer reported, the ad says: “Remember when neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville and killed a young woman? ... When they were banned from social media, Dan Bishop took their side. In fact, he invested in a social media website because it welcomed the white supremacists.”
Bishop threatened a lawsuit to any media that published or broadcast the ad. It was his latest attempt to dodge the damning investment he made in Gab, a website Bishop has claimed some ignorance about. But regardless of whether or not Bishop invested in Gab “because” it welcomed white supremacists, the evidence shows he knew what he was investing in. As the Observer editorial board wrote last November, the Washington Post report he cited when announcing his investment detailed how tech companies were taking action on hate-filled sites like Gab.
What was most striking about the news of Bishop’s investment, however, was that it wasn’t that much of a surprise. After all, the state senator has a history of discrimination that stretches back at least a decade.
Most notable was his authorship of HB2, the discriminatory 2016 legislation that cost North Carolina dearly in economic investment. The so-called “bathroom bill” was not only about transgender people — or “a cross-dresser’s liberty,” as Bishop once sneered. HB2 also blocked cities from enacting non-discrimination ordinances, and it included language that made it harder for workers who were fired because of race, gender or religion to seek redress.
When Bishop and other lawmakers looked for a way out of the damage HB2 inflicted on his state and city, he worked with an official of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a group that works to discriminate against the LGBTQ community.
Bishop, too, has worked against gay and lesbian efforts toward equality. He was a public advocate for North Carolina’s Amendment 1, which in 2012 made our state the last in the country to ban gay marriage before a court overturned the law. Seven years earlier, as a Mecklenburg commissioner, he spoke out against a county measure to ban discrimination against gays, calling it “either a political stunt or a serious dagger at the heart of marriage.”
Bishop doesn’t seem to want to talk much about that history these days. When asked in May if he would have done anything differently with HB2, he told WFAE that ”every piece of legislation is imperfect and everything could be improved,” then pivoted to criticize “the endless controversy that has been mostly media manufactured.”
Voters should see through the dodges. Dan Bishop has supported discrimination against gays and lesbians. He authored one of the most discriminatory, destructive laws in our state’s history. And now, he would like voters to think he didn’t know a web site he invested in catered to hate — despite citing an article then that said so. Keep running, Mr. Bishop. Your past is right behind you.
genocide wasn't enough. now voter suppression!!!
Court Upholds North Dakota Law Stripping Voting Rights From Native Americans
BY Imani Gandy, Rewire.News
PUBLISHED August 9, 2019
The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals last week upheld a law that strips nearly 10 percent of all voting-age Native Americans living in North Dakota of their right to vote.
The case is as much about local infrastructure and lack of regard for North Dakota’s indigenous population as it is about voter suppression and a state forcing voters to comply with a requirement that the state itself has made impossible to follow.
Thousands of Native Americans who do not have residential addresses through no fault of their own have been affected by the law, HB 1369. What’s worse is that these Native voters may be disenfranchised permanently should HB 1369 remain in place—something the three-judge panel that ruled on the lawsuit challenging the law seems OK with. That should trouble us all.
The Native American Rights Fund initially filed the lawsuit, Brakebill v. Jaeger, in 2016 on behalf of Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa tribe members. The lawsuit alleges the law discriminates against Native American voters in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
The primary dispute is over a provision of North Dakota’s law called the current residential street address requirement, which requires voters to present qualifying identification to cast a ballot. An ID card isn’t valid unless it contains the voter’s legal name, current residential street address, and date of birth. If a voter’s ID lacks any of these three things, the voter may still cast a ballot if they can provide the missing information using one of several supplemental documents: a current utility bill, a current bank statement, a paycheck, or a check or other document issued by a federal, state, or local government. Notably, ID cards with mailing addresses aren’t sufficient, and documents issued by tribal leaders, such as tribal IDs, aren’t either.
If the voter cannot provide a valid form of ID, then officials at the polling place set that voter’s ballot aside, counting it only if one of two things happens: the voter returns to the polling place and shows a valid form of ID or, if they cannot make it back with the requisite ID, the voter presents a valid ID within six days to “an employee of the office of the election official responsible for the administration of the election,” according to the law.
At first blush, these requirements may seem reasonable. After all, most ID cards contain your name, DOB, and residential street address, right? So what’s the big deal, you may be thinking.
Well, most identification cards do not require a residential street address, but rather a mailing address. North Dakota is the only state to require a residential street address for a voter ID card to be valid. And since many Native Americans in North Dakota don’t have residential addresses—they have their mail delivered to a post office box—North Dakota’s requirement puts them at a disadvantage.
As the Native American Rights Fund explains on its website:
[M]ost tribal IDs do not have a residential address printed on them. This is due, in part, to the fact that the U.S. postal service does not provide residential delivery in these rural Indian communities. Thus, most tribal members use a PO Box. If a tribal ID has an address, it is typically the PO Box address, which does not satisfy North Dakota’s restrictive voter ID law. In both the primary and general election in 2014, many qualified North Dakota tribal electors were disenfranchised because they only had a tribal ID.
To make their case, the plaintiffs presented evidence of the discriminatory impact of the residential street address requirement, which prompted U.S. District Court Judge Daniel L. Hovland to issue two injunctions—one in 2016 and another in 2018—blocking the residential street requirement. Judge Hovland ordered North Dakota’s secretary of state, Alvin A. Jaeger, to accept identification that includes either “a current residential street address or a current mailing address (P.O. Box or other address) in North Dakota.”
The judge also ordered Jaeger to accept “an official form of identification issued by a tribal government, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), any other tribal agency or entity, or any other document, letter, writing, enrollment card, or other form of tribal identification issued by a tribal authority,” as long as the document has the voter’s name, date of birth, and current residential address or mailing address on it.
Judge Hovland explained that at least 4,998 otherwise eligible Native American voters lacked a valid ID under the law, and that about 48.7 percent of those individuals lacked the supplemental identification documentation. This means that at least 2,305 eligible Native American voters would be disenfranchised under this law which, according to Census data cited it in the court documents, amounts to approximately 10 percent of all voting-age Native Americans in the state.
And disenfranchised they were. After a bitter legal battle, which I reported on back in October, at least 2,305 Native Americans in the state were unable to vote in the November 2018 election.
Now that the Eighth Circuit vacated the district court’s preliminary injunction last week, North Dakota is one step closer to ensuring that these Native American voters will never be able to vote.
The North Dakota secretary of state argued that the residential address requirement is intended to combat voter fraud—the go-to defense used by elected officials to take away voting rights. The three-judge panel agreed, ruling that the requirement furthers North Dakota’s legitimate interest in preventing voter fraud and safeguarding voter confidence, even though, as the district court noted in its 2018 ruling, Jaeger had produced “no evidence of voter fraud in the past, and no evidence of voter fraud in 2016.”
Indeed, the secretary’s rationale for the voter ID law is pure nonsense. Jaeger argued that permitting a voter to use a mailing address as opposed to a residential street address would allow fraudulent voting of people who reside outside North Dakota but who maintain a P.O. Box in the state. But, as Circuit Judge Jane Kelly, an Obama appointee, pointed out in her dissent, that nonresident would still have to obtain a tribal or state-issued identification card, and neither are issued to people who aren’t residents of North Dakota.
The bad faith of Jaeger’s argument is stunning: No one suggested that a simple proof of mailing address would suffice. Not even the law suggests that.
And in any event, while North Dakota may have an interest in guarding against, as the district court put it, “the theoretical possibility of voter fraud [that] exists with every election nationwide,” that interest does not justify stripping the right to vote from some of the state’s Native American residents.
The three-judge panel disagreed. It criticized the district court’s injunction, implying that a statewide injunction is overbroad and unwarranted because the law would only negatively affect “a relatively small percentage of eligible voters.” But that “relatively small percentage of eligible voters” includes a historically disenfranchised population, which ostensibly should be unacceptable.
The three-judge panel, with George W. Bush-appointee Steven Colloton writing for the majority, simply shrugged in the face of this evidence. Irrespective of the district court’s finding that nearly 5,000 eligible Native American voters and 64,000 non-Native voters lacked qualifying identification, the panel said that the plaintiffs had not shown the remaining 88 percent of eligible voters in the state lacked qualifying identification.
In other words, who cares about that remaining 12 percent of voters?
“Even assuming that some communities do not have residential street addresses, that fact does not justify a statewide injunction that prevents the Secretary from requiring a form of identification with a residential street address from the vast majority of residents who have them,” Judge Colloton wrote.
But the plaintiffs shouldn’t have to present evidence that the residential street address requirement imposes a substantial burden on “most” North Dakota voters. As Judge Kelly pointed out in her dissent, “[a] barrier to voting may be unconstitutional even if most voters can overcome it.”
If the argument about “substantial burdens” sounds uncannily familiar to you, that’s because Judge Kelly borrowed it from Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the seminal abortion rights case that gave us the “undue burden” standard. As laid out in Casey (and followed by myriad abortion cases thereafter), a court will determine whether or not a law is an undue burden based on the population that the law will affect, not based on the population writ large. As the U.S. Supreme Court noted in Casey, “[t]he proper focus of the constitutional inquiry is the group for whom the law is a restriction, not the group for whom the law is irrelevant.”
For example, a law that restricts abortion access may be an undue burden on people seeking an abortion, not on people of reproductive age, or even pregnant people, because not all pregnant people or people of reproductive age are seeking an abortion. Therefore, at least according to the ruling, the idea is that an abortion restriction will have nothing to do with those people.
The same principle applies in this North Dakota case. The thinking goes, a law requiring an ID with a residential street address is irrelevant to people who already have ID with a residential street address, because the law doesn’t burden those people. But it may burden people who don’t have an ID if the reason those people don’t have one is that they don’t have a residential street address. As the district court noted in frustration, “The State has acknowledged that Native American communities often lack residential street addresses . . . Nevertheless, under current State law an individual who does not have a ‘current residential street address’ will never be qualified to vote. This is a clear ‘legal obstacle’ inhibiting the opportunity to vote.” (Emphasis in original.)
It is hard to argue that the law does not target Native American voters. Given that North Dakota is the only state with such a requirement, there truly is no rational reason to require a residential street address unless the state is simply trying to make it impossible for people without a residential street address to vote.
The panel’s decision is a bad one, but there’s still hope. The court’s ruling related only to the tribe members equal protection claims under the U.S. Constitution. Their claims under the North Dakota Constitution and the Voting Rights Act are still alive. The appeals court did not rule on whether the North Dakota law violates the Voting Rights Act, which leaves open the possibility of the district court ruling in favor of the plaintiffs on that basis.
However, given the ultra-conservative nature of the trumped-up Eighth Circuit, there’s no guarantee that the court will preserve the estimated 10 percent of eligible Native Americans’ right to vote.
The case is as much about local infrastructure and lack of regard for North Dakota’s indigenous population as it is about voter suppression and a state forcing voters to comply with a requirement that the state itself has made impossible to follow.
Thousands of Native Americans who do not have residential addresses through no fault of their own have been affected by the law, HB 1369. What’s worse is that these Native voters may be disenfranchised permanently should HB 1369 remain in place—something the three-judge panel that ruled on the lawsuit challenging the law seems OK with. That should trouble us all.
The Native American Rights Fund initially filed the lawsuit, Brakebill v. Jaeger, in 2016 on behalf of Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa tribe members. The lawsuit alleges the law discriminates against Native American voters in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
The primary dispute is over a provision of North Dakota’s law called the current residential street address requirement, which requires voters to present qualifying identification to cast a ballot. An ID card isn’t valid unless it contains the voter’s legal name, current residential street address, and date of birth. If a voter’s ID lacks any of these three things, the voter may still cast a ballot if they can provide the missing information using one of several supplemental documents: a current utility bill, a current bank statement, a paycheck, or a check or other document issued by a federal, state, or local government. Notably, ID cards with mailing addresses aren’t sufficient, and documents issued by tribal leaders, such as tribal IDs, aren’t either.
If the voter cannot provide a valid form of ID, then officials at the polling place set that voter’s ballot aside, counting it only if one of two things happens: the voter returns to the polling place and shows a valid form of ID or, if they cannot make it back with the requisite ID, the voter presents a valid ID within six days to “an employee of the office of the election official responsible for the administration of the election,” according to the law.
At first blush, these requirements may seem reasonable. After all, most ID cards contain your name, DOB, and residential street address, right? So what’s the big deal, you may be thinking.
Well, most identification cards do not require a residential street address, but rather a mailing address. North Dakota is the only state to require a residential street address for a voter ID card to be valid. And since many Native Americans in North Dakota don’t have residential addresses—they have their mail delivered to a post office box—North Dakota’s requirement puts them at a disadvantage.
As the Native American Rights Fund explains on its website:
[M]ost tribal IDs do not have a residential address printed on them. This is due, in part, to the fact that the U.S. postal service does not provide residential delivery in these rural Indian communities. Thus, most tribal members use a PO Box. If a tribal ID has an address, it is typically the PO Box address, which does not satisfy North Dakota’s restrictive voter ID law. In both the primary and general election in 2014, many qualified North Dakota tribal electors were disenfranchised because they only had a tribal ID.
To make their case, the plaintiffs presented evidence of the discriminatory impact of the residential street address requirement, which prompted U.S. District Court Judge Daniel L. Hovland to issue two injunctions—one in 2016 and another in 2018—blocking the residential street requirement. Judge Hovland ordered North Dakota’s secretary of state, Alvin A. Jaeger, to accept identification that includes either “a current residential street address or a current mailing address (P.O. Box or other address) in North Dakota.”
The judge also ordered Jaeger to accept “an official form of identification issued by a tribal government, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), any other tribal agency or entity, or any other document, letter, writing, enrollment card, or other form of tribal identification issued by a tribal authority,” as long as the document has the voter’s name, date of birth, and current residential address or mailing address on it.
Judge Hovland explained that at least 4,998 otherwise eligible Native American voters lacked a valid ID under the law, and that about 48.7 percent of those individuals lacked the supplemental identification documentation. This means that at least 2,305 eligible Native American voters would be disenfranchised under this law which, according to Census data cited it in the court documents, amounts to approximately 10 percent of all voting-age Native Americans in the state.
And disenfranchised they were. After a bitter legal battle, which I reported on back in October, at least 2,305 Native Americans in the state were unable to vote in the November 2018 election.
Now that the Eighth Circuit vacated the district court’s preliminary injunction last week, North Dakota is one step closer to ensuring that these Native American voters will never be able to vote.
The North Dakota secretary of state argued that the residential address requirement is intended to combat voter fraud—the go-to defense used by elected officials to take away voting rights. The three-judge panel agreed, ruling that the requirement furthers North Dakota’s legitimate interest in preventing voter fraud and safeguarding voter confidence, even though, as the district court noted in its 2018 ruling, Jaeger had produced “no evidence of voter fraud in the past, and no evidence of voter fraud in 2016.”
Indeed, the secretary’s rationale for the voter ID law is pure nonsense. Jaeger argued that permitting a voter to use a mailing address as opposed to a residential street address would allow fraudulent voting of people who reside outside North Dakota but who maintain a P.O. Box in the state. But, as Circuit Judge Jane Kelly, an Obama appointee, pointed out in her dissent, that nonresident would still have to obtain a tribal or state-issued identification card, and neither are issued to people who aren’t residents of North Dakota.
The bad faith of Jaeger’s argument is stunning: No one suggested that a simple proof of mailing address would suffice. Not even the law suggests that.
And in any event, while North Dakota may have an interest in guarding against, as the district court put it, “the theoretical possibility of voter fraud [that] exists with every election nationwide,” that interest does not justify stripping the right to vote from some of the state’s Native American residents.
The three-judge panel disagreed. It criticized the district court’s injunction, implying that a statewide injunction is overbroad and unwarranted because the law would only negatively affect “a relatively small percentage of eligible voters.” But that “relatively small percentage of eligible voters” includes a historically disenfranchised population, which ostensibly should be unacceptable.
The three-judge panel, with George W. Bush-appointee Steven Colloton writing for the majority, simply shrugged in the face of this evidence. Irrespective of the district court’s finding that nearly 5,000 eligible Native American voters and 64,000 non-Native voters lacked qualifying identification, the panel said that the plaintiffs had not shown the remaining 88 percent of eligible voters in the state lacked qualifying identification.
In other words, who cares about that remaining 12 percent of voters?
“Even assuming that some communities do not have residential street addresses, that fact does not justify a statewide injunction that prevents the Secretary from requiring a form of identification with a residential street address from the vast majority of residents who have them,” Judge Colloton wrote.
But the plaintiffs shouldn’t have to present evidence that the residential street address requirement imposes a substantial burden on “most” North Dakota voters. As Judge Kelly pointed out in her dissent, “[a] barrier to voting may be unconstitutional even if most voters can overcome it.”
If the argument about “substantial burdens” sounds uncannily familiar to you, that’s because Judge Kelly borrowed it from Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the seminal abortion rights case that gave us the “undue burden” standard. As laid out in Casey (and followed by myriad abortion cases thereafter), a court will determine whether or not a law is an undue burden based on the population that the law will affect, not based on the population writ large. As the U.S. Supreme Court noted in Casey, “[t]he proper focus of the constitutional inquiry is the group for whom the law is a restriction, not the group for whom the law is irrelevant.”
For example, a law that restricts abortion access may be an undue burden on people seeking an abortion, not on people of reproductive age, or even pregnant people, because not all pregnant people or people of reproductive age are seeking an abortion. Therefore, at least according to the ruling, the idea is that an abortion restriction will have nothing to do with those people.
The same principle applies in this North Dakota case. The thinking goes, a law requiring an ID with a residential street address is irrelevant to people who already have ID with a residential street address, because the law doesn’t burden those people. But it may burden people who don’t have an ID if the reason those people don’t have one is that they don’t have a residential street address. As the district court noted in frustration, “The State has acknowledged that Native American communities often lack residential street addresses . . . Nevertheless, under current State law an individual who does not have a ‘current residential street address’ will never be qualified to vote. This is a clear ‘legal obstacle’ inhibiting the opportunity to vote.” (Emphasis in original.)
It is hard to argue that the law does not target Native American voters. Given that North Dakota is the only state with such a requirement, there truly is no rational reason to require a residential street address unless the state is simply trying to make it impossible for people without a residential street address to vote.
The panel’s decision is a bad one, but there’s still hope. The court’s ruling related only to the tribe members equal protection claims under the U.S. Constitution. Their claims under the North Dakota Constitution and the Voting Rights Act are still alive. The appeals court did not rule on whether the North Dakota law violates the Voting Rights Act, which leaves open the possibility of the district court ruling in favor of the plaintiffs on that basis.
However, given the ultra-conservative nature of the trumped-up Eighth Circuit, there’s no guarantee that the court will preserve the estimated 10 percent of eligible Native Americans’ right to vote.
a state election run by criminals!!!
'The selling of an election': how private firms compromised midterms security
Georgia’s voting machines and online registration were almost entirely managed by private companies, raising security concerns
Jordan Wilkie
The Guardian
Thu 1 Aug 2019 13.44 BST
Private companies had near-complete control over Georgia’s elections for the 2018 midterms and posed a serious security risk, according to testimony and documents revealed during a federal court case challenging the constitutionality of Georgia’s elections.
The most maligned components of Georgia’s election systems – voting machines and online voter registration – were almost entirely managed by private companies, prompting concerns from election security experts.
Voting machine company Elections Systems and Software (ES&S), which has close connections with the Georgia secretary of state’s office and Governor Brian Kemp’s staff, had three staff in Georgia building electronic ballots out of their homes through the 2018 midterms.
This introduced significant security concerns about both foreign actors attacking the election system with malware or about a “political insider” potentially introducing their own coding that could alter the results of an election without detection, according to the plaintiffs.
“It’s a shock to everyone that the vendor is actually building ballots for state elections,” said David Cross, lead attorney for one of the two groups suing the state. “That should not be happening. That should be at the state level, because the state does not have any means of ensuring the necessary security protocols of the vendor.”
PCC Technologies, which offers voter registration management, hosted Georgia’s online voter registration system on its own servers and was responsible for running the My Voter Page, which gave registered voters important information about their ballots and polling places. In court, it was revealed that PCC was a major security concern for the secretary of state’s office, and that the state was unable to audit the registration system because they were not contractually allowed to access PCC’s servers.
The contract for server hosting ended on 30 June, and the secretary of state’s office – which runs elections in Georgia – is in the process of moving the voter registration system back to its own servers, according to documents produced by the state and the testimony of the secretary of state’s chief information officer, Merritt Beaver.
But the state is continuing its contract with PCC to manage the voter registration system and the My Voter Page.
“It’s the selling of a public election,” said Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance and another plaintiff in the case. “The [election vendor] decides whether or not to mess with the election … Interestingly enough, [Georgia] wrote them a check to do it. I’m not saying they exercised that option, but the state gave them that option.”
The series of revelations on the state’s relationships with ES&S and PCC also exposed mischaracterizations made by Beaver and the secretary of state’s legal team.
The election system that Georgia currently uses has a component called the Gems database. That database holds information used to build the electronic ballots that voters use to cast votes in precincts across Georgia, and is responsible for bringing up the correct ballot to the correct voter.
Beaver told the court that the structure of Georgia’s Gems database was unique and confidential as part of the security procedures for the secretary of state’s office. If the structure of the database was not known to outside parties, then outside parties would find it more difficult to manipulate the election.
The catch, according to Cross, is that ES&S employees were designing ballots from their home offices, in conditions “completely outside the controls the state says they have in place to keep this from happening”.
“You’re taking what the state has said is the roadmap to hack an election and they’re just letting it sit on people’s home computers with no evidence of any kind of security,” Cross said. “I mean, it’s truly insane. I cannot overstate how crazy that is.”
The plaintiffs spent a year, tens of thousands of dollars on litigation and were required to create secure facilities in order to review those same databases, only to find that they were neither unique nor confidential. The database’s structure was identical to Gems databases from around the country that have been public record for up to 17 years.
Beaver was also shown to have provided misleading information to the court when he told the judge that penetration testing – where a cybersecurity firm attempts to gain access to test the network’s security – ensured that the secretary of state’s computer systems were secure.
Beaver failed to mention to the judge that the testing failed, and the cybersecurity firm was able to take over the entire network, which was only revealed when the state was forced to provide those security reports.
A second round of testing in November 2018 showed some improvement, though many of the vulnerabilities identified a year before had not been fixed.
Georgia announced on Monday it is buying an entirely new voting system from Dominion Voting Systems for nearly $107m, set to be rolled out by next year’s presidential primaries. It is unclear how that announcement will affect the outcome of this case, which centers on the constitutionality of the voting system currently in place in Georgia.
The case, Curling v Raffensperger, is “the most important federal constitutional litigation concerning the baseline requirements for voting systems in order to assure honest elections,” according to Candice Hoke, an elections technology and law expert.
Judge Amy Totenberg is set to issue her ruling in the next week, though an exact date is not known. That ruling is likely to have national impact, even as its specific requirements will only apply to Georgia.
“The remedy will be Georgia specific, but how she interprets the federal constitution and the protections for voting rights – that is a set of principles that will be out there to be evaluated and reflected on by courts and the public for years,” Hoke said.
Georgia’s secretary of state’s office did not respond in time for publication.
The most maligned components of Georgia’s election systems – voting machines and online voter registration – were almost entirely managed by private companies, prompting concerns from election security experts.
Voting machine company Elections Systems and Software (ES&S), which has close connections with the Georgia secretary of state’s office and Governor Brian Kemp’s staff, had three staff in Georgia building electronic ballots out of their homes through the 2018 midterms.
This introduced significant security concerns about both foreign actors attacking the election system with malware or about a “political insider” potentially introducing their own coding that could alter the results of an election without detection, according to the plaintiffs.
“It’s a shock to everyone that the vendor is actually building ballots for state elections,” said David Cross, lead attorney for one of the two groups suing the state. “That should not be happening. That should be at the state level, because the state does not have any means of ensuring the necessary security protocols of the vendor.”
PCC Technologies, which offers voter registration management, hosted Georgia’s online voter registration system on its own servers and was responsible for running the My Voter Page, which gave registered voters important information about their ballots and polling places. In court, it was revealed that PCC was a major security concern for the secretary of state’s office, and that the state was unable to audit the registration system because they were not contractually allowed to access PCC’s servers.
The contract for server hosting ended on 30 June, and the secretary of state’s office – which runs elections in Georgia – is in the process of moving the voter registration system back to its own servers, according to documents produced by the state and the testimony of the secretary of state’s chief information officer, Merritt Beaver.
But the state is continuing its contract with PCC to manage the voter registration system and the My Voter Page.
“It’s the selling of a public election,” said Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance and another plaintiff in the case. “The [election vendor] decides whether or not to mess with the election … Interestingly enough, [Georgia] wrote them a check to do it. I’m not saying they exercised that option, but the state gave them that option.”
The series of revelations on the state’s relationships with ES&S and PCC also exposed mischaracterizations made by Beaver and the secretary of state’s legal team.
The election system that Georgia currently uses has a component called the Gems database. That database holds information used to build the electronic ballots that voters use to cast votes in precincts across Georgia, and is responsible for bringing up the correct ballot to the correct voter.
Beaver told the court that the structure of Georgia’s Gems database was unique and confidential as part of the security procedures for the secretary of state’s office. If the structure of the database was not known to outside parties, then outside parties would find it more difficult to manipulate the election.
The catch, according to Cross, is that ES&S employees were designing ballots from their home offices, in conditions “completely outside the controls the state says they have in place to keep this from happening”.
“You’re taking what the state has said is the roadmap to hack an election and they’re just letting it sit on people’s home computers with no evidence of any kind of security,” Cross said. “I mean, it’s truly insane. I cannot overstate how crazy that is.”
The plaintiffs spent a year, tens of thousands of dollars on litigation and were required to create secure facilities in order to review those same databases, only to find that they were neither unique nor confidential. The database’s structure was identical to Gems databases from around the country that have been public record for up to 17 years.
Beaver was also shown to have provided misleading information to the court when he told the judge that penetration testing – where a cybersecurity firm attempts to gain access to test the network’s security – ensured that the secretary of state’s computer systems were secure.
Beaver failed to mention to the judge that the testing failed, and the cybersecurity firm was able to take over the entire network, which was only revealed when the state was forced to provide those security reports.
A second round of testing in November 2018 showed some improvement, though many of the vulnerabilities identified a year before had not been fixed.
Georgia announced on Monday it is buying an entirely new voting system from Dominion Voting Systems for nearly $107m, set to be rolled out by next year’s presidential primaries. It is unclear how that announcement will affect the outcome of this case, which centers on the constitutionality of the voting system currently in place in Georgia.
The case, Curling v Raffensperger, is “the most important federal constitutional litigation concerning the baseline requirements for voting systems in order to assure honest elections,” according to Candice Hoke, an elections technology and law expert.
Judge Amy Totenberg is set to issue her ruling in the next week, though an exact date is not known. That ruling is likely to have national impact, even as its specific requirements will only apply to Georgia.
“The remedy will be Georgia specific, but how she interprets the federal constitution and the protections for voting rights – that is a set of principles that will be out there to be evaluated and reflected on by courts and the public for years,” Hoke said.
Georgia’s secretary of state’s office did not respond in time for publication.
Georgia election officials deny evidence destruction
Kate Brumback, Associated Press - Chron
Updated 3:52 pm CDT, Wednesday, July 31, 2019
ATLANTA (AP) — Lawyers for Georgia election officials are rejecting as frivolous allegations that their clients destroyed evidence in a case challenging the state's outdated election system.
Election integrity advocates and individual Georgia voters sued election officials, saying the voting machines the state has used since 2002 are unsecure and vulnerable to hacking. In a court filing Thursday, they said the state began destroying evidence within days of the suit's filing in 2017 and has continued to do so as the case moved forward.
Responding in a court filing Tuesday, lawyers for state election officials called those allegations "a desperate attempt to distract the Court and the public from the complete lack of evidence of an actual compromise of Georgia's election system."
The state's election system came under national scrutiny last year during the closely watched gubernatorial election in which Republican Brian Kemp, who was the state's top election official at the time, narrowly beat Democrat Stacey Abrams.
State officials on Monday announced that they have selected a new voting system and expect it to be in place in time for the presidential primary election on March 24. But the state still plans to use the outdated machines for special and municipal elections in the interim.
U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg held a two-day hearing last Thursday and Friday on requests by the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that she order the state to immediately stop using its current voting machines and switch to hand-marked paper ballots. She hadn't ruled on those requests by Wednesday.
In their brief last week, lawyers for the Coalition for Good Governance accused state officials of destroying computer servers from the Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University after a security hole there that exposed Georgia voters' personal data and passwords used by county election officials was discovered. State lawyers then failed to ask the FBI for a copy of a forensic image the agency made of the server before it was wiped, despite saying they would, coalition lawyers say.
Their brief also accuses state officials and their lawyers of deleting and overwriting data preserved on voting machine memories and on memory cards used to program the voting machines. They did so in spite of the plaintiffs' demands, the court's instructions and requirements of the law, the coalition lawyers wrote.
All of the evidence that the coalition's brief says was destroyed still exists and remains available for their review during the evidence gathering process, the state's lawyers wrote. They contend that the coalition was aware of this and made the allegations to get news media attention and promote its fundraising efforts.
The initial lawsuit filed in 2017 had nothing to do with elections conducted while the Kennesaw State server was in use, and the server was not identified as something that needed to be preserved until several months later when the plaintiffs announced their intent to file an amended lawsuit with additional claims, the state lawyers wrote. The server and its backup were "repurposed in the normal course of business" by Kennesaw State before election officials got requests to preserve it, they wrote
But an FBI copy of that server does exist and the state has requested a copy, and the state lawyers say they told the plaintiffs in early July that they would provide it to them.
"The State says it 'repurposed' these computers by wiping them clean, much like shredding documents 'repurposes' the documents into trash," coalition lawyer Cary Ichter said in an email, adding that state officials have repeatedly changed their story about the wiping of the server.
The coalition has "put forward no evidence that the webserver or any other information was 'crucial' to their ability to prove their case," state lawyers wrote.
Ichter argued the relevance, which he said is central to the case, is "whether the State has addressed the potentially devastating and lasting impact that leaving the server open to the internet for months has had upon election security to this day. The State, by wiping the server clean, destroyed the only evidence of what was exposed to the world."
State lawyers also argued that past election data on memory cards and the internal memory of the voting machines isn't erased by later usage because each election is stored in folders on various election systems, and the plaintiffs are aware of that. Therefore, allegations that that relevant evidence was destroyed are unfounded, they argued.
Election integrity advocates and individual Georgia voters sued election officials, saying the voting machines the state has used since 2002 are unsecure and vulnerable to hacking. In a court filing Thursday, they said the state began destroying evidence within days of the suit's filing in 2017 and has continued to do so as the case moved forward.
Responding in a court filing Tuesday, lawyers for state election officials called those allegations "a desperate attempt to distract the Court and the public from the complete lack of evidence of an actual compromise of Georgia's election system."
The state's election system came under national scrutiny last year during the closely watched gubernatorial election in which Republican Brian Kemp, who was the state's top election official at the time, narrowly beat Democrat Stacey Abrams.
State officials on Monday announced that they have selected a new voting system and expect it to be in place in time for the presidential primary election on March 24. But the state still plans to use the outdated machines for special and municipal elections in the interim.
U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg held a two-day hearing last Thursday and Friday on requests by the plaintiffs in the lawsuit that she order the state to immediately stop using its current voting machines and switch to hand-marked paper ballots. She hadn't ruled on those requests by Wednesday.
In their brief last week, lawyers for the Coalition for Good Governance accused state officials of destroying computer servers from the Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University after a security hole there that exposed Georgia voters' personal data and passwords used by county election officials was discovered. State lawyers then failed to ask the FBI for a copy of a forensic image the agency made of the server before it was wiped, despite saying they would, coalition lawyers say.
Their brief also accuses state officials and their lawyers of deleting and overwriting data preserved on voting machine memories and on memory cards used to program the voting machines. They did so in spite of the plaintiffs' demands, the court's instructions and requirements of the law, the coalition lawyers wrote.
All of the evidence that the coalition's brief says was destroyed still exists and remains available for their review during the evidence gathering process, the state's lawyers wrote. They contend that the coalition was aware of this and made the allegations to get news media attention and promote its fundraising efforts.
The initial lawsuit filed in 2017 had nothing to do with elections conducted while the Kennesaw State server was in use, and the server was not identified as something that needed to be preserved until several months later when the plaintiffs announced their intent to file an amended lawsuit with additional claims, the state lawyers wrote. The server and its backup were "repurposed in the normal course of business" by Kennesaw State before election officials got requests to preserve it, they wrote
But an FBI copy of that server does exist and the state has requested a copy, and the state lawyers say they told the plaintiffs in early July that they would provide it to them.
"The State says it 'repurposed' these computers by wiping them clean, much like shredding documents 'repurposes' the documents into trash," coalition lawyer Cary Ichter said in an email, adding that state officials have repeatedly changed their story about the wiping of the server.
The coalition has "put forward no evidence that the webserver or any other information was 'crucial' to their ability to prove their case," state lawyers wrote.
Ichter argued the relevance, which he said is central to the case, is "whether the State has addressed the potentially devastating and lasting impact that leaving the server open to the internet for months has had upon election security to this day. The State, by wiping the server clean, destroyed the only evidence of what was exposed to the world."
State lawyers also argued that past election data on memory cards and the internal memory of the voting machines isn't erased by later usage because each election is stored in folders on various election systems, and the plaintiffs are aware of that. Therefore, allegations that that relevant evidence was destroyed are unfounded, they argued.
No, both sides are not the same
Mark E Andersen for Daily Kos
Community
Sunday July 28, 2019 · 6:30 PM PDT
Read the comments on any political post and sooner or later you will run across the obligatory “Both sides are the same” argument, or some variant of that sentiment. It is normally said by someone who thinks they are smarter than everyone else, and when they say it, they talk down to all who disagree with them. They also happen to be wrong.
There are two distinct sides in American politics today. The differences between the two sides could not be any more apparent or clear, especially since the election of the current White House occupant.
On one side is the American right, where facts and reason have been cast off as if they were a worthless trinket won at the country fair. Members of the Republican Party are expected to walk lockstep with party leadership: There is no dissent, and very little, if any, diversity. They are a party that uses racism, hatred, and fear to drive voters to the polls. Someone is always coming to get their guns or bring sharia law to the country, and scary brown people are constantly trying to take their jobs.
The GOP is a party that claims fiscal restraint yet cuts taxes with abandon, never worrying about the impacts those tax cuts will have on the very institutions that rely on government funding to function. Infrastructure crumbles, college tuition climbs, and elementary and secondary education suffer. Parents have to pick up the slack by selling wrapping paper, magazine subscriptions, discount cards, and various other schemes to replace funding that has been cut to pay for ill-advised tax cuts, while the Air Force gets all the money they want for a bomber that we really don’t need. You can bet the Air Force won’t be holding a bake sale to raise $600 million to buy a new bomber.
The Republican Party also claims the moral high ground. With the backing of American evangelicals, they claim to be the soul of America, yet they support a thrice-married cheater who epitomizes everything Jesus preached against.
On the left you have the Democratic Party which, while not perfect, is a damn sight better than anything on the right. On the left there are actual proposals that will make peoples lives better, and not just rich folks.
The Affordable Care Act was a long time coming and is the first step in making health care a right, and not a privilege. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has a plan for everything, recently released a plan to eliminate student debt, a plan that could help millions of Americans and prevent an economic collapse.
Democrats stand for taxes and decry income equality, arguing that billionaires and large corporations should not be paying less in taxes than the average American making a median income. Democrats believe that no one should suffer from food insecurity, while Republicans have no issue with kicking 3 million people off the SNAP program.
Democrats want inclusivity and as a result, it often seems like getting the Democratic Party to agree on anything is like herding cats. Every group has a voice and every voice has a different priority, but eventually a consensus is achieved, and moved forward.
Some of America’s greatest achievements have been shepherded in by the American left. In the throes of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced Social Security. John F. Kennedy gave us the moon. Lyndon Johnson gave us Medicare. Barack Obama gave us the Affordable Care Act.
Is the Democratic Party perfect? Not by a long shot. But that is what is so great about it: We can all complain about the party, we can argue about its future, we can agree, and we can disagree. We do not have to march in lockstep with the party leaders, and that is the strength of the American left.
So the next time you hear someone smugly say that “both parties are the same,” do not engage them, and do not argue with them. Let them have their little moment, and know that they are not as smart as they think they are. There is a stark difference between the parties. Anyone who says any different is doing nothing more than displaying their ignorance of American politics.
There are two distinct sides in American politics today. The differences between the two sides could not be any more apparent or clear, especially since the election of the current White House occupant.
On one side is the American right, where facts and reason have been cast off as if they were a worthless trinket won at the country fair. Members of the Republican Party are expected to walk lockstep with party leadership: There is no dissent, and very little, if any, diversity. They are a party that uses racism, hatred, and fear to drive voters to the polls. Someone is always coming to get their guns or bring sharia law to the country, and scary brown people are constantly trying to take their jobs.
The GOP is a party that claims fiscal restraint yet cuts taxes with abandon, never worrying about the impacts those tax cuts will have on the very institutions that rely on government funding to function. Infrastructure crumbles, college tuition climbs, and elementary and secondary education suffer. Parents have to pick up the slack by selling wrapping paper, magazine subscriptions, discount cards, and various other schemes to replace funding that has been cut to pay for ill-advised tax cuts, while the Air Force gets all the money they want for a bomber that we really don’t need. You can bet the Air Force won’t be holding a bake sale to raise $600 million to buy a new bomber.
The Republican Party also claims the moral high ground. With the backing of American evangelicals, they claim to be the soul of America, yet they support a thrice-married cheater who epitomizes everything Jesus preached against.
On the left you have the Democratic Party which, while not perfect, is a damn sight better than anything on the right. On the left there are actual proposals that will make peoples lives better, and not just rich folks.
The Affordable Care Act was a long time coming and is the first step in making health care a right, and not a privilege. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has a plan for everything, recently released a plan to eliminate student debt, a plan that could help millions of Americans and prevent an economic collapse.
Democrats stand for taxes and decry income equality, arguing that billionaires and large corporations should not be paying less in taxes than the average American making a median income. Democrats believe that no one should suffer from food insecurity, while Republicans have no issue with kicking 3 million people off the SNAP program.
Democrats want inclusivity and as a result, it often seems like getting the Democratic Party to agree on anything is like herding cats. Every group has a voice and every voice has a different priority, but eventually a consensus is achieved, and moved forward.
Some of America’s greatest achievements have been shepherded in by the American left. In the throes of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced Social Security. John F. Kennedy gave us the moon. Lyndon Johnson gave us Medicare. Barack Obama gave us the Affordable Care Act.
Is the Democratic Party perfect? Not by a long shot. But that is what is so great about it: We can all complain about the party, we can argue about its future, we can agree, and we can disagree. We do not have to march in lockstep with the party leaders, and that is the strength of the American left.
So the next time you hear someone smugly say that “both parties are the same,” do not engage them, and do not argue with them. Let them have their little moment, and know that they are not as smart as they think they are. There is a stark difference between the parties. Anyone who says any different is doing nothing more than displaying their ignorance of American politics.
Political Fundraising Has a Big, Nasty Secret
U.S. campaign-finance laws have been written to prevent donors from taking advantage of politicians—but do little to protect donors from being scammed.
6:00 AM ET
David A. Graham
Staff writer at The Atlantic
It’s nice work if you can get it—“it,” in this case, being other folks’ hard-earned cash.
The world of political fundraising has a big problem. Consider an excellent investigation by ProPublica and Politico published Friday about a political-action committee called the Conservative Majority Fund, which, the authors write:
has raised nearly $10 million since mid-2012 and continues to solicit funds to this day, primarily from thousands of steadfast contributors to conservative causes, many of them senior citizens. But it has made just $48,400 in political contributions to candidates and committees. Public records indicate its main beneficiaries are the operative Kelley Rogers, who has a history of disputes over allegedly unethical fundraising, and one of the largest conservative fundraising companies, InfoCision Management Corp., which charged millions of dollars in fundraising fees.
Such groups, often labeled “scam PACs,” are not new, and though they seemed to gain a toehold on the right first, liberal counterparts have been catching up in the Trump era. The basic setup is something like this: A group raises money it claims will go to some political cause, but ends up spending no money, or effectively no money, on that goal, instead directing the funds to other ends—often to its founders or staff in the form of salaries, payment for services rendered, travel, and the like. The Conservative Majority Fund is just an especially extreme example.
Broadly speaking, U.S. campaign-finance laws have been written to prevent nefarious influence by donors over politicians. To that end, the government limits (for now, at least) how much an individual can give to a candidate. It prevents “straw donations,” in which an individual routes donations through other people, since that would give a single individual undue influence. It prevents donations from foreigners to U.S. political campaigns. It requires that campaigns and some other bodies disclose who has given to them. The unifying principle is the presumption that the public needs to worry about who might influence a politician. Scam PACs bypass that principle. Here, it’s not the donors who are taking advantage—it’s the donors who are being taken advantage of, by operators who have spotted a shadow in the law in which they can operate.
Politics is a lucrative business, and campaign operatives routinely take office seekers for rides. Sometimes that is because they are unscrupulous, and sometimes that is simply because the operative makes errors or because the candidate just can’t cut it. (After all, most candidates lose.) “The consultant is selling something to the candidate,” the political scientist Adam Sheingate told Molly Ball in The Atlantic in 2016. “The confidence game is that the candidate is always a little afraid. They’re always a little scared they can lose, and that’s what the consultant exploits.”
It’s hard to feel much pity for candidates who light their campaign cash on fire. But the kind of people who give to scam PACs are more sympathetic. CMF, for example, relied heavily on telemarketing, which is both an extremely expensive method of raising funds—it requires live people to call would-be donors—and one that, like direct mail, is particularly effective at targeting older and often less sophisticated, more vulnerable people.
About $9 million of what CMF raised went to an Akron, Ohio–based telemarketing firm called InfoCision, according to ProPublica. Devoted readers will not be surprised to see the firm’s name here. As I reported in a pair of pieces on Ben Carson’s 2016 presidential run, the Carson campaign was raising astonishing amounts of money—but it was also spending eye-popping amounts. FEC reports showed that much of the money was being plowed back into direct mail and telemarketing fundraising. A lot of it went to a direct-mail firm run by Carson’s chief fundraiser, and big chunks also went to InfoCision and Eleventy, another company based in Akron.
In summary, Carson was raising cash from possibly unsophisticated donors and then spending it to raise more cash from unsophisticated donors. Carson didn’t end up with much to show for it—he was polling fourth, in single digits, when he dropped out in March 2016, though he did end up with a Cabinet position for which, by his own account, he was not qualified. But the vendors made a neat buck. InfoCision had previously been a major payee for a dubious PAC run by Newt Gingrich, which, as of mid-2015, had raised $1.25 million and spent $1.38 million, but gave just $2,500 to candidates.
Still, those numbers look like a model of efficiency compared with CMF’s ratios. The modus operandi—call people up, solicit money for a specific cause, and then spend next to no money on that—sounds a great deal like a standard variety of scam, Carolyn Carter, the deputy director of the National Consumer Law Center, confirmed to me. (Carter noted that the state and federal laws that govern what tax-exempt organizations can do are complicated, but in general deceptive practices are barred.)
The catch here is who regulates the behavior. If you call people up, ask them for money, and claim most of the donation will go to a charity but don’t actually do that, you’re liable to get in trouble with the government. In fact, that has happened to InfoCision: In 2012, the Ohio attorney general reached a settlement with InfoCision in which the company paid a fine and agreed to abide by state laws. The company also settled a class-action lawsuit based on the same practices in 2014. (Those are not its only scrapes with the law. In 2018, the Federal Trade Commission fined InfoCision $250,000 for claiming that it was not asking for money in phone calls in which it asked for money. InfoCision also settled a class-action lawsuit in which employees said they’d been underpaid.)
But the FTC, state attorneys general, and other bodies that might regulate this kind of behavior in other spheres are constrained in their ability to intervene, because this is all happening under election law—which seems to be an ingenious loophole for bad behavior. As ProPublica notes, the FTC doesn’t have jurisdiction over political fundraising. That’s the province of the Federal Election Commission.
The FEC, however, is notoriously toothless, effectively created to deadlock. But even setting aside that problem, two Democratic commissioners acknowledged in 2016 that “the power of the Commission to directly and comprehensively protect political contributors is limited.” In 2018, the FEC asked Congress to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act to allow the commission to regulate fraud.
The Daily Beast also reported in 2018 that the Justice Department had brought charges against a scam PAC in Arizona, and a defendant pleaded guilty in November 2018. “This is the first-ever federal prosecution of fraudulent scam PACs, but it won’t be the last,” U.S. Attorney for Manhattan Geoffrey Berman said at the time.
One hopes Berman is correct. For the time being, scam PACs seem to have found a clever way to get away with behavior that might be illegal in other areas simply by doing it in the election sphere. It’s hard to besmirch any pursuit as routinely maligned as politics, but they have found a way.
The world of political fundraising has a big problem. Consider an excellent investigation by ProPublica and Politico published Friday about a political-action committee called the Conservative Majority Fund, which, the authors write:
has raised nearly $10 million since mid-2012 and continues to solicit funds to this day, primarily from thousands of steadfast contributors to conservative causes, many of them senior citizens. But it has made just $48,400 in political contributions to candidates and committees. Public records indicate its main beneficiaries are the operative Kelley Rogers, who has a history of disputes over allegedly unethical fundraising, and one of the largest conservative fundraising companies, InfoCision Management Corp., which charged millions of dollars in fundraising fees.
Such groups, often labeled “scam PACs,” are not new, and though they seemed to gain a toehold on the right first, liberal counterparts have been catching up in the Trump era. The basic setup is something like this: A group raises money it claims will go to some political cause, but ends up spending no money, or effectively no money, on that goal, instead directing the funds to other ends—often to its founders or staff in the form of salaries, payment for services rendered, travel, and the like. The Conservative Majority Fund is just an especially extreme example.
Broadly speaking, U.S. campaign-finance laws have been written to prevent nefarious influence by donors over politicians. To that end, the government limits (for now, at least) how much an individual can give to a candidate. It prevents “straw donations,” in which an individual routes donations through other people, since that would give a single individual undue influence. It prevents donations from foreigners to U.S. political campaigns. It requires that campaigns and some other bodies disclose who has given to them. The unifying principle is the presumption that the public needs to worry about who might influence a politician. Scam PACs bypass that principle. Here, it’s not the donors who are taking advantage—it’s the donors who are being taken advantage of, by operators who have spotted a shadow in the law in which they can operate.
Politics is a lucrative business, and campaign operatives routinely take office seekers for rides. Sometimes that is because they are unscrupulous, and sometimes that is simply because the operative makes errors or because the candidate just can’t cut it. (After all, most candidates lose.) “The consultant is selling something to the candidate,” the political scientist Adam Sheingate told Molly Ball in The Atlantic in 2016. “The confidence game is that the candidate is always a little afraid. They’re always a little scared they can lose, and that’s what the consultant exploits.”
It’s hard to feel much pity for candidates who light their campaign cash on fire. But the kind of people who give to scam PACs are more sympathetic. CMF, for example, relied heavily on telemarketing, which is both an extremely expensive method of raising funds—it requires live people to call would-be donors—and one that, like direct mail, is particularly effective at targeting older and often less sophisticated, more vulnerable people.
About $9 million of what CMF raised went to an Akron, Ohio–based telemarketing firm called InfoCision, according to ProPublica. Devoted readers will not be surprised to see the firm’s name here. As I reported in a pair of pieces on Ben Carson’s 2016 presidential run, the Carson campaign was raising astonishing amounts of money—but it was also spending eye-popping amounts. FEC reports showed that much of the money was being plowed back into direct mail and telemarketing fundraising. A lot of it went to a direct-mail firm run by Carson’s chief fundraiser, and big chunks also went to InfoCision and Eleventy, another company based in Akron.
In summary, Carson was raising cash from possibly unsophisticated donors and then spending it to raise more cash from unsophisticated donors. Carson didn’t end up with much to show for it—he was polling fourth, in single digits, when he dropped out in March 2016, though he did end up with a Cabinet position for which, by his own account, he was not qualified. But the vendors made a neat buck. InfoCision had previously been a major payee for a dubious PAC run by Newt Gingrich, which, as of mid-2015, had raised $1.25 million and spent $1.38 million, but gave just $2,500 to candidates.
Still, those numbers look like a model of efficiency compared with CMF’s ratios. The modus operandi—call people up, solicit money for a specific cause, and then spend next to no money on that—sounds a great deal like a standard variety of scam, Carolyn Carter, the deputy director of the National Consumer Law Center, confirmed to me. (Carter noted that the state and federal laws that govern what tax-exempt organizations can do are complicated, but in general deceptive practices are barred.)
The catch here is who regulates the behavior. If you call people up, ask them for money, and claim most of the donation will go to a charity but don’t actually do that, you’re liable to get in trouble with the government. In fact, that has happened to InfoCision: In 2012, the Ohio attorney general reached a settlement with InfoCision in which the company paid a fine and agreed to abide by state laws. The company also settled a class-action lawsuit based on the same practices in 2014. (Those are not its only scrapes with the law. In 2018, the Federal Trade Commission fined InfoCision $250,000 for claiming that it was not asking for money in phone calls in which it asked for money. InfoCision also settled a class-action lawsuit in which employees said they’d been underpaid.)
But the FTC, state attorneys general, and other bodies that might regulate this kind of behavior in other spheres are constrained in their ability to intervene, because this is all happening under election law—which seems to be an ingenious loophole for bad behavior. As ProPublica notes, the FTC doesn’t have jurisdiction over political fundraising. That’s the province of the Federal Election Commission.
The FEC, however, is notoriously toothless, effectively created to deadlock. But even setting aside that problem, two Democratic commissioners acknowledged in 2016 that “the power of the Commission to directly and comprehensively protect political contributors is limited.” In 2018, the FEC asked Congress to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act to allow the commission to regulate fraud.
The Daily Beast also reported in 2018 that the Justice Department had brought charges against a scam PAC in Arizona, and a defendant pleaded guilty in November 2018. “This is the first-ever federal prosecution of fraudulent scam PACs, but it won’t be the last,” U.S. Attorney for Manhattan Geoffrey Berman said at the time.
One hopes Berman is correct. For the time being, scam PACs seem to have found a clever way to get away with behavior that might be illegal in other areas simply by doing it in the election sphere. It’s hard to besmirch any pursuit as routinely maligned as politics, but they have found a way.
A List -- Why A Majority of Whites No Longer Vote Democratic at the Presidential Level
Stephen Nelson
Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)
Wednesday March 06, 2013 · 2:59 PM PST
In seven of the nine Presidential elections that took place in the United States from 1932 through 1964 a majority of white voters in the country voted for the Democratic nominee for President. However, not once in the twelve President elections since 1964 has a majority of white voters voted for the Democratic nominee for President. What has happened to cause this rather dramatic and consistent shift among white voters?
There is no single simple answer. It's a complex confluence of many different causes and issues. Below is simply a list, in my opinion, of some of the causes of white flight from the Democratic party at the Presidential level.
Race --
The 1964 Civil Rights Act -- Lyndon Johnson reportedly said to Bill Moyers after Johnson signed the 1964 Civil rights act, "We have last the South for a generation." Johnson actually underestimated the length of time that the Democrats would lose the South as it's been almost 50 years since the Civil Rights Act was signed and with very few exceptions Democratic Presidential nominees have not won states in the South (I'm not considering Florida to be part of the original South). Out of the 132 opportunities to win states in the South between 1968 and 2012 Democratic nominees have won only 24 times, and 10 of those wins occurred during a single election, the post-Watergate backlash election of 1976 when Georgia native Jimmy Carter was on the Democratic ticket.
The 1965 Immigration Law --
Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Immigration Law which changed the immigration policy toward non-Europeans. In 1970 Europeans accounted for almost 60% of the foreign born population but by 2000 Europeans accounted for only 15% of the foreign born population. Many white xenophobes blame the Democrats for what they see as the browning of America.
Affimative Action --
White backlash to affirmation action (the 1978 Bakke case held that racial quotas were unconstitutional) which was started started by executive orders of the Kennedy (10925) and Johnson (11246 and 11375) administrations.
The Perceived Breakdown of "Law and Order" --
The term "Law and Order" was used as coded racism by the right-wing as they used it to dissolve a liberal consensus about crime that involved federal court decisions and a pushback against illegal drugs and violent gang activity. Many whites turned against the Democratic party, blaming it for being soft on crime and rioters, including the Watts riots in 1965 and the Newark and Detroit riots in 1967.
The Warren Court --
many "law abiding" citizens blamed the "activist" Warren Court and Democrats for its "liberal" decisions, such as Escobedo vs. Illinois and Miranda vs. Arizona, which they believed handcuffed law enforcement and allowed criminals to evade justice.
Student Demonstrations --
In the Fall of 1964 the Free Speech Movement erupted on the Berkeley campus of the Univeristy of California, and many, including Ronald Reagan, blamed the "permissive, liberal" establishment, including Pat Brown, who was California governor, Clark Kerr, who was President of the University of California, and Edward Strong, who was chancellor at Berkeley, all of whom were Democrats. The FSM demonstrations were just the beginning, as later in the decade the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations become center stage.
1968 Democratic National Convention --
There was the chaos and disorder at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago which was seen by millions of Americans on television and reinforced the view that the Democrats could not maintain order in their own party, much less in the streets of America.
General Distrust of Goverment --
Democrats have tended to be seen as the pro-government party and the Republicans have been the anti-government party and there has been, in general, a mistrust of government including:
The Warren Commission -- 25 years after the JFK assassination a majority of the American public believed (rightly or wrongly) that JFK was assassinated as part of a conspiracy and not by a lone assassin as the Warren Commission concluded.
The Vietnam War --
The American public was constantly told by government officials that there was light at the end of the Tunnel, then early in 1968 the Tet Offensive occurred and it became obvious that the light at the end of the tunnel was the headlight of an oncoming train. Then, of course, there was Nixon's non-existant secret plan to end the war.
Watergate --
If people at the highest levels of the Federal government are corrupt, then government in general must be corrupt by definiation.
Democrats seen as weak on Defense/Foreign Policy --
Vietnam War-- One reason the Vietnam War divided and discredited Democrats and splintered the liberal consensus was because it was a Democratic adminstration that effectively started that war. Opposition to the war didn’t unify the party, it divided it. Nixon won the 1968 election, in part, because Humphrey was associated with the war, and couldn’t split with Johnson, and Nixon promised a non-existant secret plan to end the war. The national security gap for Democrats first appeared in polls in 1967, because Johnson was held responsible for the war itself, not because Democrats were associated intially with antiwar activists. But the anti-war demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic convention permantly linked anti-war protesters to the Democratic party.
Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion --
After tne 1972 Massachusetts Democratic primary, long before Thomas Eagleton was chosen as George McGovern's running mate, Thomas Eagleton told reporter Robert Novak "The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot," Once "middle America—Catholic middle America, in particular" — once they find out, "he’s dead." Somewhere along the way the "pot" was dropped and the alliterative acid was substituted. The Acid, Amnesy, and Abortion label stuck to Democratic party for many years afterwards. In reality, of course, in 1972 McGovern was not for the legalization of marijuana, much less acid, as his daughter was an addict, and on abortion McGovern was to the Right of Roe, as he believed that abortion was better left to the states.
Iranian Hostage Crisis --
Throughout 1980 in the United States, constant media coverage -- yellow ribbons, footage of chanting Iranian mobs, even a whole new television news program, ABC's Nightline (orignally titled American Held Hostage) -- provided a dispiriting backdrop to the presidential election season. Because people felt that Jimmy Carter had not been tough enough in foreign policy, this symbolized for them that some bunch of students could seize American diplomatic officials and hold them prisoner and thumb their nose at the United States. This associated Carter and the Democrats with American impotence the in world.
Of course, this list is incomplete as these are just some of the major reasons that Democrats at the Presidential level no longer receive a majority of the white vote. The reasons are quite numerous and very complex and can't be adequately addressed in detail in a single diary.
There is no single simple answer. It's a complex confluence of many different causes and issues. Below is simply a list, in my opinion, of some of the causes of white flight from the Democratic party at the Presidential level.
Race --
The 1964 Civil Rights Act -- Lyndon Johnson reportedly said to Bill Moyers after Johnson signed the 1964 Civil rights act, "We have last the South for a generation." Johnson actually underestimated the length of time that the Democrats would lose the South as it's been almost 50 years since the Civil Rights Act was signed and with very few exceptions Democratic Presidential nominees have not won states in the South (I'm not considering Florida to be part of the original South). Out of the 132 opportunities to win states in the South between 1968 and 2012 Democratic nominees have won only 24 times, and 10 of those wins occurred during a single election, the post-Watergate backlash election of 1976 when Georgia native Jimmy Carter was on the Democratic ticket.
The 1965 Immigration Law --
Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Immigration Law which changed the immigration policy toward non-Europeans. In 1970 Europeans accounted for almost 60% of the foreign born population but by 2000 Europeans accounted for only 15% of the foreign born population. Many white xenophobes blame the Democrats for what they see as the browning of America.
Affimative Action --
White backlash to affirmation action (the 1978 Bakke case held that racial quotas were unconstitutional) which was started started by executive orders of the Kennedy (10925) and Johnson (11246 and 11375) administrations.
The Perceived Breakdown of "Law and Order" --
The term "Law and Order" was used as coded racism by the right-wing as they used it to dissolve a liberal consensus about crime that involved federal court decisions and a pushback against illegal drugs and violent gang activity. Many whites turned against the Democratic party, blaming it for being soft on crime and rioters, including the Watts riots in 1965 and the Newark and Detroit riots in 1967.
The Warren Court --
many "law abiding" citizens blamed the "activist" Warren Court and Democrats for its "liberal" decisions, such as Escobedo vs. Illinois and Miranda vs. Arizona, which they believed handcuffed law enforcement and allowed criminals to evade justice.
Student Demonstrations --
In the Fall of 1964 the Free Speech Movement erupted on the Berkeley campus of the Univeristy of California, and many, including Ronald Reagan, blamed the "permissive, liberal" establishment, including Pat Brown, who was California governor, Clark Kerr, who was President of the University of California, and Edward Strong, who was chancellor at Berkeley, all of whom were Democrats. The FSM demonstrations were just the beginning, as later in the decade the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations become center stage.
1968 Democratic National Convention --
There was the chaos and disorder at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago which was seen by millions of Americans on television and reinforced the view that the Democrats could not maintain order in their own party, much less in the streets of America.
General Distrust of Goverment --
Democrats have tended to be seen as the pro-government party and the Republicans have been the anti-government party and there has been, in general, a mistrust of government including:
The Warren Commission -- 25 years after the JFK assassination a majority of the American public believed (rightly or wrongly) that JFK was assassinated as part of a conspiracy and not by a lone assassin as the Warren Commission concluded.
The Vietnam War --
The American public was constantly told by government officials that there was light at the end of the Tunnel, then early in 1968 the Tet Offensive occurred and it became obvious that the light at the end of the tunnel was the headlight of an oncoming train. Then, of course, there was Nixon's non-existant secret plan to end the war.
Watergate --
If people at the highest levels of the Federal government are corrupt, then government in general must be corrupt by definiation.
Democrats seen as weak on Defense/Foreign Policy --
Vietnam War-- One reason the Vietnam War divided and discredited Democrats and splintered the liberal consensus was because it was a Democratic adminstration that effectively started that war. Opposition to the war didn’t unify the party, it divided it. Nixon won the 1968 election, in part, because Humphrey was associated with the war, and couldn’t split with Johnson, and Nixon promised a non-existant secret plan to end the war. The national security gap for Democrats first appeared in polls in 1967, because Johnson was held responsible for the war itself, not because Democrats were associated intially with antiwar activists. But the anti-war demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic convention permantly linked anti-war protesters to the Democratic party.
Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion --
After tne 1972 Massachusetts Democratic primary, long before Thomas Eagleton was chosen as George McGovern's running mate, Thomas Eagleton told reporter Robert Novak "The people don’t know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot," Once "middle America—Catholic middle America, in particular" — once they find out, "he’s dead." Somewhere along the way the "pot" was dropped and the alliterative acid was substituted. The Acid, Amnesy, and Abortion label stuck to Democratic party for many years afterwards. In reality, of course, in 1972 McGovern was not for the legalization of marijuana, much less acid, as his daughter was an addict, and on abortion McGovern was to the Right of Roe, as he believed that abortion was better left to the states.
Iranian Hostage Crisis --
Throughout 1980 in the United States, constant media coverage -- yellow ribbons, footage of chanting Iranian mobs, even a whole new television news program, ABC's Nightline (orignally titled American Held Hostage) -- provided a dispiriting backdrop to the presidential election season. Because people felt that Jimmy Carter had not been tough enough in foreign policy, this symbolized for them that some bunch of students could seize American diplomatic officials and hold them prisoner and thumb their nose at the United States. This associated Carter and the Democrats with American impotence the in world.
Of course, this list is incomplete as these are just some of the major reasons that Democrats at the Presidential level no longer receive a majority of the white vote. The reasons are quite numerous and very complex and can't be adequately addressed in detail in a single diary.
Leaked voting machine passwords add to North Carolina's growing tally of election security woes
DocDawg
Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)
Sunday June 09, 2019 · 6:02 AM PDT
When it comes to election irregularities, North Carolina is the new Florida.
First there was the mini-disaster on Election Day 2016, in North Carolina’s bluest county by far, Durham. E-pollbook computers used by poll workers to check voters’ status as they arrive at the polls mysteriously malfunctioned in five Durham precincts, wrongly indicating either that they had already voted or that they were not registered. The story gained national attention when The Intercept later broke news of top-secret NSA documents suggesting that the e-pollbooks’ vendor, Florida’s VR Systems, had been hacked by Russian military operatives earlier that year. The story grew shadier still, early last week, with Politico’s revelation that just days before the election VR Systems technicians used remote-access software to log into Durham County election computers, potentially opening a digital barn door wide enough for a herd of those same Russian hackers to gallop into the county’s election system.
Then, of course, there’s the now famed story of Republican-funded election fraud(absentee ballot harvesting) in the state’s 9th Congressional district in 2018, requiring a costly do-over election to be held later this summer.
Now comes the state’s latest in a dizzying series of electoral embarrassments. Yesterday cybersecurity investigator Chris Vickery revealed on Twitter his discovery of an unsecured (that is, publicly accessible) online file in an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket belonging to the North Carolina State Board of Elections, containing what seemed to be election-related administrative passwords.
---
The ES&S iVotronic is a popular touchscreen voting machine currently used in 24 of North Carolina’s 100 counties, including the state’s largest, Mecklenburg (the rest use hand-marked paper ballots).
To be entirely fair, it isn’t at all clear that the exposed passwords would have provided malign hackers with any ability to interfere in the 2018 election. First, as the instructions above make clear, one needs to physically insert a properly programmed “master PEB” and “supervisor PEB” (essentially programmable card-keys) into an iVotronic unit in order to access the administrative menus these passwords unlock. Second, Vickery’s tweets seem to suggest that the password file he found was a backup file. We don’t know how old that backup was, or whether the passwords it exposed were still current during the 2018 election. And finally, 2018’s midterm election was North Carolina Democrats’ best showing in nearly a decade, with Dems winning every statewide race and breaking the state House of Representatives’ GOP supermajority. If GOP-sympathizing Russians meddled in that election they certainly didn’t do a very good job.
Still, this leak reveals a disturbingly lax cybersecurity culture at the State Board. Any IT professional careless enough to expose highly sensitive election-related passwords in plaintext on the internet is probably careless enough to make other, even more consequential, mistakes. This affair also reveals important weaknesses in the Department of Homeland Security’s election cybersecurity assessments, since it seems that DHS didn’t spot this tyro snafu hiding in plain sight.
The good news is that there’s a new sheriff in town at the North Carolina State Board of Elections. A highly experienced elections staffer, Karen Brinson Bell, has just been chosen by the new majority-Democrat Board of Elections to replace its recently fired executive director, Kim Strach, on whose watch all of these fusterclucks and many more occurred. Strach’s spouse, Phil Strach, is the GOP-controlled state legislature’s go-to attorney in lawsuits defending the state’s voter suppression laws.
“Our top priorities will be promoting voter confidence in elections and assisting the 100 county boards, the boots on the ground in every election,” Brinson Bell has stated. How she manages the Board’s response to this latest election scandal will be her first trial by fire in this new role. North Carolina voting rights activists will be watching hopefully.
First there was the mini-disaster on Election Day 2016, in North Carolina’s bluest county by far, Durham. E-pollbook computers used by poll workers to check voters’ status as they arrive at the polls mysteriously malfunctioned in five Durham precincts, wrongly indicating either that they had already voted or that they were not registered. The story gained national attention when The Intercept later broke news of top-secret NSA documents suggesting that the e-pollbooks’ vendor, Florida’s VR Systems, had been hacked by Russian military operatives earlier that year. The story grew shadier still, early last week, with Politico’s revelation that just days before the election VR Systems technicians used remote-access software to log into Durham County election computers, potentially opening a digital barn door wide enough for a herd of those same Russian hackers to gallop into the county’s election system.
Then, of course, there’s the now famed story of Republican-funded election fraud(absentee ballot harvesting) in the state’s 9th Congressional district in 2018, requiring a costly do-over election to be held later this summer.
Now comes the state’s latest in a dizzying series of electoral embarrassments. Yesterday cybersecurity investigator Chris Vickery revealed on Twitter his discovery of an unsecured (that is, publicly accessible) online file in an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket belonging to the North Carolina State Board of Elections, containing what seemed to be election-related administrative passwords.
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The ES&S iVotronic is a popular touchscreen voting machine currently used in 24 of North Carolina’s 100 counties, including the state’s largest, Mecklenburg (the rest use hand-marked paper ballots).
To be entirely fair, it isn’t at all clear that the exposed passwords would have provided malign hackers with any ability to interfere in the 2018 election. First, as the instructions above make clear, one needs to physically insert a properly programmed “master PEB” and “supervisor PEB” (essentially programmable card-keys) into an iVotronic unit in order to access the administrative menus these passwords unlock. Second, Vickery’s tweets seem to suggest that the password file he found was a backup file. We don’t know how old that backup was, or whether the passwords it exposed were still current during the 2018 election. And finally, 2018’s midterm election was North Carolina Democrats’ best showing in nearly a decade, with Dems winning every statewide race and breaking the state House of Representatives’ GOP supermajority. If GOP-sympathizing Russians meddled in that election they certainly didn’t do a very good job.
Still, this leak reveals a disturbingly lax cybersecurity culture at the State Board. Any IT professional careless enough to expose highly sensitive election-related passwords in plaintext on the internet is probably careless enough to make other, even more consequential, mistakes. This affair also reveals important weaknesses in the Department of Homeland Security’s election cybersecurity assessments, since it seems that DHS didn’t spot this tyro snafu hiding in plain sight.
The good news is that there’s a new sheriff in town at the North Carolina State Board of Elections. A highly experienced elections staffer, Karen Brinson Bell, has just been chosen by the new majority-Democrat Board of Elections to replace its recently fired executive director, Kim Strach, on whose watch all of these fusterclucks and many more occurred. Strach’s spouse, Phil Strach, is the GOP-controlled state legislature’s go-to attorney in lawsuits defending the state’s voter suppression laws.
“Our top priorities will be promoting voter confidence in elections and assisting the 100 county boards, the boots on the ground in every election,” Brinson Bell has stated. How she manages the Board’s response to this latest election scandal will be her first trial by fire in this new role. North Carolina voting rights activists will be watching hopefully.
Corporate Incompetence Strikes Again!!!
Did software firm's flaws expose North Carolina to election hacking?
Three years after election systems failed in one North Carolina county, DHS agrees to investigate possible hack
IGOR DERYSH - Salon
JUNE 6, 2019 10:00AM (UTC)
The Department of Homeland Security has finally agreed to examine election equipment used in North Carolina, nearly three years after voters reported malfunctions on Election Day in 2016, Politico reports.
In April, special counsel Robert Mueller wrote in his report that Russian military hackers had penetrated a voting software firm and “installed malware on the company network” of an unidentified election vendor. That vendor appears to be VR Systems, a Florida-based firm that Politico reports used remote access software to access a central computer in Durham County, North Carolina. DHS has agreed to send investigators to see whether the firm exposed that central computer to the hackers.
Hackers would not have been able to alter vote tallies, but could potentially have prevented people from voting in the key swing state. Computers used to check in voters in Durham County malfunctioned on Election Day 2016, telling voters that they had already voted even though they had not, NPR reported.
“Vulnerabilities in voting machines get most of the attention, but the security and availability of poll books is as critical to the integrity of elections as voting machines themselves,” election security expert Matt Blaze told Politico. “If poll books are compromised, this can selectively disenfranchise voters, create long lines at polling places, and cast doubt on the legitimacy of election results.”
The county switched to using paper poll books after numerous reports of malfunctions but officials never identified what had caused the issues in 2016, finally leading DHS to agree to review the computers nearly three years later.
Homeland Security officials told the Washington Post they plan to conduct a forensic analysis on the laptops used in Durham County. Josh Lawson, former general counsel of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, told the Post that his agency had requested a DHS review more than 18 months ago.
The DHS announcement came just weeks after the FBI came under fire for not sharing information with Florida officials about another alleged hack. After Mueller’s report revealed that Russian hackers accessed “the network of at least one Florida county government in 2016,” the FBI finally told Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that two Florida counties had been hacked, but asked him not to disclose which ones.
The Post reported last month that one of the counties was Washington County in the Florida panhandle, which is rural and sparsely populated.
VR Systems admitted to the Post that “we think we are the company referenced” in the Mueller report but denied that its network was breached or that its software had failed in Durham County.
But according to a leaked report by the National Security Agency, Russian hackers mounted a spearphishing campaign targeting the firm before using VR Systems credentials to send malicious emails to roughly 120 local government offices.
More than 60 Florida counties used VR Systems in 2016, as did counties in North Carolina, California, New York, Illinois, Indiana, Virginia and West Virginia.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told Politico that VR Systems had served up “our democracy on a silver platter to foreign hackers” by remotely accessing voting systems the day before Election Day.
“No company that plays such a critical role in our elections should be taking such a reckless shortcut with the cybersecurity of its state and local customers,” he said. "The fact that we’re just learning about this practice two years after the election, and after any evidence of hacking has likely been destroyed, is inexcusable. Americans need to know if VR Systems still has remote access to election computers in other states, and how often this occurred.”
In April, special counsel Robert Mueller wrote in his report that Russian military hackers had penetrated a voting software firm and “installed malware on the company network” of an unidentified election vendor. That vendor appears to be VR Systems, a Florida-based firm that Politico reports used remote access software to access a central computer in Durham County, North Carolina. DHS has agreed to send investigators to see whether the firm exposed that central computer to the hackers.
Hackers would not have been able to alter vote tallies, but could potentially have prevented people from voting in the key swing state. Computers used to check in voters in Durham County malfunctioned on Election Day 2016, telling voters that they had already voted even though they had not, NPR reported.
“Vulnerabilities in voting machines get most of the attention, but the security and availability of poll books is as critical to the integrity of elections as voting machines themselves,” election security expert Matt Blaze told Politico. “If poll books are compromised, this can selectively disenfranchise voters, create long lines at polling places, and cast doubt on the legitimacy of election results.”
The county switched to using paper poll books after numerous reports of malfunctions but officials never identified what had caused the issues in 2016, finally leading DHS to agree to review the computers nearly three years later.
Homeland Security officials told the Washington Post they plan to conduct a forensic analysis on the laptops used in Durham County. Josh Lawson, former general counsel of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, told the Post that his agency had requested a DHS review more than 18 months ago.
The DHS announcement came just weeks after the FBI came under fire for not sharing information with Florida officials about another alleged hack. After Mueller’s report revealed that Russian hackers accessed “the network of at least one Florida county government in 2016,” the FBI finally told Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that two Florida counties had been hacked, but asked him not to disclose which ones.
The Post reported last month that one of the counties was Washington County in the Florida panhandle, which is rural and sparsely populated.
VR Systems admitted to the Post that “we think we are the company referenced” in the Mueller report but denied that its network was breached or that its software had failed in Durham County.
But according to a leaked report by the National Security Agency, Russian hackers mounted a spearphishing campaign targeting the firm before using VR Systems credentials to send malicious emails to roughly 120 local government offices.
More than 60 Florida counties used VR Systems in 2016, as did counties in North Carolina, California, New York, Illinois, Indiana, Virginia and West Virginia.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told Politico that VR Systems had served up “our democracy on a silver platter to foreign hackers” by remotely accessing voting systems the day before Election Day.
“No company that plays such a critical role in our elections should be taking such a reckless shortcut with the cybersecurity of its state and local customers,” he said. "The fact that we’re just learning about this practice two years after the election, and after any evidence of hacking has likely been destroyed, is inexcusable. Americans need to know if VR Systems still has remote access to election computers in other states, and how often this occurred.”
White Women Are Helping States Pass Abortion Restrictions
Their support for Republican officials has been key to the GOP’s strength in the South.
RONALD BROWNSTEIN - the atlantic
12:23 PM ET
It’s common for critics of the new wave of state laws severely limiting access to abortion to say the measures are part of a Republican “war on women.”
But strong support from most white women, especially those who identify as evangelical Christians, has helped Republicans dominate local government in the states passing the most restrictive measures, from Alabama and Georgia to Kentucky and Missouri. In some of those states, polling shows that opposition to legal abortion is higher among white women than among white men.
These attitudes underscore why it’s too simplistic to forecast that the renewed push against abortion will uniformly drive women away from the GOP. There’s no question that abortion-rights supporters everywhere are mobilizing in opposition to the highly restrictive new laws, which range from bans starting at six weeks of pregnancy to total prohibition. Activists held some 500 events in all 50 states on Tuesday to protest the new laws—a preview, they say, of the energy the measures will ignite in the 2020 presidential and congressional elections, particularly among the roughly 60 percent majority of women who support legalized abortion. “We will power this movement into 2020,” NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue insisted in a conference call on Wednesday. “There will be political consequences.”
But it’s much less clear that abortion-rights supporters can exact political consequences in the states actually approving these laws, which are explicitly designed to prompt the Supreme Court to reconsider the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing nationwide access to the procedure. Their success will depend on whether the restrictions dislodge meaningful numbers of white women in these states from their respective Republican coalitions. And that is far from certain, particularly in the southern and border states advancing most of the laws.
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster who works extensively across the South, says that white women, “particularly suburban white women … have been absolutely critical” to the GOP’s strength in states approving the abortion bans. Election Day exit polls showed that most white women in these areas joined big majorities of white men to provide insuperable leads for Republican candidates.
In 2018, for instance, exit polls conducted by Edison Research found that fully three-fourths of white women supported the Republican Brian Kemp over the Democrat Stacey Abrams in the Georgia governor’s race. That same year, just 16 percent of white women picked the Democrat Mike Espy for Mississippi’s Senate seat. In the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama, 63 percent of white women backed the Republican Roy Moore, who faced multiple allegations that he had dated teenage girls as an adult, over the Democrat Doug Jones (who narrowly triumphed anyway).
In all of these races, southern white women’s preferences diverged sharply from those of African American women, who gave 97 percent of their votes to Abrams, 98 percent to Jones, and 93 percent to Espy.
In most southern states, white women express at least as much opposition to legal abortion as white men, and in some cases more. The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) examined state-by-state attitudes on abortion in 2014. It found that just over three-fifths of white women in Alabama and Mississippi said that abortion should be illegal in most or all circumstances, almost exactly the same percentage as white men in those states. About three-fifths of white women in Kentucky and a narrow majority in Georgia said that abortion should be mostly illegal; in both cases, that was a higher share than among the state’s white men. Only in Missouri did a 51 percent majority of white women say that abortion should mostly remain legal.
Across the South, the core of female opposition to abortion—and of support for the GOP—is women who identify as evangelical Christians. These women now consistently support Republicans in overwhelming numbers. Fully 80 percent of southern white evangelical women backed Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, according to previously unpublished exit-poll results provided to me by Edison. Three-fourths of white evangelical women in Alabama backed Moore over Jones in 2017, and an even more emphatic 88 percent of them in Georgia backed Kemp over Abrams in last year’s governor’s race. Across the South overall, three-fourths of white evangelical women said they approved of Trump’s performance in the 2018 exit poll, according to Edison, and just 20 percent of white evangelical women backed Democratic House candidates that year.
Robert P. Jones, the CEO of PRRI and the author of The End of White Christian America, says that for evangelicals and other culturally conservative Americans, abortion has become a crucial symbol of attitudes toward the larger demographic, cultural, and even economic changes reshaping the nation.
In PRRI polling, Americans who oppose abortion expressed much more negative views on a broad array of social changes than those who support legal access, according to a new analysis it conducted at my request. Looking back at its 2016 Annual Values Survey, the group found that abortion opponents and supporters provided mirror-image responses to a core question: whether “American culture and way of life” has changed mostly for the better or for the worse since the 1950s. Two-thirds of abortion opponents picked worse, while two-thirds of supporters picked better. Similarly, while 60 percent of abortion opponents said the growing ranks of immigrants “threaten American customs and values,” a matching 60 percent of abortion supporters said having more immigrants “strengthens American society.” Women who opposed abortion were as likely as male opponents to express conservative views on those other social changes.(READ MORE)
But strong support from most white women, especially those who identify as evangelical Christians, has helped Republicans dominate local government in the states passing the most restrictive measures, from Alabama and Georgia to Kentucky and Missouri. In some of those states, polling shows that opposition to legal abortion is higher among white women than among white men.
These attitudes underscore why it’s too simplistic to forecast that the renewed push against abortion will uniformly drive women away from the GOP. There’s no question that abortion-rights supporters everywhere are mobilizing in opposition to the highly restrictive new laws, which range from bans starting at six weeks of pregnancy to total prohibition. Activists held some 500 events in all 50 states on Tuesday to protest the new laws—a preview, they say, of the energy the measures will ignite in the 2020 presidential and congressional elections, particularly among the roughly 60 percent majority of women who support legalized abortion. “We will power this movement into 2020,” NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue insisted in a conference call on Wednesday. “There will be political consequences.”
But it’s much less clear that abortion-rights supporters can exact political consequences in the states actually approving these laws, which are explicitly designed to prompt the Supreme Court to reconsider the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing nationwide access to the procedure. Their success will depend on whether the restrictions dislodge meaningful numbers of white women in these states from their respective Republican coalitions. And that is far from certain, particularly in the southern and border states advancing most of the laws.
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster who works extensively across the South, says that white women, “particularly suburban white women … have been absolutely critical” to the GOP’s strength in states approving the abortion bans. Election Day exit polls showed that most white women in these areas joined big majorities of white men to provide insuperable leads for Republican candidates.
In 2018, for instance, exit polls conducted by Edison Research found that fully three-fourths of white women supported the Republican Brian Kemp over the Democrat Stacey Abrams in the Georgia governor’s race. That same year, just 16 percent of white women picked the Democrat Mike Espy for Mississippi’s Senate seat. In the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama, 63 percent of white women backed the Republican Roy Moore, who faced multiple allegations that he had dated teenage girls as an adult, over the Democrat Doug Jones (who narrowly triumphed anyway).
In all of these races, southern white women’s preferences diverged sharply from those of African American women, who gave 97 percent of their votes to Abrams, 98 percent to Jones, and 93 percent to Espy.
In most southern states, white women express at least as much opposition to legal abortion as white men, and in some cases more. The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) examined state-by-state attitudes on abortion in 2014. It found that just over three-fifths of white women in Alabama and Mississippi said that abortion should be illegal in most or all circumstances, almost exactly the same percentage as white men in those states. About three-fifths of white women in Kentucky and a narrow majority in Georgia said that abortion should be mostly illegal; in both cases, that was a higher share than among the state’s white men. Only in Missouri did a 51 percent majority of white women say that abortion should mostly remain legal.
Across the South, the core of female opposition to abortion—and of support for the GOP—is women who identify as evangelical Christians. These women now consistently support Republicans in overwhelming numbers. Fully 80 percent of southern white evangelical women backed Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, according to previously unpublished exit-poll results provided to me by Edison. Three-fourths of white evangelical women in Alabama backed Moore over Jones in 2017, and an even more emphatic 88 percent of them in Georgia backed Kemp over Abrams in last year’s governor’s race. Across the South overall, three-fourths of white evangelical women said they approved of Trump’s performance in the 2018 exit poll, according to Edison, and just 20 percent of white evangelical women backed Democratic House candidates that year.
Robert P. Jones, the CEO of PRRI and the author of The End of White Christian America, says that for evangelicals and other culturally conservative Americans, abortion has become a crucial symbol of attitudes toward the larger demographic, cultural, and even economic changes reshaping the nation.
In PRRI polling, Americans who oppose abortion expressed much more negative views on a broad array of social changes than those who support legal access, according to a new analysis it conducted at my request. Looking back at its 2016 Annual Values Survey, the group found that abortion opponents and supporters provided mirror-image responses to a core question: whether “American culture and way of life” has changed mostly for the better or for the worse since the 1950s. Two-thirds of abortion opponents picked worse, while two-thirds of supporters picked better. Similarly, while 60 percent of abortion opponents said the growing ranks of immigrants “threaten American customs and values,” a matching 60 percent of abortion supporters said having more immigrants “strengthens American society.” Women who opposed abortion were as likely as male opponents to express conservative views on those other social changes.(READ MORE)
How Gerrymandering and Voter Suppression Paved the Way for Abortion Bans
Attacks on democracy have turned into attacks on reproductive freedom.
ARI BERMAN, Senior Reporter - mother jones
5/17/19
In recent days, Republican-dominated legislatures in Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, and Missouri have passed some of the harshest abortion restrictions in decades. But aside from their collective assault on reproductive freedoms, these states have something else in common: a systematic effort to distort the democratic process through voter suppression and gerrymandering. These tactics have greased the way for near-total bans on abortion and for other extreme right-wing policies.
Georgia is a perfect example. The state’s 2018 governor’s race became the epicenter of Republican voter suppression efforts. As secretary of state, Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp essentially oversaw his own election and instituted a series of policies that hurt his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams. On Kemp’s watch, Georgia purged 1.4 million people from the voter rolls from 2012 to 2016; put the registrations of 53,000 people, 80 percent of whom were voters of color, on hold before the election; and closed 214 polling places in six years. On Election Day, there were four-hour lines in heavily black precincts. All this helped Kemp win the election, and last week he signed into to law a measure prohibiting abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
“Bad policies like the forced pregnancy bill are a direct result of voter suppression,” Abrams tweeted last week. “If leaders can silence Georgians’ voices at the ballot box, they can ignore Georgians’ voices when in office.”
Meanwhile, extreme partisan gerrymandering has helped Republicans establish strangleholds on state legislatures around the country. After winning control of the redistricting process following the 2010 election, Georgia Republicans concentrated black voters into as few districts as possible in order to maximize the number of safe, heavily white Republican seats. In 2018, Kemp narrowly won with 50.2 percent of the vote, but Republicans held nearly 60 percent of state’s legislative seats. There are few swing districts left in the state—in 2018, an incumbent was elected with no opposition in 112 of 180 House districts in the state.
This set-up helps insulate GOP lawmakers from any public backlash over their votes. Georgians oppose the new anti-abortion law 49 percent to 44 percent, according to a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll. Yet the bill easily cleared the GOP-dominated state legislature, with nearly all Republicans, and just one Democrat, voting yes.
Alabama Republicans have pursued a similar gerrymandering strategy, segregating black voters to boost conservative white Republicans. In his successful campaign for the US Senate in 2017, Democrat Doug Jones won 50 percent of the vote but carried just one of Alabama’s seven congressional districts—a sign of just how lopsided the state’s political map has become. That same year, a federal court ruled that 12 of Alabama’s legislative districts were illegally racially gerrymandered. The Republican State Leadership Committee—which funded the GOP’s takeover of numerous state legislatures in 2010 and then coordinated the drawing of new, gerrymandered maps—spent $1.5 million to flip Alabama red for the first time since Reconstruction.
Gerrymandering has similarly boosted Republicans in Missouri and Ohio, two other states where lawmakers have moved forward with near-total abortion bans. Republicans barely surpassed 50 percent of the vote in Ohio’s state legislative elections in 2018, but they won control of 63 percent of the seats in the Ohio House of Representatives. Republicans won 57 percent of the statewide vote for the Missouri House of Representatives, but they control 71 percent of the seats in the chamber—giving them 13 more seats than they would have under a neutral map, according to an Associated Press analysis.
Forty-five percent of Missourians support abortion rights in all or most cases, compared to 50 percent who oppose them in all or most cases, according to a 2014 Pew study. But that state’s bill—which outlaws abortion after eight weeks, even in cases of rape—sailed through the Senate Thursday with the backing of more than 70 percent of its lawmakers, all of them Republicans.
A 2016 analysis by Rewire News found that 22 states had passed new restrictions on both voting and abortion since the 2010 election, which pro-choice advocates don’t believe is a coincidence. Many of the constituencies that strongly support abortion rights—such as women, young people, and voters of color—are among the most likely to be impacted by tactics such as gerrymandering and voter suppression.
Georgia is a perfect example. The state’s 2018 governor’s race became the epicenter of Republican voter suppression efforts. As secretary of state, Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp essentially oversaw his own election and instituted a series of policies that hurt his Democratic opponent, Stacey Abrams. On Kemp’s watch, Georgia purged 1.4 million people from the voter rolls from 2012 to 2016; put the registrations of 53,000 people, 80 percent of whom were voters of color, on hold before the election; and closed 214 polling places in six years. On Election Day, there were four-hour lines in heavily black precincts. All this helped Kemp win the election, and last week he signed into to law a measure prohibiting abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
“Bad policies like the forced pregnancy bill are a direct result of voter suppression,” Abrams tweeted last week. “If leaders can silence Georgians’ voices at the ballot box, they can ignore Georgians’ voices when in office.”
Meanwhile, extreme partisan gerrymandering has helped Republicans establish strangleholds on state legislatures around the country. After winning control of the redistricting process following the 2010 election, Georgia Republicans concentrated black voters into as few districts as possible in order to maximize the number of safe, heavily white Republican seats. In 2018, Kemp narrowly won with 50.2 percent of the vote, but Republicans held nearly 60 percent of state’s legislative seats. There are few swing districts left in the state—in 2018, an incumbent was elected with no opposition in 112 of 180 House districts in the state.
This set-up helps insulate GOP lawmakers from any public backlash over their votes. Georgians oppose the new anti-abortion law 49 percent to 44 percent, according to a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll. Yet the bill easily cleared the GOP-dominated state legislature, with nearly all Republicans, and just one Democrat, voting yes.
Alabama Republicans have pursued a similar gerrymandering strategy, segregating black voters to boost conservative white Republicans. In his successful campaign for the US Senate in 2017, Democrat Doug Jones won 50 percent of the vote but carried just one of Alabama’s seven congressional districts—a sign of just how lopsided the state’s political map has become. That same year, a federal court ruled that 12 of Alabama’s legislative districts were illegally racially gerrymandered. The Republican State Leadership Committee—which funded the GOP’s takeover of numerous state legislatures in 2010 and then coordinated the drawing of new, gerrymandered maps—spent $1.5 million to flip Alabama red for the first time since Reconstruction.
Gerrymandering has similarly boosted Republicans in Missouri and Ohio, two other states where lawmakers have moved forward with near-total abortion bans. Republicans barely surpassed 50 percent of the vote in Ohio’s state legislative elections in 2018, but they won control of 63 percent of the seats in the Ohio House of Representatives. Republicans won 57 percent of the statewide vote for the Missouri House of Representatives, but they control 71 percent of the seats in the chamber—giving them 13 more seats than they would have under a neutral map, according to an Associated Press analysis.
Forty-five percent of Missourians support abortion rights in all or most cases, compared to 50 percent who oppose them in all or most cases, according to a 2014 Pew study. But that state’s bill—which outlaws abortion after eight weeks, even in cases of rape—sailed through the Senate Thursday with the backing of more than 70 percent of its lawmakers, all of them Republicans.
A 2016 analysis by Rewire News found that 22 states had passed new restrictions on both voting and abortion since the 2010 election, which pro-choice advocates don’t believe is a coincidence. Many of the constituencies that strongly support abortion rights—such as women, young people, and voters of color—are among the most likely to be impacted by tactics such as gerrymandering and voter suppression.
map of the hypocrites!!!
The Daily Kos Elections guide to the nation's religious populations, by congressional district
By David Jarman
Sunday Jan 07, 2018 · 5:15 PM PST
Religion is one of the driving forces in American culture; it always has been, and continues to do so even as American religiosity, in general, has declined. It tends not to loom as large as race in the American consciousness, but it’s still one of the main ways that Americans tend to identify themselves, and to divide themselves along “us” and “them” boundaries.
More specifically, religion is something that tends to correlate with, and be predictive of, one’s politics. This is especially the case in an era where cultural issues supplant economic issues in many people’s ideological framework. If you genuinely believe, for instance, that abortion means killing people, that often creates a moral imperative against which, say, your marginal tax rate pales in comparison.
You probably have a vague idea of which parts of the country are more religiously active, and where religion is more suffused into local politics (usually taking it in a more conservative direction), versus which parts of the country are more laissez-faire about religion and about social issues in general. You may also have a general sense of, say, which parts of the country are more likely to be Southern Baptist or Catholic or Lutheran; you may have even seen state or even county-level maps that depict this. What I’m doing in this article that hasn’t been done before, though, is to quantitatively show those differences at the level of congressional districts, where much of our politics actually happens, so we can get a better sense of how religiosity corresponds with people’s electoral choices.
I’ve put together a spreadsheet that covers every CD, and what percentage of each CD’s residents belong to which religious tradition and denomination. One additional advantage of using district-level data is that it, as seen above, it lets us use the Daily Kos Elections 435-CD cartogram map, which breaks out the nation’s metropolitan areas into proper focus, and de-emphasizes the nation’s empty spaces (which has the effect of not making the country seem more evangelical, or more Mormon, than it actually is). As we continue, we’ll talk more about the methods and limitations behind these maps, and then zoom in on some additional data for certain denominations. Read More
More specifically, religion is something that tends to correlate with, and be predictive of, one’s politics. This is especially the case in an era where cultural issues supplant economic issues in many people’s ideological framework. If you genuinely believe, for instance, that abortion means killing people, that often creates a moral imperative against which, say, your marginal tax rate pales in comparison.
You probably have a vague idea of which parts of the country are more religiously active, and where religion is more suffused into local politics (usually taking it in a more conservative direction), versus which parts of the country are more laissez-faire about religion and about social issues in general. You may also have a general sense of, say, which parts of the country are more likely to be Southern Baptist or Catholic or Lutheran; you may have even seen state or even county-level maps that depict this. What I’m doing in this article that hasn’t been done before, though, is to quantitatively show those differences at the level of congressional districts, where much of our politics actually happens, so we can get a better sense of how religiosity corresponds with people’s electoral choices.
I’ve put together a spreadsheet that covers every CD, and what percentage of each CD’s residents belong to which religious tradition and denomination. One additional advantage of using district-level data is that it, as seen above, it lets us use the Daily Kos Elections 435-CD cartogram map, which breaks out the nation’s metropolitan areas into proper focus, and de-emphasizes the nation’s empty spaces (which has the effect of not making the country seem more evangelical, or more Mormon, than it actually is). As we continue, we’ll talk more about the methods and limitations behind these maps, and then zoom in on some additional data for certain denominations. Read More
election funnies, etc
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Map Porn: If "Did Not Vote" Was a Candidate...
NeoGreen
From Demo. Underground: ... posted in response to all those who want to blame their friends and neighbors who did their civic duty and opted to vote:
what stupid americans voted for
*destruction of medicare, social security, obamacare, abolition of women's rights
*keystone pipeline renewed
*dapl will be finished and destroy indian burial grounds and missouri river
*lower taxes for rich, death of social safety net
*destruction of public schools
*high probability of middle east war
*more racism, discrimination, and injustice
*thieves and conmen running the federal government
*no minimum wage hikes
*cut in food stamps, more starving poor children and families
elections do matter
when you allow a piece of shit to win office, don't be surprised when your state starts to smell
*gop plans in the house: The entire rest of the party is committed to gigantic cuts to welfare, as shown by the budget formulated by House Republicans. Their most recent plan would slash $5.3 trillion in spending over a decade, 69 percent of which would come from programs for the needy.
"THE ARKANSAS TRAVELLER" 1840
AN ELITE POLITICIAN CANVASSING IN THE BACKCOUNTRY ASKS A SQUATTER FOR REFRESHMENTS. THE SQUATTER, SEATED ON A WHISKEY BARREL BEFORE HIS RUN-DOWN CABIN, IGNORES THE MAN'S REQUEST. FOR A BRIEF INTERLUDE(BECAUSE IT WAS ELECTION SEASON), THE POLITICIAN WAS OBLIGED TO BRING HIMSELF DOWN TO THE LEVEL OF THE COMMON MAN. TO GET HIS DRINK AND THE SQUATTER'S VOTE, THE POLITICIAN, HAD TO DISMOUNT HIS HORSE, GRAB THE SQUATTER'S FIDDLE, AND SHOW THAT HE COULD PLAY HIS KIND OF MUSIC. ONCE THE POLITICIAN RETURNED TO HIS MANSION, HOWEVER, NOTHING CHANGED IN THE LIFE OF THE SQUATTER, NOR FOR HIS DRUDGE OF A WIFE AND HIS BROOD OF DIRTY, SHOELESS BRATS.
Henry A. Giroux
Trump is simply the most visible and vocal member of a fractured party made up of frightened Americans, religious fundamentalists, and self-serving economic extremists who believe that the market should arbitrate and dominate all aspects of government and society. Trump represents a new form of social disorder -- intolerant, authoritarian, and violent -- that sees preventable inequality as part of the natural order of things. Guns, walls, laws, surveillance, prisons, media, and wars are there to serve the interest of the wealthy winners, and to keep the rest of the population in check. Bankers who commit theft, fraud, and acts of economic mass destruction never feel the cold steel of handcuffs tighten on their wrists. Corporate suspects never get shot down accidently in the streets, as do unarmed Blacks, by white cops who feel threatened by skin color. Trump's rise reinforces these injustices and gives anxious whites a boastful businessman and TV celebrity to rule as their strongman.
The State Of America’s Voting Rights, In One Map
Power has shifted.
by Ian Millhiserby
From Think Progress: The Supreme Court announced on Wednesday that it would not reinstate North Carolina’s comprehensive voter suppression law, and the big headlines out of this announcement rightly touted this decision as good news for voting rights. Just below the surface, however, this order has ominous news for many Americans.
In 2016, a voter’s right to the franchise — even when that right is protected by the Constitution itself — may not amount to much if they do not live in the right state...
...Below is a map of the federal appellate circuits, the level of federal court below the Supreme Court, which predicts how these courts are likely to vote in voting rights cases. Dark blue circuits are dominated by left-of-center judges and are likely to be strong supporters of voting rights, while dark red circuits are the opposite. Lighter colored circuits still lean to the left or to the right on voting rights, but are more ideologically mixed.
In 2016, a voter’s right to the franchise — even when that right is protected by the Constitution itself — may not amount to much if they do not live in the right state...
...Below is a map of the federal appellate circuits, the level of federal court below the Supreme Court, which predicts how these courts are likely to vote in voting rights cases. Dark blue circuits are dominated by left-of-center judges and are likely to be strong supporters of voting rights, while dark red circuits are the opposite. Lighter colored circuits still lean to the left or to the right on voting rights, but are more ideologically mixed.
In coloring this map, I made several judgment calls. The Seventh Circuit, for example, is colored white because, although a majority of its judges were appointed by Republicans, two of its GOP-appointed members have broken with their more conservative colleagues in at least one major voting rights case. The Eleventh Circuit is colored light blue, despite the fact that Democratic appointees enjoy a significant advantage, because several of the judges on this court were appointed due to a compromise between a Democratic president and Republican senators — and at least one of these appointees is very conservative. The Fifth Circuit is coded light red because, although Republican appointees dominate this court, the full court recently held that Texas’s voter ID law violates the Voting Rights Act.[...]