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welcome to reality ~ triva
election news and items of interest
Aug 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
*Mexican man facing voter fraud trial in Sacramento. He’s a Trump supporter
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Dan Bishop’s harsh history of discrimination
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Court Upholds North Dakota Law Stripping Voting Rights From Native Americans
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*'The selling of an election': how private firms compromised midterms security
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Georgia election officials deny evidence destruction
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*No, both sides are not the same
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Political Fundraising Has a Big, Nasty Secret
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*A List -- Why A Majority of Whites No Longer Vote Democratic at the Presidential Level
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Leaked voting machine passwords add to North Carolina's growing tally of election security woes
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Did software firm's flaws expose North Carolina to election hacking?
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*LAWSUIT CALLS MISSISSIPPI'S WAY OF CHOOSING GOVERNORS RACIST
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*WHITE WOMEN ARE HELPING STATES PASS ABORTION RESTRICTIONS
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Republican Keller wins Pennsylvania special election
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*How Gerrymandering and Voter Suppression Paved the Way for Abortion Bans
(ARTICLE BELOW)
MAP OF THE HYPOCRITES!!!
THE DAILY KOS ELECTIONS GUIDE TO THE NATION'S RELIGIOUS POPULATIONS, BY CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT(ARTICLE BELOW)
funnies(at the end)
*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
Mexican man facing voter fraud trial in Sacramento. He’s a Trump supporter
BY SAM STANTON - The Sacramento Bee
AUGUST 19, 2019 11:03 AM, UPDATED AUGUST 19, 2019 06:09 PM
For years, President Trump has claimed that millions of noncitizens voted in the 2016 presidential election, unfairly skewing his vote as Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College.
On Monday in federal court in Sacramento, a man accused of coming to the United States from Mexico and voting illegally in elections for the past 20 years went on trial on charges of aggravated identity theft, voting by an alien and making a false statement on a passport application.
But there’s a twist.
Gustavo Araujo Lerma is an avowed Trump supporter, and evidence expected to be introduced in his trial includes letters of thanks from Trump, former Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and current RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel.
A June 2, 2017, letter from Trump to the defendant assures him that the president and Vice President Mike Pence “are deeply grateful for your resolve to help us make American safer, stronger and more prosperous than ever before.”
The letter was addressed to Hiram Enrique Velez – the name of a deceased American citizen whose identity Lerma allegedly assumed years ago to win legal status for his wife and their two children, who were all born in Mexico, according to prosecutors.
“The evidence will show that the defendant was born in Mexico in 1955, married a woman named Maria Manriquez in 1982, and had two children with her in Mexico in the 1980s,” according to a trial brief filed by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Katherine Lydon and Shea Kenny. “By the early 1990s, he began living in the United States, fraudulently using the identity of a Puerto Rican-born United States citizen named Hiram Velez.”
Lerma, a 64-year-old Sacramento resident, was indicted in 2017 by a federal grand jury and faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
The government says evidence it will use against Lerma includes a letter he mailed from jail to Hiram Velez’ mother “requesting her help in his upcoming trial” and saying he bought a birth certificate and Social Security number for Velez while living in Chicago.
Prosecutors plan to offer up a Sacramento County elections official as a witness and say Lerma went to the polls in five elections and signed in as “Hiram Velez.”
Assistant Federal Defender Doug Beevers argues that his client, whom he refers to as “Velez,” was entitled to use the name and cannot be found guilty unless the government “proves beyond a reasonable doubt that he knew that his name was not Hiram Enrique Velez.”
“Mr. Velez contends that he was entitled to use the name Hiram Enrique Velez because under California common law a person may change his name at any time without initiating legal proceedings,” Beevers wrote.
“Defendant has taken the position that he has adopted the name Hiram Enrique Velez for all purposes and will introduce the testimony of family members including his children who know him only as Hiram Enrique Velez,” Beevers wrote. “Defense counsel intends to state his appearance as counsel for the defendant ‘Hiram Enrique Velez’ whom the government claims is Gustavo Araujo-Lerma.”
The trial before U.S. District Judge John A. Mendez is expected to last through the week.
On Monday in federal court in Sacramento, a man accused of coming to the United States from Mexico and voting illegally in elections for the past 20 years went on trial on charges of aggravated identity theft, voting by an alien and making a false statement on a passport application.
But there’s a twist.
Gustavo Araujo Lerma is an avowed Trump supporter, and evidence expected to be introduced in his trial includes letters of thanks from Trump, former Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and current RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel.
A June 2, 2017, letter from Trump to the defendant assures him that the president and Vice President Mike Pence “are deeply grateful for your resolve to help us make American safer, stronger and more prosperous than ever before.”
The letter was addressed to Hiram Enrique Velez – the name of a deceased American citizen whose identity Lerma allegedly assumed years ago to win legal status for his wife and their two children, who were all born in Mexico, according to prosecutors.
“The evidence will show that the defendant was born in Mexico in 1955, married a woman named Maria Manriquez in 1982, and had two children with her in Mexico in the 1980s,” according to a trial brief filed by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Katherine Lydon and Shea Kenny. “By the early 1990s, he began living in the United States, fraudulently using the identity of a Puerto Rican-born United States citizen named Hiram Velez.”
Lerma, a 64-year-old Sacramento resident, was indicted in 2017 by a federal grand jury and faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
The government says evidence it will use against Lerma includes a letter he mailed from jail to Hiram Velez’ mother “requesting her help in his upcoming trial” and saying he bought a birth certificate and Social Security number for Velez while living in Chicago.
Prosecutors plan to offer up a Sacramento County elections official as a witness and say Lerma went to the polls in five elections and signed in as “Hiram Velez.”
Assistant Federal Defender Doug Beevers argues that his client, whom he refers to as “Velez,” was entitled to use the name and cannot be found guilty unless the government “proves beyond a reasonable doubt that he knew that his name was not Hiram Enrique Velez.”
“Mr. Velez contends that he was entitled to use the name Hiram Enrique Velez because under California common law a person may change his name at any time without initiating legal proceedings,” Beevers wrote.
“Defendant has taken the position that he has adopted the name Hiram Enrique Velez for all purposes and will introduce the testimony of family members including his children who know him only as Hiram Enrique Velez,” Beevers wrote. “Defense counsel intends to state his appearance as counsel for the defendant ‘Hiram Enrique Velez’ whom the government claims is Gustavo Araujo-Lerma.”
The trial before U.S. District Judge John A. Mendez is expected to last through the week.
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.
---
The ES&S iVotronic is a popular touchscreen voting machine currently used in 24 of North Carolina’s 100 counties, including the state’s largest, Mecklenburg (the rest use hand-marked paper ballots).
To be entirely fair, it isn’t at all clear that the exposed passwords would have provided malign hackers with any ability to interfere in the 2018 election. First, as the instructions above make clear, one needs to physically insert a properly programmed “master PEB” and “supervisor PEB” (essentially programmable card-keys) into an iVotronic unit in order to access the administrative menus these passwords unlock. Second, Vickery’s tweets seem to suggest that the password file he found was a backup file. We don’t know how old that backup was, or whether the passwords it exposed were still current during the 2018 election. And finally, 2018’s midterm election was North Carolina Democrats’ best showing in nearly a decade, with Dems winning every statewide race and breaking the state House of Representatives’ GOP supermajority. If GOP-sympathizing Russians meddled in that election they certainly didn’t do a very good job.
Still, this leak reveals a disturbingly lax cybersecurity culture at the State Board. Any IT professional careless enough to expose highly sensitive election-related passwords in plaintext on the internet is probably careless enough to make other, even more consequential, mistakes. This affair also reveals important weaknesses in the Department of Homeland Security’s election cybersecurity assessments, since it seems that DHS didn’t spot this tyro snafu hiding in plain sight.
The good news is that there’s a new sheriff in town at the North Carolina State Board of Elections. A highly experienced elections staffer, Karen Brinson Bell, has just been chosen by the new majority-Democrat Board of Elections to replace its recently fired executive director, Kim Strach, on whose watch all of these fusterclucks and many more occurred. Strach’s spouse, Phil Strach, is the GOP-controlled state legislature’s go-to attorney in lawsuits defending the state’s voter suppression laws.
“Our top priorities will be promoting voter confidence in elections and assisting the 100 county boards, the boots on the ground in every election,” Brinson Bell has stated. How she manages the Board’s response to this latest election scandal will be her first trial by fire in this new role. North Carolina voting rights activists will be watching hopefully.
Corporate Incompetence Strikes Again!!!
Did software firm's flaws expose North Carolina to election hacking?
Three years after election systems failed in one North Carolina county, DHS agrees to investigate possible hack
IGOR DERYSH - Salon
JUNE 6, 2019 10:00AM (UTC)
The Department of Homeland Security has finally agreed to examine election equipment used in North Carolina, nearly three years after voters reported malfunctions on Election Day in 2016, Politico reports.
In April, special counsel Robert Mueller wrote in his report that Russian military hackers had penetrated a voting software firm and “installed malware on the company network” of an unidentified election vendor. That vendor appears to be VR Systems, a Florida-based firm that Politico reports used remote access software to access a central computer in Durham County, North Carolina. DHS has agreed to send investigators to see whether the firm exposed that central computer to the hackers.
Hackers would not have been able to alter vote tallies, but could potentially have prevented people from voting in the key swing state. Computers used to check in voters in Durham County malfunctioned on Election Day 2016, telling voters that they had already voted even though they had not, NPR reported.
“Vulnerabilities in voting machines get most of the attention, but the security and availability of poll books is as critical to the integrity of elections as voting machines themselves,” election security expert Matt Blaze told Politico. “If poll books are compromised, this can selectively disenfranchise voters, create long lines at polling places, and cast doubt on the legitimacy of election results.”
The county switched to using paper poll books after numerous reports of malfunctions but officials never identified what had caused the issues in 2016, finally leading DHS to agree to review the computers nearly three years later.
Homeland Security officials told the Washington Post they plan to conduct a forensic analysis on the laptops used in Durham County. Josh Lawson, former general counsel of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, told the Post that his agency had requested a DHS review more than 18 months ago.
The DHS announcement came just weeks after the FBI came under fire for not sharing information with Florida officials about another alleged hack. After Mueller’s report revealed that Russian hackers accessed “the network of at least one Florida county government in 2016,” the FBI finally told Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that two Florida counties had been hacked, but asked him not to disclose which ones.
The Post reported last month that one of the counties was Washington County in the Florida panhandle, which is rural and sparsely populated.
VR Systems admitted to the Post that “we think we are the company referenced” in the Mueller report but denied that its network was breached or that its software had failed in Durham County.
But according to a leaked report by the National Security Agency, Russian hackers mounted a spearphishing campaign targeting the firm before using VR Systems credentials to send malicious emails to roughly 120 local government offices.
More than 60 Florida counties used VR Systems in 2016, as did counties in North Carolina, California, New York, Illinois, Indiana, Virginia and West Virginia.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told Politico that VR Systems had served up “our democracy on a silver platter to foreign hackers” by remotely accessing voting systems the day before Election Day.
“No company that plays such a critical role in our elections should be taking such a reckless shortcut with the cybersecurity of its state and local customers,” he said. "The fact that we’re just learning about this practice two years after the election, and after any evidence of hacking has likely been destroyed, is inexcusable. Americans need to know if VR Systems still has remote access to election computers in other states, and how often this occurred.”
In April, special counsel Robert Mueller wrote in his report that Russian military hackers had penetrated a voting software firm and “installed malware on the company network” of an unidentified election vendor. That vendor appears to be VR Systems, a Florida-based firm that Politico reports used remote access software to access a central computer in Durham County, North Carolina. DHS has agreed to send investigators to see whether the firm exposed that central computer to the hackers.
Hackers would not have been able to alter vote tallies, but could potentially have prevented people from voting in the key swing state. Computers used to check in voters in Durham County malfunctioned on Election Day 2016, telling voters that they had already voted even though they had not, NPR reported.
“Vulnerabilities in voting machines get most of the attention, but the security and availability of poll books is as critical to the integrity of elections as voting machines themselves,” election security expert Matt Blaze told Politico. “If poll books are compromised, this can selectively disenfranchise voters, create long lines at polling places, and cast doubt on the legitimacy of election results.”
The county switched to using paper poll books after numerous reports of malfunctions but officials never identified what had caused the issues in 2016, finally leading DHS to agree to review the computers nearly three years later.
Homeland Security officials told the Washington Post they plan to conduct a forensic analysis on the laptops used in Durham County. Josh Lawson, former general counsel of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, told the Post that his agency had requested a DHS review more than 18 months ago.
The DHS announcement came just weeks after the FBI came under fire for not sharing information with Florida officials about another alleged hack. After Mueller’s report revealed that Russian hackers accessed “the network of at least one Florida county government in 2016,” the FBI finally told Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that two Florida counties had been hacked, but asked him not to disclose which ones.
The Post reported last month that one of the counties was Washington County in the Florida panhandle, which is rural and sparsely populated.
VR Systems admitted to the Post that “we think we are the company referenced” in the Mueller report but denied that its network was breached or that its software had failed in Durham County.
But according to a leaked report by the National Security Agency, Russian hackers mounted a spearphishing campaign targeting the firm before using VR Systems credentials to send malicious emails to roughly 120 local government offices.
More than 60 Florida counties used VR Systems in 2016, as did counties in North Carolina, California, New York, Illinois, Indiana, Virginia and West Virginia.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told Politico that VR Systems had served up “our democracy on a silver platter to foreign hackers” by remotely accessing voting systems the day before Election Day.
“No company that plays such a critical role in our elections should be taking such a reckless shortcut with the cybersecurity of its state and local customers,” he said. "The fact that we’re just learning about this practice two years after the election, and after any evidence of hacking has likely been destroyed, is inexcusable. Americans need to know if VR Systems still has remote access to election computers in other states, and how often this occurred.”
Lawsuit calls Mississippi's way of choosing governors racist
Emily Wagster Pettus and David A. Lieb, Associated Press
Updated 12:47 pm CDT, Thursday, May 30, 2019
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — In 1890, as white politicians across the South cracked down on the black population with Jim Crow laws, Mississippi inserted into its constitution an unusually high bar for getting elected governor or winning any other state office.
The provision, which remains in force to this day, says candidates must win not only a majority of the popular vote — that is, more than 50% — but also a majority of the state's 122 House districts.
On Thursday, more than a century later, four black Mississippians sued in federal court to put an end to what they say is a racially discriminatory system, unique in the U.S. and deliberately aimed at thwarting the election of African Africans.
"The scheme has its basis in racism — an 1890 post-Reconstruction attempt to keep African Americans out of statewide office," said former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, the first black person to hold that position. He added: "In the 21st century, it's finally time to say that this provision should be struck down."
Holder is chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, whose affiliated foundation is providing financial and legal backing for the lawsuit.
Under the Mississippi provision, if no candidate wins the required majorities, the election is decided by the Mississippi House.
It's not one of those dusty segregation-era provisions that have remained on the books, forgotten and unused: It was invoked in 1999, when the House chose between two whites who were the top vote-getters in a four-person race for governor.
"This is not a theoretical thing," Holder said. "We have seen no statewide African American elected to office since this was enacted, in spite of the fact that Mississippi has the highest percentage of African Americans of any state in the country."
The lawsuit asks a judge to prohibit Mississippi from using the procedure in this year's elections. It does not suggest an alternative way, but Holder said Mississippi could simply be ordered to do what most states do — "count all the votes and the person who gets the greatest number of votes wins."
Mississippi Republican House Speaker Philip Gunn, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, declined to comment.
The longtime chairman of the Mississippi House Elections Committee, Republican Rep. Bill Denny, said that during his 32 years in office, there has been no serious effort to change Mississippi's method of electing statewide officials.
"I'm comfortable with it," Denny said of the current system.
It was put in place as white politicians sought to suppress black voting power that emerged during Reconstruction and propelled some black candidates to statewide office.
The lawsuit cites comments at the time by the president of Mississippi's constitutional convention, who asserted that black control of government "meant economic and moral ruin" and that the state had an "over generous" number of black voters.
The case is part of an effort by Holder's organization to influence the election of the politicians who will oversee congressional redistricting in Mississippi after the 2020 census. Some African American candidates are running for governor and other statewide offices this year.
The lawsuit notes that black voters are highly concentrated in some Mississippi House districts, holding a majority of the voting-age population in 42 of them. Mississippi's white residents overwhelmingly vote Republican, while its black residents overwhelmingly cast their ballots for Democrats. About 38% of the state is black.
Because of the racially polarized and concentrated voting, a candidate preferred by white voters could win a majority of the House districts without winning the statewide vote, the lawsuit says.
To date, no Mississippi candidate who won the most votes for a statewide office has been prevented from taking office because of the other requirements.
African American candidates have faced other hurdles in Mississippi politics over the years. After Reconstruction, extremely few blacks were registered to vote until the mid-1960s because of poll taxes and deadly violence.
The lawsuit says only four states — Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi and Vermont — require a candidate for governor to win a majority of the popular vote. Arizona and Georgia have runoffs if needed, while in Vermont, the state House and Senate decide the winner.
The four plaintiffs in the lawsuit include two retired political science professors.
The provision, which remains in force to this day, says candidates must win not only a majority of the popular vote — that is, more than 50% — but also a majority of the state's 122 House districts.
On Thursday, more than a century later, four black Mississippians sued in federal court to put an end to what they say is a racially discriminatory system, unique in the U.S. and deliberately aimed at thwarting the election of African Africans.
"The scheme has its basis in racism — an 1890 post-Reconstruction attempt to keep African Americans out of statewide office," said former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, the first black person to hold that position. He added: "In the 21st century, it's finally time to say that this provision should be struck down."
Holder is chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, whose affiliated foundation is providing financial and legal backing for the lawsuit.
Under the Mississippi provision, if no candidate wins the required majorities, the election is decided by the Mississippi House.
It's not one of those dusty segregation-era provisions that have remained on the books, forgotten and unused: It was invoked in 1999, when the House chose between two whites who were the top vote-getters in a four-person race for governor.
"This is not a theoretical thing," Holder said. "We have seen no statewide African American elected to office since this was enacted, in spite of the fact that Mississippi has the highest percentage of African Americans of any state in the country."
The lawsuit asks a judge to prohibit Mississippi from using the procedure in this year's elections. It does not suggest an alternative way, but Holder said Mississippi could simply be ordered to do what most states do — "count all the votes and the person who gets the greatest number of votes wins."
Mississippi Republican House Speaker Philip Gunn, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, declined to comment.
The longtime chairman of the Mississippi House Elections Committee, Republican Rep. Bill Denny, said that during his 32 years in office, there has been no serious effort to change Mississippi's method of electing statewide officials.
"I'm comfortable with it," Denny said of the current system.
It was put in place as white politicians sought to suppress black voting power that emerged during Reconstruction and propelled some black candidates to statewide office.
The lawsuit cites comments at the time by the president of Mississippi's constitutional convention, who asserted that black control of government "meant economic and moral ruin" and that the state had an "over generous" number of black voters.
The case is part of an effort by Holder's organization to influence the election of the politicians who will oversee congressional redistricting in Mississippi after the 2020 census. Some African American candidates are running for governor and other statewide offices this year.
The lawsuit notes that black voters are highly concentrated in some Mississippi House districts, holding a majority of the voting-age population in 42 of them. Mississippi's white residents overwhelmingly vote Republican, while its black residents overwhelmingly cast their ballots for Democrats. About 38% of the state is black.
Because of the racially polarized and concentrated voting, a candidate preferred by white voters could win a majority of the House districts without winning the statewide vote, the lawsuit says.
To date, no Mississippi candidate who won the most votes for a statewide office has been prevented from taking office because of the other requirements.
African American candidates have faced other hurdles in Mississippi politics over the years. After Reconstruction, extremely few blacks were registered to vote until the mid-1960s because of poll taxes and deadly violence.
The lawsuit says only four states — Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi and Vermont — require a candidate for governor to win a majority of the popular vote. Arizona and Georgia have runoffs if needed, while in Vermont, the state House and Senate decide the winner.
The four plaintiffs in the lawsuit include two retired political science professors.
White Women Are Helping States Pass Abortion Restrictions
Their support for Republican officials has been key to the GOP’s strength in the South.
RONALD BROWNSTEIN - the atlantic
12:23 PM ET
It’s common for critics of the new wave of state laws severely limiting access to abortion to say the measures are part of a Republican “war on women.”
But strong support from most white women, especially those who identify as evangelical Christians, has helped Republicans dominate local government in the states passing the most restrictive measures, from Alabama and Georgia to Kentucky and Missouri. In some of those states, polling shows that opposition to legal abortion is higher among white women than among white men.
These attitudes underscore why it’s too simplistic to forecast that the renewed push against abortion will uniformly drive women away from the GOP. There’s no question that abortion-rights supporters everywhere are mobilizing in opposition to the highly restrictive new laws, which range from bans starting at six weeks of pregnancy to total prohibition. Activists held some 500 events in all 50 states on Tuesday to protest the new laws—a preview, they say, of the energy the measures will ignite in the 2020 presidential and congressional elections, particularly among the roughly 60 percent majority of women who support legalized abortion. “We will power this movement into 2020,” NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue insisted in a conference call on Wednesday. “There will be political consequences.”
But it’s much less clear that abortion-rights supporters can exact political consequences in the states actually approving these laws, which are explicitly designed to prompt the Supreme Court to reconsider the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing nationwide access to the procedure. Their success will depend on whether the restrictions dislodge meaningful numbers of white women in these states from their respective Republican coalitions. And that is far from certain, particularly in the southern and border states advancing most of the laws.
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster who works extensively across the South, says that white women, “particularly suburban white women … have been absolutely critical” to the GOP’s strength in states approving the abortion bans. Election Day exit polls showed that most white women in these areas joined big majorities of white men to provide insuperable leads for Republican candidates.
In 2018, for instance, exit polls conducted by Edison Research found that fully three-fourths of white women supported the Republican Brian Kemp over the Democrat Stacey Abrams in the Georgia governor’s race. That same year, just 16 percent of white women picked the Democrat Mike Espy for Mississippi’s Senate seat. In the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama, 63 percent of white women backed the Republican Roy Moore, who faced multiple allegations that he had dated teenage girls as an adult, over the Democrat Doug Jones (who narrowly triumphed anyway).
In all of these races, southern white women’s preferences diverged sharply from those of African American women, who gave 97 percent of their votes to Abrams, 98 percent to Jones, and 93 percent to Espy.
In most southern states, white women express at least as much opposition to legal abortion as white men, and in some cases more. The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) examined state-by-state attitudes on abortion in 2014. It found that just over three-fifths of white women in Alabama and Mississippi said that abortion should be illegal in most or all circumstances, almost exactly the same percentage as white men in those states. About three-fifths of white women in Kentucky and a narrow majority in Georgia said that abortion should be mostly illegal; in both cases, that was a higher share than among the state’s white men. Only in Missouri did a 51 percent majority of white women say that abortion should mostly remain legal.
Across the South, the core of female opposition to abortion—and of support for the GOP—is women who identify as evangelical Christians. These women now consistently support Republicans in overwhelming numbers. Fully 80 percent of southern white evangelical women backed Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, according to previously unpublished exit-poll results provided to me by Edison. Three-fourths of white evangelical women in Alabama backed Moore over Jones in 2017, and an even more emphatic 88 percent of them in Georgia backed Kemp over Abrams in last year’s governor’s race. Across the South overall, three-fourths of white evangelical women said they approved of Trump’s performance in the 2018 exit poll, according to Edison, and just 20 percent of white evangelical women backed Democratic House candidates that year.
Robert P. Jones, the CEO of PRRI and the author of The End of White Christian America, says that for evangelicals and other culturally conservative Americans, abortion has become a crucial symbol of attitudes toward the larger demographic, cultural, and even economic changes reshaping the nation.
In PRRI polling, Americans who oppose abortion expressed much more negative views on a broad array of social changes than those who support legal access, according to a new analysis it conducted at my request. Looking back at its 2016 Annual Values Survey, the group found that abortion opponents and supporters provided mirror-image responses to a core question: whether “American culture and way of life” has changed mostly for the better or for the worse since the 1950s. Two-thirds of abortion opponents picked worse, while two-thirds of supporters picked better. Similarly, while 60 percent of abortion opponents said the growing ranks of immigrants “threaten American customs and values,” a matching 60 percent of abortion supporters said having more immigrants “strengthens American society.” Women who opposed abortion were as likely as male opponents to express conservative views on those other social changes.(READ MORE)
But strong support from most white women, especially those who identify as evangelical Christians, has helped Republicans dominate local government in the states passing the most restrictive measures, from Alabama and Georgia to Kentucky and Missouri. In some of those states, polling shows that opposition to legal abortion is higher among white women than among white men.
These attitudes underscore why it’s too simplistic to forecast that the renewed push against abortion will uniformly drive women away from the GOP. There’s no question that abortion-rights supporters everywhere are mobilizing in opposition to the highly restrictive new laws, which range from bans starting at six weeks of pregnancy to total prohibition. Activists held some 500 events in all 50 states on Tuesday to protest the new laws—a preview, they say, of the energy the measures will ignite in the 2020 presidential and congressional elections, particularly among the roughly 60 percent majority of women who support legalized abortion. “We will power this movement into 2020,” NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue insisted in a conference call on Wednesday. “There will be political consequences.”
But it’s much less clear that abortion-rights supporters can exact political consequences in the states actually approving these laws, which are explicitly designed to prompt the Supreme Court to reconsider the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing nationwide access to the procedure. Their success will depend on whether the restrictions dislodge meaningful numbers of white women in these states from their respective Republican coalitions. And that is far from certain, particularly in the southern and border states advancing most of the laws.
Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster who works extensively across the South, says that white women, “particularly suburban white women … have been absolutely critical” to the GOP’s strength in states approving the abortion bans. Election Day exit polls showed that most white women in these areas joined big majorities of white men to provide insuperable leads for Republican candidates.
In 2018, for instance, exit polls conducted by Edison Research found that fully three-fourths of white women supported the Republican Brian Kemp over the Democrat Stacey Abrams in the Georgia governor’s race. That same year, just 16 percent of white women picked the Democrat Mike Espy for Mississippi’s Senate seat. In the 2017 special Senate election in Alabama, 63 percent of white women backed the Republican Roy Moore, who faced multiple allegations that he had dated teenage girls as an adult, over the Democrat Doug Jones (who narrowly triumphed anyway).
In all of these races, southern white women’s preferences diverged sharply from those of African American women, who gave 97 percent of their votes to Abrams, 98 percent to Jones, and 93 percent to Espy.
In most southern states, white women express at least as much opposition to legal abortion as white men, and in some cases more. The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) examined state-by-state attitudes on abortion in 2014. It found that just over three-fifths of white women in Alabama and Mississippi said that abortion should be illegal in most or all circumstances, almost exactly the same percentage as white men in those states. About three-fifths of white women in Kentucky and a narrow majority in Georgia said that abortion should be mostly illegal; in both cases, that was a higher share than among the state’s white men. Only in Missouri did a 51 percent majority of white women say that abortion should mostly remain legal.
Across the South, the core of female opposition to abortion—and of support for the GOP—is women who identify as evangelical Christians. These women now consistently support Republicans in overwhelming numbers. Fully 80 percent of southern white evangelical women backed Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, according to previously unpublished exit-poll results provided to me by Edison. Three-fourths of white evangelical women in Alabama backed Moore over Jones in 2017, and an even more emphatic 88 percent of them in Georgia backed Kemp over Abrams in last year’s governor’s race. Across the South overall, three-fourths of white evangelical women said they approved of Trump’s performance in the 2018 exit poll, according to Edison, and just 20 percent of white evangelical women backed Democratic House candidates that year.
Robert P. Jones, the CEO of PRRI and the author of The End of White Christian America, says that for evangelicals and other culturally conservative Americans, abortion has become a crucial symbol of attitudes toward the larger demographic, cultural, and even economic changes reshaping the nation.
In PRRI polling, Americans who oppose abortion expressed much more negative views on a broad array of social changes than those who support legal access, according to a new analysis it conducted at my request. Looking back at its 2016 Annual Values Survey, the group found that abortion opponents and supporters provided mirror-image responses to a core question: whether “American culture and way of life” has changed mostly for the better or for the worse since the 1950s. Two-thirds of abortion opponents picked worse, while two-thirds of supporters picked better. Similarly, while 60 percent of abortion opponents said the growing ranks of immigrants “threaten American customs and values,” a matching 60 percent of abortion supporters said having more immigrants “strengthens American society.” Women who opposed abortion were as likely as male opponents to express conservative views on those other social changes.(READ MORE)
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.[...]