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welcome to reality ~ triva
election news and items of interest
august 15, 2018
Automatic Voter Registration
Noam chomsky: “Voting should not be viewed as a form of personal self-expression or moral judgement directed in retaliation towards major party candidates who fail to reflect our values, or of a corrupt system designed to limit choices to those acceptable to corporate elites,”
what kind of democracy condones vote suppression?
The Informed American Voter
headlines
*'We made history': Vermont Democrats nominate US's first transgender candidate for governor(ARTICLE BELOW)
*An 11-Year-Old at a Hacking Convention Demonstrates Ability to Hack and Change Florida Vote in 10 minutes(ARTICLE BELOW)
*It’s Not Just Kobach: Three Vote-Suppressing Secretaries of State Are Overseeing Their Own Elections(excerpt BELOW)
*Vote Mistake Discovery Cuts Kobach’s Kansas GOP Primary Lead In Half
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*St. Louis Prosecutor Who Handled Mike Brown Case Ousted by Black Councilman Wesley Bell In Primary(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Republican gerrymandering wall is starting to crumble
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Here are the key US election match-ups at stake in final big nominating contests
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Disinformation expert warns senators that Russia is still trying to suppress minority votes and divide the left(ARTICLE BELOW)
*States purged 16 million voters from the rolls before the 2016 election
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The Districts Are Mostly White. The Candidates Are Not.
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Native American leaders tell Senate to act to protect their voting rights
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*RECORD NUMBER OF MUSLIM AMERICANS RUNNING FOR OFFICE
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Election system firm with Maryland contract has ties to Russian oligarch, FBI tells state(ARTICLE BELOW)
*A SWING-STATE ELECTION VENDOR REPEATEDLY DENIED BEING HACKED BY RUSSIANS. THE NEW MUELLER INDICTMENT SAYS OTHERWISE.(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Congress Can Stop Foreign Secret Spending on US Elections Right Now
(ARTICLE BELOW)
MAP OF THE HYPOCRITES!!!
THE DAILY KOS ELECTIONS GUIDE TO THE NATION'S RELIGIOUS POPULATIONS, BY CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT(ARTICLE BELOW)
funnies(at the end)
*MAP PORN: IF "DID NOT VOTE" WAS A CANDIDATE...( article below)
The Political Punchline
Putting the Mock in Democracy
'We made history': Vermont Democrats nominate US's first transgender candidate for governor
In night of primary elections, Christine Hallquist makes history as the first transgender nominee for governor for a major party
Ben Jacobs in Washington and Adam Gabbatt in Burlington
the guardian
Wed 15 Aug 2018 09.10 EDT
Democrats in Vermont have nominated America’s first transgender nominee for governor for a major party, in a night of primary elections that also saw Minnesota Republicans reject a familiar face of the Republican old guard in favour of a candidate more aligned with President Donald Trump.
Minnesota also picked a woman who could be the first Somali-American member of Congress, and Connecticut Democrats nominated a candidate who could become the first black woman from the state to serve in Congress.
“Tonight we made history,” Hallquist, 62, told supporters during her victory speech. “I’m so honored to be part of this historical moment.”
Hallquist told CNN on Wednesday morning that she had not necessarily run to make history, but as a reaction to the election of Trump to the White House.
“The reason I’m here is because of what happened in 2016,” she said. “In physics we say for every action there’s an opposite and opposing reaction. Well, I’m definitely a reaction to 2016.”
Hallquist follows in the footsteps of Danica Roem, the Virginia Democrat who in 2017 became the first transgender state legislator in the US.
She will face incumbent Republican Phil Scott in November. Scott, a moderate who faced a primary challenge on the right fueled by his support for gun control, is considered the favorite of the two. According to one recent poll the incumbent Republican has a 61% approval rating from Vermont Democrats.
Last week she spoke to the Guardian about her chances of becoming the Democratic candidate, saying: “I tell people this isn’t the hardest thing I ever did. In fact, I think after transitioning everything else looks pretty easy.”
Her success caps a remarkable journey, which has included decades of internal strife over how her family would accept her as Christine, the five-year transition process before she felt ready to present herself as a woman in her job as a high-powered CEO, and even dodging an exorcism attempt as a child.
Hallquist said she was inspired to run for governor when Trump became president.
“November 8, 2016, I realized the world changed,” she said.
“I went to bed, and of course like any other trauma I was in political depression and I just didn’t know what to do. I mean, many of us in this country shed a lot of tears for what happened on November 8.”
Minnesota
In Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty lost the Republican nomination for Minnesota governor on Tuesday after his opponent repeatedly attacked him for calling Trump “unfit” for the White House in the aftermath of the Access Hollywood tape.
In Minnesota, Pawlenty, who was governor from 2003 to 2011 and mounted an unsuccessful president bid in 2012, had been considered the favorite in the primary and was one of the GOP’s best hopes for picking up a governor’s mansion in an unfavorable national environment. However, like a number of other establishment Republicans his past criticism of Trump proved to be his Achilles heel.
Instead, Republican Jeff Johnson will face Congressman Tim Walz in November.
Hallquist was not the only candidate to make history on Tuesday.
Ilhan Omar is poised to become the nation’s first Somali-American and one of the first Muslim women in Congress after winning the Democratic nomination in Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District. Omar will likely join Rashida Tlaib, who won a Democratic primary in Michigan last week on Capitol Hill in January. Both are expected to easily win their general elections in safe Democratic districts.
In the special election for the Senate seat vacated by Al Franken’s resignation, appointed incumbent Tina Smith easily beat former White House lawyer and television pundit Richard Painter. Smith will face Republican Karin Housley in November to fill the remaining two years of Franken’s term.
Congressman Keith Ellison easily won the Democratic nomination for state attorney general despite allegations of domestic abuse and a video recording the abuse. Ellison, a progressive icon, has strongly denied the allegations and insisted “this video does not exist because I never behaved in this way, and any characterisation otherwise is false.”
Wisconsin Democrats nominated Tony Evers to be their standard bearer against Scott Walker, who is facing his fourth statewide election in eight years. Walker who has faced a recall in addition two hard fought campaigns for office, drew national attention through his efforts to break public sector unions in the state and support for right to work legislation.
Walker’s protege Leah Vukmir also won a competitive primary against businessman Kevin Nicholson for the Republican Senate nomination. She will face incumbent Tammy Baldwin in November.
In Connecticut, businessman Ned Lamont easily won the Democratic nomination for governor against Joe Ganim, the mayor of Bridgeport who mounted a political comeback after a 2003 conviction for fraud.
Connecticut Democrats also picked former teacher of the year, Jahana Hayes, to run for the seat vacated by Elizabeth Etsy, who is leaving Congress after bungling sexual abuse claims levied against a former staffer. Hayes could become the first black woman from the state to serve in Congress.
RELATED: JAHANA HAYES CRUSHES PARTY-BACKED CANDIDATE IN A LANDSLIDE
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a Republican-aligned voice for big business, almost never endorses Democrats and rarely intervenes in a Democratic primary.
RELATED: ILHAN OMAR ROMPS IN MINNEAPOLIS DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY, WHILE TIM WALZ AND KEITH ELLISON WIN STATEWIDE Ilhan Omar and Keith Ellison win, while Lori Swanson is beaten by both Tim Walz and Erin Murphy.
RELATED: Midwest battleground states tap candidates for midterm elections
Minnesota also picked a woman who could be the first Somali-American member of Congress, and Connecticut Democrats nominated a candidate who could become the first black woman from the state to serve in Congress.
“Tonight we made history,” Hallquist, 62, told supporters during her victory speech. “I’m so honored to be part of this historical moment.”
Hallquist told CNN on Wednesday morning that she had not necessarily run to make history, but as a reaction to the election of Trump to the White House.
“The reason I’m here is because of what happened in 2016,” she said. “In physics we say for every action there’s an opposite and opposing reaction. Well, I’m definitely a reaction to 2016.”
Hallquist follows in the footsteps of Danica Roem, the Virginia Democrat who in 2017 became the first transgender state legislator in the US.
She will face incumbent Republican Phil Scott in November. Scott, a moderate who faced a primary challenge on the right fueled by his support for gun control, is considered the favorite of the two. According to one recent poll the incumbent Republican has a 61% approval rating from Vermont Democrats.
Last week she spoke to the Guardian about her chances of becoming the Democratic candidate, saying: “I tell people this isn’t the hardest thing I ever did. In fact, I think after transitioning everything else looks pretty easy.”
Her success caps a remarkable journey, which has included decades of internal strife over how her family would accept her as Christine, the five-year transition process before she felt ready to present herself as a woman in her job as a high-powered CEO, and even dodging an exorcism attempt as a child.
Hallquist said she was inspired to run for governor when Trump became president.
“November 8, 2016, I realized the world changed,” she said.
“I went to bed, and of course like any other trauma I was in political depression and I just didn’t know what to do. I mean, many of us in this country shed a lot of tears for what happened on November 8.”
Minnesota
In Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty lost the Republican nomination for Minnesota governor on Tuesday after his opponent repeatedly attacked him for calling Trump “unfit” for the White House in the aftermath of the Access Hollywood tape.
In Minnesota, Pawlenty, who was governor from 2003 to 2011 and mounted an unsuccessful president bid in 2012, had been considered the favorite in the primary and was one of the GOP’s best hopes for picking up a governor’s mansion in an unfavorable national environment. However, like a number of other establishment Republicans his past criticism of Trump proved to be his Achilles heel.
Instead, Republican Jeff Johnson will face Congressman Tim Walz in November.
Hallquist was not the only candidate to make history on Tuesday.
Ilhan Omar is poised to become the nation’s first Somali-American and one of the first Muslim women in Congress after winning the Democratic nomination in Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District. Omar will likely join Rashida Tlaib, who won a Democratic primary in Michigan last week on Capitol Hill in January. Both are expected to easily win their general elections in safe Democratic districts.
In the special election for the Senate seat vacated by Al Franken’s resignation, appointed incumbent Tina Smith easily beat former White House lawyer and television pundit Richard Painter. Smith will face Republican Karin Housley in November to fill the remaining two years of Franken’s term.
Congressman Keith Ellison easily won the Democratic nomination for state attorney general despite allegations of domestic abuse and a video recording the abuse. Ellison, a progressive icon, has strongly denied the allegations and insisted “this video does not exist because I never behaved in this way, and any characterisation otherwise is false.”
Wisconsin Democrats nominated Tony Evers to be their standard bearer against Scott Walker, who is facing his fourth statewide election in eight years. Walker who has faced a recall in addition two hard fought campaigns for office, drew national attention through his efforts to break public sector unions in the state and support for right to work legislation.
Walker’s protege Leah Vukmir also won a competitive primary against businessman Kevin Nicholson for the Republican Senate nomination. She will face incumbent Tammy Baldwin in November.
In Connecticut, businessman Ned Lamont easily won the Democratic nomination for governor against Joe Ganim, the mayor of Bridgeport who mounted a political comeback after a 2003 conviction for fraud.
Connecticut Democrats also picked former teacher of the year, Jahana Hayes, to run for the seat vacated by Elizabeth Etsy, who is leaving Congress after bungling sexual abuse claims levied against a former staffer. Hayes could become the first black woman from the state to serve in Congress.
RELATED: JAHANA HAYES CRUSHES PARTY-BACKED CANDIDATE IN A LANDSLIDE
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a Republican-aligned voice for big business, almost never endorses Democrats and rarely intervenes in a Democratic primary.
RELATED: ILHAN OMAR ROMPS IN MINNEAPOLIS DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY, WHILE TIM WALZ AND KEITH ELLISON WIN STATEWIDE Ilhan Omar and Keith Ellison win, while Lori Swanson is beaten by both Tim Walz and Erin Murphy.
RELATED: Midwest battleground states tap candidates for midterm elections
An 11-Year-Old at a Hacking Convention Demonstrates Ability to Hack and Change Florida Vote in 10 minutes
The young hacker described the process as easy.
By Walter Einenkel / Daily Kos - alternet
August 14, 2018, 3:34 AM GMT
The second annual DEFCON Voting Village took place over a weekend at the end of July in Las Vegas, during the 29th annual DEFCON security convention. Computer experts and hackers meet annually to discuss and show off the latest and greatest computer security systems and practices. The Voting Village allow hackers to work on various “in use” and “not in use” voting machines, and see if and how they can hack them. It has been known for some time that our computer voting across the country is woefully lacking in state-of-the-art security, mostly because of a lack of financing and upgrading of our elections system. There’s a lot of money in elections—just not in the machines that count the votes.
BuzzFeed News explains that a dummy election was held using the machines, and then hackers were given the chance to monkey with the results. The basic idea in hacking these machines is to offer up opportunities for improvements in security. If you know the vulnerabilities in your machines, you can hopefully fix those before the next election.
If you can’t read the small picture there, they gave out awards for all kinds of things (i.e. fastest, most innovative, etc.); and they gave out awards for the youngest winners in a hacking contest of replica government elections websites as well. An 11-year-old was able to hack the dummy Florida secretary of state website.
In another area of DEFCON, organizers set up a semicircle of computers preloaded with copies of secretaries of states’ websites to allow young children to try to alter the appearance of a vote result. While such an attack wouldn’t change actual votes, simply changing the appearance could cause havoc on Election Day, and reflects a tactic Russia did employ in Ukraine in 2014.
Notably, the kids were instructed to use a simple database hacking tactic called SQL injection, the same tool the US has said Russian hackers used when targeting state voter registration databases in the summer of 2016.
The 11-year-old, named Audrey, told BuzzFeed News that it was easy and once inside she could do just about anything she wanted. Florida’s secretary of state gave a statement to BuzzFeed reiterating that the website was not connected to the voting machines in any way.
One of the criticisms of the event is that hackers are given full access to the machines, which can include figuring out how to open those machines physically, in order to perform a hack—something that is less likely to happen in real life, officials say. Of course, when you consider the stories that come out every few weeks showing that our voting machines may have much bigger and accessible security flaws that are easily exploitable remotely, I don’t find much reassurance in the critics’ assessments.
BuzzFeed News explains that a dummy election was held using the machines, and then hackers were given the chance to monkey with the results. The basic idea in hacking these machines is to offer up opportunities for improvements in security. If you know the vulnerabilities in your machines, you can hopefully fix those before the next election.
If you can’t read the small picture there, they gave out awards for all kinds of things (i.e. fastest, most innovative, etc.); and they gave out awards for the youngest winners in a hacking contest of replica government elections websites as well. An 11-year-old was able to hack the dummy Florida secretary of state website.
In another area of DEFCON, organizers set up a semicircle of computers preloaded with copies of secretaries of states’ websites to allow young children to try to alter the appearance of a vote result. While such an attack wouldn’t change actual votes, simply changing the appearance could cause havoc on Election Day, and reflects a tactic Russia did employ in Ukraine in 2014.
Notably, the kids were instructed to use a simple database hacking tactic called SQL injection, the same tool the US has said Russian hackers used when targeting state voter registration databases in the summer of 2016.
The 11-year-old, named Audrey, told BuzzFeed News that it was easy and once inside she could do just about anything she wanted. Florida’s secretary of state gave a statement to BuzzFeed reiterating that the website was not connected to the voting machines in any way.
One of the criticisms of the event is that hackers are given full access to the machines, which can include figuring out how to open those machines physically, in order to perform a hack—something that is less likely to happen in real life, officials say. Of course, when you consider the stories that come out every few weeks showing that our voting machines may have much bigger and accessible security flaws that are easily exploitable remotely, I don’t find much reassurance in the critics’ assessments.
It’s Not Just Kobach: Three Vote-Suppressing Secretaries of State Are Overseeing Their Own Elections
The glaring conflicts of interest are only getting worse.
PEMA LEVY - mother jones
AUG 11, 2018 6:00 AM
Tuesday’s too-close-to-call Republican primary election for Kansas governor has plunged the state into an ethics crisis. Secretary of State Kris Kobach emerged with a 121-vote lead over incumbent Gov. Jeff Colyer, and a recount appears inevitable. But Kobach, the most prominent national advocate for policies that make it harder to vote, is in charge of overseeing the state’s elections. After days of mounting pressure, Kobach on Friday agreed grudgingly to let his top deputy oversee the recount. Still, that doesn’t negate the glaring conflicts of interest in a race where a candidate has shaped the state’s election policies from the start and, if he emerges on top, will oversee his general-election race this fall.
The episode highlights an oddity of state-level politics: secretaries of state presiding over their own elections. This year, three Republican secretaries of state with a history of restricting access to the ballot will be presiding over elections in which they are a candidate for higher office. The potential for conflict is not new, nor is it not limited to one party. But in an era where voting rights are an increasingly partisan issue, having politicians overseeing elections—particularly their own—creates an additional incentive for dishonest or politically motivated election oversight.
It’s a problem that most Western democracies don’t have; instead, nonpartisan professionals administer elections. But in the United States, says Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, conflicts of interest are inevitable. Many elected secretaries of state with aspirations to higher office feel an allegiance to their party, whose support they’ll need. “But the problem is of a different magnitude when the elected official is supervising an election or a recount where the secretary himself or herself is on the ballot,” Hasen said in an email. “There the conflict of interest is extreme and the best course of action is for the secretary to recuse from all decisions involving the counting of votes, recounts, and any further legal or administrative action. No person should be a judge of his or her own case.”
Kobach has insisted there is no conflict overseeing a recount of his own race. “The recount thing is done on a county level, so the secretary of state does not actually participate directly in the recount,” Kobach said Wednesday, two days before he recused himself. “The secretary of state’s office merely serves as a coordinating entity overseeing it all, but not actually counting the votes.”
But there is the potential for Kobach to shape the outcome. The day after the election, Kobach appeared to lead with 191 votes. That margin was slashed by 100 votes when it turned out that one county had reported 522 votes for Colyer, but the secretary of state’s website showed 422. The county clerk blamed Kobach’s office for entering the wrong number into its system. (Kobach’s lead grew to 121 on Thursday when certain county vote totals were adjusted.) A spokesman for Colyer also told the Kansas City Star that Kobach’s office had instructed local officials to disregard mail-in ballots if the postmark is smudged. Colyer is counting on mail-in and provisional ballots to erase his deficit in the race.
Even before Tuesday, Kobach helped set the policies that determined who could vote in Kansas. Early in his tenure, Kobach lobbied the state legislature to pass a draconian voter ID bill that required photo identification to cast a ballot and proof of citizenship to register to vote. Due to this provision, between 2013 and 2016, more than 16,000 people had their voter registrations canceled, and more than 31,000 Kansans had been blocked from registering to vote. In June, federal judge Julie Robinson threw out the proof-of-citizenship requirement because “the magnitude of potentially disenfranchised voters…cannot be justified by the scant evidence of noncitizen voter fraud.”
Two other Republican secretaries of state who have pushed for similarly restrictive voting regulations are also running for higher office and overseeing their own races. Brian Kemp, the secretary of state of Georgia, won the state’s Republican primary for governor in July. Kemp has been the subject of multiple lawsuits alleging that his office failed to process the registration applications of minority voters. Last year, Kemp’s office settled a federal suit that accused his office of disenfranchising minority voters by rejecting registration applications on which applicants’ personal information did not exactly match their information in state databases. On several occasions, his office has responded to these allegations by investigating the voter advocacy groups.
Georgia Democrats have called on Kemp to resign as secretary of state while he runs for governor to avoid any conflict, but Kemp has refused. Like Kobach, Kemp defended his decision by pointing out that counting vote totals falls to the individual counties, not the secretary of state. “For anyone to think there’s a way to manipulate the process because you’re secretary of state is outrageous,” he said, according to the Atlanta Constitution-Journal.
In Ohio, Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted is running for lieutenant governor in November. He has purged more than 2 million people from the state’s voter rolls since taking office in 2011. In a close race this fall, it’s possible that those purged voters could have made the difference.
There are myriad ways a secretary of state can hinder a political opponent. For example, Florida voters almost lost their chance to register to vote in fall 2016 when Hurricane Matthew caused mass evacuations ahead of the registration deadline. The Republican secretary of state, Ken Detzner, refused to extend the deadline. State Democrats sued, and a federal judge ultimately extended it. Kemp was also sued for not extending registration in his state, which was also slammed by the storm, but Kemp prevailed. [...]
The episode highlights an oddity of state-level politics: secretaries of state presiding over their own elections. This year, three Republican secretaries of state with a history of restricting access to the ballot will be presiding over elections in which they are a candidate for higher office. The potential for conflict is not new, nor is it not limited to one party. But in an era where voting rights are an increasingly partisan issue, having politicians overseeing elections—particularly their own—creates an additional incentive for dishonest or politically motivated election oversight.
It’s a problem that most Western democracies don’t have; instead, nonpartisan professionals administer elections. But in the United States, says Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, conflicts of interest are inevitable. Many elected secretaries of state with aspirations to higher office feel an allegiance to their party, whose support they’ll need. “But the problem is of a different magnitude when the elected official is supervising an election or a recount where the secretary himself or herself is on the ballot,” Hasen said in an email. “There the conflict of interest is extreme and the best course of action is for the secretary to recuse from all decisions involving the counting of votes, recounts, and any further legal or administrative action. No person should be a judge of his or her own case.”
Kobach has insisted there is no conflict overseeing a recount of his own race. “The recount thing is done on a county level, so the secretary of state does not actually participate directly in the recount,” Kobach said Wednesday, two days before he recused himself. “The secretary of state’s office merely serves as a coordinating entity overseeing it all, but not actually counting the votes.”
But there is the potential for Kobach to shape the outcome. The day after the election, Kobach appeared to lead with 191 votes. That margin was slashed by 100 votes when it turned out that one county had reported 522 votes for Colyer, but the secretary of state’s website showed 422. The county clerk blamed Kobach’s office for entering the wrong number into its system. (Kobach’s lead grew to 121 on Thursday when certain county vote totals were adjusted.) A spokesman for Colyer also told the Kansas City Star that Kobach’s office had instructed local officials to disregard mail-in ballots if the postmark is smudged. Colyer is counting on mail-in and provisional ballots to erase his deficit in the race.
Even before Tuesday, Kobach helped set the policies that determined who could vote in Kansas. Early in his tenure, Kobach lobbied the state legislature to pass a draconian voter ID bill that required photo identification to cast a ballot and proof of citizenship to register to vote. Due to this provision, between 2013 and 2016, more than 16,000 people had their voter registrations canceled, and more than 31,000 Kansans had been blocked from registering to vote. In June, federal judge Julie Robinson threw out the proof-of-citizenship requirement because “the magnitude of potentially disenfranchised voters…cannot be justified by the scant evidence of noncitizen voter fraud.”
Two other Republican secretaries of state who have pushed for similarly restrictive voting regulations are also running for higher office and overseeing their own races. Brian Kemp, the secretary of state of Georgia, won the state’s Republican primary for governor in July. Kemp has been the subject of multiple lawsuits alleging that his office failed to process the registration applications of minority voters. Last year, Kemp’s office settled a federal suit that accused his office of disenfranchising minority voters by rejecting registration applications on which applicants’ personal information did not exactly match their information in state databases. On several occasions, his office has responded to these allegations by investigating the voter advocacy groups.
Georgia Democrats have called on Kemp to resign as secretary of state while he runs for governor to avoid any conflict, but Kemp has refused. Like Kobach, Kemp defended his decision by pointing out that counting vote totals falls to the individual counties, not the secretary of state. “For anyone to think there’s a way to manipulate the process because you’re secretary of state is outrageous,” he said, according to the Atlanta Constitution-Journal.
In Ohio, Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted is running for lieutenant governor in November. He has purged more than 2 million people from the state’s voter rolls since taking office in 2011. In a close race this fall, it’s possible that those purged voters could have made the difference.
There are myriad ways a secretary of state can hinder a political opponent. For example, Florida voters almost lost their chance to register to vote in fall 2016 when Hurricane Matthew caused mass evacuations ahead of the registration deadline. The Republican secretary of state, Ken Detzner, refused to extend the deadline. State Democrats sued, and a federal judge ultimately extended it. Kemp was also sued for not extending registration in his state, which was also slammed by the storm, but Kemp prevailed. [...]
Vote Mistake Discovery Cuts Kobach’s Kansas GOP Primary Lead In Half
By JOHN HANNA | tpm
August 9, 2018 2:47 pm
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s lead over Gov. Jeff Colyer in the Republican primary has shrunk to only 91 votes after election officials discovered a mistake in the listing for one county’s results in the state’s tally of votes.
The lead is minuscule when compared with the 311,000 votes cast.
The final, unofficial results posted on the secretary of state’s website show Kobach winning Thomas County in northwest Kansas, with 466 votes to Colyer’s 422. But the tally posted by the Thomas County clerk’s office shows Colyer with 522 votes, or 100 votes more for him, a number the clerk confirmed to The Associated Press on Thursday.
And Bryan Caskey, state elections director, said county officials pointed out the discrepancy Thursday following a routine request for a post-election check of the numbers to counties by the secretary of state’s office.
County election officials have yet to finish counting late-arriving mail-in ballots or provisional ballots provided to voters at the polls when their eligibility wasn’t clear.
“This is a routine part of the process,” Caskey said. “This is why we emphasize that election-night results are unofficial.”
Thomas County Clerk Shelly Harms said it’s possible that her handwriting on the tally sheet faxed to the secretary of state’s office was bad enough in the rush of primary-night business that the number for Colyer wasn’t clear.
“They just misread it,” she told The Associated Press.
Kobach is perhaps President Donald Trump’s closest political ally in the state, and he’s a vocal advocate of tough policies on immigration and strict voter identification laws who served as vice chairman of Trump’s now disbanded commission on election fraud. The president tweeted his endorsement of Kobach on Monday, less than 24 hours before the polls opened.
The lead is minuscule when compared with the 311,000 votes cast.
The final, unofficial results posted on the secretary of state’s website show Kobach winning Thomas County in northwest Kansas, with 466 votes to Colyer’s 422. But the tally posted by the Thomas County clerk’s office shows Colyer with 522 votes, or 100 votes more for him, a number the clerk confirmed to The Associated Press on Thursday.
And Bryan Caskey, state elections director, said county officials pointed out the discrepancy Thursday following a routine request for a post-election check of the numbers to counties by the secretary of state’s office.
County election officials have yet to finish counting late-arriving mail-in ballots or provisional ballots provided to voters at the polls when their eligibility wasn’t clear.
“This is a routine part of the process,” Caskey said. “This is why we emphasize that election-night results are unofficial.”
Thomas County Clerk Shelly Harms said it’s possible that her handwriting on the tally sheet faxed to the secretary of state’s office was bad enough in the rush of primary-night business that the number for Colyer wasn’t clear.
“They just misread it,” she told The Associated Press.
Kobach is perhaps President Donald Trump’s closest political ally in the state, and he’s a vocal advocate of tough policies on immigration and strict voter identification laws who served as vice chairman of Trump’s now disbanded commission on election fraud. The president tweeted his endorsement of Kobach on Monday, less than 24 hours before the polls opened.
Republican Anti-Union Bill Goes Down in Flames in Missouri
"Right to work" is dead in the Show Me State.
By Matthew Chapman / AlterNet
August 8, 2018, 3:57 AM GMT
On Tuesday night, voters in Missouri defeated Proposition A, a referendum which would have allowed a "right to work" law to go into effect in the state.
This marked the first time a right to work law has ever been defeated by popular vote. It is an enormous setback for Missouri Republicans, who had made imposing this law a signature policy goal after winning full control of the state government in 2016.
Right to work laws, which currently exist in 27 states, ban labor unions and businesses from negotiating a "security agreement" in bargaining, in which a union may collect "agency fees" from workers who are not a member of the union. Since unions generally represent all workers in a workplace, not simply their own members, these fees cover the cost of bargaining for nonmembers and prevent free ridership — and lead to wage increases.
Corporations and right-wing politicians, however, have painted these fees as a threat to individual freedom and sought to pass laws banning them — which has depressed union membership and wages around the country. Earlier this year, they persuaded the Supreme Court to void all such security agreements in public sector unions. Workers in the private sector, however, are still free to pursue them in states without right to work laws.
In February 2017, then-Gov. Eric Greitens — who later resigned amid an unrelated sexual assault and blackmail scandal — signed the right to work bill in Missouri. In response, outraged union workers got a referendum on the ballot to overturn it, with AFL-CIO mobilizing steelworkers and construction workers to go door to door to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures.
Republicans were desperate to win this vote, even going so far as to pass a law moving the referendum from the November ballot to the August primary in the hope lower turnout would kill the measure. But in the end, it wasn't even close. Voters rejected right to work 67.5 to 37.5.
In Missouri, workers stood up and said no to the erosion of their right to organize. And the business interests pushing to undermine unions have been put on notice.
This marked the first time a right to work law has ever been defeated by popular vote. It is an enormous setback for Missouri Republicans, who had made imposing this law a signature policy goal after winning full control of the state government in 2016.
Right to work laws, which currently exist in 27 states, ban labor unions and businesses from negotiating a "security agreement" in bargaining, in which a union may collect "agency fees" from workers who are not a member of the union. Since unions generally represent all workers in a workplace, not simply their own members, these fees cover the cost of bargaining for nonmembers and prevent free ridership — and lead to wage increases.
Corporations and right-wing politicians, however, have painted these fees as a threat to individual freedom and sought to pass laws banning them — which has depressed union membership and wages around the country. Earlier this year, they persuaded the Supreme Court to void all such security agreements in public sector unions. Workers in the private sector, however, are still free to pursue them in states without right to work laws.
In February 2017, then-Gov. Eric Greitens — who later resigned amid an unrelated sexual assault and blackmail scandal — signed the right to work bill in Missouri. In response, outraged union workers got a referendum on the ballot to overturn it, with AFL-CIO mobilizing steelworkers and construction workers to go door to door to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures.
Republicans were desperate to win this vote, even going so far as to pass a law moving the referendum from the November ballot to the August primary in the hope lower turnout would kill the measure. But in the end, it wasn't even close. Voters rejected right to work 67.5 to 37.5.
In Missouri, workers stood up and said no to the erosion of their right to organize. And the business interests pushing to undermine unions have been put on notice.
St. Louis Prosecutor Who Handled Mike Brown Case Ousted by Black Councilman Wesley Bell In Primary
By Associated Press - atlanta black star
August 8, 2018
Black Councilman Wesley Bell wins primary in St. Louis against prosecutor Bob McColluch
At a raucous election night party, Bell recalled that even close friends told him he had no chance. He called for unity.
“There’s too much divisiveness, too much division in this county, in this region,” Bell said in a video posted on his campaign Facebook page. “We’ve got to start bringing people together.”
McCulloch couldn’t be reached for comment.
The prosecutor’s race put Ferguson back into the spotlight four years after Brown’s death led to months of often violent protests, prompted significant reforms in the St. Louis suburb and helped fuel the national Black Lives Matter movement.
Many onlookers saw the election as a referendum on what happened in Ferguson. It marked the first time McCulloch had been challenged since Brown’s death.
Brown, a black and unarmed 18-year-old, died on Aug. 9, 2014, in a street confrontation with white Officer Darren Wilson. Some witnesses said Brown had his hands up in surrender. Wilson said Brown was moving aggressively toward him and he fired the fatal shots in self-defense.
A St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict Wilson, who later resigned. Critics accused McCulloch, who is white, of skewing the investigation in favor of the officer.
The U.S. Department of Justice launched its own investigation. While the Justice Department found no grounds to indict Wilson, a scathing report found racial bias in the way Ferguson police and courts treated black people. A consent agreement requires the city to take several steps to remove that bias, including hiring more minority police officers, court reforms, and other measures.
Bell campaigned on a platform to “fundamentally change the culture” of the prosecutor’s office, partially by assigning special prosecutors to review allegations of police misconduct. Black residents make up about 23 percent of St. Louis County’s population.
Bell and McCulloch are both sons of police officers. But McCulloch, an ardent police supporter, became a target of critics who unsuccessfully demanded he recuse himself from the Brown case, citing his family history. Several of his relatives worked for the St. Louis police department, including his father, who was fatally shot by a black suspect when McCulloch was 12.
“There’s too much divisiveness, too much division in this county, in this region,” Bell said in a video posted on his campaign Facebook page. “We’ve got to start bringing people together.”
McCulloch couldn’t be reached for comment.
The prosecutor’s race put Ferguson back into the spotlight four years after Brown’s death led to months of often violent protests, prompted significant reforms in the St. Louis suburb and helped fuel the national Black Lives Matter movement.
Many onlookers saw the election as a referendum on what happened in Ferguson. It marked the first time McCulloch had been challenged since Brown’s death.
Brown, a black and unarmed 18-year-old, died on Aug. 9, 2014, in a street confrontation with white Officer Darren Wilson. Some witnesses said Brown had his hands up in surrender. Wilson said Brown was moving aggressively toward him and he fired the fatal shots in self-defense.
A St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict Wilson, who later resigned. Critics accused McCulloch, who is white, of skewing the investigation in favor of the officer.
The U.S. Department of Justice launched its own investigation. While the Justice Department found no grounds to indict Wilson, a scathing report found racial bias in the way Ferguson police and courts treated black people. A consent agreement requires the city to take several steps to remove that bias, including hiring more minority police officers, court reforms, and other measures.
Bell campaigned on a platform to “fundamentally change the culture” of the prosecutor’s office, partially by assigning special prosecutors to review allegations of police misconduct. Black residents make up about 23 percent of St. Louis County’s population.
Bell and McCulloch are both sons of police officers. But McCulloch, an ardent police supporter, became a target of critics who unsuccessfully demanded he recuse himself from the Brown case, citing his family history. Several of his relatives worked for the St. Louis police department, including his father, who was fatally shot by a black suspect when McCulloch was 12.
Republican gerrymandering wall is starting to crumble
Take that, John Roberts!
IAN MILLHISER - thinkprogress
AUG 6, 2018, 8:00 AM
One of retired Justice Anthony Kennedy’s final acts as a sitting justice was to stare partisan gerrymandering directly in the eye and cry out a resounding “meh.” A pair of cases argued last term were supposed to deliver sharp blows to such gerrymandering. Instead, the Court punted, Kennedy retired, and there is no longer a plausible way to form a majority that could halt this anti-democratic practice.
Yet, even as the Supreme Court refuses to enforce the Constitution, two of the most gerrymandered states dealt severe blows to partisan election rigging this year, and a third is likely to follow suit this November.
So gerrymandering is not dead, and there is a very real risk that the Supreme Court will invigorate it if Judge Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed to replace Justice Kennedy. For the moment, however, the GOP’s death grip on U.S. House redistricting is starting to crumble.
How we got hereEvery ten years, the states must redraw their legislative districts to comport with the most recent census. As a result, if one party dominates the election immediately proceeding a redistricting, that victory can have consequences that extend for years or even decades. The party that dominates in an redistricting year can draw maps that lock it into power for the next ten years — and is more likely than not to over-perform in the next election immediately proceeding a redistricting cycle.
Which brings us to 2010, a Republican wave election year that allowed the GOP to draw rigidly gerrymandered maps in multiple swing states. Indeed, in 2012, the first election with the GOP’s new gerrymandered maps, Republicans won lopsided majorities in six key states’ congressional delegations, even though President Obama won the popular vote in each of these states — in some instances, not by close margins.
In 2012, Democratic House candidates narrowly won the national popular voteover their Republican counterparts, but Republicans entered the 113th Congress with a solid majority. Democrats began 2013 with just 200 House seats. If the six states depicted above had drawn fair maps, Democrats would, in all likelihood, have won 17 of the 18 additional seats they needed to win a majority.
With such a majority, Democrats could have stimulated the economy, expanded Obamacare, and avoided a government shutdown. Arguably, had Hillary Clinton campaigned during the stronger economy such stimulus would have provided, she would be president right now, and Justice Merrick Garland would have been on hand to provide the necessary fifth vote to declare partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional.
The wall starts to crumbleThough the Supreme Court of the United States is content to let Republican lawmakers rig congressional elections, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was not. Last January, the state supreme court held that the state’s existing maps violate the state constitution and ordered new maps drawn for the 2018 election.
The new maps still favor the GOP — they include “four swing districts, eight that favor Republicans, and six that favor Democrats” — but that’s still a substantial improvement for Democrats over the previous maps, which made Republicans the strong favorite in 13 districts.
Then, in May, Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure that would make it harder for either party to recreate the kind of gerrymander Republicans enacted in 2010. The initiative creates a Rube Goldberg-like method of drawing Congressional districts that will be in effect in the 2021 redistricting cycle.
Ohio’s solution is not perfect, and it is difficult to summarize concisely (if you want to learn the details, you can read about them here), but it uses a combination of supermajority requirements, requirements that new maps be approved by some members of the minority party, and a fail safe that causes maps drawn by the majority party to expire in four years if the two parties cannot reach a consensus. At the very least, it will seriously complicate Republican efforts to keep in place maps like the ones Ohio has now.
Then, on Tuesday, the Michigan Supreme Court voted 4-3 to reject a lawsuit seeking to remove a ballot initiative targeting gerrymandering in that state. The court’s decision was mildly surprising because Republicans enjoy a 5-2 majority on the state supreme court, and the court has long been a bastion of ideological conservatism.
Chief Justice Stephen Markman, who dissented from the court’s decision, once said that he is “committed to the judicial values that are often identified with the Federalist Society”
As a result, Michigan voters will decide in November on a ballot initiative which would transfer power to draw legislative districts to an independent commission whose members “will be randomly selected from a pool of registered voters, and consist of four members who self-identify with each of the two major political parties, and five non-affiliated, independent members.” If the lopsided vote on Ohio’s ballot initiative is any sign, Michigan’s initiative is likely to pass.
The Roberts threat
So that’s the good news for supporters of free and fair elections. Three of the most gerrymandered states in the country will likely have permanent safeguards against gerrymandering during the next redistricting cycle. The bad news is that these safeguards may not survive the single greatest threat to voting rights in the United States of America — the Supreme Court of the United States.
In 2015, the Supreme Court decided Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, a challenge to that state’s use of an independent redistrict commission to draw its congressional maps. The premise of this lawsuit was that the Constitution provides that “the times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the Legislature thereof,” and Republicans argued that the word “legislature” can only be read to mean the body of lawmakers elected to make laws — not an independent commission created by a ballot initiative.
But this legal theory ran headlong into precedent. Among other things, the Supreme Court established in its 1916 decision in Ohio ex. rel. Davis v. Hildebrant that the word “legislature” can apply to any body that is empowered to make laws. Thus, a referendum “constituted a part of the state constitution and laws,” and was accordingly “contained within the legislative power.”
Although five justices upheld Arizona’s redistricting commission in the 2015 case, one of them was Justice Kennedy. So if Trump succeeds in picking Kennedy’s replacement, there will no longer be a majority for the proposition that ballot initiatives may target gerrymandering. The Ohio and Michigan initiatives could fall to a Supreme Court hostile to voting rights.
Indeed, after Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court struck down that state’s gerrymander, Republicans argued that a court could not do so — because a court is not a legislature. The Supreme Court of the United States treated this argument pretty dismissively, but — again — that was while Kennedy was still around. With him gone, the Republican Supreme Court may view a case that could eliminate Republicans’ power to rig congressional elections differently.
Yet, even as the Supreme Court refuses to enforce the Constitution, two of the most gerrymandered states dealt severe blows to partisan election rigging this year, and a third is likely to follow suit this November.
So gerrymandering is not dead, and there is a very real risk that the Supreme Court will invigorate it if Judge Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed to replace Justice Kennedy. For the moment, however, the GOP’s death grip on U.S. House redistricting is starting to crumble.
How we got hereEvery ten years, the states must redraw their legislative districts to comport with the most recent census. As a result, if one party dominates the election immediately proceeding a redistricting, that victory can have consequences that extend for years or even decades. The party that dominates in an redistricting year can draw maps that lock it into power for the next ten years — and is more likely than not to over-perform in the next election immediately proceeding a redistricting cycle.
Which brings us to 2010, a Republican wave election year that allowed the GOP to draw rigidly gerrymandered maps in multiple swing states. Indeed, in 2012, the first election with the GOP’s new gerrymandered maps, Republicans won lopsided majorities in six key states’ congressional delegations, even though President Obama won the popular vote in each of these states — in some instances, not by close margins.
In 2012, Democratic House candidates narrowly won the national popular voteover their Republican counterparts, but Republicans entered the 113th Congress with a solid majority. Democrats began 2013 with just 200 House seats. If the six states depicted above had drawn fair maps, Democrats would, in all likelihood, have won 17 of the 18 additional seats they needed to win a majority.
With such a majority, Democrats could have stimulated the economy, expanded Obamacare, and avoided a government shutdown. Arguably, had Hillary Clinton campaigned during the stronger economy such stimulus would have provided, she would be president right now, and Justice Merrick Garland would have been on hand to provide the necessary fifth vote to declare partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional.
The wall starts to crumbleThough the Supreme Court of the United States is content to let Republican lawmakers rig congressional elections, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was not. Last January, the state supreme court held that the state’s existing maps violate the state constitution and ordered new maps drawn for the 2018 election.
The new maps still favor the GOP — they include “four swing districts, eight that favor Republicans, and six that favor Democrats” — but that’s still a substantial improvement for Democrats over the previous maps, which made Republicans the strong favorite in 13 districts.
Then, in May, Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure that would make it harder for either party to recreate the kind of gerrymander Republicans enacted in 2010. The initiative creates a Rube Goldberg-like method of drawing Congressional districts that will be in effect in the 2021 redistricting cycle.
Ohio’s solution is not perfect, and it is difficult to summarize concisely (if you want to learn the details, you can read about them here), but it uses a combination of supermajority requirements, requirements that new maps be approved by some members of the minority party, and a fail safe that causes maps drawn by the majority party to expire in four years if the two parties cannot reach a consensus. At the very least, it will seriously complicate Republican efforts to keep in place maps like the ones Ohio has now.
Then, on Tuesday, the Michigan Supreme Court voted 4-3 to reject a lawsuit seeking to remove a ballot initiative targeting gerrymandering in that state. The court’s decision was mildly surprising because Republicans enjoy a 5-2 majority on the state supreme court, and the court has long been a bastion of ideological conservatism.
Chief Justice Stephen Markman, who dissented from the court’s decision, once said that he is “committed to the judicial values that are often identified with the Federalist Society”
As a result, Michigan voters will decide in November on a ballot initiative which would transfer power to draw legislative districts to an independent commission whose members “will be randomly selected from a pool of registered voters, and consist of four members who self-identify with each of the two major political parties, and five non-affiliated, independent members.” If the lopsided vote on Ohio’s ballot initiative is any sign, Michigan’s initiative is likely to pass.
The Roberts threat
So that’s the good news for supporters of free and fair elections. Three of the most gerrymandered states in the country will likely have permanent safeguards against gerrymandering during the next redistricting cycle. The bad news is that these safeguards may not survive the single greatest threat to voting rights in the United States of America — the Supreme Court of the United States.
In 2015, the Supreme Court decided Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, a challenge to that state’s use of an independent redistrict commission to draw its congressional maps. The premise of this lawsuit was that the Constitution provides that “the times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the Legislature thereof,” and Republicans argued that the word “legislature” can only be read to mean the body of lawmakers elected to make laws — not an independent commission created by a ballot initiative.
But this legal theory ran headlong into precedent. Among other things, the Supreme Court established in its 1916 decision in Ohio ex. rel. Davis v. Hildebrant that the word “legislature” can apply to any body that is empowered to make laws. Thus, a referendum “constituted a part of the state constitution and laws,” and was accordingly “contained within the legislative power.”
Although five justices upheld Arizona’s redistricting commission in the 2015 case, one of them was Justice Kennedy. So if Trump succeeds in picking Kennedy’s replacement, there will no longer be a majority for the proposition that ballot initiatives may target gerrymandering. The Ohio and Michigan initiatives could fall to a Supreme Court hostile to voting rights.
Indeed, after Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court struck down that state’s gerrymander, Republicans argued that a court could not do so — because a court is not a legislature. The Supreme Court of the United States treated this argument pretty dismissively, but — again — that was while Kennedy was still around. With him gone, the Republican Supreme Court may view a case that could eliminate Republicans’ power to rig congressional elections differently.
Here are the key US election match-ups at stake in final big nominating contests
Reuters - raw story
05 AUG 2018 AT 08:39 ET
The campaign for control of the U.S. Congress and key governor’s offices reaches a critical juncture in August, the last big month for party nominating contests as voters in 14 states pick candidates for November’s midterm elections.
Vital battleground states such as Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida highlight this month’s primaries. The final five state primaries are in early September, clearing the way for a general election campaign that has become a referendum on Republican President Donald Trump’s chaotic first 19 months in office.
Trump has endorsed a string of recent primary winners, turning many Republican races into contests over which candidate is more supportive of Trump or can earn his backing. August will provide more tests of his clout.
For Democrats, several nominating contests will feature showdowns between mainstream candidates and the party’s resurgent progressive wing, including candidates backed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
“We’re going to find out more this month about how powerful a Trump endorsement, or even a perceived endorsement, can be,” said Jennifer Duffy, an analyst with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “We’re also going to figure out how powerful the progressive message is for Democrats.”
Democrats need to pick up 23 seats in the House of Representatives and two seats in the Senate to claim majorities in each chamber of Congress and put a brake on Trump’s agenda. All 435 House seats and 35 of 100 Senate seats are up for grabs on Nov. 6, along with 36 of the 50 gubernatorial offices.
Here is a look at some of the key races in August, and a few of the questions that could be answered this month.
WHICH PRIMARIES WILL HAVE THE BIGGEST IMPACT IN NOVEMBER?
The Republican U.S. Senate primaries in Arizona and Wisconsin will be crucial in the battle for control of that chamber.
In Arizona, one of two top takeover opportunities for Democrats along with Nevada, a three-way Republican race features establishment favorite U.S. Representative Martha McSally against two hard-line conservatives, former state Senator Kelli Ward and former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
The two conservative firebrands could split the right-wing vote in the Aug. 28 primary against the more moderate McSally. They are seen as less viable contenders against the likely Democratic nominee, U.S. Representative Kyrsten Sinema, to replace the retiring Jeff Flake in November.
Trump has not endorsed anyone in the race.
He also has not endorsed either of the main Republican contenders in Wisconsin’s Aug. 14 battle for the right to challenge Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin in a state Trump narrowly won in 2016. State lawmaker Leah Vukmir and Kevin Nicholson, a former Marine and a former Democrat, are battling to prove their loyalty to the president.
Democrats have several primaries in House races in districts that will be competitive in November, notably in Kansas and Washington state on Tuesday.
Trump’s backing of Republican Representative Ron DeSantis gave the conservative congressman a huge boost in his Aug. 28 primary for the gubernatorial nomination in the important battleground state of Florida. DeSantis faces Adam Putnam, the state agriculture commissioner and a former congressman, for the nomination to replace Governor Rick Scott, who is running for the U.S. Senate.
A recent DeSantis campaign ad touts his allegiance to Trump, showing him urging his toddler daughter to “build the wall” with toy blocks and features his baby in a red “Make America Great Again” onesie.
WILL PROGRESSIVES NOTCH MORE BIG DEMOCRATIC WINS?
The next test of the electoral power of progressive Democrats will be in Michigan, where health director Abdul El-Sayed is vying to become the country’s first Muslim American governor. El-Sayed was endorsed by Sanders and campaigned recently with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young democratic socialist whose shocking, recent New York primary upset made her a movement star.
El-Sayed has backed a state-level, single-payer healthcare system that the front-runner in the race, former state Senate Democratic leader Gretchen Whitmer, has said is not realistic.
In Florida, another Sanders-backed Democrat, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, is running for governor in a crowded field that includes moderate former U.S. Representative Gwen Graham.
OTHER RACES WITH PROMINENT CONTENDERS
Two well-known Republicans, Kris Kobach in Kansas and Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota, are vying for the governor’s office in their home states.
Kobach, a leader in the conservative drive to restrict illegal immigration and pass more restrictive voting laws, is challenging Governor Jeff Colyer for their party’s nomination on Tuesday.
Polls show Kobach, vice chairman of Trump’s commission to investigate voting fraud before it collapsed, and the incumbent governor running head-to-head at the top of a big pack.
Pawlenty, a former two-term governor whose 2012 presidential bid ended quickly, is running against a county commissioner to get his old job back in Minnesota’s Aug. 14 primary.
Vital battleground states such as Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida highlight this month’s primaries. The final five state primaries are in early September, clearing the way for a general election campaign that has become a referendum on Republican President Donald Trump’s chaotic first 19 months in office.
Trump has endorsed a string of recent primary winners, turning many Republican races into contests over which candidate is more supportive of Trump or can earn his backing. August will provide more tests of his clout.
For Democrats, several nominating contests will feature showdowns between mainstream candidates and the party’s resurgent progressive wing, including candidates backed by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
“We’re going to find out more this month about how powerful a Trump endorsement, or even a perceived endorsement, can be,” said Jennifer Duffy, an analyst with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “We’re also going to figure out how powerful the progressive message is for Democrats.”
Democrats need to pick up 23 seats in the House of Representatives and two seats in the Senate to claim majorities in each chamber of Congress and put a brake on Trump’s agenda. All 435 House seats and 35 of 100 Senate seats are up for grabs on Nov. 6, along with 36 of the 50 gubernatorial offices.
Here is a look at some of the key races in August, and a few of the questions that could be answered this month.
WHICH PRIMARIES WILL HAVE THE BIGGEST IMPACT IN NOVEMBER?
The Republican U.S. Senate primaries in Arizona and Wisconsin will be crucial in the battle for control of that chamber.
In Arizona, one of two top takeover opportunities for Democrats along with Nevada, a three-way Republican race features establishment favorite U.S. Representative Martha McSally against two hard-line conservatives, former state Senator Kelli Ward and former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
The two conservative firebrands could split the right-wing vote in the Aug. 28 primary against the more moderate McSally. They are seen as less viable contenders against the likely Democratic nominee, U.S. Representative Kyrsten Sinema, to replace the retiring Jeff Flake in November.
Trump has not endorsed anyone in the race.
He also has not endorsed either of the main Republican contenders in Wisconsin’s Aug. 14 battle for the right to challenge Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin in a state Trump narrowly won in 2016. State lawmaker Leah Vukmir and Kevin Nicholson, a former Marine and a former Democrat, are battling to prove their loyalty to the president.
Democrats have several primaries in House races in districts that will be competitive in November, notably in Kansas and Washington state on Tuesday.
Trump’s backing of Republican Representative Ron DeSantis gave the conservative congressman a huge boost in his Aug. 28 primary for the gubernatorial nomination in the important battleground state of Florida. DeSantis faces Adam Putnam, the state agriculture commissioner and a former congressman, for the nomination to replace Governor Rick Scott, who is running for the U.S. Senate.
A recent DeSantis campaign ad touts his allegiance to Trump, showing him urging his toddler daughter to “build the wall” with toy blocks and features his baby in a red “Make America Great Again” onesie.
WILL PROGRESSIVES NOTCH MORE BIG DEMOCRATIC WINS?
The next test of the electoral power of progressive Democrats will be in Michigan, where health director Abdul El-Sayed is vying to become the country’s first Muslim American governor. El-Sayed was endorsed by Sanders and campaigned recently with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the young democratic socialist whose shocking, recent New York primary upset made her a movement star.
El-Sayed has backed a state-level, single-payer healthcare system that the front-runner in the race, former state Senate Democratic leader Gretchen Whitmer, has said is not realistic.
In Florida, another Sanders-backed Democrat, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, is running for governor in a crowded field that includes moderate former U.S. Representative Gwen Graham.
OTHER RACES WITH PROMINENT CONTENDERS
Two well-known Republicans, Kris Kobach in Kansas and Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota, are vying for the governor’s office in their home states.
Kobach, a leader in the conservative drive to restrict illegal immigration and pass more restrictive voting laws, is challenging Governor Jeff Colyer for their party’s nomination on Tuesday.
Polls show Kobach, vice chairman of Trump’s commission to investigate voting fraud before it collapsed, and the incumbent governor running head-to-head at the top of a big pack.
Pawlenty, a former two-term governor whose 2012 presidential bid ended quickly, is running against a county commissioner to get his old job back in Minnesota’s Aug. 14 primary.
Disinformation expert warns senators that Russia is still trying to suppress minority votes and divide the left
Tana Ganeva - raw story
01 AUG 2018 AT 11:59 ET
At a hearing of the U.S. Senate Committee on Intelligence Wednesday, a cybersecurity expert warned that the Kremlin continues to exploit social media to influence America’s elections.
Renee DiResta, Director of Research at the cybersecurity company New Knowledge, explained how social media has opened a new front in the global propaganda wars.
“Over the past decade, disinformation, misinformation, and social media hoaxes have evolved from a nuisance into high-stakes information war,” she said.
“Our frameworks for dealing with them, however, remain the same — we discuss counter-messaging and counter-narratives, falling into the trap of treating this as a problem of false stories rather than as an attack on our information ecosystem.”
She pointed out that out of date regulatory systems leave too much power in the hands of private companies, which don’t have much incentive to protect the public discourse.
“We find ourselves in the midst of an arms race, in which responsibility for the integrity of public discourse is largely in the hands of private social platforms, and determined adversaries continually find new ways to manipulate evolving feature sets and circumvent new security measures.”
After she finished her opening statement, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) asked DiResta about ongoing Russian efforts to influence American elections.
“Ms. DiResta, your testimony referenced the Russian Facebook pages in 2016 targeting both the right and the left. But you noted it was the pages targeting the left that includes not only content intended to appeal to its audience, but also content intended to suppress the vote and be critical of Secretary Clinton,” he said.
“In your view, does the apparent Russian content released yesterday by Facebook resemble the content the Russians used last time to attract an audience on the left and among racial minorities which the Russians then used to suppress their vote?”
“Yes sir it does,” DiResta replied. “There’s a strong component of cultural posts that appear in communities and pages targeting minority voters. A lot of pride-related content. Less news, more memes. And that reflects what we saw yesterday.”
“Content-targeting is going to be a big part of the challenge and the public’s got to be aware of it because not all Russian propaganda is going to get caught,” Wyden continued.
“And Americans are inevitably going to read something … particularly if it’s consistent with what they already believe.”
“The public has got to be alert to a repeat of the 2016 Russian playbook which was to attract an audience on the Left, discourage them from voting and that could mean attacking Democratic candidates … in effect the Russians are trying to make it possible that our votes don’t matter. Is that essentially your concern?” Wyden asked.
“Yes sir, there’s a lot of efforts to push intra-party divisions on the left.”
Renee DiResta, Director of Research at the cybersecurity company New Knowledge, explained how social media has opened a new front in the global propaganda wars.
“Over the past decade, disinformation, misinformation, and social media hoaxes have evolved from a nuisance into high-stakes information war,” she said.
“Our frameworks for dealing with them, however, remain the same — we discuss counter-messaging and counter-narratives, falling into the trap of treating this as a problem of false stories rather than as an attack on our information ecosystem.”
She pointed out that out of date regulatory systems leave too much power in the hands of private companies, which don’t have much incentive to protect the public discourse.
“We find ourselves in the midst of an arms race, in which responsibility for the integrity of public discourse is largely in the hands of private social platforms, and determined adversaries continually find new ways to manipulate evolving feature sets and circumvent new security measures.”
After she finished her opening statement, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) asked DiResta about ongoing Russian efforts to influence American elections.
“Ms. DiResta, your testimony referenced the Russian Facebook pages in 2016 targeting both the right and the left. But you noted it was the pages targeting the left that includes not only content intended to appeal to its audience, but also content intended to suppress the vote and be critical of Secretary Clinton,” he said.
“In your view, does the apparent Russian content released yesterday by Facebook resemble the content the Russians used last time to attract an audience on the left and among racial minorities which the Russians then used to suppress their vote?”
“Yes sir it does,” DiResta replied. “There’s a strong component of cultural posts that appear in communities and pages targeting minority voters. A lot of pride-related content. Less news, more memes. And that reflects what we saw yesterday.”
“Content-targeting is going to be a big part of the challenge and the public’s got to be aware of it because not all Russian propaganda is going to get caught,” Wyden continued.
“And Americans are inevitably going to read something … particularly if it’s consistent with what they already believe.”
“The public has got to be alert to a repeat of the 2016 Russian playbook which was to attract an audience on the Left, discourage them from voting and that could mean attacking Democratic candidates … in effect the Russians are trying to make it possible that our votes don’t matter. Is that essentially your concern?” Wyden asked.
“Yes sir, there’s a lot of efforts to push intra-party divisions on the left.”
voter suppression alive and well in america!!!
States purged 16 million voters from the rolls before the 2016 election
Voter purges disproportionately affect low-income and minority voters.
KIRA LERNER - thinkprogress
JUL 20, 2018, 8:00 AM
States purged more than 16 million voters from the rolls between 2014 and 2016. That number, calculated in a new report published Friday by the Brennan Center for Justice, is a significant increase from previous years and an indication that large numbers of eligible voters are likely being disenfranchised by inaccurate and unlawful voter roll maintenance.
The report comes just a few weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Ohio’s voter purge system, clearing the way for more states to move forward with the types of purges that disproportionately impact low-income and minority voters.
For the two years before the 2016 election, the number of purged voters across the county increased 33 percent over the two years before the 2008 presidential election, according to the report. The increase in purged voters was most significant in parts of the country with a history of racial discrimination that, until the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision in 2013, were required to seek pre-approval of changes to their voting laws from the Department of Justice.
The report, which examined purge data submitted to the Election Assistance Commission, found that states historically subject to preclearance were purging voters at a higher rate than other states. If the jurisdictions with a history of discrimination had purged voters at the same rate as other jurisdictions, 2 million fewer voters would have been removed from the rolls from 2012 to 2016.
In Texas, for example, one of the states previously subject to federal preclearance, approximately 363,000 more voters were erased from the rolls in the first election cycle after Shelby County than in the comparable midterm election cycle immediately preceding it,” the report said. “And Georgia purged twice as many voters — 1.5 million — between the 2012 and 2016 elections as it did between 2008 and 2012.”
While the Justice Department previously served as a check on states seeking to disenfranchise eligible voters through list maintenance, the agency under Trump has shifted course and indicated its eagerness for states to more aggressively purge their rolls. When the Supreme Court was considering the legality of Ohio’s system — which removed individuals who did not vote in an election, did not respond to a mailed notice, and then did not vote in two more federal elections — the Trump Justice Department wrote a brief in support of Ohio’s purge system.
The federal National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), passed in 1993, set standards for how states can maintain their voter rolls. Under the law, states are only allowed to remove voters if they were never eligible to vote (if they are under 18 or non-citizens) or if they have committed a disenfranchising crime, been deemed mentally incompetent, moved residences, or died. In those cases, states must give notice to voters that are going to be removed, providing them an opportunity to remedy any errors. States are also are not permitted to conduct widespread purges in the months leading up to an election.
According to the report, four states (Florida, New York, North Carolina, and Virginia) have engaged in illegal purges in the last five years and another four (Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, and Maine) have implemented purge rules that violate federal law.
Many of the states conducting illegal purges use the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, the brainchild of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R). The Crosscheck system is extremely flawed — a vast majority of the names the system flags as voters in two states are not actually double-voters, and at least eight states have pulled out of the system because of its high margin of error.
The use of voter purges is just part of a scheme by Republican politicians who vastly exaggerate the threat of voter fraud in order to push laws and policies that end up disenfranchising voters. The 2016 election was the first presidential contest without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act, and evidence of how many voters were affected by the loss in protections continues to emerge.
The report comes just a few weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Ohio’s voter purge system, clearing the way for more states to move forward with the types of purges that disproportionately impact low-income and minority voters.
For the two years before the 2016 election, the number of purged voters across the county increased 33 percent over the two years before the 2008 presidential election, according to the report. The increase in purged voters was most significant in parts of the country with a history of racial discrimination that, until the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision in 2013, were required to seek pre-approval of changes to their voting laws from the Department of Justice.
The report, which examined purge data submitted to the Election Assistance Commission, found that states historically subject to preclearance were purging voters at a higher rate than other states. If the jurisdictions with a history of discrimination had purged voters at the same rate as other jurisdictions, 2 million fewer voters would have been removed from the rolls from 2012 to 2016.
In Texas, for example, one of the states previously subject to federal preclearance, approximately 363,000 more voters were erased from the rolls in the first election cycle after Shelby County than in the comparable midterm election cycle immediately preceding it,” the report said. “And Georgia purged twice as many voters — 1.5 million — between the 2012 and 2016 elections as it did between 2008 and 2012.”
While the Justice Department previously served as a check on states seeking to disenfranchise eligible voters through list maintenance, the agency under Trump has shifted course and indicated its eagerness for states to more aggressively purge their rolls. When the Supreme Court was considering the legality of Ohio’s system — which removed individuals who did not vote in an election, did not respond to a mailed notice, and then did not vote in two more federal elections — the Trump Justice Department wrote a brief in support of Ohio’s purge system.
The federal National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), passed in 1993, set standards for how states can maintain their voter rolls. Under the law, states are only allowed to remove voters if they were never eligible to vote (if they are under 18 or non-citizens) or if they have committed a disenfranchising crime, been deemed mentally incompetent, moved residences, or died. In those cases, states must give notice to voters that are going to be removed, providing them an opportunity to remedy any errors. States are also are not permitted to conduct widespread purges in the months leading up to an election.
According to the report, four states (Florida, New York, North Carolina, and Virginia) have engaged in illegal purges in the last five years and another four (Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, and Maine) have implemented purge rules that violate federal law.
Many of the states conducting illegal purges use the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, the brainchild of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R). The Crosscheck system is extremely flawed — a vast majority of the names the system flags as voters in two states are not actually double-voters, and at least eight states have pulled out of the system because of its high margin of error.
The use of voter purges is just part of a scheme by Republican politicians who vastly exaggerate the threat of voter fraud in order to push laws and policies that end up disenfranchising voters. The 2016 election was the first presidential contest without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act, and evidence of how many voters were affected by the loss in protections continues to emerge.
The Districts Are Mostly White. The Candidates Are Not.
By Astead W. Herndon - ny times
July 19, 2018
Lauren Underwood, a Democratic candidate in Illinois’s 14th District, is one of a few nonwhite candidates running in majority-white districts in the midterm elections.
Credit
Joshua Lott for The New York Times
NORTH AURORA, Ill. — Most of the room’s occupants looked nothing like Lauren Underwood, but no one seemed to care.
Ms. Underwood, the Democratic congressional nominee in northern Illinois’s pivotal 14th District, flowed effortlessly from person to person at a meet-and-greet last month, confident in her belief that she, a 31-year-old black woman, was best suited to represent a community that is overwhelmingly white.
“I learned to be a black woman in this community,” Ms. Underwood said. “This is my home, and the idea that I might not be a good fit is an idea I never gave a lot of consideration to.”
Kathy Birkett, a former school superintendent who came to the event to support Ms. Underwood, said the candidate’s ideas about health care and reducing gun violence are what helped her draw support from a cross-section of voters in the district.
“When you’re top notch, you’re top notch — and I don’t think that has anything to do with color,” she said.
A decade after the election of America’s first black president, Ms. Underwood and several other African-American, Hispanic and minority candidates for Congress are facing a major test this fall: whether they can win in districts where white voters make up the majority of the electorate. Like Barack Obama, these contenders — most of them Democrats — often strain to avoid explicit discussions of race out of fear of alienating white voters, which stands in contrast to the uncompromising insurgent challengers that have taken hold in the post-Obama era like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York House candidate, or Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia.
Ms. Underwood and several other minority candidates in majority-white districts say they have not encountered overt racism aimed at their bids for office. But they also said their campaigns face distinct challenges: difficulty in finding initial support, a need to combat racial stereotypes, and most importantly, a lack of trust from even members of their own party that a minority candidate can succeed in a predominantly white district.
According to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, there are 14 self-identified racial minorities out of the nearly 60 party-backed Democrats in the most competitive House races. The number is either an impressive amount or frighteningly low, depending on who is asked. Party officials say the numbers are better than previous cycles, and point out nine minority candidates are running in majority-white districts. But others have complained the number is proof the party only supports nonwhite candidates in so-called “minority districts,” where nonwhite voters outnumber their white counterparts and therefore have more electoral power.
Separately, each of the 14 candidates has their own constituencies to impress, and they face varying degrees of viability come November. But together, the group is a cross-cultural fraternity united by a common thread: America’s fraught racial history. There’s the tiptoeing around certain topics with an overt racial element, several said. Questions about their name, background or appearance can be as common as ones regarding policy issues. There’s also concern about failing, a belief that any mistake from a minority candidate would be punished in a way that’s far worse than one from their white opponents.
“We have to be excellent,” said Ms. Underwood, who served as a senior adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services before returning to her Illinois hometown to run against Representative Randy Hultgren, a four-term incumbent. “I recognize that we’re a trailblazer and we’re doing this historic thing, and we have to do it in a way that allows people to come behind us.”
Minority candidates “have to cross more T’s and dot more I’s,” said Colin Allred. “I know that.” Mr. Allred is a black 35-year-old former voting rights attorney and N.F.L. player who is running in Texas’ 32nd District, another majority-white community on the Democrats’ target list. He will face Representative Pete Sessions, a Republican who first assumed office in 1997.
The makeup of Congress skews disproportionately white, and among the minority House members, a large percentage represent gerrymandered districts made up predominantly of minority voters. (There are some exceptions, including black women on both sides of the aisle in Congress: Mia Love of Utah, a Republican whose district is 74 percent white, and Delaware’s Lisa Blunt Rochester, a Democrat whose district is 62 percent white.)
During an interview in Mr. Allred’s suburban Dallas hometown — a district that is 48 percent white and 26 percent Hispanic — he said he has sidestepped some issues on the campaign trail in order to avoid being deemed “too black.”
“There’s some topics I have to talk about differently, and there’s some subjects where I’m probably not going to be the one to lead on the issue,” Mr. Allred said, declining to be more specific. “You have to be honest and say, ‘You know what, as a young black man I’m probably not going to be the flag-bearer for that.’”
Political recruitment experts and even some House candidates say there are so few minority Democratic candidates in majority-white areas in part because of a failure by party officials to recruit and develop a diverse bench. Official campaign arms like the D.C.C.C. often rely on indicators such as fund-raising and name recognition to determine viability, and candidates from historically marginalized backgrounds may have greater trouble meeting those thresholds, particularly in competitive swing districts that invite big-money candidates.
Kamau Marshall, the deputy national press secretary for the D.C.C.C., acknowledged a lack of historical investment by the Democratic Party in supporting minority candidates across the country, but said there has been recent improvement.
“In the past, the party hasn’t invested enough in minority candidates, but we’re in the process of fixing that,” Mr. Marshall said.
However, he added, there may be some places a minority candidate just does not make sense.
“I can’t see a candidate of color winning in a conservative area like North Dakota or South Dakota or Montana,” he said.
It is that assertion — that minority candidates likely cannot win in heavily white or rural areas — that inspires so much hand-wringing among grass-roots activists and people who recruit liberal candidates. While party strategists charged with electioneering may see such statements as political realism, outsiders said the sentiment places unnecessary limits on where minority candidates can run. (After this article was published Thursday, the D.C.C.C. said that Mr. Marshall was incorrect and that the group has been supporting nonwhite candidate in all parts of the country.)
On the Republican side, Ms. Love found high-profile success in Utah, though she has often tried to downplay the role of her personal identity in her campaign.
“I wasn’t elected because of the color of my skin; I wasn’t elected because of my gender,” Ms. Love said the night she was elected in 2014. “I was elected because of the solutions I put at the table.”
Some liberals also disagreed with Mr. Marshall’s sentiment. A’shanti Gholar is a political director for Emerge America, a candidate training and recruitment firm focused on helping Democratic women who want to run for office. She said that the D.C.C.C. often has a rigid view of where minority candidates can be successful, but added, “Just because this is what’s happened traditionally doesn’t always mean that’s what going to occur.”
Steven Horsford, a black former congressman from a majority-white Nevada district who is currently running to reclaim the seat after a 2014 defeat, said there “clearly needs to be more support of candidates from diverse backgrounds.”
“The more we can have the national party and the decision makers understand that this is really the future of our country,” Mr. Horsford said, “then we will be moving in the direction we need.”
President Trump’s election spurred legions of fresh liberal activism, and political groups like Emerge America, Higher Heights for America and The Collective PAC have taken a particular interest in the unique needs of minority candidates. Some problems posed to the political groups are cosmetic, such as how to guide voters through pronouncing an atypical name, or questions from black women about whether their natural hair texture will be unappealing to white voters. Other issues are structural — tied to the racial inequities that still exist across America.
Amanda Litman, the co-founder of a liberal recruitment firm called Run For Something, said her organization’s internal data shows racial disparities in the candidates who, after reaching out to the organization, decide to run for office. According to Ms. Litman, while people across racial groups show interest in running for office at equal rates, prospective candidates who are racial minorities are more likely to drop out of the process before formally entering the race.
“There’s that saying that a woman needs to be asked seven times to run for office, while a man will just tell you he’s running,” Ms. Litman said. “We think that applies, generally speaking, to most underrepresented communities.”
Ms. Underwood said she’s acutely aware of such difficulties. Although she was grateful to receive the support of the D.C.C.C. after her primary win in March, she made sure to clarify that such institutional support only came after she vanquished six male challengers in a primary contest.
(Ms. Underwood’s sister, Lindsey, is an editor in the Smarter Living section of The New York Times.)
Aftab Pureval, an Ohio native of Tibetan and Indian descent who is the Democratic nominee in a majority-white district near Cincinnati, said that when he first ran for office, the most common question he received was not about his policies or his platform, but about his name.
“I’d get asked, ‘What is an Aftab?’ Not, ‘Who is Aftab?’” Mr. Pureval said. In November, he will face Representative Steve Chabot, a Republican, in a competitive election being closely watched throughout the country.
“People thought I was an insurance company. I would get quacked at because people would think it would be funny to call me Aflac,” he said.
Regardless, the minority candidates all said running for office has been an overwhelmingly positive experience.
Mr. Allred, in fact, said running for office has helped erase some tough memories of racial tension during his childhood in the 1980s. Back then, a teenage Mr. Allred and his high school friends used to avoid the Park Cities, a part of the Dallas metro area that was known for being unwelcoming to black residents and their children, he said.
Two decades later, that same area is home to some of his most vocal political supporters, who are now organizing and donating money to send that once-frightened black teenager to Congress.
Ms. Underwood, the Democratic congressional nominee in northern Illinois’s pivotal 14th District, flowed effortlessly from person to person at a meet-and-greet last month, confident in her belief that she, a 31-year-old black woman, was best suited to represent a community that is overwhelmingly white.
“I learned to be a black woman in this community,” Ms. Underwood said. “This is my home, and the idea that I might not be a good fit is an idea I never gave a lot of consideration to.”
Kathy Birkett, a former school superintendent who came to the event to support Ms. Underwood, said the candidate’s ideas about health care and reducing gun violence are what helped her draw support from a cross-section of voters in the district.
“When you’re top notch, you’re top notch — and I don’t think that has anything to do with color,” she said.
A decade after the election of America’s first black president, Ms. Underwood and several other African-American, Hispanic and minority candidates for Congress are facing a major test this fall: whether they can win in districts where white voters make up the majority of the electorate. Like Barack Obama, these contenders — most of them Democrats — often strain to avoid explicit discussions of race out of fear of alienating white voters, which stands in contrast to the uncompromising insurgent challengers that have taken hold in the post-Obama era like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York House candidate, or Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia.
Ms. Underwood and several other minority candidates in majority-white districts say they have not encountered overt racism aimed at their bids for office. But they also said their campaigns face distinct challenges: difficulty in finding initial support, a need to combat racial stereotypes, and most importantly, a lack of trust from even members of their own party that a minority candidate can succeed in a predominantly white district.
According to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, there are 14 self-identified racial minorities out of the nearly 60 party-backed Democrats in the most competitive House races. The number is either an impressive amount or frighteningly low, depending on who is asked. Party officials say the numbers are better than previous cycles, and point out nine minority candidates are running in majority-white districts. But others have complained the number is proof the party only supports nonwhite candidates in so-called “minority districts,” where nonwhite voters outnumber their white counterparts and therefore have more electoral power.
Separately, each of the 14 candidates has their own constituencies to impress, and they face varying degrees of viability come November. But together, the group is a cross-cultural fraternity united by a common thread: America’s fraught racial history. There’s the tiptoeing around certain topics with an overt racial element, several said. Questions about their name, background or appearance can be as common as ones regarding policy issues. There’s also concern about failing, a belief that any mistake from a minority candidate would be punished in a way that’s far worse than one from their white opponents.
“We have to be excellent,” said Ms. Underwood, who served as a senior adviser at the Department of Health and Human Services before returning to her Illinois hometown to run against Representative Randy Hultgren, a four-term incumbent. “I recognize that we’re a trailblazer and we’re doing this historic thing, and we have to do it in a way that allows people to come behind us.”
Minority candidates “have to cross more T’s and dot more I’s,” said Colin Allred. “I know that.” Mr. Allred is a black 35-year-old former voting rights attorney and N.F.L. player who is running in Texas’ 32nd District, another majority-white community on the Democrats’ target list. He will face Representative Pete Sessions, a Republican who first assumed office in 1997.
The makeup of Congress skews disproportionately white, and among the minority House members, a large percentage represent gerrymandered districts made up predominantly of minority voters. (There are some exceptions, including black women on both sides of the aisle in Congress: Mia Love of Utah, a Republican whose district is 74 percent white, and Delaware’s Lisa Blunt Rochester, a Democrat whose district is 62 percent white.)
During an interview in Mr. Allred’s suburban Dallas hometown — a district that is 48 percent white and 26 percent Hispanic — he said he has sidestepped some issues on the campaign trail in order to avoid being deemed “too black.”
“There’s some topics I have to talk about differently, and there’s some subjects where I’m probably not going to be the one to lead on the issue,” Mr. Allred said, declining to be more specific. “You have to be honest and say, ‘You know what, as a young black man I’m probably not going to be the flag-bearer for that.’”
Political recruitment experts and even some House candidates say there are so few minority Democratic candidates in majority-white areas in part because of a failure by party officials to recruit and develop a diverse bench. Official campaign arms like the D.C.C.C. often rely on indicators such as fund-raising and name recognition to determine viability, and candidates from historically marginalized backgrounds may have greater trouble meeting those thresholds, particularly in competitive swing districts that invite big-money candidates.
Kamau Marshall, the deputy national press secretary for the D.C.C.C., acknowledged a lack of historical investment by the Democratic Party in supporting minority candidates across the country, but said there has been recent improvement.
“In the past, the party hasn’t invested enough in minority candidates, but we’re in the process of fixing that,” Mr. Marshall said.
However, he added, there may be some places a minority candidate just does not make sense.
“I can’t see a candidate of color winning in a conservative area like North Dakota or South Dakota or Montana,” he said.
It is that assertion — that minority candidates likely cannot win in heavily white or rural areas — that inspires so much hand-wringing among grass-roots activists and people who recruit liberal candidates. While party strategists charged with electioneering may see such statements as political realism, outsiders said the sentiment places unnecessary limits on where minority candidates can run. (After this article was published Thursday, the D.C.C.C. said that Mr. Marshall was incorrect and that the group has been supporting nonwhite candidate in all parts of the country.)
On the Republican side, Ms. Love found high-profile success in Utah, though she has often tried to downplay the role of her personal identity in her campaign.
“I wasn’t elected because of the color of my skin; I wasn’t elected because of my gender,” Ms. Love said the night she was elected in 2014. “I was elected because of the solutions I put at the table.”
Some liberals also disagreed with Mr. Marshall’s sentiment. A’shanti Gholar is a political director for Emerge America, a candidate training and recruitment firm focused on helping Democratic women who want to run for office. She said that the D.C.C.C. often has a rigid view of where minority candidates can be successful, but added, “Just because this is what’s happened traditionally doesn’t always mean that’s what going to occur.”
Steven Horsford, a black former congressman from a majority-white Nevada district who is currently running to reclaim the seat after a 2014 defeat, said there “clearly needs to be more support of candidates from diverse backgrounds.”
“The more we can have the national party and the decision makers understand that this is really the future of our country,” Mr. Horsford said, “then we will be moving in the direction we need.”
President Trump’s election spurred legions of fresh liberal activism, and political groups like Emerge America, Higher Heights for America and The Collective PAC have taken a particular interest in the unique needs of minority candidates. Some problems posed to the political groups are cosmetic, such as how to guide voters through pronouncing an atypical name, or questions from black women about whether their natural hair texture will be unappealing to white voters. Other issues are structural — tied to the racial inequities that still exist across America.
Amanda Litman, the co-founder of a liberal recruitment firm called Run For Something, said her organization’s internal data shows racial disparities in the candidates who, after reaching out to the organization, decide to run for office. According to Ms. Litman, while people across racial groups show interest in running for office at equal rates, prospective candidates who are racial minorities are more likely to drop out of the process before formally entering the race.
“There’s that saying that a woman needs to be asked seven times to run for office, while a man will just tell you he’s running,” Ms. Litman said. “We think that applies, generally speaking, to most underrepresented communities.”
Ms. Underwood said she’s acutely aware of such difficulties. Although she was grateful to receive the support of the D.C.C.C. after her primary win in March, she made sure to clarify that such institutional support only came after she vanquished six male challengers in a primary contest.
(Ms. Underwood’s sister, Lindsey, is an editor in the Smarter Living section of The New York Times.)
Aftab Pureval, an Ohio native of Tibetan and Indian descent who is the Democratic nominee in a majority-white district near Cincinnati, said that when he first ran for office, the most common question he received was not about his policies or his platform, but about his name.
“I’d get asked, ‘What is an Aftab?’ Not, ‘Who is Aftab?’” Mr. Pureval said. In November, he will face Representative Steve Chabot, a Republican, in a competitive election being closely watched throughout the country.
“People thought I was an insurance company. I would get quacked at because people would think it would be funny to call me Aflac,” he said.
Regardless, the minority candidates all said running for office has been an overwhelmingly positive experience.
Mr. Allred, in fact, said running for office has helped erase some tough memories of racial tension during his childhood in the 1980s. Back then, a teenage Mr. Allred and his high school friends used to avoid the Park Cities, a part of the Dallas metro area that was known for being unwelcoming to black residents and their children, he said.
Two decades later, that same area is home to some of his most vocal political supporters, who are now organizing and donating money to send that once-frightened black teenager to Congress.
democracy for some!!!
Native American leaders tell Senate to act to protect their voting rights
Congress could help restore the Voting Rights Act to protect voters on Indian County.
KIRA LERNER - thinkprogress
JUL 18, 2018, 11:16 AM
WASHINGTON, D.C. — During a Senate roundtable Tuesday on “Voting Rights, Access, and Barriers in Indian Country,” North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) turned to the tribal leaders and voting advocates and asked a question they were all thinking.
“Why should we have to sue every year in North Dakota to get voting rights for Native people?” she asked.
Throughout the morning, witnesses explained to the Senate Indian Affairs and Rules committees how barriers to the ballot persist in Indian Country, almost 100 years after Native Americans were granted the right to vote and more than 50 years after Congress signed the Voting Rights Act (VRA) to protect the civil rights of the country’s marginalized populations.
As ThinkProgress recently reported, voters in Indian Country have faced renewed barriers to the ballot since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the VRA in 2013. In states with large Native American populations, elected officials have cut voting hours and opportunities, refused to add voting locations on reservations, eliminated language assistance services, and fought to keep Native voters in majority-white gerrymandered districts where they’d never get political representation.
On Tuesday, advocates and tribal leaders who have worked to identify the problems urged the Senate to act to eliminate those barriers.
Julie Kitka, president of the Alaska Federation of Natives, spoke about how before the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, she remembers receiving notices every time Alaska officials attempted to change election laws. After the ruling, she said she has not received a single notice, making it impossible to know when lawmakers are attempting to suppress voters. Some of the most restrictive provisions, she noted, are tucked into minor changes in election law.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) agreed with Kitka. The senator from the state with the country’s highest voter turnout said that passing the bipartisan Voting Rights Amendment Act would help remedy that problem and restore preclearance requirements in certain states with a history of discrimination. Klobuchar pointed out that she also sits on the Senate Committee on the Judiciary — the body that would be responsible for renewing the VRA — and said she would act to move the law forward when there is more support (most likely, when Democrats take back the Senate).
Without help from Congress to address the barriers through legislation, advocates for Native voters have had to rely on costly and time-intensive litigation. Over the past five years, Native American voters and groups representing them have brought at least seven lawsuits in six states, accusing state and local governments of discriminating against Native American voters. All but one legal challenge has been successful.
Jim Tucker, a lawyer on the Native American Voting Rights Coalition, told the hearing that the lawsuit he filed to seek language assistance for Alaska’s Native voters was extremely expensive and took years of work. And he noted that each win hangs in a balance. One new election official or change in control of local or state government could undo all of the gains, he said.
Instead of relying on advocates to identify problems and file lawsuits, Tucker said that Congress could amend existing law to protect people who speak Native languages and could extend more Help America Vote Act (HAVA) funding to states with Native populations.
“There’s been no federal HAVA funding since 2002,” he said. “States still have some left in … their personal piggy banks, but there needs to be some additional federal appropriations to really facilitate some of these programs.”
He told ThinkProgress he plans to send demand letters to Arizona and Nevada ahead of the November midterms, asking them to open voting locations on reservations. If the letters aren’t successful, he said the Native American Rights Fund may file litigation.
Other tribal leaders spoke about issues that would be more difficult for Congress to fix or issues that would take years of work. Some suggested that voter education and engagement campaigns could help bring more Native voters to the polls. Others said that hiring Natives to run their own elections would help empower them to get involved in politics.
Jackson Brossy, the executive director of the Navajo Nation Washington Office, said he’d like to see a shift in how non-Natives treat the country’s Native people.
“We should not have to talk about blatant discrimination,” he said. “Here we are in 2018 — we still face many, many unacceptable barriers to voting for Navajo people.”
“Why should we have to sue every year in North Dakota to get voting rights for Native people?” she asked.
Throughout the morning, witnesses explained to the Senate Indian Affairs and Rules committees how barriers to the ballot persist in Indian Country, almost 100 years after Native Americans were granted the right to vote and more than 50 years after Congress signed the Voting Rights Act (VRA) to protect the civil rights of the country’s marginalized populations.
As ThinkProgress recently reported, voters in Indian Country have faced renewed barriers to the ballot since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the VRA in 2013. In states with large Native American populations, elected officials have cut voting hours and opportunities, refused to add voting locations on reservations, eliminated language assistance services, and fought to keep Native voters in majority-white gerrymandered districts where they’d never get political representation.
On Tuesday, advocates and tribal leaders who have worked to identify the problems urged the Senate to act to eliminate those barriers.
Julie Kitka, president of the Alaska Federation of Natives, spoke about how before the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, she remembers receiving notices every time Alaska officials attempted to change election laws. After the ruling, she said she has not received a single notice, making it impossible to know when lawmakers are attempting to suppress voters. Some of the most restrictive provisions, she noted, are tucked into minor changes in election law.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) agreed with Kitka. The senator from the state with the country’s highest voter turnout said that passing the bipartisan Voting Rights Amendment Act would help remedy that problem and restore preclearance requirements in certain states with a history of discrimination. Klobuchar pointed out that she also sits on the Senate Committee on the Judiciary — the body that would be responsible for renewing the VRA — and said she would act to move the law forward when there is more support (most likely, when Democrats take back the Senate).
Without help from Congress to address the barriers through legislation, advocates for Native voters have had to rely on costly and time-intensive litigation. Over the past five years, Native American voters and groups representing them have brought at least seven lawsuits in six states, accusing state and local governments of discriminating against Native American voters. All but one legal challenge has been successful.
Jim Tucker, a lawyer on the Native American Voting Rights Coalition, told the hearing that the lawsuit he filed to seek language assistance for Alaska’s Native voters was extremely expensive and took years of work. And he noted that each win hangs in a balance. One new election official or change in control of local or state government could undo all of the gains, he said.
Instead of relying on advocates to identify problems and file lawsuits, Tucker said that Congress could amend existing law to protect people who speak Native languages and could extend more Help America Vote Act (HAVA) funding to states with Native populations.
“There’s been no federal HAVA funding since 2002,” he said. “States still have some left in … their personal piggy banks, but there needs to be some additional federal appropriations to really facilitate some of these programs.”
He told ThinkProgress he plans to send demand letters to Arizona and Nevada ahead of the November midterms, asking them to open voting locations on reservations. If the letters aren’t successful, he said the Native American Rights Fund may file litigation.
Other tribal leaders spoke about issues that would be more difficult for Congress to fix or issues that would take years of work. Some suggested that voter education and engagement campaigns could help bring more Native voters to the polls. Others said that hiring Natives to run their own elections would help empower them to get involved in politics.
Jackson Brossy, the executive director of the Navajo Nation Washington Office, said he’d like to see a shift in how non-Natives treat the country’s Native people.
“We should not have to talk about blatant discrimination,” he said. “Here we are in 2018 — we still face many, many unacceptable barriers to voting for Navajo people.”
Record number of Muslim Americans running for office
More than 100 Muslim candidates ran for office this election cycle.
ELHAM KHATAMI - thinkprogress
JUL 16, 2018, 4:20 PM
A record number of American Muslims are running for Congress, state, and local office this election cycle, motivated into action in large part by President Donald Trump’s Islamophobic rhetoric and policies, a new report by the Associated Press found.
More than 100 candidates ran for office over the past year, more than ever since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, according to Jetpac, a 501(c)(3) organization working to increase American Muslim civic engagement. Roughly 40 of those candidates made it past their primaries and face elections in November. For comparison, about a dozen Muslim-American candidates ran in 2016.
“I never had any intentions to run for office, actually. I was supposed to go to medical school,” Michigan state Senate candidate Abraham Aiyash told ThinkProgress. But years of corruption in the state legislature, coupled with Trump’s xenophobia, motivated Aiyash to throw his hat in the ring.
“I saw a need to have leadership that was accountable,” he said. “I call this my generation’s Vietnam moment.”
Of the estimated 40 current candidates (Jetpac is still working on identifying others), nine are running for Congress, 18 are vying for seats in the state legislatures, and 10 are running for statewide offices, like governor, mayor, and city council. There are also several running for school boards and local planning boards.
Aiyash, a Democrat who is running on a progressive platform, said his district includes parts of Detroit and Hamtramck, an “immigrant hot bed” that “sees the value of diversity and embracing people instead of just tolerating them.” He cited education, environment, and government accountability as key issues that resonate with Michigan voters.
More than a dozen of the 40 Muslim candidates highlighted by Jetpac are women. Fayrouz Saad and Rashida Tlaib, running in Michigan, Ilhan Omar, running in Minnesota, Deedra Aboud of Arizona, and Tahirah Amatul-Wadud of Massachusetts, may become the first Muslim women elected to the U.S. Congress.
Women are also making inroads at the local level. A candidate for Tennessee’s 45th state House district, Hana Ali has not been fazed by the fact that more than 60 percent of her state voted for Trump in the 2016 elections. Part of her district includes Sumner County, where 70 percent of voters cast their ballot in favor of Trump.
“Yes, Trump is still very popular in our state,” Ali, a Democrat, told ThinkProgress. “But here’s the thing. When you talk to families about the health care issues, when you talk to them about the issues that affect their everyday life, local politics is something that is very different from what is happening in Washington, D.C.”
Ali, a former physician who currently works as a health care executive, said Tennessee is bluer than most people realize — many Tennesseans are just afraid to admit it.
“Every door that we knocked and we asked them if they wanted to have a yard sign or not, every person, their first initial response was, ‘you know, I think I’m the only Democrat in this subdivision and I would not like to give it away,’” she said. “But they didn’t realize that they were probably the tenth door in the row to say the same thing. People feel alone but they don’t know that there are many of us.”
Perhaps because voters are so focused on health care (Ali’s key priorities include Medicaid expansion and addressing the growing opioid epidemic), Ali said, no one has ever confronted her about race or her religion.
“We have lived in the community for almost 12 years. People know my name. They know me from school because both my kids attend public school,” she said.
For Aiyash, however, although there is a significant Muslim community in Michigan’s 2nd Senate district, the campaign has had some ups and downs.
“I knocked on a woman’s door … the first thing she asked me was, ‘Are you Muslim?’ I said, ‘yes,’ and she said, ‘well, I’m prejudiced,’” Aiyash said, adding that through conversation, he has been able to win over hearts. “She ended up asking me for a yard sign to show her support.”
Another Muslim candidate running in Michigan is Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat vying for governor. Though El-Sayed and Aiyash do not look alike and are running for different offices, Aiyash said he is routinely mistaken for El-Sayed.
“We certainly have people who are going to say what they’re going to say,” he said, referring to prejudice and racism. “I’m optimistic that that line of thinking doesn’t dictate what we want from our politics.”
More than 100 candidates ran for office over the past year, more than ever since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, according to Jetpac, a 501(c)(3) organization working to increase American Muslim civic engagement. Roughly 40 of those candidates made it past their primaries and face elections in November. For comparison, about a dozen Muslim-American candidates ran in 2016.
“I never had any intentions to run for office, actually. I was supposed to go to medical school,” Michigan state Senate candidate Abraham Aiyash told ThinkProgress. But years of corruption in the state legislature, coupled with Trump’s xenophobia, motivated Aiyash to throw his hat in the ring.
“I saw a need to have leadership that was accountable,” he said. “I call this my generation’s Vietnam moment.”
Of the estimated 40 current candidates (Jetpac is still working on identifying others), nine are running for Congress, 18 are vying for seats in the state legislatures, and 10 are running for statewide offices, like governor, mayor, and city council. There are also several running for school boards and local planning boards.
Aiyash, a Democrat who is running on a progressive platform, said his district includes parts of Detroit and Hamtramck, an “immigrant hot bed” that “sees the value of diversity and embracing people instead of just tolerating them.” He cited education, environment, and government accountability as key issues that resonate with Michigan voters.
More than a dozen of the 40 Muslim candidates highlighted by Jetpac are women. Fayrouz Saad and Rashida Tlaib, running in Michigan, Ilhan Omar, running in Minnesota, Deedra Aboud of Arizona, and Tahirah Amatul-Wadud of Massachusetts, may become the first Muslim women elected to the U.S. Congress.
Women are also making inroads at the local level. A candidate for Tennessee’s 45th state House district, Hana Ali has not been fazed by the fact that more than 60 percent of her state voted for Trump in the 2016 elections. Part of her district includes Sumner County, where 70 percent of voters cast their ballot in favor of Trump.
“Yes, Trump is still very popular in our state,” Ali, a Democrat, told ThinkProgress. “But here’s the thing. When you talk to families about the health care issues, when you talk to them about the issues that affect their everyday life, local politics is something that is very different from what is happening in Washington, D.C.”
Ali, a former physician who currently works as a health care executive, said Tennessee is bluer than most people realize — many Tennesseans are just afraid to admit it.
“Every door that we knocked and we asked them if they wanted to have a yard sign or not, every person, their first initial response was, ‘you know, I think I’m the only Democrat in this subdivision and I would not like to give it away,’” she said. “But they didn’t realize that they were probably the tenth door in the row to say the same thing. People feel alone but they don’t know that there are many of us.”
Perhaps because voters are so focused on health care (Ali’s key priorities include Medicaid expansion and addressing the growing opioid epidemic), Ali said, no one has ever confronted her about race or her religion.
“We have lived in the community for almost 12 years. People know my name. They know me from school because both my kids attend public school,” she said.
For Aiyash, however, although there is a significant Muslim community in Michigan’s 2nd Senate district, the campaign has had some ups and downs.
“I knocked on a woman’s door … the first thing she asked me was, ‘Are you Muslim?’ I said, ‘yes,’ and she said, ‘well, I’m prejudiced,’” Aiyash said, adding that through conversation, he has been able to win over hearts. “She ended up asking me for a yard sign to show her support.”
Another Muslim candidate running in Michigan is Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat vying for governor. Though El-Sayed and Aiyash do not look alike and are running for different offices, Aiyash said he is routinely mistaken for El-Sayed.
“We certainly have people who are going to say what they’re going to say,” he said, referring to prejudice and racism. “I’m optimistic that that line of thinking doesn’t dictate what we want from our politics.”
Election system firm with Maryland contract has ties to Russian oligarch, FBI tells state
By Ovetta Wiggins - washington post
July 13 at 8:36 PM
Top Maryland officials have asked the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to help ensure that the state’s election system is secure after learning that a Russian-backed firm is linked to the Maryland state Board of Elections.
Gov. Larry Hogan (R), Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert) and House Speaker Michael E. Busch (D-Anne Arundel) sent a joint letter on Friday to Homeland Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen asking for technical assistance to evaluate the network utilized by the state board.
Miller and Busch said late Friday during a hastily called news conference in Annapolis that the FBI briefed them on the Russian investment in Maryland’s voting system. They were told there was no indication of a breach or any criminal wrongdoing.
“The mere fact that we have had discussions with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Department of Homeland Security, Office of Cybersecurity and Communications should provide evidence of our grave concern regarding this matter,” the joint letter from Hogan, Miller and Busch reads. “We have collectively decided that this is one of the most pressing issues that demands our attention and has therefore become our joint priority.”
The action by the Maryland lawmakers came just hours after Deputy U.S. Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein announced the indictment charging 12 Russians of conspiracy to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
Amid concerns that Russians targeted some election websites and voting systems, several states, including Maryland, have taken steps to make their election systems more secure.
Miller and Busch said they also have asked state Attorney General Brian E. Frosh to take a closer look at the state contract held since 2013 by ByteGrid LLC to determine if the state can withdraw from the deal.
In 2015, ByteGrid LLC was financed by AltPoint Capital Partners, whose fund manager is a Russian and its largest investor is a Russian oligarch named Vladimir Potanin.
The software vendor handles statewide voter registration, candidacy, the election-management system, the online ballot-delivery system and the website for unofficial election-night results.
Election officials said ByteGrid LLC has a $7.5 million, five-year contract with the state that ends in 2019.
“Even the appearance of the potential for bad actors to have any influence on our election infrastructure could undermine public trust in the integrity of our election system,” Hogan said in a statement. “That is why it is imperative that the State Board of Elections take immediate and comprehensive action to evaluate the security of our system and take any and all necessary steps to address any vulnerabilities.”
Hogan, Miller and Busch said they decided to make the information from the FBI public to inform other states about Russian involvement and to assure Maryland voters that they are working to ensure that the state’s elections are not compromised.
“We thought it was very important today for everybody here to have the information and for citizens of Maryland to have the information that the Governor, the Senate President and myself are going to be on top of this issue and make sure that the election that takes place in November is going to have the integrity that everybody expects it to have,” Busch said.
Miller said the Russian involvement was “shocking news . . . that goes to the heart of our democracy. This is the evil empire and they are at our door.”
Gov. Larry Hogan (R), Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert) and House Speaker Michael E. Busch (D-Anne Arundel) sent a joint letter on Friday to Homeland Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen asking for technical assistance to evaluate the network utilized by the state board.
Miller and Busch said late Friday during a hastily called news conference in Annapolis that the FBI briefed them on the Russian investment in Maryland’s voting system. They were told there was no indication of a breach or any criminal wrongdoing.
“The mere fact that we have had discussions with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Department of Homeland Security, Office of Cybersecurity and Communications should provide evidence of our grave concern regarding this matter,” the joint letter from Hogan, Miller and Busch reads. “We have collectively decided that this is one of the most pressing issues that demands our attention and has therefore become our joint priority.”
The action by the Maryland lawmakers came just hours after Deputy U.S. Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein announced the indictment charging 12 Russians of conspiracy to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
Amid concerns that Russians targeted some election websites and voting systems, several states, including Maryland, have taken steps to make their election systems more secure.
Miller and Busch said they also have asked state Attorney General Brian E. Frosh to take a closer look at the state contract held since 2013 by ByteGrid LLC to determine if the state can withdraw from the deal.
In 2015, ByteGrid LLC was financed by AltPoint Capital Partners, whose fund manager is a Russian and its largest investor is a Russian oligarch named Vladimir Potanin.
The software vendor handles statewide voter registration, candidacy, the election-management system, the online ballot-delivery system and the website for unofficial election-night results.
Election officials said ByteGrid LLC has a $7.5 million, five-year contract with the state that ends in 2019.
“Even the appearance of the potential for bad actors to have any influence on our election infrastructure could undermine public trust in the integrity of our election system,” Hogan said in a statement. “That is why it is imperative that the State Board of Elections take immediate and comprehensive action to evaluate the security of our system and take any and all necessary steps to address any vulnerabilities.”
Hogan, Miller and Busch said they decided to make the information from the FBI public to inform other states about Russian involvement and to assure Maryland voters that they are working to ensure that the state’s elections are not compromised.
“We thought it was very important today for everybody here to have the information and for citizens of Maryland to have the information that the Governor, the Senate President and myself are going to be on top of this issue and make sure that the election that takes place in November is going to have the integrity that everybody expects it to have,” Busch said.
Miller said the Russian involvement was “shocking news . . . that goes to the heart of our democracy. This is the evil empire and they are at our door.”
A SWING-STATE ELECTION VENDOR REPEATEDLY DENIED BEING HACKED BY RUSSIANS. THE NEW MUELLER INDICTMENT SAYS OTHERWISE.
Sam Biddle - the intercept
July 13 2018, 12:04 p.m.
SHORTLY BEFORE THE 2016 presidential election, Russian military hackers tried to trick employees of VR Systems, a Florida-based e-voting vendor, into downloading computer-hijacking malware, according to a top-secret NSA report published by The Intercept last year. As recently as last month, the company denied any breach had occurred. But, in fact, the hacking attempt worked, judging from an indictment of 12 Russian military officers prepared by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and handed down by a grand jury today.
Although the indictment doesn’t mention VR by name, referring to the polling and registration software maker as “U.S. Vendor” or “Vendor 1,” the facts laid out in the indictment line up with what was previously know about the 2016 spear-phishing campaign against the company. The indictment alleges that “in or around August 2016, [Russian military officer] KOVALEV and his co-conspirators hacked into the computers of a U.S. vendor (“Vendor 1″) that supplied software used to verify voter registration information for the 2016 U.S. elections.”
Compare that to a section describing VR Systems from the NSA report:
Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors … executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions. … The actors likely used data obtained from that operation to … launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations.
The indictment continues:
In or around November 2016 and prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, KOVALEV and his co-conspirators used an email account designed to look like a Vendor 1 email address to send over 100 spearphishing emails to organizations and personnel involved in administering elections in numerous Florida counties.
Compare that once more to the NSA report, which noted that Russian
cyber actors used the vr.systems@gmail.com account to contact U.S. email addresses 1 to 122 associated with named local government organizations.
Today’s indictment further states that “the spearphishing emails contained malware that the Conspirators embedded into Word documents bearing Vendor 1’s logo.” This lines up with documents obtained by The Intercept through a state public records request showing that the hackers used VR Systems’ logo in their attempt to further spread malware to the aforementioned local election officials across the country:
VR Systems has repeatedly denied that it was ever hacked. When I asked VR last month about the NSA’s estimate that at least one employee of the company “likely” had their email account compromised, a company spokesperson replied: “To be clear, there was no ‘hack’ by any standard definition of the word.” The spokesperson added that “VR Systems engaged the services of one of the top cyber security companies in the world and they conducted a full assessment of our systems and determined that our system was not breached as a result of this attempt.” Based on the Department of Justice’s indictment, that is a falsehood.
VR Systems, which sells digital pollbook software used to verify eligible voters, has customers in eight states, including the electoral battlegrounds like North Carolina and Virginia. The company spokesperson did not return a request for comment.
Although the indictment doesn’t mention VR by name, referring to the polling and registration software maker as “U.S. Vendor” or “Vendor 1,” the facts laid out in the indictment line up with what was previously know about the 2016 spear-phishing campaign against the company. The indictment alleges that “in or around August 2016, [Russian military officer] KOVALEV and his co-conspirators hacked into the computers of a U.S. vendor (“Vendor 1″) that supplied software used to verify voter registration information for the 2016 U.S. elections.”
Compare that to a section describing VR Systems from the NSA report:
Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors … executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions. … The actors likely used data obtained from that operation to … launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations.
The indictment continues:
In or around November 2016 and prior to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, KOVALEV and his co-conspirators used an email account designed to look like a Vendor 1 email address to send over 100 spearphishing emails to organizations and personnel involved in administering elections in numerous Florida counties.
Compare that once more to the NSA report, which noted that Russian
cyber actors used the vr.systems@gmail.com account to contact U.S. email addresses 1 to 122 associated with named local government organizations.
Today’s indictment further states that “the spearphishing emails contained malware that the Conspirators embedded into Word documents bearing Vendor 1’s logo.” This lines up with documents obtained by The Intercept through a state public records request showing that the hackers used VR Systems’ logo in their attempt to further spread malware to the aforementioned local election officials across the country:
VR Systems has repeatedly denied that it was ever hacked. When I asked VR last month about the NSA’s estimate that at least one employee of the company “likely” had their email account compromised, a company spokesperson replied: “To be clear, there was no ‘hack’ by any standard definition of the word.” The spokesperson added that “VR Systems engaged the services of one of the top cyber security companies in the world and they conducted a full assessment of our systems and determined that our system was not breached as a result of this attempt.” Based on the Department of Justice’s indictment, that is a falsehood.
VR Systems, which sells digital pollbook software used to verify eligible voters, has customers in eight states, including the electoral battlegrounds like North Carolina and Virginia. The company spokesperson did not return a request for comment.
great, if we had a real government!!!!
Congress Can Stop Foreign Secret Spending on US Elections Right Now
BY Lisa Gilbert Truthout
PUBLISHED
July 11, 2018
Following the release of a Senate Judiciary Committee report suggesting “the Kremlin used the National Rifle Association [NRA] as a means of accessing and assisting Mr. Trump and his campaign,” Americans are right to wonder how much longer Congress is going to look the other way while foreign actors secretly influence US elections.
In the years since the US Supreme Court’s overreaching Citizens United v. FEC decision, Congress has watched political groups that do not disclose their funding sources spend hundreds of millions to elect and defeat political candidates. But rather than ensure that none of those millions came from the bank accounts of foreign individuals, corporations or governments, Congress has failed to pass basic disclosure laws that would both deter and ferret out illegal foreign spending. Federal agencies also have fallen down on the job by failing to require disclosure: the US Securities and Exchange Commission on corporate political spending, the Internal Revenue Service on nonprofit spending and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on entities across the board.
The law banning foreign nationals from spending money in US political campaigns is solid and unambiguous. It is illegal for foreign actors to directly or indirectly spend money or provide things of value in connection with US elections.
Enforcing the ban, on the other hand, is riddled with easily exploited loopholes — a fact perfectly demonstrated by Russians allegedly funneling money through the NRA to promote Trump’s candidacy and evading detection until after the election. A simple rule requiring the disclosure of major donors quickly would patch this obvious hole, but Republicans in Congress repeatedly have blocked such an easy fix. The DISCLOSE Act, newly reintroduced in the Senate this month, is a chance for them to correct this error, as well as fix the limitations on disclosure rules that have snuck into the appropriations packages over the last few years.
When it comes to donations directly given to candidates, rather than outside groups, enforcing the ban on foreign spending is quite easy. Donors are required to disclose their name, address, employer and occupation. The media, public and the FEC then can scrutinize those donations and identify potentially illegal donations.
The same cannot be said about donations to the NRA and other politically active nonprofits that, under current law, aren’t required to disclose their donors even if they spend millions of dollars to support and oppose political candidates. Those donations are hidden completely from public view and are an obvious route for bad actors looking to evade the foreign spending ban.
Would the NRA and the Kremlin have attempted a brazen ploy to help elect Donald Trump with foreign money if the NRA had been required to file regular disclosures of its donors, as candidates and other political committees are required to do? It seems unlikely.
Even if the FBI concludes that the NRA was not, in fact, complicit in Russians illegally spending money to influence a US election, the door remains wide open for foreign actors to do so in a future election. Until Congress closes and locks that door, lawmakers’ inaction will continue to threaten our national security and sovereignty. Americans, and Americans alone, should be in charge of deciding US elections.
Under the DISCLOSE Act, any organization that spends more than $10,000 on elections would be required to promptly report their activity as well as their major financial backers. The legislation also would prohibit shell companies from hiding a donor’s identity and bar domestic corporations with significant foreign ownership from making election expenditures. This bill will give us the information we need to hold those who play in politics accountable, though it doesn’t yet change the system itself. For that next step we must move additional reforms to shift who is spending, like small donor focused public financing and overturning Citizens United.
Republicans in Congress have been unmoved by US billionaires and wealthy corporations secretly influencing US elections. Let’s hope the public’s repeated concerns about nonprofits serving as hidden conduits for a foreign government to interfere in our elections finally push lawmakers to support commonsense disclosure rules to put public eyes on this secret election money.
The foreign spending ban is on the books for a reason. We should make sure we have an easy and effective mechanism for fully enforcing it.
In the years since the US Supreme Court’s overreaching Citizens United v. FEC decision, Congress has watched political groups that do not disclose their funding sources spend hundreds of millions to elect and defeat political candidates. But rather than ensure that none of those millions came from the bank accounts of foreign individuals, corporations or governments, Congress has failed to pass basic disclosure laws that would both deter and ferret out illegal foreign spending. Federal agencies also have fallen down on the job by failing to require disclosure: the US Securities and Exchange Commission on corporate political spending, the Internal Revenue Service on nonprofit spending and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on entities across the board.
The law banning foreign nationals from spending money in US political campaigns is solid and unambiguous. It is illegal for foreign actors to directly or indirectly spend money or provide things of value in connection with US elections.
Enforcing the ban, on the other hand, is riddled with easily exploited loopholes — a fact perfectly demonstrated by Russians allegedly funneling money through the NRA to promote Trump’s candidacy and evading detection until after the election. A simple rule requiring the disclosure of major donors quickly would patch this obvious hole, but Republicans in Congress repeatedly have blocked such an easy fix. The DISCLOSE Act, newly reintroduced in the Senate this month, is a chance for them to correct this error, as well as fix the limitations on disclosure rules that have snuck into the appropriations packages over the last few years.
When it comes to donations directly given to candidates, rather than outside groups, enforcing the ban on foreign spending is quite easy. Donors are required to disclose their name, address, employer and occupation. The media, public and the FEC then can scrutinize those donations and identify potentially illegal donations.
The same cannot be said about donations to the NRA and other politically active nonprofits that, under current law, aren’t required to disclose their donors even if they spend millions of dollars to support and oppose political candidates. Those donations are hidden completely from public view and are an obvious route for bad actors looking to evade the foreign spending ban.
Would the NRA and the Kremlin have attempted a brazen ploy to help elect Donald Trump with foreign money if the NRA had been required to file regular disclosures of its donors, as candidates and other political committees are required to do? It seems unlikely.
Even if the FBI concludes that the NRA was not, in fact, complicit in Russians illegally spending money to influence a US election, the door remains wide open for foreign actors to do so in a future election. Until Congress closes and locks that door, lawmakers’ inaction will continue to threaten our national security and sovereignty. Americans, and Americans alone, should be in charge of deciding US elections.
Under the DISCLOSE Act, any organization that spends more than $10,000 on elections would be required to promptly report their activity as well as their major financial backers. The legislation also would prohibit shell companies from hiding a donor’s identity and bar domestic corporations with significant foreign ownership from making election expenditures. This bill will give us the information we need to hold those who play in politics accountable, though it doesn’t yet change the system itself. For that next step we must move additional reforms to shift who is spending, like small donor focused public financing and overturning Citizens United.
Republicans in Congress have been unmoved by US billionaires and wealthy corporations secretly influencing US elections. Let’s hope the public’s repeated concerns about nonprofits serving as hidden conduits for a foreign government to interfere in our elections finally push lawmakers to support commonsense disclosure rules to put public eyes on this secret election money.
The foreign spending ban is on the books for a reason. We should make sure we have an easy and effective mechanism for fully enforcing it.
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.[...]