The electoral process, vote fraud, SEIU/ACORN et al, etc.

[G M]

They can use the vaxx cards they use to get in restaurants.

Exactly.

[ccp]

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2022/01/20/clyburn-echoes-biden-absolutely-concerned-about-legitimacy-of-elections-in-gop-led-states/

psssssst.  hey Clyburn - it ain't 1965
blacks can vote
just like anyone else
we just want your side to cheat

[Crafty_Dog]

The Democrats’ Election-Law Circus
By THE EDITORS
January 21, 2022 11:48 AM
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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) speaks during a news conference at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., January 11, 2022. (Sarah Silbiger/Reuters)

The Democrats spent the past two weeks holding a circus. The theme of that circus was that American elections would be illegitimate and reimpose “Jim Crow 2.0” unless Congress passed a radical overhaul changing how elections have been held in this country since the Founding. People who ought to know better, including President Joe Biden and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, argued that American elections are a “rigged game” (Schumer’s term) or “easily could . . . be illegitimate” (Biden’s words) if their proposals did not pass Congress. The next day, after having had time to consider the uproar caused by the president’s remarks, House majority whip Jim Clyburn said he was “absolutely concerned” that without the passage of the proposals, the 2022 elections would not be legitimate. In other words, this was not a one-off statement by Biden during an extended press conference. Rather, there is a deliberate effort under way by Democrats to preemptively sow doubts about the legitimacy of midterm elections they are widely expected to lose.



These rhetorical assaults on the legitimacy of American democracy are playing with fire. They are only words, but then, Donald Trump’s ongoing attacks on the 2020 election are now only words, too. Given the long history of street mobs and riots on the left, it is dangerous to encourage the belief that the 2022 midterm elections and the 2024 presidential elections, if conducted under state laws and in line with pre-pandemic American election procedures, represent an oppressive theft of democracy justifying radical action in response.

Perhaps as alarming as the rhetoric is the procedural radicalism of the Democrats. Biden and nearly the entire Senate Democratic caucus signed on to a kamikaze attack on the filibuster, a tool nearly all of them have used, and praised, for decades. Eloquent defenses of the filibuster were an essential element of Biden’s onetime reputation as a Senate institutionalist.


Democrats deployed the filibuster hundreds of times during the Trump presidency and used it, most recently, last week to block a bill with 55 votes in support of sanctions on Russia for its Nord Stream 2 pipeline with Germany. In 2017, 30 Democratic senators signed a bipartisan letter to Mitch McConnell asking for him to stand strong against Donald Trump’s pressure to end the filibuster. McConnell, consistent with his principles and against the short-term interests of his party, did just that.

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Now, Democrats have made the abolition of the filibuster a litmus test for their party. That will likely harm their electoral prospects for a time, but they will eventually regain a Senate majority. Destroying the filibuster would be a bad thing. Precisely because federal legislation tends to take power from state governments and be nearly impossible in practice to repeal, the filibuster’s requirement of broad, national consensus before passing federal laws is a protection of democratic self-government in the states, the “laboratories of democracy” as progressives such as Louis Brandeis once called them.

Politically, the circus was inexplicable. Biden intemperately compared Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to Jefferson Davis, Bull Connor, and George Wallace, a tactic that did nothing to make them more interested in voting for his agenda. Schumer used a procedural loophole to force a vote on the filibuster, putting vulnerable Democratic senators such as Mark Kelly and Maggie Hassan on the record ahead of tough reelection bids. All of this for a foreordained failure that will further demoralize and alienate the Democratic voting base and convince independent voters of the Democrats’ radicalism.

And for what? The two bills the Democrats are promoting were originally designed as partisan “messaging” bills, not governing agendas. They would bulldoze popular state voter-ID laws; attack the secret ballot by eliminating state laws against “ballot harvesting”; eliminate deadlines for the counting of votes on Election Day; outlaw commonsense methods of removing dead or relocated voters from state voter rolls; greatly expand federal power over redistricting; suppress political speech critical of the government; and subsidize political campaigns and Democratic activist groups that conduct partisan voter-registration drives.

The Senate was right to reject these bills. It was right to adhere to its traditional rules for deliberation and debate of changes to our national laws. Democrats burned precious political capital simply to poison the well for acceptance of the upcoming midterm elections and lay the foundation for a perilous assault on core traditions of American governance. None of that reflects well on them. Voters should take notice, and act accordingly.

[DougMacG]

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/01/21/bidens_election_integrity_reply_puts_wh_in_cleanup_mode_147078.html

[Crafty_Dog]

Noncitizens granted right to vote show little interest

No registrations after Vermont cities’ ordeals

BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Montpelier City Clerk John Odum chuckled when he was asked how many noncitizens had registered to vote ahead of the Vermont city’s municipal elections in March — the first time they will have the chance to cast ballots.

Not a single person has asked to be signed up, he told The Washington Times this month.

City residents went through a significant ordeal to grant legally present noncitizens the right to vote. They won an amendment to the city charter, got approval from the state legislature and then surmounted a governor’s veto.

Yet with just a few weeks to go, noncitizens don’t seem to have much interest in flexing their new power.

“Right now, we have zero,” Mr. Odum said. As New York City moves to expand voting rights in local elections to noncitizens, including illegal immigrants, cities that have experimented with the policy have found people don’t rush to sign up.

In Winooski, another Vermont city that begins noncitizen voting this year, Jenny Willingham said no one there has signed up either. She said the city is about to do some outreach.

“We’re really trying to promote it,” she said. In San Francisco, which has allowed noncitizen voting in board of education elections for several years, the highest turnout was in 2018, when 59 people on the noncitizen voting list cast ballots. That was a tiny fraction of the nearly 373,000 voters who turned out.

A year later, just two people on the noncitizen roll cast ballots. In 2020, 31 did so.

Federal law is supposed to prohibit noncitizens from registering and casting ballots in federal elections, but state and local governments have no national restrictions within the confines of their

own contests.

Some states have proactively barred noncitizen voting, but others have taken permissive approaches.

The policies vary. In San Francisco, noncitizen voters can cast ballots only in board of education elections, and only if they are parents or caregivers of a juvenile who lives in the city. Illegal immigrants qualify.

In Montpelier, noncitizen voters must have legal status in the U.S., so illegal immigrants are not allowed to cast ballots. Noncitizens can vote on every local issue except for schools. In Winooski, school elections are included.

New York City’s policy, which was allowed to become law early this year and takes effect in 2023, applies to legal permanent residents — green card holders — and to illegal immigrants who have been granted work permits by the Homeland Security Department. That category could include DACA recipients, those in the Temporary Protected Status program and illegal immigrants who have applied for victim visas or asylum.

It is by far the biggest experiment in noncitizen voting that the U.S. has ever seen.

Election officials who spoke with The Times didn’t hazard guesses as to why participation rates have been so low in places where noncitizen voting is allowed.

Some analysts said it could be fear of entanglement with a government agency.

Indeed, San Francisco’s webpage for noncitizen voters contains a stark warning to anyone thinking of signing up: “Any information you provide to the Department of Elections, including your name and address, may be obtained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies, organizations, and individuals. In addition, if you apply for naturalization, you will be asked whether you have ever registered or voted in a federal, state, or local election in the United States. You may wish to consult with an immigration attorney, an organization that protects immigrant rights, or other knowledgeable source before providing any personal information to the Department of Elections and before registering to vote in San Francisco Board of Education Elections.”

The warning is repeated in 50 languages.

J. Christian Adams, who runs the Public Interest Legal Foundation, dedicated to voter integrity measures, said noncitizens may have inertia when it comes to voting, but experiments such as New York’s are intended to break down those barriers and normalize rights for noncitizens.

“The more they desensitize and legitimize illegal aliens voting, eventually the fear goes away,” he said. “The long play here is to alter the cultural inhibitions on registration.”

With the federal prohibition in place, jurisdictions that allow noncitizen voting must keep second voter rolls with the noncitizens’ names to ensure they don’t get mixed in with the rolls for elections for national office.

New York City has tested those waters.

The city allowed any parent who had children in public schools to vote in community school board elections from 1969 to 2002, said Ron Hayduk, a political scientist at San Francisco State University who tracks noncitizen voting.

The professor even found some elections in which noncitizen voters turned out en masse and likely swayed outcomes.

One was the school board contest in the predominantly Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights in 1986. Mr. Hayduk said turnout hit 10,000 parents, most of them immigrants, and they installed a pro-immigrant majority on the board, including the first Dominican to win election in the U.S.

Mr. Hayduk’s research found that when people focus on mobilizing noncitizen voters, they turn out.

In Hyattsville, Maryland, just over the boundary from the District of Columbia, election officials paid for locally targeted ads in Spanish on Facebook and adopted an all-mail election system, the professor said.

The city-only list of voters — which is where noncitizens would show up, as well as voters ages 16 and 17 — went from 31 names in 2017 to 216 in the 2021 election, and turnout climbed from 12 in 2017 to 144 last year.

That works out to a 67% turnout rate in 2021, far outstripping the 28% rate overall.

Still, those 144 voters accounted for less than 5% of the total votes cast in the city’s election, even though noncitizens make up about 20% of the city’s population, according to data at TownCharts. com.

Takoma Park, another Maryland city on the D.C. line where about 1 in 6 residents are noncitizens, has allowed them to vote in local elections for decades.

Participation is sparse there too, according to city statistics.

The city has about 13,000 registered voters but only several hundred on the city-only list for noncitizens. Takoma Park has never had more than 100 voters in an election in recent years, City Clerk Jessie Carpenter said.

“The numbers are low,” she said. Mr. Hayduk said Takoma Park’s turnout was higher in the 1990s but dropped after the 2001 terrorist attacks, “when anti-immigrant sentiment and surveillance grew.”

New York, of course, dwarfs the other jurisdictions, and the chance for an immigrant voting bloc to emerge has elevated the issue.

The Republican National Committee has filed a lawsuit arguing that the city ordinance runs afoul of the New York Constitution, which the RNC said treats the right to vote as a privilege of citizenship.

The RNC last year sued the two Vermont cities. Those lawsuits are pending.

If noncitizens suddenly start to register and vote in significant numbers, it could create other legal problems, Mr. Adams said, such as diluting the strength of current minority voting blocs.

If, for example, Black voters suddenly see hindrances to selecting their preferred candidates in a Democratic primary, that could be a problem under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Mr. Adams said.

“If New York does this and African Americans are harmed by this, the Public Interest Legal Foundation vows to file a lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act,” he told The Times

[Crafty_Dog]

second

https://www.theepochtimes.com/texas-republicans-urge-court-to-reconsider-decision-that-stripped-ag-of-power-to-prosecute-election-fraud_4229194.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-01-23-4&utm_medium=email&est=hHBWpg4XW%2FfCvoTUFJjX0j0Bz70nIylAytTjOTPo3jY6tNhAizgeaIK1F03Ooh6uygqv

[ccp]

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/01/24/2022-midterms-republicans-losing-redistricting-battle-aggressive-democrats/

yet we will hear on MSM how Repub redistricting is a

THREAT TO DEMOCRACY

[ccp]

and of course I should
add

"RACISM"
"DEPRIVING BLACKS THE RIGHT TO VOTE"

[Crafty_Dog]

CONGRESS

House Democrats make surprising inroads in the redistricting process

GOP advantage not likely to be as dominant as feared

BY NICHOLAS R ICCARDI AND BOBY CAINA CALVAN ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK | Democrats braced for disaster when state legislatures began redrawing congressional maps, fearing that Republican dominance of statehouses would tilt power away from them for the next decade.

But as the redistricting process reaches its final stages, that anxiety is beginning to ease.

For Democrats, the worstcase scenario of losing well over a dozen seats in the U.S. House appears unlikely to happen. After some aggressive map drawing of their own in states with Democratic legislatures, some in the party predict the typical congressional district will shift from leaning to the right of the national vote to matching it, ending a distortion that gave the GOP a built-in advantage over the past five House elections.

“We have stymied their intent to gerrymander their way to a House majority,” Kelly Ward Burton, head of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said of the GOP.

The nation’s congressional maps won’t be settled for several more months. Republicans in some large states such as Florida have yet to finalize proposed changes, giving the GOP a lastminute opportunity to seek an advantage.

But the picture could come into greater clarity this week as the Democratic-controlled New York state legislature gets a chance to seize map-drawing power from the state’s bipartisan commission. That would almost certainly blunt the GOP advantage that has been in place since the last redistricting process in 2010.

The jockeying in state capitals has implications not just for Democrats’ uphill effort to maintain a majority in the U.S. House in this year’s midterm elections. It will affect the broader balance of power in Washington and state legislatures for the remainder of the decade.

While Republicans say they have achieved their goals so far, they’re surprised at how much Democrats have tried to expand the number of seats their party can win. The GOP has taken a markedly different approach by aiming to shore up its vulnerable members’ districts, transforming competitive seats into safe ones.

That’s partly because Republicans already expanded the map with aggressive redistricting after the 2010 census, when they controlled more states. Now, as the lines are adjusted to meet 2020 census figures released last year, they are locking in their gains while Democrats are taking risks to fight back.

In a wave election, Democrats could lose even more seats in the maps they have drawn because they spread their voters so thin, analysts say. And, if political coalitions shift in upcoming years, seats Democrats thought were within reach could suddenly disappear.

“Republicans have given themselves pretty good tsunami protection,” said Michael Li of the Brennan Center for Justice, which tracks redistricting. “But for Democrats, if it rains a little, their house is flooded.”

The Democratic push comes as the party has unsuccessfully fought to ban partisan gerrymandering nationwide — their elections bill barring the practice died in the Senate last week during a Republican filibuster, joined by Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Mr. Li said Democrats, however, are still gerrymandering in states they control, sometimes aggressively as in Illinois, other times relatively lightly, as in New Mexico and Oregon.

In contrast, experts say Republicans, who control more states, have gerrymandered heavily in places such as Texas, North Carolina and Ohio. But the GOP’s Ohio maps were tossed out by the state Supreme Court this month, and Democrats are hopeful North Carolina’s high court follows suit with the districts there, part of the reason for the party’s increased optimism.

The next and biggest opportunity for Democrats is in New York, which will test how much power Democrats are willing to give up to fight gerrymandering. Saying they wanted to take partisanship out of redistricting, Democrats there in 2014 backed a ballot measure to put the process in the hands of a bipartisan commission. But the state legislature can overrule the commission. In 2014, the legislature was divided between Democratic and Republican control. Now Democrats have a supermajority in both houses.

The New York Legislature already rejected the commission’s first attempt at maps, and Democrats on the commission declared a deadlock on Monday, giving the Legislature the opportunity to draw its own maps.

“The Democratic leadership and those on the far left that run the show in Albany, they’re hellbent to take this process over to derail the commission, and to have the party bosses in Albany draw the maps,” said Nick Langworthy, chairman of the New York GOP. “I think that they looked at a handful of states to give them a shot to hold on to the majority.”

Republicans need only to net five seats in November’s election to gain control of the House. They started the redistricting cycle controlling line-drawing in states representing 187 House seats while Democrats controlled 75

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/01/huge-breaking-news-wisconsin-assembly-votes-withdraw-10-electors-joe-biden-2020-election-video/

[DougMacG]

https://will-law.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/2021ElectionReviewStudy.pdf


Insertion by Marc:

"Our bottom line is that, while we found little evidence of “fraud,” we did find that a substantial number of
votes were not cast in accordance with legal requirements. While we could not find evidence that these
votes were “fraudulent” in the sense of being cast by ineligible voters or nonexistent voters—particularly in
numbers large enough to change the winner—the total number of votes cast unlawfully could have affected
the outcome.

It is possible, for example, that the use of drop boxes made the difference. It is also possible that the injection
of private funding for election administration—funding what was disproportionately directed to Democratic
areas—contributed substantially to the Biden margin. The widespread, and potentially improper, use of
“indefinitely confined” status, and the failure to follow up with voters who fail DMV checks, or the failure
to keep voter rolls up to date also could have had significant impacts. Other failures, such as the conduct of
absentee voting at nursing homes in a way that was not authorized by law, may have had a more limited
impact but undercut confidence in the fairness of the election.

We were able to disprove certain suspicions regarding the election—such as a ballot dump in Milwaukee,
manipulation of voting machines, votes exceeding the number of voters, etc. We do not believe the election
was “stolen.” But it was not adequately secure. Reform is required. We can do better.

[DougMacG]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/its-just-plain-unconstitutional-wisconsin-gop-leaders-again-reject-resolution-to-pull-back-2020-electoral-votes/ar-AATa27G?ocid=BingNewsSearch

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jan/26/senators-vexed-bidens-unwillingness-rework-vice-pr/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=a0Y47z9%2BoacYOC2r8AYXbQV7Prjb3SC7x1h8zaJF3pxRHayYELDfy3KULfDlbNAs&bt_ts=1643281671957

[Crafty_Dog]

NEW YORK

DCCC chair submits redistricted map of New York heavily favoring Democrats

BY KERRY PICKET THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The chairman of the House Democratic campaign arm has proposed an aggressive gerrymander of the New York State congressional map, not long after he and his party accused Republican state legislatures of partisan redistricting practices.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Sean Patrick Maloney released an “Interested Parties” memo Wednesday night suggesting to New York Democrats who are redrawing the state’s congressional lines to support a remapping that would eliminate five of the eight Republican seats, resulting in a 23-Democrats-to-3-Republicans gerrymander. The redistricting would amend the “imbalances” in the current map, he said.

“In New York City and the surrounding areas, the current map does a serviceable job ensuring that communities are linked together and that minority representation is strong - as the New York State constitution requires,” Mr. Maloney writes in his memo. “Of course, communities have changed over the past decade and the new map should reflect that.”

He said, “Ultimately, although lines may shift or expand, the districts must preserve the ability of minority communities to elect their chosen representatives to Congress. Groups like the Unity Coalition have suggested maps that adhere to the state constitutional requirement that maps shall not abridge the voting rights of racial or language minorities.”

Cook Political Report’s election analyst Dave Wasserman described Mr. Maloney’s proposal to Albany map drawers as an “aggressive … gerrymander” and that only three New York Republicans — Reps. Elise Stefanik, Chris Jacobs and Andrew Garbarino — could possibly survive such a redistricting.

Mr. Maloney, whose memo goes through each region of the state and how the districts should be remapped, previously criticized Senate Republicans for blocking Senate Democrats voting legislation that purportedly prevents partisan gerrymandering.

“While Republicans clearly think their best way back to power is suppressing and gerrymandering their way to a majority, Democrats are committed to the fight of protecting and expanding voting rights for all Americans,” Mr. Maloney said last June.

In a statement to The Washington Times, DCCC Communications Director Chris Hayden defended Mr. Maloney.

“The Chairman’s priority is to ensure that the state of New York has a map that represents communities of interest so that every voter’s voice is heard in Washington,” Mr. Hayden said. “The state’s public comment process is critical to a healthy democracy and the only venue for public comment, so as a citizen of the state Congressman Maloney chose to participate in that process.”

Former New York Rep. John Faso, a Republican who serves as a board member of Fair Lines New York, a GOP-affiliated group concerned with fair redistricting, described Mr. Maloney’s memo as an “illegal” proposal to New York’s Constitution.

“The New York State Constitution, which was adopted by the voters in 2014, includes anti-partisan gerrymandering provisions, and the memo is filled with inaccuracies as to the State of New York and its communities,” Mr. Faso told The Washington Times.

“It also had some laughable places where they refer to the Town of Hempstead on Long Island as the City of Hempstead. It obviously was written by someone who has no clue about the true communities of interest in the state, but it would just haphazardly break county lines, municipal boundaries to achieve a political result,” he explained, calling the proposal a suppression of New York GOP voters.

Mr. Faso, a former member of the state assembly, suggested Mr. Maloney’s memo was written because it reflects what the state legislative Democrats intend to do. New York Republicans expect Democrats in Albany “to act probably as soon as tomorrow in terms of introducing a bill and trying to pass it on Monday … in the dark of night,” he said.

He added, “It would be rammed through on minimum notice and, literally, no one in the state will know what they planned and how they plan to rig congressional and legislative districts for the next 10 years … so I think the only recourse is likely to be the courts.

[Crafty_Dog]

Biden’s Voting Panic Didn’t Move Georgia
Look at the chart. Can you spot his claimed voter suppression?
By The Editorial Board
Follow
Jan. 27, 2022 6:40 pm ET


Joe Biden’s overheated speech in Atlanta on voting rights didn’t persuade the Senate, and apparently it didn’t move Georgians either. A new survey taken in the wake of his visit by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution says that Georgia voters give Mr. Biden a 34% approval rating, down from 51% in May last year.

It’s possible Mr. Biden elevated the debate over elections and voting, which the poll rated as the No. 1 issue facing the state. But since both sides are animated, how do they net out?

Well, 53% of Georgia voters think ballot dropboxes should be either eliminated entirely, or else they agree with keeping such boxes “inside early voting locations” and “available during voting hours.” Only 44% want dropboxes “widely available.”

If Mr. Biden’s demagoguery about “Jim Crow 2.0” didn’t take hold, that’s probably because it flies in the face of what Georgians have experienced. The chart nearby shows the state’s voter turnout by race/ethnicity since 2006, according to Census Bureau data. Can you spot the voter suppression? We see something else.

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Some analysts point to the gap between black and white voters, which has reversed since 2012. But who was at the top of the ballot that year? Barack Obama. It would hardly be surprising if black voters were enthusiastic to support the first black President, as the chart suggests.

White Non-Hispanic
Black
Asian
Hispanic (any race)
2006
'08
'10
'12
'14
'16
'18
'20
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
%
All the turnout lines have been rising, generally, since 2014. This date is important because Georgia previously had to get “preclearance” from Washington before changing its voting laws. The Supreme Court nixed that requirement in 2013, and a year later Vice President Joe Biden sounded alarms about a “new assault on the most basic of civil rights, the right to vote.”

Then what happened? In 2018, when Stacey Abrams was running for Governor and narrowly lost, black turnout handily beat white turnout, 59.6% to 56.1%. That bucked the typical trend of much lower voting in midterm years. In 2020, a year with huge overall voting, black turnout rose again to 64%, one point shy of Mr. Obama’s re-election year.

These are survey data, and they aren’t perfect. The voting law that Georgia passed last year is too new to be reflected. But Democrats have warned for years about alleged assaults on the franchise. Here’s a 2012 headline: “Despite voter ID law, minority turnout up in Georgia.” The story explains that opponents of the law “labeled it a Jim Crow-era tactic that would suppress the minority vote.”

If people in Georgia don’t believe Mr. Biden’s same song and dance a decade later, maybe it’s because they remember.

[Crafty_Dog]

Pennsylvania Court Says State’s Mail Voting Law Is Unconstitutional
The decision, which could deal a blow to voting access in a critical battleground state, was immediately appealed.




The law permitted no-excuse absentee voting, created a permanent mail-in voter list and reduced the voter registration deadline from 30 days to 15.
The law permitted no-excuse absentee voting, created a permanent mail-in voter list and reduced the voter registration deadline from 30 days to 15.Credit...Robert Nickelsberg for The New York Times
Nick Corasaniti
By Nick Corasaniti
Jan. 28, 2022
Updated 5:18 p.m. ET
A state court in Pennsylvania on Friday struck down the state’s landmark election law as unconstitutional, dealing a temporary blow to voting access in one of the nation’s most critical battleground states.

In a 3-to-2 decision, the state court sided with 14 Republican lawmakers who sued last year, arguing that the law was unconstitutional. Pennsylvania filed an appeal to its Supreme Court on Friday afternoon, triggering an automatic stay that keeps the law in place during the appeal process.

The law, known as Act 77, was passed by the Republican-controlled legislature and signed by Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, in 2019. It permitted no-excuse absentee voting, created a permanent mail-in voter list, reduced the voter registration deadline from 30 days to 15 and provided for $90 million in election infrastructure upgrades. It also eliminated straight ticket voting.

The majority opinion, written by Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt, a Republican, said that voting “requires the physical presence of the elector” and ruled that the legislature could not make changes to voting laws without amending the state Constitution.

Democrats in Pennsylvania said they were not surprised that the Commonwealth Court, which they said leans conservative, ruled against the law. They expressed confidence that the appeal to the state Supreme Court, which has sided with the state on voting issues both during and following the 2020 election, would be successful.

In a statement, Josh Shapiro, the Democratic Pennsylvania attorney general who is also running for governor, criticized the state court’s decision as “faulty”

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“This opinion is based on twisted logic and faulty reasoning, and is wrong on the law,” Mr. Shapiro said in a statement.

Republicans in the state celebrated the decision, claiming that the law had been warped by Democratic state leaders in the run-up to the 2020 election.

“After what occurred in the 2020 and 2021 elections, I have no confidence in the no-excuse mail in ballot provisions,” said Jake Corman, the top Republican in the State Senate. “There is no doubt that we need a stronger election law than the one we have in place today.”

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The bipartisan law was praised by both sides when it was passed, but it became a target of conservatives during the 2020 election, as former President Donald J. Trump unspooled falsehoods and lies about fraud involving mail-in voting. Eleven of the 14 lawmakers who sued to kill the law voted for it in 2019.

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Following the 2020 election, Representative Mike Kelly, a Republican from northwestern Pennsylvania, filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the results in the federal races and claimed that Act 77 was unconstitutional.

But his effort was sternly rebuffed by the state’s Supreme Court, which ruled that the law had been in place for well over a year with no legal challenge until Mr. Trump lost Pennsylvania.

“Unsatisfied with the results of that wager, they would now flip over the table, scattering to the shadows the votes of millions of Pennsylvanians,” Justice David Wecht wrote following the election. “It is not our role to lend legitimacy to such transparent and untimely efforts to subvert the will of Pennsylvania voters. Courts should not decide elections when the will of the voters is clear.”

An appeal by Mr. Kelly to the United States Supreme Court was also denied.

Yet the Republican attempts to overturn the 2020 election based on challenges to Act 77 continued. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Republican, challenged the slate of electors from Pennsylvania on Jan. 6, 2021, claiming that the state’s lawmakers had passed Act 77 “irregardless of what the Pennsylvania Constitution said.”

Soon after, rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Later that night, Pennsylvania’s electors were seated.

“This is just a continuation of attacking and undermining our electoral process,” said State Senator Jay Costa, the Democratic minority leader.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/judge-wont-budge-as-voting-machine-report-fuels-conspiracies?fbclid=IwAR0DFEOF7BYj1o4kDeD1KK04V6larTimXBJ2_EhMl5xW2MvT1bRuHeZQP4A

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/02/felon-voting-rights-states-00004372?fbclid=IwAR37710fgJL0HAySoiayQpaWZLHdziTQwNsIRcz4iTfhYeBxiPsVJQSBgic

[Crafty_Dog]

NEW YORK

Voting integrity group sues to stop NYC noncitizen voting

Argue move will dilute Black voters’ power

BY STEPHEN DINAN THE WASHINGTON TIMES

A group dedicated to voting integrity efforts sued Wednesday to block New York City’s new law allowing noncitizens to vote, saying it will illegally dilute Black residents’ political power.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation sued on behalf of four Black residents, saying the city council adopted the noncitizen voting law despite warnings that Black voters could be hurt.

PILF, run by former Justice Department voting rights specialist J. Christian Adams, pointed to several instances during debate over the legislation where backers explicitly said the measure was about racial voting power.

One council member griped about “white men’s power,” while another, in Spanish, said the point of the legislation was to increase the political power of Asians and Hispanics, PILF said.

“The 15th Amendment prohibits any race-based voting restrictions. Legislators made statements that this was about race.This law violates the Constitution,” Mr. Adams said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

The complaint was filed in state court in Staten Island.

Mr. Adams had teased the lawsuit in a Washington Times story last month.

The Times has reached out to New York’s Law Department for comment on the new complaint.

New York’s new law allows noncitizens who have lawful permanent presence in the U.S., or who have been approved for work permits, to cast ballots in elections on city matters. That would include immigrants who are in the country illegally and under temporary protections such as the DACA program, Temporary Protected Status or even applications for victim’s visas or asylum.

The city figures perhaps 800,000 residents could be eligible.

Noncitizens are barred by federal law from participating in federal elections.

In debating the bill last year Council Member Laurie Cumbo warned colleagues they needed to learn more about its effects on Black residents.

“This particular legislation is going to shift the power dynamics in New York City in a major way, and we do not have the numbers or the information to know how that is going to impact African American communities,” she said.

She complained, in particular, that many more Latino voters than Black voters backed President Trump in elections.

Her requests to delay the bill for more study were blocked, PILF says.

According to the lawsuit, voting in New York is already deeply polarized along racial lines, and adding hundreds of thousands of new foreign citizens to the pool — most of them Asian or Hispanic — will give Black voters less of a say.


The Public Interest Legal Foundation sued on behalf of four Black residents of New York City on Wednesday arguing the city council adopted the noncitizen voting law despite warnings that Black voters could be hurt. ASSOCIATED PRES

[DougMacG]

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/02/felon-voting-rights-states-00004372?fbclid=IwAR37710fgJL0HAySoiayQpaWZLHdziTQwNsIRcz4iTfhYeBxiPsVJQSBgic

We had better start competing for the felon vote.  Wouldn't they be better off in a robust entreprenurial economy than under statism?

[G M]

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/02/felon-voting-rights-states-00004372?fbclid=IwAR37710fgJL0HAySoiayQpaWZLHdziTQwNsIRcz4iTfhYeBxiPsVJQSBgic

We had better start competing for the felon vote.  Wouldn't they be better off in a robust entreprenurial economy than under statism?

They do fine under the left’s anarco-tyranny. See California or Minnesota as examples.

[DougMacG]

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/02/felon-voting-rights-states-00004372?fbclid=IwAR37710fgJL0HAySoiayQpaWZLHdziTQwNsIRcz4iTfhYeBxiPsVJQSBgic

We had better start competing for the felon vote.  Wouldn't they be better off in a robust entrepreneurial economy than under statism?

They do fine under the left’s anarco-tyranny. See California or Minnesota as examples.

G M sarcasm alert - but to be clear, no they don't.  Best thing someone not trusted by big business and big government can do for themselves is start a needed business,  cf. pillow guy. 

Best thing government can do for people discriminated against for any reason is to remove the barriers to starting a business for people who don't have teams of lawyers, lobbyists, accountants and compliance people.  Where is that message to this new voting bloc, and to everyone else?

[ccp]

"Best thing someone not trusted by big business and big government can do for themselves is start a needed business,  cf. pillow guy. "

sans the 25 x per nightly for years same old face voice and marketing pitch

 

[DougMacG]

https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/07/exclusive-whistleblower-videos-show-systemic-issues-with-pennsylvania-elections/

[Crafty_Dog]

Exclusive: Whistleblower Videos Show Systemic Issues With Pennsylvania Elections
BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND
FEBRUARY 07, 2022
9 MIN READ
Delaware County, Penn. election workers
IMAGE CREDITTHE FEDERALIST / YOUTUBE
These videos indicate there were widespread violations of the election code in a large Pennsylvania county, followed by coverups.


According to a new whistleblower video obtained by The Federalist, 80 percent of Delaware County, Pennsylvania precincts lacked a valid chain of custody for the provisional ballots cast in the November 2020 election.

This video and two others just obtained by The Federalist provide further evidence that, while officials continue to deny that irregularities occurred during the last presidential election, there were widespread violations of the election code in the large Pennsylvania county, followed by efforts to cover up those problems.


Regina Miller, a contract worker assisting Delaware County officials, secretly filmed the videos as she helped election employees gather material in response to a “Right to Know Request” that sought documentation to confirm the election results certified by the county.

In one of the several most-recent videos The Federalist obtained from someone familiar with the situation, two employees are speaking. The first woman states, “This is what a provisional bag looks like.” As she continues to explain the process for safeguarding provisional ballots following the close of polls, she notes, “And what we currently do not have is a valid chain of custody for the provisional ballots.”

The shocked whistleblower repeats the claim as a question: “So are you saying we never had a chain of custody?” The other woman replies that only “20 percent of precincts have locked the blue bag in the past,” a reference to the bag in which provisional ballots are to be stored and safeguarded.

“Personally, I think that this is happening in every county in Pennsylvania,” the Delaware County election official notes. “We’re working on this antiquated law,” she explains, “on top of the new law,” an apparent reference to changes instituted shortly before the 2020 election.





A second video shared with The Federalist on Friday captures a discussion between Delaware County poll worker coordinator Christina Iacono and Tom Gallagher, an attorney for Delaware County, about “V drives.” Those are removable drives that contain the election results obtained from the county’s individual voting machines.

This video begins with the whistleblower saying she was concerned with the way the V drives were returned to the county. Gallagher then detailed what happened, with the hidden camera capturing him saying the county employee “dumped them in a bag, put them in a box,” and “puts it on the top of the hood of her car.”

The election worker then started rattling off problems, according to Gallagher. “She goes . . . we don’t have anything for Chester 11,” and another precinct “is missing.” Gallagher mimics what the employee, identified in the video merely as Loureen, said as she passed the box of V drives and other election material to the county attorney.

“Do you have a piece of paper with that on it?” Gallagher explains he asked her. She didn’t, Gallagher continued, noting she said, “No, that’s why I’m telling it to you.” She also didn’t have an inventory or anything showing what V drive she was providing and what was missing. Gallagher added that he left her a message but didn’t expect any response.




Gallagher’s discussion of the missing V drive provides further context to The Federalist’s earlier reporting on another whistleblower video that captured Delaware County election officials plotting to recreate missing election data from the November 2020 contest.

According to a source familiar with the video, the clip captured James Savage, who served as the voting machine warehouse supervisor during the November 2020 election, discussing a Right to Know Request with another election worker. That request was served on Delaware County after the presidential election and sought documentation confirming the vote totals.

In the video, Savage inquired of another individual off-camera about “recreating data.” The second election official offers his suggested approach, with them recreating results for “these jokers,” and “then create another set for the next set of jokers” — an apparent reference to the citizens seeking the confirmation of the election results under the Right-to-Know request — “but we cut it up and then we create a permanent record,” he explains.

“Here you go, here you go,” the election official says, apparently explaining how they would then provide the recreated data to individuals who filed the Right To Know requests. The individual, who was blocked from view on the camera, then continues, “We scan those cut, copied sheets in.”

Savage continues, “The first part has a lot of work, but it might save us work in the long run, if it’s gonna be a drip, drip, drip.” The duo then discuss the process more, with Savage asking about whether they would go to every machine and put in a clean V drive. The off-camera election worker appears to agree with that approach.

A third just-obtained video now provides evidence suggesting Delaware County officials later executed that plan. That video begins with the whistleblower talking about missing V drives and the fact that “some had to be recreated.”

A man off-camera, identified for The Federalist by a person familiar with the videos as Savage, then notes that “John” “came here with a V drive.” The off-camera man then continues, “I don’t know what the process was ‘cause I wasn’t [there] … I put one of my staff with him to get the machine out and open it up for em’ and then he did everything else.”

“He was able to pull the data from the scanner onto to that V-drive,” the individual identified as Savage explained. The whistleblower then interjected to ask about the “machine tapes” and whether they needed to reprint those to go with the V drives, but no one seemed to know.

However, with the discussion moving on to the missing “machine tapes,” the video unwittingly exposes yet another problem in Delaware County: missing machine tapes that should have existed to verify the voting “return sheets” given the county after the November 2020 election.

According to sources familiar with the video, Delaware County election official James Ziegelhoffer is seen on tape explaining that “most people produced” the tape, referring to a paper printout from the voting machines. Some didn’t, however, Ziegelhoffer added, causing the whistleblower to ask, “What do you do with those return sheets?” a reference to the document individual precincts remitted to the county with a tally of the November 2020 poll results.

Ziegelhoffer explained that “the people that never came” with the tapes, “that was reported to the DA.” After that, Ziegelhoffer seemed to say, he didn’t know what happened.

The Federalist asked Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer whether his office launched an investigation into those referrals and if so, the results of the investigation, but received no response.

Private citizens of Delaware County also seemed to have no luck getting satisfactory answers from government officials, leading several residents to file a sprawling lawsuit in mid-November 2021 against former Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, Delaware County, the Delaware County Board of Elections, and more than a dozen individual election officials.

Given the pending litigation, Adrienne Marofsky, the public relations director for Delaware County, previously told The Federalist the county is not responding to press questions. However, Marofsky then added that “the County is confident that the elections in 2020 and 2021 were conducted fairly and fully complied with state and federal laws.”

The county’s claim conflicts with on-camera statements made by Delaware County, Pennsylvania’s Christina Perrone, who told fellow election-related workers during a Zoom meeting after the November 2020 election that this time—referring to the upcoming elections—“we’re going to actually follow the law fully.”

At least one member of the Delaware County Council is likewise continuing to deny problems with the November 2020 election that the videos obtained by The Federalist seem to establish.

Notwithstanding the whistleblower videos capturing election workers apparently discussing the missing V drives, conversing on how to recreate the data, and then explaining that new V drives were created, at a January 19, 2022, county council meeting, one member of the council, identified on the tape as Christine Reuther, declared, “There were no missing drives. It’s been debunked. It’s been before the board of elections. It’s been addressed in court. There’s been testimony about it. There were no missing drives.”

Reuther then explained it was such misinformation being spread in the comments on Facebook that led her to believe that the county should remove the ability for public comment on its Facebook posts.

“We have a circumstance where a lot of research has shown that the way misinformation spreads, or one of the ways that misinformation spreads through social media is the hijacking of trusted websites,” Reuther said. “I can tell you that the county’s comments on its Facebook page were hijacked,” the council member continued, noting that one area in which “misinformation was spread were about elections.” She then stated unequivocally, “There were no missing drives.”


The Federalist asked Reuther whether her position was “that the drives were never missing or that they were ‘not missing’ because they were recreated.” Alternatively, did Reuther believe “those whistleblower videos are altered”? The Federalist inquired. Reuther did not respond to these questions.

While these latest videos provide more evidence of significant issues with the November 2020 election in Delaware County, the totality of the whistleblower tapes has two broader implications: First, the problems captured on video suggest systemic issues with American elections. Second, without whistleblowers filming the behind-the-scenes chaos, the public would remain blissfully ignorant of the apparent banana republic-like state of our electoral process.

Even with the videos, public officials continue to brand the evidence “misinformation.” Americans need to wake up—and soon.


Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

[ccp]

"Whistleblower Videos Show Systemic Issues With Pennsylvania Elections"

the dirty shysters were in on it

all planned out

they got away with it.......

[Crafty_Dog]

The Supreme Court Has Crossed the Rubicon
Feb. 9, 2022


Credit...Joshua Lott/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


1587
Linda Greenhouse
By Linda Greenhouse

Ms. Greenhouse, the winner of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008 and was a contributing Opinion writer from 2009 through 2021.

You know the Rubicon has been crossed when the Supreme Court issues a conservative voting rights order so at odds with settled precedent and without any sense of the moment that Chief Justice John Roberts feels constrained to dissent.

This is the same John Roberts who in 1982, as a young lawyer in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, fought a crucial amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965; whose majority opinion in 2013 gutted one-half of the Voting Rights Act and who joined an ahistoric opinion last summer that took aim at the other half; and who famously complained in dissent from a 2006 decision in favor of Latino voters in South Texas that “it is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”

Yes, that Chief Justice Roberts. What the 5-to-4 majority did was that far out of line.

The unsigned order that drew the chief justice’s dissent Monday night blocked the decision by a special three-judge Federal District Court ordering the Alabama Legislature to draw a second congressional district in which Black residents constitute a majority. Alabama’s population is 27 percent Black. The state has seven congressional districts. The lower court held that by packing some Black voters into one district and spreading others out over three other districts, the state diluted the Black vote in violation of the Voting Rights Act.

The Supreme Court will hear Alabama’s appeal of the district court order in its next term, so the stay it granted will mean that the 2022 elections will take place with district lines that the lower court unanimously, with two of the three judges appointed by President Donald Trump, found to be illegal.

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Chief Justice Roberts objected that the ordinary standards under which the Supreme Court grants a stay of a lower court opinion had not been met. “The district court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction,” he wrote. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, also dissented in a more extensive opinion that accused the majority of using the court’s emergency “shadow docket” not only to intervene improperly on behalf of the state but also to change voting rights law in the process.

This is no mere squabble over procedure. What happened Monday night was a raw power play by a runaway majority that seems to recognize no stopping point. It bears emphasizing that the majority’s agenda of cutting back on the scope of the Voting Rights Act is Chief Justice Roberts’s agenda too. He made that abundantly clear in the past and suggested it in a kind of code on Monday with his bland observation that the court’s Voting Rights Act precedents “have engendered considerable disagreement and uncertainty regarding the nature and contours of a vote dilution claim.” But in his view, that was an argument to be conducted in the next Supreme Court term while permitting the district court’s decision to take effect now.

Dig deeper into the moment.
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While the majority as a whole said nothing, Justice Brett Kavanaugh took it upon himself to offer a kind of defense. Only Justice Samuel Alito joined him. Perhaps the others — Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — chose not to sign onto his rude reference to Justice Kagan’s “catchy but worn-out rhetoric about the ‘shadow docket.’ ” Or perhaps his “To reiterate: The court’s stay order is not a decision on the merits” rang a little hollow when, as Justice Kagan pointed out, “the district court here did everything right under the law existing today” and “staying its decision forces Black Alabamians to suffer what under that law is clear vote dilution.”

In other words, when it comes to the 2022 elections, for Black voters in Alabama the Supreme Court’s procedural intervention is the equivalent of a ruling on the merits.

Or maybe the others couldn’t indulge in the hypocrisy of Justice Kavanaugh’s description of the standards for granting a stay. The party asking for a stay, he wrote, “ordinarily must show (i) a reasonable probability that this court would eventually grant review and a fair prospect that the court would reverse, and (ii) that the applicant would likely suffer irreparable harm absent the stay.”

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But wait a minute. Weren’t those conditions clearly met back in September when abortion providers in Texas came to the court seeking a stay of the Texas vigilante law, S.B. 8, which was about to go into effect? That law, outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and authorizing anyone anywhere in the country to sue a Texas abortion provider for damages, was flagrantly unconstitutional, and the law was about to destroy the state’s abortion infrastructure. But did Justice Kavanaugh or any of the others in Monday’s majority vote to grant the requested stay? They did not. Chief Justice Roberts did.

It’s impossible not to conclude that what we see at work is not some neutral principle guiding the Supreme Court’s intervention but simply whether a majority likes or doesn’t like what a lower court has done. In his opinion, Justice Kavanaugh sought to avoid that conclusion by arguing that when it comes to election cases, the Supreme Court will more readily grant a stay to counteract “late judicial tinkering with election laws.” But there was no late “tinkering” here. The legislature approved the disputed plan in November, after six days of consideration, and the governor signed it. The district court conducted a seven-day trial in early January and on Jan. 24 issued its 225-page opinion. The election is months away — plenty of time for the legislature to comply with the decision.

Disturbing as this development is, it is even more alarming in context. Last July, in a case from Arizona, the court took a very narrow view of the Voting Rights Act as a weapon against vote denial measures, policies that have a discriminatory effect on nonwhite voters’ access to the polls. That case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, was brought under the act’s Section 2, which prohibits voting procedures that give members of racial minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” Justice Alito’s opinion for a 6-to-3 majority set a high bar for showing that any disputed measure is more than just an ordinary burden that comes with turning out to vote.

It was an unusual case, in that Section 2 has much more typically been used as it was in Alabama, to challenge district lines as causing vote dilution. Obviously, at the heart of any Section 2 case is the question of how to evaluate the role of race. In its request for a stay, Alabama characterized the district court of having improperly “prioritized” race, as opposed to other districting factors, in ordering a second majority Black district. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, representing the Alabama plaintiffs, called this a mischaracterization of what the district court had actually done when it took account of the compactness and cohesion of the Black community and the history of white Alabama voters refusing to support Black candidates.

Stripped to its core, Alabama is essentially arguing that a law enacted to protect the interests of Black citizens bars courts from considering race in evaluating a redistricting plan. Justice Kagan’s dissenting opinion contained a warning that granting the stay amounted to a tacit acceptance of that startling proposition. She said the stay reflected “a hastily made and wholly unexplained prejudgment” that the court was “ready to change the law.”

The battle over what Section 2 means has been building for years, largely under the radar, and now it is front and center. The current Supreme Court term is all about abortion and guns. The next one  will be all about race. Along with the Alabama case, Merrill v. Milligan, the Harvard and University of North Carolina admissions cases are also on the docket — to be heard by a Supreme Court that, presumably, for the first time in history, will have two Black justices, and all in the shadow of the midterm elections. The fire next time.

Linda Greenhouse, the winner of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008. She is the author of “Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court.”

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.npr.org/2022/02/09/1076529761/right-wing-conspiracies-have-a-new-target-a-tool-that-fights-actual-voter-fraud?fbclid=IwAR1HQgECeXJ89NgmnmObp4wYUgN571FH4v3e1tAbCm2eR4EJqma8hPQrsYw

Right-wing conspiracies have a new target: a tool that fights actual voter fraud
February 9, 20225:00 AM ET
Miles Parks
MILES PARKS

Twitter

A Trump supporter holds up a "no voter fraud" sign in Arizona in 2020. The accelerating far-right disinformation campaign about a national voter-verification system is taking its toll.
Courtney Pedroza/Getty Images
If Republicans over the past few years have made one thing clear, it's that they really care about voter fraud.

Sometimes they call it "election irregularities" or "shenanigans," but the issue has become a calling card for a party whose voters by and large falsely think elections in the U.S. are tainted.

Which is what makes a currently blossoming election conspiracy so strange: The far right is now running a disinformation campaign against one of the best tools that states have to detect and prevent voter fraud.

And experts worry voting policy is already starting to suffer as a result.

A data-sharing revolution
The tool is a shared database called the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC for short. It allows states to securely share voter registration data across state lines and with a number of other government agencies, like the Social Security Administration and departments of motor vehicles.

That data-sharing allows participating states to expand ballot access by giving officials information that helps them reach out to eligible voters who have moved into the jurisdiction but have not yet registered to vote. But it also increases election security by notifying those same officials when a registered voter moves away or dies, allowing states to maintain more accurate voter rolls.

Article continues after sponsor message

"When you move away from a state, you don't call your old state and say, 'Please take me off the voter lists,' " said David Becker, an elections expert and former Justice Department attorney who led the development of ERIC while working at the Pew Charitable Trusts. "So to get really strong data that someone moved to another state — got a driver's license there or maybe registered to vote — that's really powerful information that allows states to keep their data up to date."

The Toll Of Conspiracy Theories: A Voting Security Expert Lives In Hiding
ELECTIONS
The Toll Of Conspiracy Theories: A Voting Security Expert Lives In Hiding
The decade-old program now includes more than 30 states spanning the political spectrum, from Republican-led places like Alabama and South Carolina to more liberal states like Connecticut and Oregon. And it's helped states remove more than 500,000 dead people from voter rolls since its founding, according to a tracker on the partnership website.

But that bipartisan unity is being tested, as some pockets of conservative media have ignited a pressure campaign against ERIC.

'Cutting their nose to spite their face'
On Jan. 20, the far-right blog The Gateway Pundit published the first of a number of articles about the program, falsely implying it is part of a left-wing election conspiracy.

Seven days later, Louisiana withdrew its membership, becoming the first state since ERIC's founding to do so.

Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin announced the move quietly in a press release, citing "concerns raised by citizens, government watchdog organizations and media reports."

His office declined an interview request from NPR, but a member of Ardoin's staff said the secretary is still in touch with ERIC staff "to better understand the mechanics of ERIC" despite having "serious reservations."

Other Republican election officials told NPR the far-right misinformation campaign is reverberating in their states, too.

"We have had a number of emails from some very ill-informed, uninformed or uneducated people," said Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, a Republican.

Merrill is a supporter of former President Donald Trump, but also of ERIC. He's not running for reelection this fall, however, and at least one Republican candidate to replace Merrill has announced he would withdraw the state from ERIC should he be elected.

That far-right pushback has been somewhat frustrating to Merrill, who noted the system provides the only way states have to accurately check whether someone has illegally cast a ballot in the same election in two states.

"It helps identify duplicate registrations," Merrill said. "It helps identify dual participation in elections. That's a concern [and] there's no other way that any state in the union can do that independently of ERIC."

Here's where election-denying candidates are running to control voting
ELECTIONS
Here's where election-denying candidates are running to control voting
So why is this system being targeted then?

Becker, who now runs the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, says it's because election deniers don't actually want voting to be more secure or efficient. It's the same reason, he says, they often oppose ballot drop boxes even though they are considered a more secure way to return mail ballots than using the Postal Service.

"They don't care about actual integrity," Becker said. "They only care that their side wins. That is the most anti-democratic idea that I can imagine."

In a Twitter thread posted shortly after Louisiana's decision, Becker noted that since the state joined ERIC in 2014, the program has identified more than 16,000 dead people on Louisiana's voting lists and more than 54,000 people who have moved out of the state. But by choosing to leave, the state will no longer have access to that data.

"If a state leaves ERIC, what they're doing is cutting their nose to spite their face," Becker said. "They're handcuffing their ability to keep their lists accurate."

[G M]

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/01/cleaning-voter-rolls-soros-founded-funded-eric-now-used-31-states/

https://www.npr.org/2022/02/09/1076529761/right-wing-conspiracies-have-a-new-target-a-tool-that-fights-actual-voter-fraud?fbclid=IwAR1HQgECeXJ89NgmnmObp4wYUgN571FH4v3e1tAbCm2eR4EJqma8hPQrsYw

Right-wing conspiracies have a new target: a tool that fights actual voter fraud
February 9, 20225:00 AM ET
Miles Parks
MILES PARKS

Twitter

A Trump supporter holds up a "no voter fraud" sign in Arizona in 2020. The accelerating far-right disinformation campaign about a national voter-verification system is taking its toll.
Courtney Pedroza/Getty Images
If Republicans over the past few years have made one thing clear, it's that they really care about voter fraud.

Sometimes they call it "election irregularities" or "shenanigans," but the issue has become a calling card for a party whose voters by and large falsely think elections in the U.S. are tainted.

Which is what makes a currently blossoming election conspiracy so strange: The far right is now running a disinformation campaign against one of the best tools that states have to detect and prevent voter fraud.

And experts worry voting policy is already starting to suffer as a result.

A data-sharing revolution
The tool is a shared database called the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC for short. It allows states to securely share voter registration data across state lines and with a number of other government agencies, like the Social Security Administration and departments of motor vehicles.

That data-sharing allows participating states to expand ballot access by giving officials information that helps them reach out to eligible voters who have moved into the jurisdiction but have not yet registered to vote. But it also increases election security by notifying those same officials when a registered voter moves away or dies, allowing states to maintain more accurate voter rolls.

Article continues after sponsor message

"When you move away from a state, you don't call your old state and say, 'Please take me off the voter lists,' " said David Becker, an elections expert and former Justice Department attorney who led the development of ERIC while working at the Pew Charitable Trusts. "So to get really strong data that someone moved to another state — got a driver's license there or maybe registered to vote — that's really powerful information that allows states to keep their data up to date."

The Toll Of Conspiracy Theories: A Voting Security Expert Lives In Hiding
ELECTIONS
The Toll Of Conspiracy Theories: A Voting Security Expert Lives In Hiding
The decade-old program now includes more than 30 states spanning the political spectrum, from Republican-led places like Alabama and South Carolina to more liberal states like Connecticut and Oregon. And it's helped states remove more than 500,000 dead people from voter rolls since its founding, according to a tracker on the partnership website.

But that bipartisan unity is being tested, as some pockets of conservative media have ignited a pressure campaign against ERIC.

'Cutting their nose to spite their face'
On Jan. 20, the far-right blog The Gateway Pundit published the first of a number of articles about the program, falsely implying it is part of a left-wing election conspiracy.

Seven days later, Louisiana withdrew its membership, becoming the first state since ERIC's founding to do so.

Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin announced the move quietly in a press release, citing "concerns raised by citizens, government watchdog organizations and media reports."

His office declined an interview request from NPR, but a member of Ardoin's staff said the secretary is still in touch with ERIC staff "to better understand the mechanics of ERIC" despite having "serious reservations."

Other Republican election officials told NPR the far-right misinformation campaign is reverberating in their states, too.

"We have had a number of emails from some very ill-informed, uninformed or uneducated people," said Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, a Republican.

Merrill is a supporter of former President Donald Trump, but also of ERIC. He's not running for reelection this fall, however, and at least one Republican candidate to replace Merrill has announced he would withdraw the state from ERIC should he be elected.

That far-right pushback has been somewhat frustrating to Merrill, who noted the system provides the only way states have to accurately check whether someone has illegally cast a ballot in the same election in two states.

"It helps identify duplicate registrations," Merrill said. "It helps identify dual participation in elections. That's a concern [and] there's no other way that any state in the union can do that independently of ERIC."

Here's where election-denying candidates are running to control voting
ELECTIONS
Here's where election-denying candidates are running to control voting
So why is this system being targeted then?

Becker, who now runs the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, says it's because election deniers don't actually want voting to be more secure or efficient. It's the same reason, he says, they often oppose ballot drop boxes even though they are considered a more secure way to return mail ballots than using the Postal Service.

"They don't care about actual integrity," Becker said. "They only care that their side wins. That is the most anti-democratic idea that I can imagine."

In a Twitter thread posted shortly after Louisiana's decision, Becker noted that since the state joined ERIC in 2014, the program has identified more than 16,000 dead people on Louisiana's voting lists and more than 54,000 people who have moved out of the state. But by choosing to leave, the state will no longer have access to that data.

"If a state leaves ERIC, what they're doing is cutting their nose to spite their face," Becker said. "They're handcuffing their ability to keep their lists accurate."

[Crafty_Dog]

Very helpful!

[Crafty_Dog]

Biden Administration Urges Court Not to Allow Release of ‘Secret Report’ on Dominion Voting Machines
By Zachary Stieber February 12, 2022 Updated: February 12, 2022biggersmaller Print
Top officials at a U.S. federal cybersecurity agency are urging a judge not to authorize at this time the release of a report that analyzes Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Georgia, arguing doing so could assist hackers trying to “undermine election security.”

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was recently provided an unredacted copy of the report, which was prepared by J. Alex Halderman, director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society.

The report discusses “potential vulnerabilities in Dominion ImageCast X ballot marking devices,” or electronic voting devices, according to the government.

While CISA supports public disclosure of any vulnerabilities and associated mitigation measures with election equipment, allowing the release of the report at this point “increases the risk that malicious actors may be able to exploit any vulnerabilities and threaten election security,” government lawyers said in a Feb. 10 filing in the case.

The case was brought in 2017 by good-government groups and voters who say the lack of paper ballots undermines the voting process.

U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg, an Obama nominee overseeing the case, was urged by CISA to reject attempts to release a redacted version of Halderman’s report for now.

CISA officials want to review the information in the report and help Dominion resolve the vulnerabilities identified before the report is released. They said they weren’t able to provide a date by which they’ll be finished.

Totenberg must weigh the request against the wishes of Georgia Secretary State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican and one of the defendants, who called in late January for the release to happen immediately.

John Poulos, Dominion’s CEO and president, said in a statement released by Raffensperger’s office that Halderman’s review lacked “a holistic approach,” adding that Dominion “supports all efforts to bring real facts and evidence forward to defend the integrity of our machines and the credibility of Georgia’s elections.”

Plaintiffs, including the Coalition for Good Governance, also support the release of the report, David Cross, one of their lawyers, confirmed to The Epoch Times.

The plaintiffs said in a filing before a copy was sent to CISA that the agency should get a copy and begin its evaluation process, but that the evaluation “should not unreasonably delay the public disclosure of the report, which must be promptly disclosed to Georgia state and county election officials, and filed on the public docket, so that public officials can secure the upcoming May primary elections.”

They asked Totenberg to order them to file a redacted version of the report on the docket, which would make it accessible to the public, no later than March 4.

[Crafty_Dog]

It is POTP so predictable snark and smears are part of the story:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/18/authentix-fraud-proof-ballots-finchem-arizona/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F361539a%2F620fd1e19d2fda34e7996f0c%2F61cdf026ae7e8a4ac205b2b3%2F14%2F72%2F620fd1e19d2fda34e7996f0c

[DougMacG]

From a political cartoon:

Cincinnati Bengals just received a late, mail-in touchdown and are now Super Bowl champions!

Sorry L.A. Rams.  Better luck next time!

[DougMacG]

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/maricopa-countys-200k-mail-ballots-mismatched-signatures-not-cured-2020

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/mar/1/election-report-finds-facebook-moguls-zuck-bucks-b/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=lIMpr9X9grZr92%2FII8EM6BRx6kiTiUoiQMudkFsPHlW0InGkxXLXYFr5XavHtMMe&bt_ts=1646228121651

[ccp]

Zucker Bezos
Schmidt
the google boys
cook and the msft people gates et al

are American oligarchs

we should take their yachts and freeze their personal accounts

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/mar/2/wisconsin-probe-finds-2020-election-riddled-nursin/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=zCdF5vifK6lJBDV51E7hNnZ6TvVj6ygdmkMXW36aUQ6lVleOcOideFG50yOrkPBt&bt_ts=1646263403811

[ccp]

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/mar/2/wisconsin-probe-finds-2020-election-riddled-nursin/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=zCdF5vifK6lJBDV51E7hNnZ6TvVj6ygdmkMXW36aUQ6lVleOcOideFG50yOrkPBt&bt_ts=1646263403811

as a voter who used to go to 5 nursing homes in NJ
I can tell you now the aids there are not Republicans

I would have been more shocked if the Democrooks were NOT doing this.
They have their people who work inside the home just print out lists of residents
and make sure they pick up any that did not vote
I am not sure how they might necessarily know which ones did not vote
family members could be bringing in mail in ballots for some
perhaps they pick the residents who get no or few visitors

[Crafty_Dog]

ET
Wisconsin Special Counsel Alleges Massive Misconduct in 2020 Election
By Steven Kovac March 4, 2022 Updated: March 6, 2022biggersmaller Print
Special Counsel Michael Gableman says in a 136-page interim report that he has uncovered numerous instances of alleged lawbreaking in Wisconsin in the 2020 election.

The former justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court was hired last summer by the Republican Speaker of the State Assembly, Robin Vos, to investigate suspected election fraud during the 2020 presidential election.

In the report released March 1, Gableman wrote that his investigation uncovered instances of numerous mentally incompetent nursing home residents, non-citizens, and ineligible felons casting votes.

He cited the use by municipal and county clerks of unstaffed absentee ballot drop-boxes, in violation of state law.

Laws were also allegedly violated when the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) allegedly exceeded its authority by ordering local election officials to disregard state statutes that regulate absentee voting.

The Special Counsel raised concerns that private money influenced municipal officials in the state’s five largest cities to “disfavor” many of their own citizens, as well as the vast majority of state residents, by spending millions of dollars of grant money on voter registration drives, absentee voter efforts, and Get-Out-The-Vote campaigns designed to serve certain favored, and specifically targeted, racial groups, in violation of the equal protection clauses of the state and federal constitution.

Wisconsin Continues Counting Ballots Through The Night Amid Close Election
Claire Woodall-Vogg, executive director of the Milwaukee election commission, collects the count from absentee ballots in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Nov. 4, 2020. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Gableman offered a list of suggested reforms designed to restore public confidence in Wisconsin elections.

Among Gableman’s recommendations was a call to abolish the WEC, prohibit outside money and personnel from participating in election administration, and improved training to better acquaint local election officials with their powers, duties, and rights.

He also laid out the legal rationale for decertifying the state’s 10 electors who voted for Democrat Joe Biden.

Biden was declared the winner of Wisconsin’s popular vote by six-tenths of one percent, or 20,000 votes.

Relying on the common law principle that fraud or illegality invalidate results under an illegal or fraudulent process, Gableman asserted that the state legislature had the constitutional plenary power to decertify the results of the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin because state laws were broken.

Democrat Governor Tony Evers released a statement the day the Special Counsel’s Report came out, saying: “This circus has long surpassed being a mere embarrassment to our state … Every day this effort continues, it is an increasingly dangerous and ongoing threat to our democracy.”

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, who has sued to block, or curtail, subpoenas issued by the Office of the Special Counsel (OSC), said in a March 1 statement that Gableman’s report was a “full-throated attack on democracy” and an attempt to “overturn the will of the voters.”

Kaul said that Republican state legislators “have an obligation to our democracy to condemn, and end, this preposterous fake investigation.”

The OSC report detailed instances of what it called “obstruction” on the part of some state officials and private interest groups, which have filed nine lawsuits against the OSC and snowed it under with what it calls “dilatory,” “frivolous,” and “voluminous” public information requests.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers holds a press conference in Madison,
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers speaks in Madison, Wis., on Feb. 6, 2020. (Steve Apps/Wisconsin State Journal via AP)
Gableman alleges in his report that Democrat political operatives, paid for by grants from the Zuckerberg-funded non-profit Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), all but took over administration of the 2020 election in five of Wisconsin’s largest cities.

According to OSC’s report, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged in the spring and summer of 2020, CTCL donated nearly $8.8 million to county clerks and municipal election administrators throughout Wisconsin.

The stated purpose of the grant funding was to help ensure that communities had enough money to be able to conduct elections in accordance with public health safety guidelines.

Five of Wisconsin’s largest cities—Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Racine, and Kenosha—received a total of $6.3 million in grant funding, ostensibly to purchase PPE and other health-related equipment, such as plexiglass barriers and hand-sanitizer.

The grants were conditioned on the five cities agreeing to guidelines of the Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan (WSVP).

Gableman alleged that WSVP was little more than a partisan campaign program designed to maximize voter registration and turnout in heavily minority-populated precincts.

The report states that the Wisconsin Elections Commission supported the WSVP Get-Out-The-Vote program, an action Gableman asserts is not part of the agency’s mission.

How Did the Five Cities Spend the Grant Money?
The cities used grant funds to pay for curbside voting tents, mobile polling places operated out of trucks, and for a drive-thru voting window at one city hall.

The cities spent grant money on voter education, a multi-media advertising and phone blitz, geo-fencing (a computer technique used to pin-point particular areas of geographic and demographic interest) and they paid for personnel called “voter navigators” (also known as ballot harvesters), whose job was to shepherd a prospective voter through the process of voting.

The municipalities purchased and installed in strategic locations, unstaffed absentee ballot drop-boxes in violation of Wisconsin law.

The OSC report presented data showing that the city of Green Bay spent eight-tenths of one percent of its $1 million in grant funding on PPE and health equipment.

Green Bay spent $50,000 for ballot drop-boxes and purchased a couple of new Ford trucks. The city paid a public relations firm $150,ooo for a voter outreach campaign.

The public relations campaigns in each city zeroed in on preferred racial groups, which, coincidentally matched the demographic profile of Biden voters, according to the OSC report.

The report said the cities’ actions were discriminatory and “disfavored” city and state residents who did not fit the targeted profile, raising issues of unequal treatment under the law.

CTCL and other private workers, called “grant mentors,” along with many volunteers, worked for weeks assisting city election officials and county clerks in conducting the 2020 presidential election.

What kind of assistance did the CTCL-supplied workers provide?

According to the OSC report, representatives of private organizations participated in much of the planning and administration of the election.

Tasks they performed included, curing defective mail-in ballots, challenging voted ballots, verifying photo ID, setting up voting equipment and vote counting centers, training volunteers, and writing instructions controlling the activities of count observers

Workers provided by private organizations assigned inspectors for polling places and vote counting centers, transported ballots to city hall and counting centers, issued a purchase order, made decisions whether or not to accept ballots after 8 p.m. on Election Day, participated in the counting of ballots, and set up wireless digital networks in polling places, clerks’ offices, and other buildings, according to the report.

The OSC report stated that local election officials, made beholden to private organizations by grant funding, could be susceptible to leverage pressuring them to do things in violation of their oath of office.

Other Alleged Offenses and Abuses by State and Local Election Officials
The special counsel alleged that rampant fraud and abuse occurred statewide in many of Wisconsin’s 6,875 nursing homes (housing 92,000 residents) during the 2020 election.

When visited by OSC investigators, many nursing home residents who are on record as having voted absentee in the election, were unaware of their surroundings, what year it was, or to whom they were speaking.

Some nursing home residents who purportedly voted had been adjudicated by a court to be mentally incompetent and whose voting rights had been taken away.

Wisconsin election laws require that a nursing home resident desiring to vote absentee must be visited by a Special Voting Deputy (SVD) designated by the local clerks or election boards to assist the resident and supervise the application and voting process.

Under the statute, only the resident’s immediate family, or an SVD, can have any contact with the ballots. They are never to be mailed.

Epoch Times Photo
Meagan Wolfe, the head of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, speaks during a virtual press conference on Nov. 4, 2020. (Wisconsin Elections Commission via Reuters)
In June 2020, for reasons of public health, the Wisconsin Elections Commission directed all clerks to handle nursing home voting according to the rules governing ordinary mail-in voting, thereby disrupting the strictly limited chain of custody of residents’ ballots—a direct violation of Wisconsin law.

The result was thousands of application forms, ballot envelopes, and ballots were illegally handled by nursing home employees, according to the report.

The report alleges nursing home administrators and staff members illegally assisted residents in marking their ballots. Some family members have reported suspected cases of staff forging the voter’s signature.

According to the OSC, the result was an “improbably high” voting rate, with many nursing homes reporting that 100 percent of their residents voted in the 2020 election.

Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe said in a statement: “The integrity of the November 2020 election, and of the WEC, has been shown time, and time again, through court cases and previous investigations.”

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the number of nursing homes in Wisconsin. The correct number is 6,875 nursing homes. The Epoch Times regrets the error.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.theepochtimes.com/10000-uncounted-ballots-found-in-texas-county-officials_4323984.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-03-09&utm_medium=email&est=YNf6CEnPCTmJEpgf3yVfP1Axmt6nVyMKg%2Bt1i7HExgInXgNiL4nFOmZZKi4hRVt6QGgM

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.theepochtimes.com/wisconsin-assembly-speaker-rejects-calls-to-decertify-2020-election_4344147.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-03-17-3&utm_medium=email&est=HYqtM%2BrFgn01CFiO4WwWZh%2BohwVdMpOXwnAbO%2FwoSP8bJhIP8oq6QnOhGhSW2XGXdjBM

[DougMacG]

https://www.theepochtimes.com/wisconsin-assembly-speaker-rejects-calls-to-decertify-2020-election_4344147.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-03-17-3&utm_medium=email&est=HYqtM%2BrFgn01CFiO4WwWZh%2BohwVdMpOXwnAbO%2FwoSP8bJhIP8oq6QnOhGhSW2XGXdjBM

It's too late to go back in time but not too late to get it right for history and for next time.

[G M]

https://www.theepochtimes.com/wisconsin-assembly-speaker-rejects-calls-to-decertify-2020-election_4344147.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-03-17-3&utm_medium=email&est=HYqtM%2BrFgn01CFiO4WwWZh%2BohwVdMpOXwnAbO%2FwoSP8bJhIP8oq6QnOhGhSW2XGXdjBM

It's too late to go back in time but not too late to get it right for history and for next time.

The constitution is quite clear, if someone steals the election, no givebacks!

[Crafty_Dog]

US Elections Officials, Workers Call for More Protection
By John Haughey March 16, 2022 Updated: March 17, 2022biggersmaller Print

Three-quarters of local elections officials and staff workers who responded to a nationwide survey say the federal government isn’t doing enough to support their needs or protect them from a rising tide of threats since the 2020 elections.

That perceived lack of support and fears of “false political attacks on the election system” is why at least 20 percent of locally elected elections officials and professional staff plan to leave their posts before the 2024 election, according to a survey released this month by the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

The center canvassed 596 of roughly 9,250 local election officials nationwide between late January and mid-February.

Of those who responded, 71 percent said the federal government must do more than create a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) task force to investigate threats against local election officials to protect them; 42 percent said they weren’t aware the task force even existed.

Half the respondents said their states must do more to boost election worker security, and about a quarter said local governments, counties specifically, must also step up protections for elections officials and staff.

About 20 percent of survey respondents said they’re “very unlikely” or “somewhat unlikely” to continue serving through 2024, citing political attacks on the system, stress, and retirement plans as primary reasons for leaving sooner than previously planned.

Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections (FSASE) President Wesley Wilcox says the 20 percent attrition forecast may be conservative.

In Florida, the state’s 67 county elections supervisors are elected every four years. While most who are currently serving were elected in 2020, Wilcox said, one has resigned already and others have made it “crystal clear” they won’t seek reelection in 2024.

“As soon as we get past the midterms, I think we will see a flood of others” resigning or opting not to seek reelection, he said.

“I would not be shocked to see 25 percent” attrition, not only among elected supervisors, Wilcox said, but among administrative workers at county elections offices.

“When you think about it, this is the front-line staff that unfortunately takes a public beating” as nonpartisan bystanders in the crossfire of heated post-2020 election politics, he said.

While 30 percent of survey respondents who plan to leave their positions cited “stress associated with the job” as the primary motivator, another 29 percent said they were retiring as planned.

“Some of this attrition is retirement. Some have been there for a long time and it is just time for them to go,” Election Center Executive Director Tim Mattice said on March 17, agreeing with the Brennan Center’s 20 percent attrition forecast.

Epoch Times Photo
A file photo shows election workers processing ballots (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
The “incredible experience in running an election—a presidential election, no less—during a pandemic” was demanding and exhausting for elections workers, but “additional pressures” have mounted since 2020, he said.

The 2020 election was “something they had never experienced before. That certainly would be a motivator for some folks to say, ‘Hey, maybe it’s time for me to step aside,’” Mattice said.

“It’s definitely been a different type of environment” since 2020.

The Elections Center is operated by the National Association of Elections Officers, based in Katy, Texas. The nonprofit, which represents more than 1,350 members in 44 states, has joined other groups in calling on federal and state governments to take threats against elected officials and administrative professionals seriously.

The National Association of State Election Directors, which represents state elections officials and staff in all 50 states from its Washington, D.C., headquarters, maintains that election officials “will persevere and will continue to administer fair elections in 2022,” amid an “unacceptable” wave of “threats, harassment and intimidation” directed at elections workers “for doing their jobs.”

Epoch Times Photo
Election workers count ballots in Philadelphia, on Nov. 4, 2020. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The Election Official Legal Defense Network, operated by the Washington-based Center for Election Innovation and Research, is providing pro-bono legal help to election workers and calling for more state and federal prosecutors dedicated to addressing what it calls “domestic terrorism.”

They point to a 2022 measure adopted by Oregon legislators that makes it a crime to harass an election official, punishable by up to a year in jail and a possible $6,250 fine, as an example of legislation that other states should replicate.

Lawmakers in at least eight states have introduced bills during 2022 to better protect election workers and more harshly punish offenders, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Wilcox said local elections workers need federal protections because threats are rarely from local constituents.

“We in Florida, we get people from Illinois or Missouri who have heard something, call attempting to berate us. We are having challenges there,” he said.

“I don’t know what you could do. We need to sit down and have some serious conversations about what are some good measures to put in place to ensure not only the physical and mental safety of our elections officials and personnel but also the safety of our democracy.”

The attacks get personal, Wilcox said.

“There needs to be a better way, or at least a more punitive way, to get people who are just maliciously fabricating stories and stuff,” he said.

“Right now, as an elected official, you can virtually say anything you want about me without any repercussions,” unless “there is an explicit threat of violence.”

Mattice said there will be high turnover between now and the 2024 elections, but there will be no shortage of elected officials and administrative workers to conduct local elections.

“We also know that for the number of people who are leaving, the local jurisdictions will fill these positions with new people coming in,” he said. “You hope there is a transition period where the folks with all the knowledge can share” their institutional insights with those taking their places.

Wilcox worries about the motivations of those who are running for some Florida county elections supervisor seats in upcoming elections, predicting the state soon may have “for lack of a better word, a new crop of supervisors” who are more partisan than their predecessors.

Mattice said there’s a distinction between employees in county election offices and those who serve, often in volunteer capacities, as poll-watchers during elections.

Most elections workers “try very hard to be nonpartisan” and are committed professionals “not looking at party, but at putting out a fair, equitable process that people can have trust in,” he said.

“Elections officials across the country work long hours and take a lot of abuse and don’t get paid a lot,” Mattice said. “We hope the people who are coming in are coming in for the right reasons. They are the gatekeepers of our democracy.”

[Crafty_Dog]

Indiana Governor Signs Bill Mandating Paper Backup for All Voting Machines
By Jack Phillips March 20, 2022 Updated: March 20, 2022biggersmaller Print
Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb has signed legislation that requires all counties using certain voting machines to leave a paper trail before the 2024 presidential election.

The new state law, HEA 1116, requires Indiana counties that use electronic voting machines to install “voter-verifiable paper audit trails”—a backup system that allows people to check their votes on a paper printout before confirming their votes, before the 2024 election.

It also “provides that, after July 1, 2022, a county must meet certain requirements when using any direct record electronic voting system that does not include a voter-verifiable paper audit trail for an election,” according to the legislation.

The measure also “specifies requirements of a statement that must be printed on the envelope of an absentee ballot application” and stipulates that voters will now have to provide a driver’s license number, state identification number, or the last four digits of their Social Security number when they submit an electronic request for an absentee ballot.

It will also require counties to have an electronic poll book that has the “capacity to transmit certain information that a voter cast a provisional ballot,” an outline of the measure reads. The new law also extends a cybersecurity contract between Indiana counties and the Indiana Secretary of State’s Office until 2028.

Most of Indiana’s counties use machines made by MicroVote, Election Systems & Software, Hart InterCivic, and Unisyn, according to the Indiana government’s website. Barbara Tully, of Indiana Vote by Mail, said during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Feb. 24 that 59 of Indiana’s 92 counties use MicroVote.

Holcomb, a Republican, signed the measure on March 15, while Indiana Secretary of State Holli Sullivan later praised the move.

“It also allows me and the Secretary of State’s office to better partner with our county election administrators to do post-election recounts, if needed, as well as post-election audits,” Sullivan, a Republican, said in a statement to local media outlets.

Sullivan said she believes electronic voting machines with paper ballot backups are the “perfect blend,” adding that it allows for “quick results and the ability to do a recount that is very reliable and fast.”

The state will now provide funding by July 1 to every county that needs paper backup systems.

The new law will also allow the secretary of state to “determine the number of elections that are subject to a post-election audit,” changing the term “risk-limiting audit” to “post-election audit,” and other measures, according to the outline of the legislation.

[DougMacG]

This is a good start.  Stop the cheating where we can and set the standard for clean elections for all the rest to see.

We think of Indiana as a red state but it went for Obama in 2008:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_presidential_election_in_Indiana

[Crafty_Dog]

Judge Strikes Down Election Integrity Laws in Arkansas as Unconstitutional
By Matthew Vadum March 20, 2022 Updated: March 21, 2022biggersmaller Print
An often-reversed Arkansas judge struck down four new election integrity laws approved by the Republican-controlled state legislature, finding the statutes unconstitutional—but an appeal to the state’s supreme court seems imminent.

Pulaski County Circuit Judge Wendell Griffen permanently enjoined the laws—Acts 249, 728, 736, and 973—on March 18 after a four-day trial. The statutes came as part of a nationwide wave of new state-level election laws that followed irregularities during the 2020 presidential election.

In court, Griffen reportedly said the defendants, including Arkansas Secretary of State John Thurston, a Republican, hadn’t demonstrated a need for the laws and that the state’s fears about election integrity were “based entirely on conjecture and speculation,” which “cannot be permitted to supply the place of proof.” Griffen said he would issue a detailed order at a later date.

The lawsuit was initiated by the League of Women Voters of Arkansas (LWVAR), Arkansas United, and five voters. They claimed the statutes disproportionately harmed voters of color.

LWVAR president Bonnie Miller said on social media that she was pleased with the court decision.

“We’re celebrating this victory for democracy and are confident that justice will continue to prevail despite the attorney general’s inevitable appeal.”

Andrew Collins, a Democrat who is a member of the Arkansas House of Representatives, also reacted favorably to the ruling.

“Each of these laws, passed amidst a flood of misinformation, represents a counterproductive ‘solution’ in search of a problem,” Collins wrote on Twitter. “Meaningful election security is important, but these laws aren’t necessary to achieve it, and they make it harder for people to vote legitimately.”

Act 249 dealt with how provisional ballots are counted. Act 728, which came in response to complaints about groups giving food and water to voters, prohibited individuals from being within 100 feet of a polling place unless they are entering or leaving the facility. Act 736, a measure aimed at ballot harvesting, stated that the possession by an individual of more than four absentee ballots “creates a rebuttable presumption of intent to defraud.” Act 973 reduced the timeframe for voters to ask for absentee ballots.

State Sen. Kim Hammer, a Republican who supported the reforms, told CNN last year that the new laws were about “protecting the integrity of the vote.”

“These were taken from real examples that happened here in the state,” he said, adding that lawmakers had worked with local election officials in writing the legislation.

State leaders who support the election integrity measures were disappointed by the ruling.

“States should be left with the flexibility to protect the integrity of the ballot box and the [Arkansas] Supreme Court will have the opportunity to review the constitutionality of these laws,” Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, told reporters.

An aide to Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge said Rutledge would review the court decision and decide what to do next.

“The Attorney General is committed to fighting for the integrity of elections in the state of Arkansas,” spokeswoman Stephanie Sharp said in a statement.

Griffen, known for his left-wing activism, is a controversial figure in Arkansas. Some Republican state lawmakers advocate impeaching and removing him as a judge. Compared by some to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, former President Barack Obama’s pastor whose fiery sermons blasted the United States as an inherently racist country, Griffen is also a Baptist preacher known for wearing an African dashiki when delivering sermons, as Wright did.

Griffen was barred from hearing cases that could lead to the death penalty after he attended an anti-capital punishment protest outside the governor’s mansion in 2017 while strapped to a cot as if he were about to be executed by lethal injection. The protest came the same day as he issued a ruling blocking the state’s execution schedule.

Griffen also denounced President-elect Donald Trump days after his election in November 2016.

“White nationalism and white male supremacy never left this country,” Griffen said, according to Arkansas Money and Politics. It is a “fallacy … that somehow the nation had moved on beyond the hatefulness, the fearfulness, the misogyny.”

Matthew Vadum
Matthew Vadum
CONTRIBUTOR

[Crafty_Dog]

Two wins for election transparency

Cleaning up voter rolls so dead can’t vote and elections can’t be stolen

By J. Christian Adams

After 2020, election integrity is all the rage. That is a welcome change, but election integrity involves grunt work. The grunt work is more important than snazzy lawsuits that lose. Two landmark court decisions in the last week represent real progress toward cleaner elections.

Federal courts in Maine and Illinois handed down two rulings to make elections more transparent. This is important because so much of the 2020 election was shrouded in bureaucratic defensiveness, outright secrecy and just enough hide-the-ball to raise doubts about the outcome.

First Illinois. In 2019, the Public Interest Legal Foundation — which I head — asked Illinois for a copy of state voter rolls.

Voter rolls are the ultimate record representing who state election officials think are eligible to vote. They are an essential election integrity document. Unfortunately, we have found rolls in other states filled with dead registrants, folks who live in other states and even voters registered up to seven times at a single address.

Of course, Illinois denied our request. After all, no election official likes to hear how badly they do voter list maintenance. Had we obtained the Illinois voter rolls in 2019, we would have added them to our nationwide database before the critical 2020 election to see who is registered in Illinois and other states at the same time.

When Illinois denied our request, we sued, alleging that the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 — often called Motor Voter — made rolls public. This month, the federal court agreed, granting us summary judgment that the rolls are public under Motor Voter. Things got so haywire in the Illinois election office during the litigation that the top election official resigned over allegations he was being extorted through an online app.

No doubt Illinois won’t look good after we get the rolls.

In other states, including Pennsylvania and Michigan, we found tens of thousands of active dead registrants, some dead for decades. Judith Presto was one of those dead voters in Pennsylvania. Our database showed she registered to vote after she died. Pennsylvania election officials argued in federal court that a post-death registration, like Presto’s, had to be an error in our data, not a mistake on their part. Ultimately, Presto’s husband was criminally charged, and our analysis was the only way Pennsylvania election officials knew about it — despite criticizing it in court.

Maine was the next big win this month. There, a federal court ruled in a similar case of ours that the voter rolls are also public under Motor Voter. Remaining to be decided in court is how much a state may punish and fine groups like ours for using the rolls to find mistakes and problems by election officials.

You read that right. Maine might give you the voter rolls but has a law that punishes and fines anyone who reports problems, such as voters registered multiple times or registered and voting in other states in addition to Maine.

This is how far some states will go to hide the bad job they do running elections.

These rulings are important because obtaining voter rolls is the first step to holding election officials accountable. So much energy and money were wasted after the 2020 election on baseless election litigation. Those cases hurt the cause.

Establishing that voter rolls are public records under federal law allows groups to conduct real research and careful nationwide analysis of where the problems are in our system and which election officials are dropping the ball.

Once we have Maine and Illinois voter rolls, they will be added to our nationwide database to reveal how many problems are on the rolls. Those results go back to election officials to help them fix the problems.

All of this illustrates that avoiding another 2020 election doesn’t enjoy a silver bullet solution. Election integrity is grunt work and requires careful judgment. Most of all, it would sure help if election officials stopped hiding their work.

J. Christian Adams is president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, former Justice Department lawyer and commissioner on the United States Commission on Civil Rights

[G M]

Why would election officials hide things if everything was lawful and legitimate?

Two wins for election transparency

Cleaning up voter rolls so dead can’t vote and elections can’t be stolen

By J. Christian Adams

After 2020, election integrity is all the rage. That is a welcome change, but election integrity involves grunt work. The grunt work is more important than snazzy lawsuits that lose. Two landmark court decisions in the last week represent real progress toward cleaner elections.

Federal courts in Maine and Illinois handed down two rulings to make elections more transparent. This is important because so much of the 2020 election was shrouded in bureaucratic defensiveness, outright secrecy and just enough hide-the-ball to raise doubts about the outcome.

First Illinois. In 2019, the Public Interest Legal Foundation — which I head — asked Illinois for a copy of state voter rolls.

Voter rolls are the ultimate record representing who state election officials think are eligible to vote. They are an essential election integrity document. Unfortunately, we have found rolls in other states filled with dead registrants, folks who live in other states and even voters registered up to seven times at a single address.

Of course, Illinois denied our request. After all, no election official likes to hear how badly they do voter list maintenance. Had we obtained the Illinois voter rolls in 2019, we would have added them to our nationwide database before the critical 2020 election to see who is registered in Illinois and other states at the same time.

When Illinois denied our request, we sued, alleging that the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 — often called Motor Voter — made rolls public. This month, the federal court agreed, granting us summary judgment that the rolls are public under Motor Voter. Things got so haywire in the Illinois election office during the litigation that the top election official resigned over allegations he was being extorted through an online app.

No doubt Illinois won’t look good after we get the rolls.

In other states, including Pennsylvania and Michigan, we found tens of thousands of active dead registrants, some dead for decades. Judith Presto was one of those dead voters in Pennsylvania. Our database showed she registered to vote after she died. Pennsylvania election officials argued in federal court that a post-death registration, like Presto’s, had to be an error in our data, not a mistake on their part. Ultimately, Presto’s husband was criminally charged, and our analysis was the only way Pennsylvania election officials knew about it — despite criticizing it in court.

Maine was the next big win this month. There, a federal court ruled in a similar case of ours that the voter rolls are also public under Motor Voter. Remaining to be decided in court is how much a state may punish and fine groups like ours for using the rolls to find mistakes and problems by election officials.

You read that right. Maine might give you the voter rolls but has a law that punishes and fines anyone who reports problems, such as voters registered multiple times or registered and voting in other states in addition to Maine.

This is how far some states will go to hide the bad job they do running elections.

These rulings are important because obtaining voter rolls is the first step to holding election officials accountable. So much energy and money were wasted after the 2020 election on baseless election litigation. Those cases hurt the cause.

Establishing that voter rolls are public records under federal law allows groups to conduct real research and careful nationwide analysis of where the problems are in our system and which election officials are dropping the ball.

Once we have Maine and Illinois voter rolls, they will be added to our nationwide database to reveal how many problems are on the rolls. Those results go back to election officials to help them fix the problems.

All of this illustrates that avoiding another 2020 election doesn’t enjoy a silver bullet solution. Election integrity is grunt work and requires careful judgment. Most of all, it would sure help if election officials stopped hiding their work.

J. Christian Adams is president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, former Justice Department lawyer and commissioner on the United States Commission on Civil Rights

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/23/debra-meadows-appears-have-filed-three-false-voter-forms/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3662eff%2F623b46093e6ed13ade36ae29%2F61cdf026ae7e8a4ac205b2b3%2F22%2F68%2F623b46093e6ed13ade36ae29