Explore:
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The Big Lie, Unraveling Day after Day, Year after Year
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Political Theater of the Big Lie
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How the Big Lie of “Election Integrity” Suppresses Voter Turnout
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Elements of the Right to Vote
“Now what about the rhetoric directed toward the Athenian people and the other peoples of free men in cities – what in the world is it, in our view?
Do the rhetoricians in your opinion always speak with a view to the best, aiming at this, that because of their speeches the citizens shall be as good as possible?
Or do these men too strive for gratifying the citizens and, for the sake of their own private interest, make light of the the common interest, and associate with the peoples as if with children, trying only to gratify them, and giving no heed to whether they will be better or worse because of these things?”
– Socrates, Plato’s Gorgias
The Big Lie, Unraveling Day after Day, Year after Year:
Wilkinson on GOP Voter Fraud Claims
Francis Wilkinson in Bloomberg: “[A]rguably the most pervasive evidence of the GOP assault on democracy remains the party’s multi-front war on the franchise. The House of Representatives passed a bill last week that makes noncitizen voting illegal and requires proof of citizenship to register to vote. Since noncitizen voting is already illegal, and the Senate is well aware of that fact, the legislation will not go far. It’s what’s known as a messaging bill. The message: Do not trust democracy.“
“GOP colleagues sneer at Rep. Good’s election complaints”
Rep. Bob Good‘s (R-Va.) efforts to sow doubts about the results of his too-close-to-call GOP primary are being met with eye rolls from many of his House Republican colleagues.
Why it matters: The House Freedom Caucus chair is tapping into a strain of election denialism common in Donald Trump’s Republican Party – but without the widespread GOP support Trump enjoyed.
- “No one is buying it, but all understand this is one of the several stages of electoral grief,” said one House Republican, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
- The GOP lawmaker added that Good’s assertion of election irregularities is “the reflexive thing people who can’t accept loss say these days.”…
- Former Rep. Denver Riggleman, a Republican-turned-independent who lost to Good in 2020, noted that McGuire and Good have both echoed Trump’s claims about the 2020 election.
- “I don’t find it surprising that an election between an election denier and an election denier would end with one of them denying the election was fair based on conspiracy theories,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/us/politics/chesebro-troupis-jan-6-messages.html
[Excerpt:]Just five days after Election Day in 2020, a conservative lawyer named Kenneth Chesebro emailed a former judge who was working for the Trump campaign in Wisconsin, James R. Troupis, pitching an idea for how to overturn the results.
Through litigation, Mr. Chesebro said, the Trump campaign could allege “various systemic abuses” and, with court proceedings pending, encourage legislatures to appoint “alternative” pro-Trump electors that could be certified instead of the Biden electors chosen by the voters.
“At minimum, with such a cloud of confusion, no votes from WI (and perhaps also MI and PA) should be counted, perhaps enough to throw the election to the House,” Mr. Chesebro wrote to Mr. Troupis, referring to the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Our Amicus Brief in United States v. Mackey: Lying About When, Where or How People Vote Violates Federal Law (18 USC 241) and Prosecution is Consistent with the First Amendment
Protect Democracy and the Yale Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic filed this Second Circuit amicus brief (with me as client and co-counsel) in United States v. Mackey. Mackey was convicted “under 18 U.S.C. § 241 for conspiring “to use Twitter to trick American citizens into thinking they could vote by text and stay at home on Election Day—thereby suppressing and injuring those citizens’ right to vote.” Gov’t Br. 2. Mackey has argued that section 241 does not cover such a scheme and that the law is facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment because it punishes too much protected speech.
In our brief, we explain that the statute, properly construed, both bars lies about when, where or how people vote intended to deprive people of their right to vote and that limiting section 241 to such empirically verifiable false speech assures that the law does not violate the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has already stated that the government “may prohibit messages intended to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures” consistent with the First Amendment. Minn. Voters All. v. Mansky, 138 S. Ct. 1876, 1889 n.4 (2018). Further, as explained in Protect Democracy’s blog post on the filing:
The primary question before the Second Circuit in Mackey’s appeal is whether the federal civil rights statute he was convicted under – which bans conspiring to “injure” any person in their exercise of federal rights – actually bars conspiracies to circulate false information about voting mechanisms and procedures. Professor Hasen’s amicus brief explains why intentionally false statements about voting mechanisms and procedures violate federal law, and why such speech can be punished without running afoul of the First Amendment’s protections.
In particular, to establish the applicability of Reconstruction-era civil rights protection to internet memes, the brief tracks the history of legal actions protecting the right to vote back to England in 1703. That history shows, among other things, a three-century-long recognition among judges that an intentional deprivation of the right to vote constitutes an “injury” for which the law provides a remedy. As a result, the brief argues, Mackey’s conduct clearly constituted a conspiracy to “injure” under long-recognized legal principles, even if the Reconstruction Congress would have had no idea what an internet meme is.
You can find the introduction to our brief below the fold, which relies heavily on common law tort principles protecting the right to vote and its explanation in the Restatement (2d) Torts section 865.
This case concerns the criminal conviction of Douglas Mackey under 18 U.S.C. § 241 for conspiring “to use Twitter to trick American citizens into thinking they could vote by text and stay at home on Election Day—thereby suppressing and injuring those citizens’ right to
vote.” Gov’t Br. 2. All parties agree that the government “may prohibit messages intended to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures” consistent with the First Amendment. Minn. Voters All. v. Mansky, 138 S. Ct. 1876, 1889 n.4 (2018). The primary legal questions before this Court are whether Section 241 prohibits such intentionally misleading statements and whether it does so without being substantially overbroad in violation of the Constitution.Section 241 properly construed does punish purposeful lies about when, where, or how people vote and is not overbroad. It prohibits, among other things, conspiracies to “injure . . . any person . . . in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” 18 U.S.C. § 241. Its prohibition on conspiracies to “injure” proscribes purposeful lies about the mechanics of voting in federal elections because that conduct inflicts an “injury” redressable under tort law dating back over three hundred years. See Restatement (Second) of Torts § 865 (Am. L. Inst. 1979); Restatement (First) of Torts § 865 (Am. L. Inst. 1939). Construing conspiracies to “injure” to encompass conspiracies to engage in conduct recognized as tortious at common law preserves Section 241’s important protection of the right to vote while avoiding the First Amendment overbreadth concerns that would arise from an open-ended reading of the statute to criminalize deceptive, but not tortious, political speech.
A unanimous Supreme Court in an opinion by Chief JusticeRehnquis t took just this approach in construing the almost contemporaneously enacted Enforcement Act of 1871. See Haddle v. Garrison, 525 U.S. 121, 124 (1998). The Haddle Court concluded that a plaintiff is “injured” under Section 2 of the 1871 Act when the plaintiff suffers “a compensable injury under tort law.” 525 U.S. at 126. In parallel fashion, Section 241’s proscription of conspiracies “to injure” someone in their exercise of a federal right extends to conspiracies to infringe the right to vote through knowing lies about “voting requirements and procedures,” Mansky, 138 S. Ct. at 1889 n.4, because intentional interference with the right to vote is a compensable injury under tort law.
Haddle’s conclusion that the injuries recognized by Section 2 of the Enforcement Act of 1871 are those cognizable under the common law of torts applies to Section 241, which derives in relevant part from Section 6 of the Enforcement Act of 1870. The same term used in two laws passed within a year of each other should be construed consistently, particularly where both laws addressed a common subject and sought a common objective—ending resistance to Reconstruction. Indeed, the Supreme Court recognizes the two statutes to be “close[] . . . analogue[s].” Griffin v. Breckenridge, 403 U.S. 88, 98 (1971).
Applying Haddle’s interpretation that a conspiracy to “injure” under Section 241 means a conspiracy to undertake conduct recognized as tortious at common law does not mean that every conspiracy to commit a tort violates Section 241. That would transgress the Supreme
Court’s instruction that Reconstruction laws should not be interpreted as “open-ended federal tort law applicable to all tortious, conspiratorial interferences with the rights of others.” Kush v. Rutledge, 460 U.S. 719, 725-26 (1983) (emphasis added) (cleaned up). Instead, Section 241 more narrowly prohibits conspiracies to commit a tort only when the tortious act is committed for the purpose of infringing a right protected by “the Constitution or laws of the United States.” 18 U.S.C. § 241; see United States v. Price, 383 U.S. 787, 800-01, 806 (1966).Private tortious conspiracies thus violate Section 241 only when they seek to (i) infringe a constitutional right secured against private actors, see, e.g., United States v. Kozminski, 487 U.S. 931, 940 (1988) (Thirteenth Amendment); United States v. Guest, 383 U.S. 745, 757-60 (1966) (right to travel), or (ii) infringe a right created by a federal law enforceable against private parties, Price, 383 U.S. at 798. For example, while the common law imposes liability for burglaries and muggings, a conspiracy to commit these torts is not punishable under Section 241 unless the tortious conduct is undertaken for the purpose of interfering with a federally protected right. See United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542, 549 (1875); cf. Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic, 506 U.S. 263, 278 (1993) (“A burglar does not violate the Fourth Amendment . . . nor does a mugger violate the Fourteenth.”).
Applying the Haddle definition of “injure” to Section 241 has three implications relevant to this appeal:
First, a conspiracy to deny the right to vote by intentionally misleading voters about voting mechanisms and procedures in a federal election constitutes a conspiracy “to injure” because the common law of torts has long recognized liability for interference with the right to vote.
One who undertakes a consciously wrongful act (including fraud) that (i) intentionally deprives another of the right to vote or (ii) seriously interferes with the right to vote inflicts a legally cognizable injury for which a remedy is available in tort. See Restatement (Second) of Torts
§ 865; Restatement (First) of Torts § 865.Second, construing conspiracies “to injure” within Section 241 to encompass conspiracies to commit this tort avoids constitutional conflict with the First Amendment. There is no First Amendment right to spread knowingly false information about voting mechanisms and procedures in a federal election with the intent to disenfranchise voters. See Mansky, 138 S. Ct. at 1889 n.4. Applying the Haddle definition also avoids any “substantial” overbreadth in the scope of Section 241 relative to its “plainly legitimate applications” as would be necessary to justify facial invalidation. Virginia v. Hicks, 539 U.S. 113, 120 (2003). The supposed potential for an explosion of prosecutions for protected speech that troubles Defendant Mackey and his amici is dispelled by the Haddle construction of “injure” because most of their proffered examples do not impose a harm cognizable under tort law and thus would not fall within the ambit of conspiracies to “injure” under Section 241.
Third, a conspiracy undertaken to deny the right to vote in a presidential election, as alleged here, violates Section 241 because thetortious conspiracy would infringe multiple federal rights securedagainst both private parties and state actors:
It violates the Article I, Section 2 right to vote for members of Congress, see Ex Parte Yarbrough, 110 U.S. 651, 663-64 (1884), because disseminating lies about the mechanics of voting to disenfranchise voters in a presidential election necessarily disenfranchises voters in simultaneous congressional elections;
It violates the “right[] and privilege[] . . . secured to citizens of the United States by the Constitution” for voters eligible under state law “to vote for presidential electors,” In re Quarles, 158U.S. 532, 535 (1895); and
It violates the federal right to engage in support or advocacy for presidential candidates free from injury guaranteed by 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3).
The Government correctly contends that Section 241 prohibits conspiracies to disseminate knowingly false information about the time,place, and manner of a presidential election to mislead voters. Enforcement of this prohibition is particularly needed given the ease with which false information can be spread today by bad actors, and the growing loss of confidence in the integrity of our elections. See generally Nathaniel Persily & Charles Stewart III, The Miracle and Tragedy of the 2020 U.S. Election, 32 J. Democracy 159 (2021).
“Scholars unmask Trump election lawyers’ use of falsified evidence”
Beadles’ reward wasn’t real. Nor was his purported evidence. But this stunt, and especially its use of irrelevant statistics to appear authoritative and smear elections, is common in Trump circles. A working paper by two Stanford University scholars, the Hoover Institution’s Justin Grimmer and the Democracy and Polarization Lab’s Abhinav Ramaswamy, underscores just how widespread these fabrications are. They are not just cooked up for propagandizing in the press. These bundles of bogus claims, erroneous assumptions, and alleged evidence — especially statistics like those cited by Beadles — were also centerpieces in scores of lawsuits to push judges to overturn the last presidential election. It was all hype, smoke and mirrors.
“Regardless of the reason why, every claim we analyze fails to provide evidence of illegality or fraud,” the scholars wrote near the start of their comprehensive 85-page paper. “We document that the supposed evidence of fraud that Trump relies upon is riddled with basic statistical misunderstandings and errors, confusion about how to use voter files or absentee voter history to analyze turnout and registration, and invented statistical techniques based on the impressions of what happens in a ‘normal’ election from ‘experts’ who never previously analyzed election data and provide no argument to justify their procedures. At no point did Trump or his allies present even remotely plausible evidence of consequential fraud or illegality.”
Updated Democracy Crisis in the Making Report
From States United, Protect Democracy and Law Forward:
As the 2024 election approaches, state legislatures continue to propose and enact laws that expose our election system to partisan disruption and manipulation. These laws ultimately increase the risk of subversion — that is, a declared outcome that does not reflect the true choice of the voters. They also abandon long-standing principles of nonpartisan election administration and instead allow for — or even encourage — dysfunction, misinformation, confusion, or manipulation by partisan actors.
Our organizations have been tracking this trend for three years, since the 2020 election. In that time, state legislatures have introduced more than 600 of these bills, and 62 have become law in 28 states. As we noted in our Report earlier this year, the 2022 elections were largely successful and free of serious subversion efforts. But we remain concerned that recently enacted laws could help precipitate a crisis — particularly in an election involving a candidate at the top of the ticket who has already attempted to subvert an election. At the very least, these laws will make it harder for professional election administrators, who already face a rise in unjustified suspicion and unprecedented levels of harassment, to do their jobs on behalf of our democracy.
This year-end update to our June 2023 Report reviews some of the major developments that we have seen this year. Some states warrant particular attention. In North Carolina, a legislative supermajority has engineered a host of changes in election oversight that could open the door to partisan interference, confusion at the polls, gridlock during the certification process, or doubt about the results, in addition to disinformation at each of those steps. In Texas, two laws enacted this year targeted the state’s most populous and diverse county, abolishing the county election office and empowering the state to take control over election procedures under flimsy pretexts and with partisan motives. In Wisconsin, some legislators, relying in part on baseless conspiracy theories, have repeatedly sought to remove the state’s top nonpartisan election official, so far without success….
[Boldface added]
Jenna Ellis Pleads Guilty in Georgia to 2020 Attempted Election Subversion
Attorney Jenna Ellis on Tuesday became the fourth defendant in the Fulton County election interference case to strike a deal with prosecutors.
In exchange for her cooperation, Ellis pleaded guilty to one count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings. The count stems from her testimony before a Georgia Senate subcommittee in late 2020. Along with co-defendants Rudy Giuliani and Ray Smith, Ellis “knowingly, willingly, and unlawfully” made false statements about election fraud in Georgia, according to her new charging document.
he plea agreement cites numerous false statements Ellis, Rudy Giuliani and Smith made during a Dec. 3, 2020, legislative hearing in Atlanta.
Among other things, they claimed at least 96,000 fraudulent absentee ballots were cast in the election, 2,506 felons voted, 66,248 underage voters cast ballots and 10,315 dead people voted. None of those claims were true — and Ellis acknowledged as much as part of her plea agreement.
Ellis also took the unusual step of addressing Fulton Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee, who is presiding over the case, from behind the defense table. With tears streaming down her face, Ellis said, “if I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Trump in these post-election challenges.”
“I look back on this experience with deep remorse,” she said.
Ellis told McAfee that she endeavored to represent Trump to the best of her ability. But in doing so, she relied on more senior attorneys “to provide me with true and reliable” information, particularly as she took on a more public role speaking before the media and state legislators.
“In the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges to the elections in several states, including Georgia, I failed to do my due diligence,” she said.
GOP state lawmaker arrested in Alabama on felony voter fraud charges
According to the sheriff’s records, Cole was booked Tuesday afternoon and released on bail amounting to $2,500. The charge is a Class C felony, meaning conviction could result in up to 10 years in prison.
Fact-Checking the Breadth of Trump’s Election Lies
The former president faces multiple charges related to his lies about the 2020 election. Here’s a look at some of his most repeated falsehoods.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/us/politics/trump-election-lies-fact-check
Governor Brian Kemp tells Trump Georgia’s 2020 election ‘was not stolen’
Republican says no one has produced evidence of fraud in court of law despite ex-president’s vow to present ‘irrefutable’ proof
Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, insisted on Tuesday that the 2020 presidential election in his state “was not stolen” in an apparent defense of the latest criminal indictment of Donald Trump.
Kemp, who has clashed frequently with the former president over his false claim the election was rigged, responded on Twitter to an earlier post on Truth Social from Trump announcing a press conference next week at which he promised to present “irrefutable” evidence of fraud.
“The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen. For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward – under oath – and prove anything in a court of law,” Kemp wrote in his tweet.
“Our elections in Georgia are secure, accessible, and fair and will continue to be as long as I am governor. The future of our country is at stake in 2024 and that must be our focus.”
DeSantis Finally Admits Trump’s Election Fraud Claims Are BS
The Trump Jan. 6 Indictment, Annotated
The Justice Department unveiled an indictment on Tuesday charging former President Donald J. Trump with four criminal counts. They relate to Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which culminated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters.
The New York Times annotated the document.
The Trump Jan. 6 indictment (unannotated):
https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2023/08/trump-indictment.pdf
Trump Indictment: Jan. 6 Riot Was ‘Fueled by Lies’ From Trump, Special Counsel Says
Former President Donald J. Trump was charged with four counts in connection with his efforts to subvert the will of voters in 2020. “Despite having lost, the defendant was determined to remain in power,” prosecutors wrote.
Trump White House Aides Subpoenaed in Firing of Election Security Expert
The special counsel is scrutinizing the dismissal of Christopher Krebs, who contradicted baseless claims by the former president that the 2020 election was marred by fraud.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/31/us/politics/trump-aides-subpoenaed-special-counsel.html
[Excerpt:]The special counsel investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election has subpoenaed staff members from the Trump White House who may have been involved in firing the government cybersecurity official whose agency judged the election “the most secure in American history,” according to two people briefed on the matter.
The team led by the special counsel, Jack Smith, has been asking witnesses about the events surrounding the firing of Christopher Krebs, who was the Trump administration’s top cybersecurity official during the 2020 election. Mr. Krebs’s assessment that the election was secure was at odds with Mr. Trump’s baseless assertions that it was a “fraud on the American public.”
Mr. Smith’s team is also seeking information about how White House officials, including in the Presidential Personnel Office, approached the Justice Department, which Mr. Trump turned to after his election loss as a way to try to stay in power, people familiar with the questions said.
The investigators appear focused on Mr. Trump’s state of mind around the firing of Mr. Krebs, as well as on establishing a timeline of events leading up to the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021. The latest subpoenas, issued roughly two weeks ago, went to officials in the personnel office, according to the two people familiar with the matter.
READ: Transcript of CNN’s town hall with former President Donald Trump
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/11/politics/transcript-cnn-town-hall-trump/index.html
[Excerpt:]
Why should Americans put you back in the White House?
TRUMP: Because we did fantastically. We got 12 million more votes than we had in – as you know, in 2016. I actually say we did far better in that election, got the most that anybody’s ever gotten as a sitting president of the United States.
I think that, when you look at that result and when you look at what happened during that election, unless you’re a very stupid person, you see what happens.
A lot of the people – a lot of the people in this audience and perhaps maybe a couple that don’t, but most people understand what happened.
That was a rigged election, and it’s a shame that we had to go through it. It’s very bad for our country. All over the world, they looked at it, and they saw exactly what everyone else saw. And you look – even if you just look recently with the 51 intelligence agents, that made a 16-point difference.
If you look at the FBI…
COLLINS: But, Mr. President…
TRUMP: If you look at the FBI and Twitter – they call it Twitter Files – made a big difference.
If you look at True the Vote…
COLLINS: Mr. President, back to what you just said there, though, it was not a rigged election. It was not a stolen election.
You and your supporters lost more than 60 court cases on the election. And it’s been nearly two-and-a-half years. Can you publicly acknowledge that you did lose the 2020 election?
TRUMP: Now, let me – let me just go on.
If you look at True the Vote, they found millions of votes on camera, on government cameras, where they were stuffing ballot boxes.
So, with all of that, I think it’s a shame that – what happened. I think it’s a very sad thing for our country. I think it’s a very sad thing, frankly, for the world, because, if you look at what’s gone to our country, our country has gone to hell. Our borders are bad. Our military has been bad.
You look at the taxes, you look at inflation, what’s happened to inflation, it’s just destroying our country. We have really become, in many ways, a Third World country. And it’s very sad what’s happened in this administration. And it’s something that we will turn around on day one.
We were energy-independent. Now energy is at a level that we have never had to pay before. We – nobody can afford to continue to pay what’s happening with energy. But we were energy-independent. And we were getting out of Afghanistan with strength and with dignity. And, instead, we got out, we looked like fools…
COLLINS: And, Mr. President…
TRUMP: … probably the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country.
COLLINS: We have a lot of questions about the economy and foreign policy tonight.
TRUMP: Good.
COLLINS: But what you just said there, Republican officials debunked those claims about fraudulent ballots.
We want to give you a chance tonight…
TRUMP: Who? Who?
COLLINS: Republican officials in Georgia…
TRUMP: Who?
COLLINS: … and every single state. There is no – your own election officials, Mr. President.
So, we wanted to give you a chance…
TRUMP: Look, people were afraid to take on the issue.
But we have a big problem in this country. We have elections…
COLLINS: Well, we wanted to give you a chance to acknowledge the results.
TRUMP: We have elections that were horrible.
If you look at what happened in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, if you look at what happened in Detroit, Michigan, if you look at what happened in Atlanta, millions of votes, and all you have to do is take a look at government cameras. You will see them, people going to 28 different voting booths to vote, to put in seven ballots apiece. I mean, and they’re all on camera.
COLLINS: But, Mr. President, I have to stop you there, because – because there is no evidence of that.
Your own election officials testified to that and have said that. Republicans in these states did this. In Georgia, there were multiple recounts, including a hand recount.
We have questions about the claims that you’re making tonight from voters on this topic.
I want to bring in Scott Dustin from Concord. He works in insurance litigation. He is an undeclared voter. That’s what they call independents here in New Hampshire, as you know.
TRUMP: OK.
COLLINS: He did vote for you in 2020.
Scott, what’s your question for the president?
SCOTT DUSTIN, WORKS IN INSURANCE LITIGATION: Hi, President Trump.
TRUMP: Hi, Scott.
DUSTIN: And welcome back to New Hampshire.
TRUMP: Thank you.
DUSTIN: Will you suspend polarizing talk of election fraud during your run for president?
TRUMP: Will I suspend – excuse me? What?
DUSTIN: Will you suspend polarizing talk of election fraud during your run for president?
TRUMP: Yes, unless I see election fraud.
If I see election fraud, I think I have an obligation to say it. And what we went through a short while ago has really put our country in a big problem. I hope to do that. I hope we’re going to have very honest elections. We should have voter I.D. We should have one-day elections. We should have paper ballots, instead of these mail-in votes.
But the answer is yes. And I hope that it’s going to be very straight-up, because, if it’s going to be straight-up, we’re going to win the election.
Thank you.
COLLINS: So you will suspend talk, to his question, about the 2020 election on the campaign trail?
TRUMP: Well, I guess we’re going to just win. We’re at a point now. We’re getting so close. Let’s just win it again and straighten out our country.
COLLINS: One other question on this.
COLLINS: When you – when you have talked about the 2020 election results in the past, you once suggested terminating the Constitution.
Do you stand by those comments?
TRUMP: No, no. You are able to do certain things. I’m not talking about terminating the Constitution. I’m talking about cherishing the Constitution.
The Constitution says that we’re supposed to have legal and well-maintained and well-looked-at elections. And we didn’t have that. I cherish our Constitution, but we have to live up to the Constitution. We weren’t living up to the Constitution.
COLLINS: I would just say that there’s no evidence of that election fraud.
You did once tweet…
TRUMP: I know you’re supposed to say that, but – you know, I’m glad you say that.
But, look…
COLLINS: It’s the truth, Mr. President.
TRUMP: … that was a horrible election.
TRUMP: That was a horrible election. And unless somebody is very stupid – and I know you very well. You’re not stupid at all. But you perhaps are given an agenda, or you have an agenda.
READ: Transcript of CNN’s town hall with former President Donald Trump
Published May 11, 2023
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/11/politics/transcript-cnn-town-hall-trump/index.html
[Excerpt:]Why should Americans put you back in the White House?
TRUMP: Because we did fantastically. We got 12 million more votes than we had in – as you know, in 2016. I actually say we did far better in that election, got the most that anybody’s ever gotten as a sitting president of the United States.
I think that, when you look at that result and when you look at what happened during that election, unless you’re a very stupid person, you see what happens.
A lot of the people – a lot of the people in this audience and perhaps maybe a couple that don’t, but most people understand what happened.
That was a rigged election, and it’s a shame that we had to go through it. It’s very bad for our country. All over the world, they looked at it, and they saw exactly what everyone else saw. And you look – even if you just look recently with the 51 intelligence agents, that made a 16-point difference.
If you look at the FBI…
COLLINS: But, Mr. President…
TRUMP: If you look at the FBI and Twitter – they call it Twitter Files – made a big difference.
If you look at True the Vote…
COLLINS: Mr. President, back to what you just said there, though, it was not a rigged election. It was not a stolen election.
You and your supporters lost more than 60 court cases on the election. And it’s been nearly two-and-a-half years. Can you publicly acknowledge that you did lose the 2020 election?
TRUMP: Now, let me – let me just go on.
If you look at True the Vote, they found millions of votes on camera, on government cameras, where they were stuffing ballot boxes.
So, with all of that, I think it’s a shame that – what happened. I think it’s a very sad thing for our country. I think it’s a very sad thing, frankly, for the world, because, if you look at what’s gone to our country, our country has gone to hell. Our borders are bad. Our military has been bad.
You look at the taxes, you look at inflation, what’s happened to inflation, it’s just destroying our country. We have really become, in many ways, a Third World country. And it’s very sad what’s happened in this administration. And it’s something that we will turn around on day one.
We were energy-independent. Now energy is at a level that we have never had to pay before. We – nobody can afford to continue to pay what’s happening with energy. But we were energy-independent. And we were getting out of Afghanistan with strength and with dignity. And, instead, we got out, we looked like fools…
COLLINS: And, Mr. President…
TRUMP: … probably the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country.
COLLINS: We have a lot of questions about the economy and foreign policy tonight.
TRUMP: Good.
COLLINS: But what you just said there, Republican officials debunked those claims about fraudulent ballots.
We want to give you a chance tonight…
TRUMP: Who? Who?
COLLINS: Republican officials in Georgia…
TRUMP: Who?
COLLINS: … and every single state. There is no – your own election officials, Mr. President.
So, we wanted to give you a chance…
TRUMP: Look, people were afraid to take on the issue.
But we have a big problem in this country. We have elections…
COLLINS: Well, we wanted to give you a chance to acknowledge the results.
TRUMP: We have elections that were horrible.
If you look at what happened in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, if you look at what happened in Detroit, Michigan, if you look at what happened in Atlanta, millions of votes, and all you have to do is take a look at government cameras. You will see them, people going to 28 different voting booths to vote, to put in seven ballots apiece. I mean, and they’re all on camera.
COLLINS: But, Mr. President, I have to stop you there, because – because there is no evidence of that.
Your own election officials testified to that and have said that. Republicans in these states did this. In Georgia, there were multiple recounts, including a hand recount.
We have questions about the claims that you’re making tonight from voters on this topic.
I want to bring in Scott Dustin from Concord. He works in insurance litigation. He is an undeclared voter. That’s what they call independents here in New Hampshire, as you know.
TRUMP: OK.
COLLINS: He did vote for you in 2020.
Scott, what’s your question for the president?
SCOTT DUSTIN, WORKS IN INSURANCE LITIGATION: Hi, President Trump.
TRUMP: Hi, Scott.
DUSTIN: And welcome back to New Hampshire.
TRUMP: Thank you.
DUSTIN: Will you suspend polarizing talk of election fraud during your run for president?
TRUMP: Will I suspend – excuse me? What?
DUSTIN: Will you suspend polarizing talk of election fraud during your run for president?
TRUMP: Yes, unless I see election fraud.
If I see election fraud, I think I have an obligation to say it. And what we went through a short while ago has really put our country in a big problem. I hope to do that. I hope we’re going to have very honest elections. We should have voter I.D. We should have one-day elections. We should have paper ballots, instead of these mail-in votes.
But the answer is yes. And I hope that it’s going to be very straight-up, because, if it’s going to be straight-up, we’re going to win the election.
Thank you.
COLLINS: So you will suspend talk, to his question, about the 2020 election on the campaign trail?
TRUMP: Well, I guess we’re going to just win. We’re at a point now. We’re getting so close. Let’s just win it again and straighten out our country.
COLLINS: One other question on this.
COLLINS: When you – when you have talked about the 2020 election results in the past, you once suggested terminating the Constitution.
Do you stand by those comments?
TRUMP: No, no. You are able to do certain things. I’m not talking about terminating the Constitution. I’m talking about cherishing the Constitution.
The Constitution says that we’re supposed to have legal and well-maintained and well-looked-at elections. And we didn’t have that. I cherish our Constitution, but we have to live up to the Constitution. We weren’t living up to the Constitution.
COLLINS: I would just say that there’s no evidence of that election fraud.
You did once tweet…
TRUMP: I know you’re supposed to say that, but – you know, I’m glad you say that.
But, look…
COLLINS: It’s the truth, Mr. President.
TRUMP: … that was a horrible election.
TRUMP: That was a horrible election. And unless somebody is very stupid – and I know you very well. You’re not stupid at all. But you perhaps are given an agenda, or you have an agenda.
Prosecutors in Jan. 6 Case Step up Inquiry Into Trump Fund-Raising
The Justice Department has been gathering evidence about whether the former president and his allies solicited donations with claims of election fraud they knew to be false.
Maggie Haberman, Alan Feuer and
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/us/politics/jan-6-prosecutors-trump-fund-raising
[Excerpts:]As they investigate former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, federal prosecutors have also been drilling down on whether Mr. Trump and a range of political aides knew that he had lost the race but still raised money off claims that they were fighting widespread fraud in the vote results, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Led by the special counsel Jack Smith, prosecutors are trying to determine whether Mr. Trump and his aides violated federal wire fraud statutes as they raised as much as $250 million through a political action committee by saying they needed the money to fight to reverse election fraud even though they had been told repeatedly that there was no evidence to back up those fraud claims.
The prosecutors are looking at the inner workings of the committee, Save America PAC, and at the Trump campaign’s efforts to prove its baseless case that Mr. Trump had been cheated out of victory.
But more recently, investigators have homed in on the activities of a joint fund-raising committee made up of staff members from the 2020 Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, among others. Some of the subpoenas have sought documents from around Election Day 2020 up to the present.
Prosecutors have been heavily focused on details of the campaign’s finances, spending and fund-raising, such as who was approving email solicitations that were blasted out to lists of possible small donors and what they knew about the truth of the fraud claims, according to the people familiar with their work. All three areas overlap, and could inform prosecutors’ thinking about whether to proceed with charges in an investigation in which witnesses are still being interviewed.
The possibility that the fund-raising efforts might have been criminally fraudulent was first raised last year by the House select committee investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to retain power.
But the Justice Department, with its ability to bring criminal charges, has been able to prompt more extensive cooperation from a number of witnesses. And prosecutors have developed more information than the House committee did, having targeted communications between Trump campaign aides and other Republican officials to determine if a barrage of fund-raising solicitations sent out after the election were knowingly misleading, according to the three people familiar with the matter.
On Thursday, former Vice President Mike Pence, a key witness to Mr. Trump’s efforts, testified for hours to the grand jury gathering evidence in the investigation.
Prosecutors have been looking at the nexus between research the Trump campaign commissioned almost immediately after the election to try to prove widespread fraud, public statements that he and his allies made at the time, the fund-raising efforts and the establishment of Save America.
The Washington Post reported earlier on the efforts by the campaign to fund research into claims of fraud and the new round of subpoenas.
Republicans may also argue that Democrats have been loose in claims they have used in fund-raising solicitations. And the Trump campaign may argue that it did in fact use the funds to try to investigate fraud.
A Trump campaign adviser said the “deep state” was ramping up its attacks on the former president as his poll numbers rose. “The ‘political police’ have been pushing their witch hunt since President Trump came down the escalator, and they’ve been proven wrong every single time,” the adviser added.
Officials with the Republican National Committee declined to comment.
Immediately after the election, an adviser to the Trump campaign reached out to Ken Block, the owner of a Rhode Island-based firm, Simpatico Software Systems, to have him evaluate specific allegations of fraud.
Mr. Block ended up researching multiple claims of possible fraud that Mr. Trump’s aides brought to him. He never produced a final report. But each time he investigated a claim, he said in an interview, he found there was nothing to it.
Mr. Block said he had disproved “everything that came in and found no substantive fraud sufficient to overturn an election result.” He said he was isolated from what was taking place within the campaign, as Mr. Trump railed at aides about staying in office and continued to insist he had won an election that he was repeatedly told he had lost.
“I was kept very walled off from all of the insanity,” said Mr. Block, whose firm was paid $735,000, records show. He received a subpoena for documents, but declined in the interview to discuss anything related to the grand jury.
Days after starting to work with Mr. Block and Simpatico, the Trump campaign hired a second firm, the Berkeley Research Group. The federal grand jury has received evidence that Berkeley was hired at the suggestion of Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, who was overseeing the political operation.
The grand jury has been asking questions related to whether Mr. Trump was briefed on findings by Berkeley suggesting there had been no widespread fraud.
The company ultimately submitted a report indicating there had been no fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election, and was paid roughly $600,000 for its work. The company was hired through a law firm that has long represented Mr. Trump in his personal capacity, Kasowitz Benson Torres, although lawyers there were not involved in pursuing Mr. Trump’s election fraud claims, according to a person briefed on the matter.
During the House Jan. 6 committee’s proceedings last year, several people close to Mr. Trump testified that they had informed him that there had been no fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the voting.
Within two weeks of the election, the Trump campaign’s own communications staff drafted an internal report debunking many aspects of a conspiracy theory that voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems had been hacked and used to flip votes away from Mr. Trump. That report was written before pro-Trump lawyers like Sidney Powell and Rudolph W. Giuliani promoted the false Dominion story at news conferences and on television.
As part of its investigation into the Trump campaign’s postelection fund-raising, the Jan. 6 panel subpoenaed records from Salesforce.com, a vendor that helped the campaign and the Republican National Committee send emails to potential donors. The R.N.C. fought back, filing a lawsuit to quash the subpoena, and the House committee ultimately withdrew it.
[Boldface added]
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson
March 16, 2023
heathercoxrichardson@substack.com
[Excerpt:]
Yesterday, Tamar Hallerman and Bill Rankin of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the special grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, investigating the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election in that state, heard yet another recording of former president Trump pushing a key lawmaker—in this case, Georgia House speaker David Ralston—to convene a special session of the legislature to overturn Biden’s victory.
One juror recalled that Ralston “basically cut the president off. He said, ‘I will do everything in my power that I think is appropriate.’ … He just basically took the wind out of the sails.” Ralston, who died last November, did not call a special session.
This is the third such recorded call. One was with Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, and another was with the lead investigator in Raffensperger’s office. Ralston had reported the call, but it was not public knowledge that there was a recording of it.
What key players at Fox News said about the network and its viewers
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/03/10/fox-news-lawsuit-key-players/
An outside firm’s work was never released publicly after researchers uncovered no evidence that the election had been rigged for Joe Biden
The campaign paid researchers from Berkeley Research Group, the people said, to study 2020 election results in six states, looking for fraud and irregularities to highlight in public and in the courts. Among the areas examined were voter machine malfunctions, instances of dead people voting and any evidence that could help Trump show he won, the people said. None of the findings were presented to the public or in court.
Trump campaign staff on 2020 election lies: ‘fan the flame’
The audio from Nov. 5, 2020, two days after the election, is surfacing as Trump again seeks the White House while continuing to lie about the legitimacy of the outcome and Democrat Joe Biden’s win.
The Wisconsin political operatives in the strategy session even praised Democratic turnout efforts in the state’s largest counties and appeared to joke about their efforts to engage Black voters, according to the recording obtained Thursday by The Associated Press. The audio centers on Andrew Iverson, who was the head of Trump’s campaign in the state.
New Documents Show Heritage Actions Activities to Make Voting and Registration Harder
The 990 tax filing was obtained by the watchdog group Documented and shared with the Guardian. It points to the pivotal role that Heritage Action is increasingly playing in shaping the rules that govern US democracy.
The efforts help explain the unprecedented tidal wave of restrictive voting laws that spread across Republican-controlled states in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. The Brennan Center reported that more voter suppression laws were passed in 2021 than in any year since it began monitoring voting legislation more than a decade ago.
The expenditures also signal a dramatic increase in Heritage Action’s advocacy activities. In 2020, Heritage Action had reported no spending at all on outside lobbying.
Heritage Action, whose board includes the Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, is set up as a 501(c)4 under the US tax code which exempts it from paying federal taxes. It operates as a “dark money” group, avoiding disclosing the sources of its total annual revenue of over $18m.
In the past two years the organization through its public messaging has echoed Donald Trump’s lie that US elections are marked by rampant fraud. A private plan prepared by Heritage Action last year set out a two-year, $24m “election integrity” strategy.
The plan, obtained by Documented, proposed a two-pronged approach that would work to block moves by Democrats in Congress to bolster voting rights while at the same time pressing Republican-controlled states to impose restrictions on access to the ballot box. It said: “Where Democrats hold power, we must defend against bad policy. Where conservatives and our allies are in power, we must advance changes that protect the lawful votes of Americans.”
The Heritage Action plan, which was first reported by the New York Times, is being published by the Guardian for the first time.
Part of Heritage Action’s two-year strategy is to promote what it calls “model election laws”, focusing initially on eight battleground states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas and Wisconsin. In a private meeting with donors in Tucson, Arizona, in 2021, the group’s executive director, Jessica Anderson, boasted about the role Heritage Action had played in pressing Republican-controlled legislatures to impose strict restrictions on voting, including limits on mail-in voting and early voting days.
In a video of that meeting obtained by Documented, Anderson told the donors that the group acted “quickly and quietly”, bragging that “honestly nobody noticed” their behind-the-scenes influence. Heritage Action staff have registered to lobby in at least two dozen states.
The laser-like focus on key swing states like Georgia appears to have had an impact. The New York Times found that one-third of the 68 voting bills filed in Georgia in 2021 contained policy measures and language that aligned closely with proposals from Heritage Action.
The group has publicly claimed that it had a hand in advancing 11 voting bills in at least eight states in 2021, though in some cases legislation was passed in only one chamber or went on to be vetoed by the state’s governor.
Heritage Foundation, under the auspices of its elections supremo Hans von Spakovsky, curates an “election fraud database”. It claims to expose the errors, omissions and mistakes made by election officials, but it presents incomplete and misleading information and underscores how exceptionally rare fraud is within the US system.
Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol
Committed to the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union and ordered to be printed.
December 22, 2022.
Former President Trump’s Big Lie of of Election and Voter Fraud is the subject of Chapter 1 of the Select Committee’s Report, presented according to this outline:
1.1 The Big Lie Reflected Deliberate Exploitation of the “Red Mirage”
1.2 Trump’s Pre-Election Plan to Declare Victory
1.3 Trump’s Pre-Election Efforts to Delegitimize the Election Process
1.4 President Trump’s Launch of the Big Lie
1.5 Post-Election: President Trump Replaces his Campaign Team
1.6 President Trump’s Campaign Team Told Him He Lost the Election and There Was No Significant Fraud
1.7 President Trump Has his Day in Court
1.8 President Trump Repeatedly Promoted Conspiracy Theories
1.9 Dominion Voting Systems
1.10 The State Farm Arena Video
1.11 The Fake Ballot Myth
1.12 The “Multiple Counting of Ballots” Fiction
1.13 The Imaginary “Dead” and “Ineligible” Voters
1.14 “President Trump’s January 6th Speech
“Unraveling the unfounded conspiracies about Dominion Voting Systems”
Reminder: When Romney Lost, Trump Called for “A Revolution”
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Thinking of it as foreshadowing.
Our friend, Christian Vanderbrouk reminds us that Donald Trump has a long career of election denialism and lies. And, I admit, I’d forgotten this, because back in 2012, we couldn’t imagine where this would lead us.
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“He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election,” he tweeted [inaccurately]. “We should have a revolution in this country!”
Over the next half hour, he continued.
The phony electoral college made a laughing stock out of our nation. The loser one! We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!
Let’s fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice! The world is laughing at us. More votes equals a loss … revolution! This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy! Our country is now in serious and unprecedented trouble … like never before. The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.
How the “big lie” spread
August 18, 2022
https://www.axios.com/2021/11/20/trump-2020-election-fraud-misinformation
Donald Trump’s “big lie” playbook — the collection of falsehoods alleging that the 2020 election was stolen through voting fraud — mirrors the tactics used by sophisticated spreaders of disinformation.
The big picture: Research from the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center shows there’s a typical cycle that people use to manipulate the media and spread disinformation. Trump’s dissemination of false claims of a stolen election demonstrates how the cycle works.
How it works: Disinformation spreaders typically start by planning their narratives early and seeding their lies online, where they can spread quickly, reaching people faster than critics can counter the disinformation.
- That’s what happened when Trump planted the seeds of his voting fraud claims early — well before the general election — and spread them through interviews and social media.
- Information gatekeepers like journalists, TV networks and tech platforms then try to mitigate the problem, as they did by banning Trump’s accounts after the Jan. 6 insurrection.
- The former president adapted by creating other channels to get out his message, such as a new blog, which ultimately shut down, and most recently a plan to launch a social media network called “Truth Social,” which has filed to go public via a SPAC.
“The main and most effective way the cycle gets broken is in that they never jump from Stage 2 to Stage 3″ and “something just sputters out in Stage 2,” says Emily Dreyfuss, senior editor at the Shorenstein Center.
- “When that happens, which is all the time, the campaign never gets much attention and so most people never know it existed in the first place.”
“Robin Vos fires Michael Gableman, ending a 2020 election review that’s cost taxpayers more than $1 million and produced no evidence of fraud”
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos fired Michael Gableman on Friday, more than a year after he hired the former Supreme Court justice to probe the 2020 election and three days after Vos barely survived a primary challenge Gableman supported.
Vos ended Gableman’s contract with the state that has provided a national platform and more than $100,000 in salary to Gableman over the last 14 months but has produced a review of former President Donald Trump’s 2020 loss that has promoted election conspiracy theories and revealed no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
The review has cost state taxpayers more than $1 million through costs for salaries and legal fees related to lawsuits filed against Gableman and Vos over ignored requests for public records.
Vos’ decision to fire Gableman comes a week after Trump announced to a Waukesha crowd that Gableman had turned on Vos and that Gableman, like Trump, had endorsed Vos’ primary opponent Adam Steen. Vos won the primary Tuesday but only barely — defeating Steen by just 260 votes.
“LOST, NOT STOLEN: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election”
This extremely detailed report, just released, was put together by eight prominent conservatives, including three former federal judges. It carefully examines “every claim of fraud and miscount put
forward by former President Trump and his advocates, and now put the results of those
investigations before the American people, and especially before fellow conservatives who may
be uncertain about what and whom to believe.”
Our conclusion is unequivocal: Joe Biden was the choice of a majority of the Electors, who themselves were the choice of the majority of voters in their states. Biden’s victory is easily explained by a political landscape that was much different in 2020 than it was when President Trump narrowly won the presidency in 2016. President Trump waged his campaign for re-election during a devastating worldwide pandemic that caused a severe downturn in the global economy. This, coupled with an electorate that included a small but statistically significant number willing to vote for other Republican candidates on the ballot but not for President Trump, are the reasons his campaign fell short, not a fraudulent election.
Donald Trump and his supporters have failed to present evidence of fraud or inaccurate results significant enough to invalidate the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. We do not claim that election administration is perfect. Election fraud is a real thing; there are prosecutions in almost every election year, and no doubt some election fraud goes undetected. Nor do we disparage attempts to reduce fraud. States should continue to do what they can do to eliminate opportunities for election fraud and to punish it when it occurs. But there is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct. It is wrong, and bad for our country, for people to propagate baseless claims that President Biden’s election was not legitimate.
Jan. 6 committee hearing: Scalia called on Trump to concede
07/12/22https://thehill.com/homenews/house/3555900-scalia-called-on-trump-to-concede
Nebraska Cops Probe Shady Tactics by Voter ID Campaign’s Foot Soldiers
Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts’ mother bankrolled the group that is trying to get a voter-identification requirement on the ballot.
Arguments for requiring identification in Nebraska elections don’t hold up because there is hardly any evidence of widespread voter fraud in the state, Blood told the Daily Beast. In February, Evnen, a Republican, sent a PowerPoint presentation to all 49 state senators debunking allegations of fraud and irregularities during the 2020 election made by the Nebraska Voter Accuracy Project, including a false claim that 4,001 votes could not be linked to registered voters.
“We have real fraud taking place in the streets in order to prevent fraud that is not happening in Nebraska,” Blood said. “It is a weird dichotomy.”
1/6 panel: Told repeatedly he lost, Trump refused to go
But in the eight weeks after losing to Joe Biden, the defeated Trump publicly, privately and relentlessly pushed his false claims of a rigged 2020 election and intensified an extraordinary scheme to overturn Biden’s victory. When all else failed in his effort to stay in power, Trump beckoned thousands of his supporters to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, where extremists groups led the deadly Capitol siege.
The scale and virulence of that scheme began to take shape at the opening House hearing by the committee investigating 1/6. The prime-time hearing was watched by an estimated 20 million people on the TV networks, almost double the number who tuned in to the opening of Trump’s two impeachment trials.
A Big Lie in a New Package
A new documentary from Trump allies makes the latest case the election was stolen, but the group behind the claim has been assailed even by some on the hard right.
This article is part of our Midterms 2022 Daily Briefing
Danny Hakim and
They Insisted the 2020 Election Was Tainted. Their 2022 Primary Wins? Not So Much.
Republicans are accepting their primary victories with little concern about the voter fraud they once falsely claimed caused Donald J. Trump’s loss.
Reid J. Epstein and
Most Republicans’ easy acceptance of a voting system they once slammed as broken exposes a fundamental contradiction in their complaints about the 2020 election. Claims about fraud and stolen elections are often situational — used in some races (against Democrats) but not others (against other Republicans), and to challenge some outcomes (losing) but not others (winning).
This phenomenon was on clear display in 2020, when scores of Republicans who repeated allegations about a “rigged” presidential race accepted their own victories based on the same ballots.
But the lack of discussion about fraud in this year’s primaries highlights a particular strain of partisanship driving many of the myths about stolen elections.
Noncitizens do not vote in federal elections in significant numbers, in Alabama or elsewhere, according to a 2020 report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Investigators from both parties have unearthed only minuscule numbers of any type of voter fraud. In recent years, the rare instances of broad fraud schemes that have become public have been engineered by Republicans, including an absentee ballot scheme in North Carolina that led the state’s Board of Elections to order a redo of a House race in 2018.
[Boldface added]
Not all Republicans who spread false claims about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election considered their own races to be exempt. Some said that “fraud existed” in their own elections and that investigations were needed. Still, they accepted their victories.
“We don’t know how much fraud exists or existed because we weren’t able to see,” Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania told a local CBS affiliate a week after the 2020 election. Mr. Perry focused on Philadelphia as a source for fraud in the presidential race and called for additional review. He also said he was “humbled” to take his seat in the House.
In the Pennsylvania primaries last week, Mr. Perry ran for re-election unopposed. He did not respond to messages left on his cellphone, and his campaign did not return requests for comment.
Part of the reason Republican candidates are accepting primary results without talking about fraud is they don’t have Democrats to blame, said Trey Grayson, the former Republican secretary of state in Kentucky.
“They’re thinking it’s a primary, it’s our side. We didn’t lose to somebody on the other side who is evil, who’s going to change policy more dramatically,” Mr. Grayson said in an interview. “There’s a tribal, ‘my side’s always right, your side is always wrong. We’re not stealing elections, your side is stealing elections.’”
“Texas state bar files professional misconduct lawsuit against Ken Paxton for attempt to overturn 2020 presidential elections”
A disciplinary committee for the State Bar of Texas on Wednesday filed a professional misconduct lawsuit against Attorney General Ken Paxton for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential elections in four battleground states won by President Joe Biden.
The filing in Collin County by the Commission for Lawyer Discipline, a standing committee of the state bar, is an extraordinary move by the body that regulates law licenses in the state against the sitting attorney general. It stems from complaints against Paxton for a lawsuit that the U.S. Supreme Court threw out, saying Texas lacked standing to sue and that Paxton’s political opponents called “frivolous.”
It seeks a sanction against Paxton, which will be determined by a judge, that could range from a private reprimand to disbarment.
In its filing, the commission said Paxton had misrepresented that he had uncovered substantial evidence that “raises serious doubts as to the integrity of the election process in the defendant states.”
“As a result of Respondent’s actions, Defendant States were required to expend time, money, and resources to respond to the misrepresentations and false statements contained in these pleadings and injunction requests even though they had previously certified their presidential electors based on the election results prior to the filing of Respondent’s pleadings,” the lawsuit read.
The lawsuit also says Paxton made “dishonest” representations that an “outcome determinative” number of votes were tied to unregistered voters, votes were switched by a glitch with voting machines, state actors had unconstitutionally revised their election statutes and “illegal votes” had been cast to affect the outcome of the election.
The lawsuit says Paxton’s allegations “were not supported by any charge, indictment, judicial finding, and/or credible or admissible evidence, and failed to disclose to the Court that some of his representations and allegations had already been adjudicated and/or dismissed in a court of law.”
Wisconsin: “Republican state elections commissioner Dean Knudson abruptly resigns, rebuking his party’s embrace of Trump’s false election claims”
A Republican member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission under fire from members of his own party for refusing to entertain 2020 election distortions stunned his colleagues Wednesday by announcing his resignation from the oversight board and blasting the GOP’s continued focus on former President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election.
Dean Knudson, a former state lawmaker who helped design the commission in 2015, said he was leaving the commission because it has become clear “I cannot be effective in my role representing Republicans on the commission.”
His announced departure pushed the commissioners to delay the election of their next chair.
“I’ll put my conservative record up against anyone in the state of Wisconsin, and yet, now I’ve been branded a RINO,” Knudson said at a meeting Wednesday, referring to an acronym that represents “Republicans In Name Only” — a nickname applied by 2020 election deniers to Republicans who acknowledge Trump lost to President Joe Biden.
“Two of my core values are to practice service above self and to display personal integrity. And to me, that integrity demands acknowledging the truth even when the truth is painful. In this case, the painful truth is that President Trump lost the election in 2020 — lost the election in Wisconsin in 2020. And the loss was not due to election fraud.”
Knudson said instances of voter fraud occur in every election but not at a large scale.
Knudson said he would leave the commission as soon as Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who appointed Knudson in 2017, named his replacement. A spokeswoman for Vos did not answer questions about the process.
Vos has called for the resignation of the Wisconsin Elections Commission director and has claimed widespread voter fraud manipulated the outcome of the 2020 election.
In 2021, he hired former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to begin a $676,000 taxpayer-funded review of the 2020 election that has focused heavily on WEC practices and suggesting foul play without evidence.
Now, as the commission has become a symbol of baseless claims of fraud to Republicans who deny Trump’s legitimate election loss, all four Republican candidates for governor want to abolish the commission altogether and most want to put its duties in a partisan office.
“My message to Republicans today is simple. If you’re a candidate focus on the issues that affect Wisconsin families and their pocketbooks. It’s time to pivot away from conspiracy theories to kitchen table issues,” Knudson said.
The Hypnotherapist and Failed Politician Who Helped Fuel the Never-Ending Hunt for Election Fraud in Wisconsin
How obscure retiree Jay Stone played a crucial, if little-known, role in making Wisconsin a hotbed of conspiracy theories that Democrats stole the state’s 10 electoral votes from Donald Trump.
Inside Mark Meadows’s final push to keep Trump in power
The former congressman played a key role in Trump’s effort to overturn the election, according to his texts, congressional investigations and interviews
Building the “Big Lie”: Inside the Creation of Trump’s Stolen Election Myth — ProPublica
Internal emails and interviews with key participants reveal for the first time the extent to which leading advocates of the rigged election theory touted evidence they knew to be disproven, disputed or dismissed as dubious.
Trump Supporters Explain Why They Believe the Big Lie
For many of Trump’s voters, the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought. It’s more of an attitude, or a tribal pose.
Mark Meadows removed from North Carolina voter rolls
https://thehill.com/news/state-watch/3266372-mark-meadows-removed-from-north-carolina-voter-rolls/
Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has been removed from North Carolina’s voter rolls, according to the State Board of Elections.
Meadows is also being investigated for allegations of voter fraud, the State Bureau of Investigation said.
The decision to remove the former North Carolina congressman and Trump adviser from the state’s voter rolls came after it was revealed that Meadows was registered to vote in September 2020 at a mobile home in Scaly Mountain, N.C., despite not residing there.
A local official in Wisconsin who served as a fake 2020 presidential ‘elector’ for Trump was booted out of office
Another ex-Trump official who might have voted illegally
It’s hardly the first evidence that the party that rails against voter fraud and rants about “stolen elections” hasn’t exactly kept a clean house itself. Indeed, it seems most of the recent high-profile instances of voter fraud and alleged fraud have featured Republicans. There’s the 2018 North Carolina congressional fiasco. There’s the much-hyped case of the Nevada supporter of President Donald Trump who did interviews claiming that someone voted in his dead wife’s name, only to later plead guilty to having done it himself. Something similar happened in Pennsylvania. There’s the local GOP official in Ohio who forged the signature of his recently deceased father on an absentee ballot. And a Trump supporter from Iowa convicted of voting twice said she did so because she worried, as Trump warned, the 2016 election would be rigged.
New Documentary by Frontline and ProPublica Reveals Origins of the Stolen Election Myth
A group of people working from a plantation in South Carolina spread misinformation about the November 2020 election. These falsehoods have since become articles of faith for many Republicans.
Series:The Insurrection
The Effort to Overturn the Election
“Plot to Overturn the Election” is part of a collaborative investigation from FRONTLINE and ProPublica. The documentary premieres March 29 at 10 p.m. EDT on PBS stations (check local listings) and will be available to stream in the PBS Video App and on FRONTLINE’s website starting at 7 p.m. EDT.
Under Trump, DHS directed to probe bogus claims about voter fraud
03/18/2022 04:30 AM EDT
Updated: 03/19/2022
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/18/trump-dhs-bogus-claims-voter-fraud-00018365
[Excerpt:]In late April of 2020, a top political appointee in the Trump administration called for Department of Homeland Security officials to scrutinize an unusual topic for a national security agency: possible voter fraud in the upcoming election. A subsequent directive included a focus on mail-in voting, according to a document reviewed by POLITICO.
That guidance came as then-President Donald Trump fomented claims that the expansion of mail-in voting would corrupt the 2020 election — which later fed his unsubstantiated assertions that the election was stolen.
DHS’ intelligence office did not release any materials substantiating the president’s claims. But it did find that the Kremlin spread lies about mail-in voting.
The issuance of a directive involving voter fraud to the DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis, which has not been previously reported, casts a new light on the extent of Trump World’s efforts to use government resources to investigate spurious claims about U.S. elections.
It also raises new questions about how a domestic political complaint found its way onto the intelligence community’s to-do list.
Trump White House aide was secret author of report used to push ‘big lie’
Report on Dominion voting machines produced after 2020 election was not the work of volunteer in Trump’s post-election legal team
Hugo Lowell in Washington
17 Mar 2022
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/16/trump-white-house-aide-secret-author-dominion-report
Weeks after the 2020 election, at least one Trump White House aide was named as secretly producing a report that alleged Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden because of Dominion Voting Systems – research that formed the basis of the former president’s wider efforts to overturn the election.
The Dominion report, subtitled “OVERVIEW 12/2/20 – History, Executives, Vote Manipulation Ability and Design, Foreign Ties”, was initially prepared so that it could be sent to legislatures in states where the Trump White House was trying to have Biden’s win reversed.
But top Trump officials would also use the research that stemmed from the White House aide-produced report to weigh other options to return Trump to the presidency, including having the former president sign off on executive orders to authorize sweeping emergency powers.
The original version of the Dominion report named Miller – who worked for the senior Trump adviser Peter Navarro – as the author on the cover page, until her name was abruptly replaced with that of Friess before the document was to be released publicly, the source said.
The involvement of a number of other Trump White House aides who worked in Navarro’s office was also scrubbed around that time, the source said. Friess has told the Daily Beast that she had nothing to do with the report and did not know how her name came to be on the document.
It was not clear why Miller’s name was removed from the report, which was sent to Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani on 29 November 2020, or why the White House aide’s involvement was obfuscated in the final 2 December version.
New evidence shows Trump was told many times there was no voter fraud — but he kept saying it anyway
The House Jan. 6 panel aims to prove that Trump was acting corruptly by continuing to spread misinformation about the election long after he had reason to know he had legitimately lost
By Rosalind S. Helderman, Jacqueline Aleman, Josh Dawsey and Tom Hamburger
March 3, 2022
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/03/trump-election-jan-6/
There’s new evidence showing the lack of fraud in 2020 that Trump’s base will never see
By Philip Bump, Staff writer
February 2, 2022
If you started counting every ballot cast for president in the state of Ohio in 2020, one each second, it would on average take you about two days, five hours and 10 minutes before you came across one that the state thought might have been cast illegally. That’s one every 191,000 seconds.
On Tuesday, the state reported that its review of voting in the most recent federal election had, predictably, uncovered isolated examples of apparent illegal voting. Those suspect votes — not yet proved to be illegal, mind you — totaled 31 ballots. That’s out of 5.9 million ballots cast for president, meaning that 0.0005 percent of cast ballots were even suspect.
President Donald Trump won Ohio by 476,000 votes. Safe to say that his victory was not tainted by rampant fraud.
Fulton County, Georgia’s Trump Investigation An Analysis of the Reported Facts and Applicable Law
By Norman Eisen, Joshua Matz, Donald Ayer, Gwen Keyes Fleming, Colby Galliher, Jason Harrow, and Raymond P. Tolentino
October 2021
Arizona audit debunks Trump’s false claims, but the poison of misinformation still threatens the electoral process
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/dan-balz-take-arizona-review
The U.S. does not have a voter fraud problem.
Numerous academic studies and criminal investigations have searched for widespread voter fraud over the years and come up empty-handed. There is ample evidence that restrictive voting laws aimed at preventing this alleged fraud disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color.
Feb. 26, 2021
Electoral Integrity Project
Abstract
Citation
Political Theater of the Big Lie
Timeline: Voting Rights demonstrates just how tightly the struggle for the right to vote is woven into the fabric of our national history. Although the right to vote and be counted is the foundation of our democratic republic, our history of voting rights is not widely taught, discussed or even universally acknowledged.
In fact, one can see in the sad far-right embrace of the meme of Critical Race Theory the fear that history holds for so many White supremacists and far-right Trump supporters. Yet we cannot move forward as a democracy if we don’t acknowledge our national struggle for equal and unfettered voting rights. Without such public recognition, our national narrative is incomplete, stymying our journey forward to a more perfect union.
Our modern struggle for the unimpeded right to vote stems, in large part, from a 2013 decision of U.S. Supreme Court. Prior to that decision, states with histories of discriminatory voting laws had been required, for nearly 50 years, to obtain prior federal approval in order to change to their voting laws. That core provision of the historic 1965 Voting Rights Act reversed a century of discrimination against Blacks and others attempting to exercise their Constitutional right to vote.
It is now abundantly clear that this 2013 Supreme Court decision was premature. Almost immediately, a number of states, prominent among them Georgia, Florida, Texas and Arizona, suddenly free of these longstanding strictures of the Voting Rights Act, began in earnest to introduce new voter suppression bills. In the wake of Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election, a tsunami of state voter suppression laws followed.
State legislator shamefully presented these bills in the name an “election integrity”. Their champions were staunch supporters of Trump’s Big Lie, the baseless assertion of electoral and voter fraud. The laws aim to change election outcomes by disenfranchising legitimate voters. They variously empower partisan poll watchers, replace professional election administrators with political cronies and change the rules of voting in ways subtle and direct to rob millions of minority and other voters nationwide of their political birthright to vote and be counted.
Big Lie as True Crime Reality TV or Viral Pandemic
Consider the Big Lie for what it is – a unwelcome and brutal assault on the person of Lady Liberty, the very personification of our democratic Republic, the world’s greatest experiment in republican democracy, and the cardinal liberty that she represents – the right to vote and be counted.
Or, perhaps equally vividly, imagine Big Lie as deadly virus, mutating from the words of narcissist Trump, then shape-shifting into an election-threatening menace and, fully revealed, into democracy-killing assault. Choose the image most fitting – each captures the anti-democratic intention of those who prize winning at all costs, even the demise of our centuries-long experiment in government “of the people, by the people, and for the people”. Whether Trump enablers have thought through the fatal consequences of their endless ambition is still to be determined, be assured both Trump and pal Putin have.
Or consider a TV production of The Big Lie (and juxtapose it again President Zelensky’s “Servant of the People”).
Season 1 (2016): Then-candidate Trump, convinced he will lose his long-shot bid for the presidency, invents the Big Lie of a stolen election (“Stop the Steal”) to protect his notoriously fragile ego. (See our Card Deck of 54+ Enablers for the Trump Card).
Read MoreSeason 2 (2017-19): President Trump, having falsely asserted that the 2016 election was rigged, now vainly attempts to “save the data” – by establishing “a National Commission to study election and voter fraud’. Like his false claim of having attracted “the biggest inaugural crowds ever”, his National Commission gains zero traction. Without fanfare, Trump disbands the Commission the following year.
Meantime, however, the conservative Heritage Foundation, a top Trump enabler, republishes a widely debunked database purporting to substantiate Trump’s claims. (See the Heritage Card in our Card Deck of 54+ Enablers).
Season 3 (2020): Encompasses Covid-19’s onslaught, back-to-back Presidential impeachments, and the run-up to the 2020 presidential elections. Co-starring an ever-increasing supporting cast. of Trump enablers (See Card Deck of 54+ Enablers, many of whom had vigorously denounced candidate Trump in 2016. By Season 3 they are they auditioning for series-long roles.)
So what’s on offer for one willing to sacrifice all personal virtue in exchange for regurgitating Trump’s Big Lie?
A trove of Midas-like treasures:
For all, a very short-lived reprieve from Trump’s scathing criticism.
For politicians: re-election insurance and hopes of ever-higher office.
F0r politicians, lobbyists and Trump family & friends, plenty of Dark Money political patronage, maybe (but probably not) a presidential pardon, reimbursement of endless legal fees.
For some, a burnished bad-boy/bad girl celebrity of sorts. See Card Deck of 54+ Enablers for profiles of Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
For conservative “news outlets” and celebrities, new, old and former: the simple prospect of bigger profits and audience share. See Card Deck of 54+ Enablers for profiles of Rupert Murdoch, Fox News, NewsMax, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity and others.
What could possibly go wrong? Just ask, among others, Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, Kenneth Chesebro, Mark Meadows, the many fake electors, Rupert Murdoch, Ann Coulter, any of the 1000+ convicted Capitol Insurrectionists, Mo Brooks, Michael Cohen, and the list goes on and on.
Season 4 (2021): Featuring the Big Lie, shape-shifting, then fully formed – the trifecta of the Dark Lord’s Dark Arts: Capitol Insurrection, a tsunami of new state voter suppression laws, and a conspiracy-driven whirlwind replete with fake electors, concerted shouts and efforts to “Hang Mike Pence”, stop electoral vote certification, all followed by fake election “audits” and incessant regurgitation of Trump’s Big Lie.
Nevertheless, nearly all top Enablers remain on board, pardoned felons and most of those who tried to jump ship on January 6. The most notable exception? Conservative author and Republican Ann Coulter, whose frank and blunt message to Trump followers is quoted in our Card Deck of 54+ Enablers. Some enablers have pretended to jump ship but then quietly climbed back onboard under the Dark Lord’s threatening gaze. Notable are Mitch McConnel and Bill Barr, who with a couple of exceptions supported their local sheriff whatever the carnage. all for reasons wholly unrelated to virtue or the common good.
The Heritage Foundation again stars in Season 4, this time selling nationwide and door-to-door a blueprint for Trump-led state legislatures to adopt voter suppression laws premised on (drum roll, please) the Big Lie.
That story is worth recounting in detail. It reveals the mutation of Big Lie from demagogue Trump’s presidential bid to his fomenting insurrection at the U.S. Capitol insurrection, and then to the Republican National Committee’s decision to team with Heritage Action to undermine future elections (by directing Trump supporters in Red state legislators to propose and adopt voter suppression laws aimed at tilting the vote in future electoral contests), most prominently the 2022 midterm and the 2024 presidential elections.
What could be worse? State “audits” of certified federal election results, efforts designed to undermine the l2020 election and the legitimacy of all future elections that a Trump-led Republican Party candidate may loses.
Such actions are not merely corrosive to democracy but fatal. All the more important to understand the party-wide genesis of these efforts:
As noted, the Heritage Foundation published in January 2021 a blueprint for Trump-led states to follow in enacting vote-suppressing and election-subverting laws. In a blitzkrieg effort, it advised the Republican National Committee at the national level and the Republican State Leadership Committee on a state-by-state basis. A number of the legislative acts followed the Heritage blueprint point by point, others selecting provision by provision from Heritage Action’s a la carte menu of voter suppression measures.
As further noted, the Heritage blueprint is cleverly styled as a “Factsheet” but shamefully and wholly premised on the Big Lie. As also as noted, Heritage has offered no evidence to support its premise and, unsurprisingly, did not specifically reference in the “factsheet” its widely debunked 2017 Election Fraud Database.
Also unsurprisingly, Heritage did not refer to the orders or findings of over 60 courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, Trump’s own Department of Justice, or the U.S. national intelligence agencies (or, for that matter, the views of Mike Pence, Rupert Murdoch or Laura Ingram, all of whom disavowed the Big Lie.
Thus far, these hundreds of Big Lie-inspired state legislative bills have produced 33 “election integrity” laws in 19 states, adding a troublesome new chapter to our Nation’s long history of voter suppression. Their shared aim? To throw multiple roadblocks in the way of ordinary voters seeking to exercise their right to vote. And even now Trump allies, should he be elected, eye the possibility of enacting a federal election law push mirroring recent state voter suppression laws.
Fortunately, the next seasons of this show prominently features historians, ethically-minded lawyers, thoughtful social scientists, the Constitutionally-mandated trio of the Executive, Judicial and Legislative branches, the free press and, yes, We the People.
Season 5 (2022): Featuring:
(1) The January 6 Committee concludes that they had enough evidence to refer Mr. Trump to the U.S. Department of Justice (for obstructing a congressional proceeding – the January 6 Congressional certification of the election of Joe Biden – and for conspiring to defraud the American people. And the Committee suggests that Trump had suborned witnesses appearing before the Committee.
(2) The U.S. Department of Justice begins to issue subpoenas to key Trump officials, and recovers by legal process highly classified documents from former President’s Trump’s personal residence in Florida.
(3) The Fulton County district attorney names Rudy Giuliani as a target of its grand jury investigation into efforts by Trump, Sidney Powell and others to persuade the Georgia Secretary of State to change the results of the 2020 presidential election. Sen. Lindsey Graham unsuccessfully seeks to quash a subpoena directing him to testify before that grand jury.
Meantime, Trump in a reprise of Marlon Brando in the Godfather sends an intermediary to the U.S. Department of Justice with a message for Attorney General Merrick Garland, apparently suggesting that he can either increase or decrease the violence following the recovery of the highly classified documents. And the Trump-led Republican caucus announces plans to shut down the January 6 Committee should Republicans retake the House after the 2022 midterm elections. Such a change in control of the House would in no small part be effected by (a) Red state voter suppression laws adopted in 19 states during 20021 and 2022 and (b) the extraordinarily corrosive effect that a reported 70+% of Republican voters continue to profess belief in Trump’s Big Lie of election and voter fraud.
Fortunately, for democracy’s sake, we have to thank (i) the rigorous work of investigative journalists, historians and the January 6 Committee, (ii) the courage of witnesses appearing before the Committee, and that of an increasing number of Republicans (Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger among them). Through these collective efforts of Americans committed to the rule of law and the continuing vitality of our democratic Republic, facts demonstrating Trump’s obstruction of justice, obstruction of Constitutional process, and conspiracy to defraud are well documented and out, with additonal supporting evidence pouring in daily.
But for such rigorous, dedicated work, the roles of such Trump enablers as Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Peter Navarro, Mark Meadows and Ginni Thomas would not have been well known and understood. To learn more about these and other Trump enablers, see our Card Deck of 54+ Enablers.
A final thought – for thoughtful Americans who wonder silently or aloud how we could have allowed this internal attack on our Republic to unfold, consider the same question in light of CPAC and Tucker Carson’s support of Viktor Orban of Hungary and Vladimir Putin of Russia. And in light of Majorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Josh Hawley’s show of support for the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. And in light of Mitch McConnell, who so lamely suggested that he will support his party’s candidate simply because he’s the party’s candidate. Lady Liberty demands more from them and us, so much more.
Season 6 (2023 – and very much in progress): Featuring the U.S. Department of Justice’s indictment of former President Trump and the indictment by the Fulton County, GA prosecutor for conspiring to upend the 2020 presidential elections. The former names as coconspirators Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Kenneth Chesbro and a thus-far unidentified political consultant, and the latter also includes Mark Meadows, a host of individuals who falsely represemtedt themselves as officially appointed electors and the then-head of the GA Republican Party.
See “Voting Rights: Where We Are”, “Links of the Week”, “Expert Analysis for You” and our Card Deck of 54+ Enablers
How the Big Lie of “Election Integrity” Suppresses Voter Turnout
On average, nearly 40% of Americans do not vote.
These three thoughtful articles consider the relationship of voter turnout and voter suppression measures.
As you would imagine, many eligible citizens don’t vote because anti-democratic vote-suppressing measures are effective.
Such measures inhibit voting through a shot-gun spray of vote-suppressing measures, including:
- onerous voter ID requirements that ruling out the many who do not drive
- prohibition to unjustifiable curtailing of mail-in and drop-off ballots
- voting “only on election day” (the plaintive campaign cry of Donald Trump, who votes by mail), forcing low-income and other workers into long lines and a reduced or lost payday
- automatic , no notice purging of voting lists, an injustice to voters who move frequently, often due to adverse economic circumstances
- burdensome paperwork and notarial/witness requirements, designed to discourage voting and voter assistance
- criminal penalties to curb Good Samaritan assistance by citizens, poll workers and election officials
Who Votes in America?
https://www.prb.org/resources/who-votes-in-america/
Why People Don’t Vote
September 2, 2020
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/why-people-dont-vote/?template=next
[This article has been edited.]
Here’s a list of five things stopping Americans from voting.
- Many Americans want to vote but can’t.
Hundreds of thousands of nonvoters would vote if they could. Voters need identification to vote in 36 states, which means the 21 million Americans who don’t have government-issued photo ID are at risk of missing out.
Financial barriers, lack of access to transportation, and limited information can make it difficult for older people, people of color, and low-income people to obtain an ID.
Former and current prisoners convicted of felonies are another group of people who are often disenfranchised during elections, especially if they are African American. Maine and Vermont are the only states that do not prohibit those convicted of felonies from voting, even when they are in prison.
- Age, gender, education, socioeconomic status, and race can impact whether a person votes.
Research shows that nonvoters are more likely to be low-income, young, Hispanic, or Asian American.
Several barriers tend to get in the way for people living in poverty, and the US census found that 47% of eligible citizens with household incomes of less than $20,000 didn’t vote in 2012.
One survey conducted by Caltech and MIT of registered and non-registered voters who didn’t cast a ballot in the 2008 election suggested that people of color are more likely not to vote because they encounter more barriers to voting, compared to white citizens who tend not to vote by choice.
Various laws and structural systems, from limited early voting windows to ID restrictions, disproportionately impact people of color and contribute to voter suppression across the country.
Read More- Election Day is held on Tuesdays.
Sunday is the most common voting day around the world, except in the US.
Election Day falls on Tuesdays in the country and is not a federal holiday, presenting a dilemma for many workers who don’t get paid time off to go to polling place and wait in line.
While early voting and mail-in voting gives citizens more flexibility, not all states offer these options.
- Voters who don’t feel candidates represent their views might choose to opt-out.
The Republican and Democratic parties are the two largest political parties in the US. The 7% of citizens who don’t support either and are registered as independent tend to be less politically engaged. They also can’t vote for a presidential candidate in the primary election.
- Citizens are less likely to vote if they don’t think their ballot matters.
As many as 15% of registered voters reported that they didn’t vote in the 2016 presidential election because they didn’t believe their vote would make a difference, according to Census Bureau data. A different Pew Research Center survey found that half of the participants didn’t bother to research the election because they didn’t think their vote impacted the government, even though voting is one of the few ways for citizens to push forward policies they support.
The many obstacles citizens face to vote can be discouraging, but when people don’t vote, they are silenced. With enough preparation and information, voting can help citizens play an important role in shaping the world in which they want to live. You can check your voter registration status here.
How GOP-backed voting measures could create hurdles for tens of millions of voters
At least 250 new laws have been proposed in 43 states to limit mail, early in-person and Election Day voting.
Elements of the Unfettered Right to Vote:
“How to Actually Guarantee the Right to Vote: A Six-Point Checklist”
This essay has been adapted from Richard L. Hasen’s new book, A Real Right To Vote: How A Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard American Democracy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/voting-rights-six-elements/677234/
[Excerpt:]1. A Positive Right to Vote
The first provision of my proposed amendment is the most fundamental. It would guarantee the right of citizen, adult, resident non-felons to vote and to have that vote fairly and accurately counted. This provision would apply to all elections, federal, state, and local, including those for president and vice president. No longer could state legislatures threaten to take away the people’s right to vote for president.
This would be the first time an explicit, positive right to vote would be part of the Constitution. As we have seen, the Constitution generally frames voting rights in the negative and prohibits discrimination in voting on the basis of such prohibited categories as race. This new amendment, in essence, would codify the Warren Court–era rulings recognizing the right to vote as fundamental for this class of voters and would lock it in so that a hostile Supreme Court cannot continue to water down voting rights.
2. Equal Weighting of Votes
This provision would explicitly embed in the Constitution the Warren Court’s one-person, one-vote principle. It is necessary, despite rulings such as Reynolds v. Sims, because a future Supreme Court could overrule those cases and determine that the original public meaning of the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (or Article I as applied to congressional elections) does not require the drawing of districts with roughly equal populations.
States and local governments would not have the power to create systems of their own, analogous to the Senate, in which each state is entitled to two senators regardless of population. Nor could states design other means of dividing voting power that give more voting power to some voters over others.
The provision would carve out voting for president and vice president, which the Constitution has always required to be conducted on a state-by-state basis through the Electoral College. That system weights the votes of voters in states with smaller populations as greater than those of voters in states with large populations. However, within each state, the votes for president must be equally weighted. The provision does not require an explicit carve-out for Senate elections, because Senate elections are conducted statewide, not in districts.
3. Automatic Voter Registration and Unique Voter-Identification Numbers
This provision helps implement the right to an equal vote. Voter registration and identification requirements are among the biggest sources of dispute in current election litigation. By making the government bear the burden and costs of registering all eligible voters and requiring the government to provide all eligible citizens with unique voter-identification numbers that would be used to help voters register across states and prevent double voting, elections may be run more securely with less litigation and greater voter confidence. And, of course, easing the path to voter registration promotes political equality by removing a hurdle from voters.
Some states may not want to set up the procedures for automatic voter registration and may prefer to leave the registration question to the federal government. States would have the option to set up their own system or leave it to the federal government. This means that the provision would not require a “federal takeover” of elections, as some conservatives fear.
Democrats and those on the left have reflexively opposed all voter-identification provisions. But such laws are ubiquitous in most other democracies because they are coupled with voter registration conducted by the government (and often using national identity cards, which the United States does not produce).
The real objection to these provisions as they have been implemented in the states is that they have put the onus on voters to get the right form of identification, which places an undue burden on certain people, such as students, poor voters, and others. Under the amendment, the government would take on all of those costs and burdens as part of the system of setting up automatic voter-registration systems. This will make the system work better across states (as people would have a single voter-identification number for their entire life, just as they have a single Social Security number) and ensure not only eased voter registration but also a more efficient and more secure voting system overall.
4. Ensuring Equal Voting Opportunities and Limiting Burdens on Voting Rights
This provision addresses two substantive points and gives a set of instructions to the courts.
First, voters in a state must have roughly equal voting opportunities. This provision does not require states to have a certain number of days of early voting (or even require early voting at all). It does mean, for example, that if a state decides to have an early-voting period, the opportunity for voters must be roughly the same. Any burdens on voting are measured on a per capita, not a per county, basis. This means that people in urban and rural voting areas should have similar wait times to vote. That might lead to more hours for early-polling places in areas with higher populations compared with sparsely populated areas. The provision does not allow a state to assign just one early-voting place per county, which would put a bigger burden on voters in larger counties and give only the illusion of equality or uniformity.
Second, the provision requires that voting not be unduly burdensome on voters and that impediments to voting be reasonably necessary. This requirement should again be measured not by a specific number of early-voting days but by the overall ease with which voters may vote. These standards are unavoidably general, but they should be applied by courts using reasonableness and common sense in a way that favors the enfranchisement of and easy voting opportunities for eligible voters.
5. Constitutionalizing Protection of Minority Voting Rights
This provision would transform what currently appears as Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act into a constitutional guarantee of equal treatment. This provision is necessary because the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments have not been properly interpreted by the Supreme Court to adequately protect voting rights, and because a very conservative Court could one day determine that the section in question, because it is race conscious, itself now violates the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Despite strides toward greater political equality, too much discrimination in voting remains, especially against African American, Latino, Native American, and Asian voters, to leave the issue to a congressional statute that can be neutered by the Supreme Court.
This constitutional provision would enshrine the original intent of Section 2 to provide meaningful protection for minority voters, rather than the watered-down version of the section that the Supreme Court has recently embraced.
6. Congress’s Broad Enforcement Powers
This provision clarifies that when Congress acts under its powers to enforce voting rights, it is fully equal with the Supreme Court. Rather than treating Congress as an ordinary litigant that has to produce enough evidence to satisfy the Supreme Court, the Court must accept congressional legislation protecting voting rights so long as it is rationally related to Congress’s purposes.
Looking across american history, the people, not the Supreme Court, have been the main protectors of voting rights. After the Supreme Court refused to recognize enslaved African Americans as citizens, and after the Civil War freed them, Congress passed and states ratified a series of amendments ending slavery, guaranteeing citizenship for those born in the United States, and barring discrimination in voting on the basis of race. After the Supreme Court refused to recognize equal voting rights for women, Congress passed and the states ratified the Nineteenth Amendment. So, too, with voting rights for 18-to-21-year-olds, and for the right of residents of Washington, D.C., to vote for president.
We can do it again, providing the American people with a real right to vote. It won’t solve all the problems with our election system, and it won’t happen tomorrow, but passing a right-to-vote amendment would go a long way toward ensuring greater enfranchisement, less litigation and uncertainty over voting rules, and a stronger democracy for all.
This essay has been adapted from Richard L. Hasen’s new book, A Real Right To Vote: How A Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard American Democracy.
I [voting rights expert Rick Hasen] have written this piece for the Atlantic, which is adapted from my book out next week, A Real Right to Vote. It begins:
As election season begins and Americans head to the polls, many would be shocked to learn that the United States Constitution does not guarantee them the right to vote. It instead leaves the question of voter qualifications mainly to the states, and bars voting discrimination only on the basis of certain protected categories, such as race and gender. What’s worse, courts for the past 50 years have repeatedly failed to protect Americans who have been denied the franchise or who face unnecessary hurdles exercising it.
The Supreme Court in 1973 refused to recognize that disenfranchisement of felons who had completed their sentences violated the Constitution. The Court in 2000 rejected the claim of residents of Washington, D.C., that they had the right to vote for members of Congress. Lower courts similarly rejected voting-rights claims brought by U.S. citizens living in U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico. The Supreme Court also upheld an Arizona law barring the third-party collection of mail-in ballots, a prohibition that made voting harder for Native Americans living on reservations.
In the case of Bush v. Gore, which ended the disputed presidential election of 2000, the Court affirmed that the Constitution does not guarantee anyone the right to vote for president, confirming that states can take away that right at any time for future elections. Similarly, in 2008, the Court in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board allowed states to pass more onerous voting rules, such as strict voter-identification laws, without proof that such laws serve any state interests in preventing fraud or promoting voter confidence.
Perhaps worst of all was Shelby County v. Holder, in 2013, when the Court held that Congress no longer had the power to force states with a history of discrimination to get federal approval before making changes to their voting rules. Shelby County marked a new era in the Court’s approach to voting rights. The Constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment, barring discrimination on the basis of race, expressly recognizes Congress’s power to prevent such discrimination by passing appropriate legislation. Yet far from recognizing “the special role assigned to Congress in protecting the integrity of the democratic process in federal elections,” as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent suggested, the Court in Shelby County did not treat Congress as a coequal branch of government entitled to exercise its own judgment as to what laws are constitutionally required to prevent race discrimination in voting. Shelby County revealed how difficult it would be to get bold voting-rights legislation upheld by the Supreme Court even if Congress could get its act together to pass it….
One might fairly ask how, if Congress cannot even pass ordinary voting-rights legislation with Republicans opposing Democrats on virtually all voting issues, we could expect it to pass a constitutional amendment with its much more difficult thresholds: An amendment requires support of two-thirds of each house of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states. Given intense political polarization, passage of this amendment is not happening anytime soon, even if Democrats take back both houses of Congress in 2024. But now is the time to begin the work.
The key is to think in the longer term and to build a political movement around passage of the amendment. That’s what happened in earlier times, as with passage of the Nineteenth Amendment ensuring gender equality in voting. Decades elapsed between 1874, when the Supreme Court rejected the argument that the Fourteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote, and 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified. Along the way, women’s-rights activists built support for gender equality in voting state by state.
An amendment affirmatively protecting the right to vote could be structured in many ways. I have developed what I term a “basic” version of the constitutional right to vote, one that would continue to let states exclude noncitizens, nonresidents, children, and former or current felons, and which would not change voting rights for U.S. territories or abolish the Electoral College or change the Senate. In my new book, I also suggest how to expand the right to vote to make these more capacious changes, leaving the full scope of the amendment to those who would lead a 21st-century voting-rights movement….
A basic constitutional right to vote should have these six elements:
*****
A substantial, bipartisan majority of voters agree that free and fair elections are:
- administered by non-partisan, professional election administrators
- staffed by trained non-partisan or bi-partisan poll workers
- safe, secure and reliable
- free from domestic and foreign intrusion or intimidation
- reserved for eligible citizens able to identify themselves by reasonable means available to all
- free of discriminatory treatment
- free of delays and unnecessary legal or other restraints
- administered under election rules which sensibly encourage eligible voters to vote
New state voter suppression laws in Georgia, Texas, Florida, Arizona and other Trump-led states flagrantly disregard these fundamental elements of the right to vote and be counted.
These vote-suppressing laws:
- Substitute political cronies for independent professional election officials and as secretaries of state
- Empower partisan poll watchers to intimidate poll workers and voters, replacing non-partisan and bipartisan poll workers
- Impose criminal penalties designed to intimidate election officials and poll workers of integrity.
- Unduly limit early voting
- Prohibit voting on Sundays
- Prohibit or limit mail-in ballots
- Limit or prohibit early review of mail-in ballots
- Prohibit or unduly limit the number of drop-off ballot boxes, reduce hours of operation, or designate drop-off box locations difficult for minority and other voters to reach.
- Impose voter ID requirements not reasonably available to all voters
- Do not count mail-in ballots received within a reasonable time after election day
- Purge voters from voting lists in discriminatory ways or with out notice and a reasonable opportunity to correct
- Empower partisan poll workers to reject provisional votes for insignificant reasons.
- Prohibit or limit automatic voter registration
Let’s be clear: Vote-suppressing laws unfairly tilt elections
Shamefully, under the misleading moniker of “election integrity”, Trump-led state legislatures deliberately aim to tilt elections and to challenge elections lost.
In proposing and enacting such “laws”, Red state legislators employ Trump tactics of deflecting, denying and lying. Make no mistake about it, they seek political power for its own sake, not for the common good, not in the interests of our democratic Republic, whose very foundation is the right to vote and be counted.
Still not persuaded?
See how your votes aren’t equal
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“Shame, for example, . . . provides a deterrence instrumental in sanctioning vicious or unjust action.”– Marlene K. Sokolon, “Political Emotions: Aristotle and the Symphony of Reason and Emotion”