The Republican War on Voting Thread

[flurb]

Not satisfied with simply restricting restricting the franchises, Republicans in the Texas legislature tried to push through another bill that would allow for Arizona-style audits of the 2020 election. They ran out of time during the immediately past special session, but the rumor is that Abbott will include it in ANOTHER special session that he’s going to call in two weeks.

This is just so baffling. Trump WON Texas. Republicans won every contested race. Obviously the driver isn’t a real concern with the outcome, but just to further invalidate elections as a legitimate way of determining outcomes.

[Ann_Hedonia]

It’s not baffling at all. They are trying to “destroy the system” by chilling - making it actually dangerous for anyone to pursue a career in election management, education or healthcare. It’s a form or terrorism.

There is a private citizen in Texas who was called out by name as a treasonous actor in Mike Lindell’s election symposium. His crime?
He used to work for Dominion Voting, then he took a job that involved managing elections for a county in Texas, a county that Biden won .
Now his life is in danger. All because he pursued a career in election management.

[ThelmaLou]

Pennsylvania GOP lawmakers approve wide-ranging subpoenas for personal...

Complete headline:
Pennsylvania GOP lawmakers approve wide-ranging subpoenas for personal information of 2020 voters

Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania on Wednesday approved subpoenas for a wide range of data and personal information on voters, advancing a probe of the 2020 election in a key battleground state former president Donald Trump has repeatedly targeted with baseless claims of fraud.

The move drew a sharp rebuke from Democrats who described the effort as insecure and unwarranted and said they would consider mounting a court fight. Among other requests, Republicans are seeking the names, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, last four digits of Social Security numbers, addresses and methods of voting for millions of people who cast ballots in the May primary and the November general election.

…

Wolf added in a statement, “Election security is not a game and should not be treated with such carelessness. Senate Republican[s] should be ashamed of their latest attempt to destabilize our election system through a sham investigation that will unnecessarily cost taxpayers millions of dollars.”

But Sen. Cris Dush, the Republican chairman of the committee that approved the subpoena, argued during the hearing that the information is needed because “there have been questions regarding the validity of people who have voted — whether or not they exist.”
…

“Whether or not they exist”? If anyone can find any logic in this, please speak up… oh, wait…logic… Never mind.

[Euphonious_Polemic]

@ThelmaLou

f anyone can find any logic in this, please speak up

“FAKE VOTERS! MOLE MEN! Stolen election! Busloads of illegals! CHINESE BALLOTS! NASA conspiracy with reverse vampires!”

That’s all the logic you need.

[ThelmaLou]

Of course! Why didn’t I think of those things? Thank you.

I’m wearing out the head-smack emoji.

[asahi]

There’s some evidence that the great lie is beginning to backfire among some right-leaning voters, which is good on one hand, but on the other, it makes the diehards even more extreme.

[Gyrate]

@ThelmaLou

“Whether or not they exist”? If anyone can find any logic in this, please speak up… oh, wait… logic … Never mind.

The logic is this: as long as they can continue to maintain the pretense that there are doubts about the validity of the last election, they can continue their efforts to undermine democracy, increase FUD, and bilk the rubes for every penny they’ve got.

[ThelmaLou]

In a changing Texas, Republicans will begin redistricting with more freedom...

Complete headline:
In a changing Texas, Republicans will begin redistricting with more freedom to draw their maps

…
Republicans disproportionately rely on white voters to elect them, but people of color were behind 95% of the state’s population growth since 2010. Hispanic Texans alone were responsible for half of that increase. And the 2020 census found that the Hispanic population — 39.3% of the total population — was nearly equal in size to the non-Hispanic white population, which makes up 39.8%.

What’s more, population growth over the last decade was largely concentrated in areas where Republicans are faltering. The state’s suburbs, many of which have turned blue in recent years or are trending in that direction, grew the fastest. Meanwhile, the state’s five most populous counties — Harris, Dallas, Bexar, Travis and Tarrant — became home to roughly 44% of the state’s 4 million new residents. Harris, Dallas, Bexar and Travis are decisively blue counties. Tarrant, which is historically red but voted Democratic at the top of the ticket in 2018 and 2020, actually saw its white population decrease by more than 30,000 in the last decade.

Despite the challenging demographic landscape, the U.S. Supreme Court paved an easier road to Republican dominance with two highly consequential rulings in the last decade.
…

Doin’ God’s work, amirite?

[Buck_Godot]

@ThelmaLou

“Whether or not they exist”? If anyone can find any logic in this, please speak up… oh, wait… logic … Never mind.

I think that this is following the old @Bricker line, "Even if there isn’t any actually any significant voter fraud we need to pass laws/investigate in order to preserve voter confidence in the system. " Of course not acknowledging that any lack of voter confidence it entirely of their own purposeful making.

[ThelmaLou]

Something positive:

Judges strike down North Carolina voter ID law, citing its ‘discriminatory...

Complete headline:
Judges strike down North Carolina voter ID law, citing its ‘discriminatory purpose’ against African Americans

A panel of North Carolina judges on Friday struck down the state’s law requiring voters to present photo identification before casting ballots, saying that the measure “was enacted in part for a discriminatory purpose” against African American voters.

…

The North Carolina measure, known as S.B. 824, was enacted in December 2018 after a supermajority of the state legislature overrode a veto by Gov. Roy Cooper (D). North Carolina voters also approved a ballot measure creating a constitutional requirement that voters present a photo ID. At the time, Cooper said the law would disenfranchise minority voters, who are less likely to possess the required identification.

In Friday’s majority decision, Superior Court Judges Michael O’Foghludha and Vince Rozier Jr. wrote that the attorneys defending the law failed to prove that it “would have been enacted in its present form if it did not tend to discriminate against African American voters.”

“Other, less restrictive voter ID laws would have sufficed to achieve the legitimate nonracial purposes of implementing the constitutional amendment requiring voter ID, deterring fraud, or enhancing voter confidence,” the judges wrote.

They noted that they did not find that any individual lawmaker supporting the voter-ID law “harbors any racial animus or hatred towards African American voters,” but rather that the legislature’s Republican majority targeted those voters because they were more likely to be Democrats.
…

Is the key then to encourage Black people to register as Republicans and then VOTE Democratic?

[Max_S]

@ThelmaLou

Is the key then to encourage Black people to register as Republicans and then VOTE Democratic?

If Black people were a significant portion of the Republican primary voters - even if they vote D in the general election, the Republican party would be much more sensitive to that demographic.

~Max

[Ann_Hedonia]

Here’s an article in the Washington Post about the danger The Republican War on Voting poses to the people with careers in governmental administration and election management, and the authors’ bipartisan effort to protect and defend them.

Opinion | Election officials need our legal help against repressive laws and...

Even though WaPo is paywalled, this link should be free for two weeks. It’s a new feature they have where I can use my subscription to “gift” a limited number of links be month. If you want to read this article, it won’t count against your free views.

[Buck_Godot]

@Ann_Hedonia

It’s a new feature they have where I can use my subscription to “gift” a limited number of links be month.

Way cool!
Can you post or PM me a link that tells how you do that? I also subscribe and may want to share some links with the board in the future.

[Ann_Hedonia]

Sure, it’s easy.

When you open the article, you will see a new icon to the right of the byline - a gift box- next to the other icons for sharing and bookmarking. Just click the icon and follow the instructions to create the link.

It really is a great feature. I always try to find free sources for straight-up news articles, but some of their editorials and investigative pieces are exclusive.

[Red_Wiggler]

That’s quite the vicious circle Republicans have constructed for themselves with black voters.

[Ann_Hedonia]

I just wanted to add that -now that I’m looking for it- the NYT has the same policy on gifting articles and it works the same way.

[Guest-starring_Id]

This New Yorker article, The Big Money Behind the Big Lie, came out last August, and even if it was posted/disciussed here back then, well then dammit I’m a gonna get all tl;dr about this anyway, and cite as many salient points as I can, in case anyone has paywall issues.

I think every human being should take this shit in, to know precisely what shit wheels are grinding away to make things even shittier.

Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the country’s foremost election-law experts, told me, “I’m scared shitless.” Referring to the array of new laws passed by Republican state legislatures since the 2020 election, he said, “It’s not just about voter suppression. What I’m really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count.”

This niggles at me and makes me wonder how bullshit-like the Cyber Ninnies’ results will be (if they ever get around to barfing them out, that is) and to what degree would such egregious horseshit stick amongst a certain ignorant electorate?

Although the Arizona audit may appear to be the product of local extremists, it has been fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives. Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who has tracked the flow of dark money in American politics, told me that a “flotilla of front groups” once focussed on advancing such conservative causes as capturing the courts and opposing abortion have now “more or less shifted to work on the voter-suppression thing.” These groups have cast their campaigns as high-minded attempts to maintain “election integrity,” but Whitehouse believes that they are in fact tampering with the guardrails of democracy.

One of the movement’s leaders is the Heritage Foundation, the prominent conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. It has been working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (alec)—a corporate-funded nonprofit that generates model laws for state legislators—on ways to impose new voting restrictions. Among those deep in the fight is Leonard Leo, a chairman of the Federalist Society, the legal organization known for its decades-long campaign to fill the courts with conservative judges. In February, 2020, the Judicial Education Project, a group tied to Leo, quietly rebranded itself as the Honest Elections Project, which subsequently filed briefs at the Supreme Court, and in numerous states, opposing mail-in ballots and other reforms that have made it easier for people to vote.

Another newcomer to the cause is the Election Integrity Project California. And a group called FreedomWorks, which once concentrated on opposing government regulation, is now demanding expanded government regulation of voters, with a project called the National Election Protection Initiative.

These disparate nonprofits have one thing in common: they have all received funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Based in Milwaukee, the private, tax-exempt organization has become an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules—a tactic once relegated to the far right. With an endowment of some eight hundred and fifty million dollars, the foundation funds a network of groups that have been stoking fear about election fraud, in some cases for years. Public records show that, since 2012, the foundation has spent some eighteen million dollars supporting eleven conservative groups involved in election issues.

It might seem improbable that a low-profile family foundation in Wisconsin has assumed a central role in current struggles over American democracy. But the modern conservative movement has depended on leveraging the fortunes of wealthy reactionaries. In 1903, Lynde Bradley, a high-school dropout in Milwaukee, founded what would become the Allen-Bradley company. He was soon joined by his brother Harry, and they got rich by selling electronic instruments such as rheostats. Harry, a John Birch Society founding member, started a small family foundation that initially devoted much of its giving to needy employees and to civic causes in Milwaukee. In 1985, after the brothers’ death, their heirs sold the company to the defense contractor Rockwell International, for $1.65 billion, generating an enormous windfall for the foundation. The Bradley Foundation remains small in comparison with such liberal behemoths as the Ford Foundation, but it has become singularly preoccupied with wielding national political influence.

[BF] has funded conservative projects ranging from school-choice initiatives to the controversial scholarship of Charles Murray, the co-author of the 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” which argues that Blacks are less likely than whites to join the “cognitive elite.” And, at least as far back as 2012, it has funded groups challenging voting rights in the name of fighting fraud

[Senator Sheldon Whitehouse]: “It’s a massive covert operation run by a small group of billionaire élites. These are powerful interests with practically unlimited resources who have moved on to manipulating that most precious of American gifts—the vote.”

Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., noted, “Trump won white America by eight points. He won non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America. It’s almost like he represents a nation within a nation.”

I dig the bolded - interesting POV, there, with its own warped sense.

Forty years ago, Paul Weyrich, who helped establish the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups, admitted, “I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Today, the so-called Independent Legislature Doctrine has informed Trump and the right’s attempts to use Republican-dominated state legislatures to overrule the popular will. Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at Stanford, told me, “It’s giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument.”

The foundation, meanwhile, has given nearly three million dollars to programs that Robert George, a Princeton political philosopher, established at Princeton. He has written in praise of Pence’s refusal to decertify Biden’s election, and has lamented that so many Americans believe, “wrongly,” that “the election was ‘stolen.’ ” But he declined to discuss with me why, then, he serves on the Bradley Foundation’s board.

One recipient of Bradley money is True the Vote, a Texas-based group that, among other things, trains people to monitor polling sites. Mitchell has served as its legal counsel, and hacked documents show that she advocated to the I.R.S. that the group deserved tax-exempt status as a charity. To earn such a designation, a group must file federal tax forms promising not to engage in electoral politics. In a letter of support, she asserted that “fraudulent voting occurs in the United States,” citing a 2010 case in which the F.B.I. arrested nine Floridians for election violations. But, as with many voter-fraud allegations, the details of the case were less than advertised. The accusation involved a school-board election in a rural Black community in which a campaign had collected dozens of absentee ballots, in violation of the law. The charges were eventually dismissed. The judge found “no intent to cast a false or fraudulent ballot.” True the Vote, which was granted tax-exempt status, has since been the subject of numerous complaints from voters, who have accused it of intimidation and racism.

Um, “True the Vote”? How fucking Neanderthal-sounding is a name like that? (ok sure, my commentary isn’t exactly on the erudite side, either, possibly. Oh wells)

Last year, a Reuters report characterized Mitchell as one of four lawyers leading the conservative war on “election fraud,” and described True the Vote as one of the movement’s hubs. The story linked the group and three other conservative nonprofits to at least sixty-one election lawsuits since 2012. Reuters noted that, during the same period, the four groups, along with two others devoted to election-integrity issues, have received more than three and a half million dollars from the Bradley Foundation

It’s a surprisingly short leap from making accusations of voter fraud to calling for the nullification of a supposedly tainted election. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a group funded by the Bradley Foundation, is leading the way. Based in Indiana, it has become a prolific source of litigation; in the past year alone, it has brought nine election-law cases in eight states. It has amassed some of the most visible lawyers obsessed with election fraud, including Mitchell, who is its chair and sits on its board.

[E]arly this year, Shawnna Bolick, a Republican state representative from Phoenix introduced a bill proposing a radical reading of Article II of the Constitution, along the lines of the Independent Legislature Doctrine. It would enable a majority of the Arizona legislature to override the popular vote if it found fault with the outcome, and dictate the state’s Electoral College votes itself—anytime up until Inauguration Day. Bolick has described her bill as just “a good, democratic check and balance,” but her measure was considered so extreme that it died in committee, despite Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature. Yet, simply by putting forth the idea as legislation, she helped lend legitimacy to the audacious scheme that the Trump campaign desperately pursued in the final days before Biden’s Inauguration: to rely on Republican-led state legislatures to overturn Electoral College votes. Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, who served as an associate White House counsel under Obama, told me, “Institutions like the Heritage Foundation and ALEC are providing the grease to turn these attacks on democracy into law.”

If Shawnna Bolick wins her race secretary of state in Arizona, she will oversee future elections in the state. And, if the Supreme Court faces another case in which arguments about the Independent Legislature Doctrine come into play, there may now be enough conservative Justices to agree with Thomas that there are circumstances under which legislatures, not voters, could have the final word in American elections.

And really, I could’ve cited on and on about aaaaww cheek-sqeezable John Eastman*, former flunkie Trump lawyer and co-author of “The Seditionist’s Handbook”, and, along with Trump, tried to persuade Vice-President Mike Pence to halt the certification of the Electoral College vote; or, two other Public Interest Legal Foundation lawyers — its president, Christian Adams, and another board member, Hans von Spakovsky — of the stupid 2017 Presidential commission on election integrity that antagonistically imploded within months; or, ALEC CEO Lisa Nelson’s boner-on for Trump; or, the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s president saying “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist, and so forth.”; or, the Rally Forge / Turning Point social media misinformation frenzy; or, more Heritage Foundation shenanigans; or, the fucking ridiculous Honest Elections Project, the group tied to Leonard Leo, of the Federalist Society; or, Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate’s president, confiding that she knew there was “nothing to” the fraud charges but still subpoened for the county’s ballots for the forensic audit; or finally, Heritage Foundation off-shoot Heritage Action’s plans to spend twenty-four million dollars mobilizing supporters and lobbyists who will promote “election integrity,” starting in eight battleground states, including Arizona.

Hooboy yeah late for work now.

*Love how this opens: “Eastman, who recently retired, under pressure, from Chapman University, and was stripped of his public duties at another post that he held, at the University of Colorado Boulder, told me he still believes that the election was stolen, and thinks that the audits in Arizona and other states will help prove it. The Bradley Foundation declined to comment on him, or on Mitchell, when asked about its role in funding their activities.”

[Dr.Winston_OBoogie]

@Guest-starring_Id

This niggles at me and makes me wonder how bullshit-like the Cyber Ninnies’ results will be ( if they ever get around to barfing them out, that is) and to what degree would such egregious horseshit stick amongst a certain ignorant electorate?

Um, I think you missed the announcement:

@Darren_Garrison

Uh oh Spaghettios:

Arizona audit draft report confirms Biden beat Trump in 2020

[Gyrate]

Not officially announced yet. 1pm today, I believe (AZ time, I assume).

[asahi]

There was really no other outcome, and there was no way to take seriously any claim to the contrary. The efforts in Arizona failed because Republicans probably assumed they would win, but more than that, they didn’t have an apparatus in place to manipulate the results.

But as the article that @Guest-starring_Id linked to describes, all of that has changed. The article refers to the ability of election officials to manipulate the results and control whether an election gets certified or not. The law professor interviewed in the article has described the exact same fears I have.

It’s not just one tactic we’re dealing with; the GOP has opened up a multi-front war on liberal democratic elections, starting with even more partisan gerrymandering which will likely result in Republican control of Congress next year. I truly believe the only thing that can stop the illiberal Republican machine is COVID killing Republican voters, or killing so many of their beloved that maybe just enough of them have a change of worldview. But there’s no indication that we’re there yet.