Voter Suppression & Election Theft by the Republican Party

[goldenvalley]

"innuendo and doubts about nefarious things" is all they've ever had. And Texas? Trump won that state. He won't get anymore electoral votes from it. Abbott should be impeached for costing the state money on any audit prompted by the immediate past president.

[LFC]

Sept 24, 2021 17:55:03 GMT goldenvalley said:

Abbott should be impeached for costing the state money on any audit prompted by the immediate past president.

Simplified it for you.

[goldenvalley]

In case anyone is interested here's the NYT article on the findings and conjectures of the Cyber Ninjas in Arizona.  I think the main thing the Ninjas found were suckers who were willing to give them money.

[LFC]

Aug 17, 2021 21:21:48 GMT LFC said:

The FBI is now involved in the leaked password scandal. Good. Somebody needs to go to jail for this.

Oh Tina, you little anti-democracy fascist. You've been working on the inside to destroy free and fair elections.

Colorado Republican Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk and recorder who is currently under investigation by the FBI, required her office’s employees to attend a presentation in April in which physics teacher Frank Douglas, an election truther working for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, peddled a bunch of fake conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being riddle with fraud.

• Peters also brought her staff to a separate private meeting with Douglas for him to push the conspiracy theories to them directly, Douglas told the Washington Post. “I sat down with her and showed her how her election was hacked, and she brought in all of her employees, one after the other,” he said.

• Peters urged her staffers not to talk to law enforcement last month, per an email obtained by the Post, amid the FBI’s investigation and the Colorado secretary of state’s lawsuit against her and her deputy, Belinda Knisley, for allegedly allowing an unauthorized person access to data from the county’s Dominion Voting Systems machines that later leaked online.

• Peters admitted last week during a podcast that she had “commissioned somebody to come in” to copy the data. Peters and Knisley’s lawyers deny that the officials had leaked the data online, and argue that they had at worst committed merely “several technical violations of election regulations.”

[goldenvalley]

Tina is an argument against having elections officials elected.

Peters, who is in her mid-60s, spent years running a family construction company and at one point sold magnets and other alternative wellness products through Nikken, a multilevel marketing firm, according to her YouTube channel and an archived version of her website. In 2017, she decided to run for clerk in Mesa County, a Republican stronghold on Colorado’s Western Slope.

Peters campaigned during the 2018 primary on a promise of shorter lines at the motor vehicle department. She beat her opponent, a longtime employee of the clerk’s office, and was not opposed in the general election.

But the following year, Peters’s office — beset by staff turnover — failed to collect and count 574 ballots that had been left in a drop box during a November 2019 election. Residents mounted an unsuccessful recall effort, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel’s editorial board called for her resignation, and the secretary of state sent a monitor, former Eagle County clerk Teak Simonton, to oversee the county’s administration of a primary in the summer of 2020.

In a report to the secretary of state, Simonton wrote that Peters had been “distrusting, frequently rude and antagonistic,” but that her staff was cooperative, hard-working and committed to integrity.

Election administration should be a civil service job...that includes Secretarys of State. This is a profession, not something for political hacks to be involved in.  
 

[LFC]

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZzhole) calls the sham faudit "a good start." The last sentence I quoted is must-read insanity. What a f***ing tool.

The results of the closely-watched Arizona GOP-led Senate "audit" of the 2020 election has reaffirmed that Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in Maricopa County. However, leading Republicans in the state are still claiming that reviews elsewhere will prove their false claims of voter fraud.

The conclusion of the audit found that Biden won Arizona's most populous county by 1,040,873 votes in November—99 more votes than shown in the certified ballots—dealing a blow to Trump's effort to overturn the election results.

Still, Trump is continuing his campaign of pressuring states to probe his baseless voter fraud claims and his congressional allies have attempted to frame the Arizona review as one that would crank up such efforts elsewhere.

"It was a good start because we now know that fraud was there. Yeah, they made their case very well. The thing about it is that they weren't given the tools to make a full disclosure," Arizona GOP Representative Paul Gosar, a close ally of Trump, told reporters from the Undercurrent in Phoenix Friday afternoon, shortly after the audit was released to the Arizona Senate.

"My suggestion is that we actually have some hearings and look over this batch and set a new election for Biden and Trump before the end of the year," he added.

Then we have this Azzhole who speaks the truth, he's just too stupid to understand who it vindicates.

"Today is vindication day," Arizona state Representative Mark Finchem, a vocal supporter of Republican efforts to challenge the election results, told a crowd gathered by the state Capitol.

Hint: It's not the dipshits who claim voter fraud occurred without any evidence to back it up.

[goldenvalley]

They could have their pet auditors do a door to door search for voters, find nothing wrong, and still claim that the election was rigged. Why? Because Trump should have won, that's why.

[jackd]

Say something three times and it's true.

[LFC]

Sept 27, 2021 17:32:06 GMT jackd said:

Say something three times and it's true.

"Covfefejuice! Covfefejuice! Covfefejuice!"

[pnwguy]

God help us if 2024 is show time....

[LFC]

Gee, what a shock. The final Arizona faudit report is brimming with propaganda and easily disproven lies.

Yes, the Arizona “audit” report affirmed Joe Biden’s victory. But for the Republican elites clinging to Trump’s lie that his second term was stolen from him, that wasn’t the point.

Instead, they focused on the bulk of the report — the bit after tallying Biden’s victory that counted “potential ballots impacted” by various things. Nevermind that Maricopa County officials and elections experts quickly debunked this material.

Take, for example, the leader of the Republican Party. Ronna McDaniel wrote that the audit had “apparently revealed election integrity failures.” But the examples she cited failed to pass even the most basic smell test. One of McDaniel’s talking points, for example, was the supposed presence of “Voters who may have voted in multiple counties.”

That referenced a section of the report that implied it was suspect that people in different counties who participated in the election had the same name and birth year. I mean, come on! As Maricopa County officials observed in their attempts to counter the misinfo, there are seven active voters in the county alone who were born in 1980 and named Maria Garcia.

“There are clear process failures that need to be resolved so that voters have confidence in our elections. Failure to establish trust in our election systems will suppress voter turnout,” McDaniel said.

But wait: That was the point of the audit in the first place, right? “Trust in our election systems.” Apparently not. Now, these bogus examples of “process failures” are GOP orthodoxy, accompanied by more explicit threats of violence. If 2016 is any indication, this is all a precursor to more attempts to steal political power on specious “fraud” grounds.

But apparently that level of lying and crazy just isn't enough for some.

There’s apparently a phony copy of the final report from the sham Arizona “audit” floating around that advises lawmakers not to certify the 2020 election.

Unfortunately, the state’s governor already did so — nearly 10 months ago.

The inexperienced, politically biased “auditors” of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results announced in a final report that, yes, Joe Biden won the election. Then, they spent the majority of their report flagging easily explained “anomalies” to provide grist for Trump and others’ quest to undermine confidence in the democratic process.

But that apparently wasn’t enough material for some Big Liars, who’ve begun circulating, knowingly or not, a fake report that claims the entire election should be trashed — a development Cyber Ninja’s spokesperson warned the media about Tuesday.

The fake report asserts that based on its findings, “the election should not be certified, and the reported results are not reliable.”

“Source confirms this is the REAL #AZ #audit report being censured in #Arizona. The election should not be certified,” Matthew DePerno, a candidate for Michigan attorney general who for months pushed conspiracy theories about the vote totals out of Antrim County, Michigan, tweeted on Friday.

[LFC]

A must-read from TPM called The Road to the Stolen 2024 Election.

[LFC]

Arizona f***nuttery continues as the utterest of nutters melt down over the faudit report.

Supporters of Republicans’ controversial “audit” of 2020 presidential election ballots have turned on each other after the partisan investigation failed to find proof of election malfeasance, with disaffected backers even circulating a fabricated rival report they claim shows interference by the “deep state.”

The audit report landed with a thud on Friday, only proving, if anything, that Joe Biden won Arizona by more votes than previously realized. On this week’s episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, hosts Asawin Suebsaeng and Will Sommer are joined by Arizona Mirror reporter Jerod MacDonald-Evoy to discuss the audit’s fractious aftermath.

“Some people who were involved in the report say the deep state kept the real truth out,” Sommer said on this week’s episode.

“The deep state and the politically correct lawyers and RINOs of the GOP suppressed this,” said MacDonald-Evoy, summarizing right-wing critics’ complaints about the anti-climactic audit report.

Among the audit report’s new detractors: Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, the controversial inventor whose supposed technology analyzing folds in ballot paper had promised, according to audit supporters, to detect some kind of voter fraud. Instead, the final audit report contained no mention of Pulitzer’s imaging technology, a change Pulitzer attributed on Twitter to “deep state” malfeasance.

Asked over email who in the “deep state” supposedly sabotaged his contribution to the report, Pulitzer remained vague.

“That’s the big question — is it not?” Pulitzer wrote in an email to The Daily Beast.

Audit discontent has been growing elsewhere in the conservative fever swamps. Joe Oltmann, a conservative businessman who rose to prominence in the post-election right after claiming without evidence that he heard a voting systems employee plotting on a conference call with antifa, claimed the state Senate had put on a “dog and pony show.” Ron Watkins, the one-time 8chan administrator who’s been accused of running the QAnon conspiracy theory, shared a video suggesting Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers (R), one of the audit’s most prominent supporters, was in fact blocking a real investigation of the 2020 ballots.

Right-wing media personalities disappointed by the audit have even promoted a fictitious rival report they claimed was the “real” report from audit operators Cyber Ninjas. In this telling, the fabricated “draft” report called for Biden’s win to be decertified. But while the fake report was embraced by prominent right-wing news blog The Gateway Pundit as proof that the real report released on Friday had been “watered down,” Cyber Ninjas blasted the report as a hoax.

Despite the auditors’ humiliation and now discord, Suebsaeng and MacDonald-Evoy say there are only more MAGA audits ahead before the midterms.

“I think it’s almost never-ending, especially with 2022 coming up,” MacDonald-Evoy said, suggesting that “audit reporter” could be a necessary new journalism beat.

[goldenvalley]

Sept 30, 2021 1:41:38 GMT LFC said:

Arizona f***nuttery continues as the utterest of nutters melt down over the faudit report.

It's an article of faith at this point.  Trump won and they won't rest until they change the official results.  Besides there is money to be gained and elections to be won by keeping this alive.

[LFC]

As predicted and in fact executed in Georgia the Republican Fascist Party is trying to take over the election process wherever they can so that they can enforce the "right" results. Republicans that aren't toeing the fascist line are facing expulsion. This is how democracy dies.

Michele Carew would seem an unlikely target of Donald Trump loyalists who have fixated their fury on the notion that the 2020 election was stolen from the former president.

The nonpartisan elections administrator in the staunchly Republican Hood County, just an hour southwest of Fort Worth, oversaw an election in which Trump got some 81% of the vote. It was among the former president’s larger margins of victory in Texas, which also went for him.

Yet over the past 10 months, Carew’s work has come under persistent attack from hard-line Republicans. They allege disloyalty and liberal bias at the root of her actions, from the time she denied a reporter with the fervently pro-Trump network One America News entrance to a training that was not open to the public to accusations, disputed by the Texas secretary of state’s office, that she is violating state law by using electronic machines that randomly number ballots.

Viewing her decisions as a litmus test of her loyalty to the Republican Party, they have demanded that Carew be fired or her position abolished and her duties transferred to an elected county clerk who has used social media to promote baseless allegations of widespread election fraud.

[snip]

But Hood County stands out nationally and within Texas because it offers a rare view into the virulent distrust and unyielding political pressure facing elections administrators even in communities that Trump safely won. The county also represents the escalation of a wider push to replace independent administrators with more actively partisan election officials, said David Kimball, a professor of political science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

“Going back to the 2020 election, by and large, we saw election officials at the state and local level stand up to and resist efforts by Trump supporters to overturn the results,” said Kimball, who is also a ballot design and voting equipment expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Election Lab. “And now this seems to me like part of the next move: Remove officials and put in somebody else who’s more to their liking.”

Kimball said such efforts can be dangerous given the power of elections administrators to control the number and location of polling places, the use of mail-in ballots and compliance with state and federal laws. In Mesa County, Colorado, for example, elected County Clerk Tina Peters, who has fueled the false narrative that Trump’s victory was stolen, allowed an unauthorized individual to copy the hard drives of voting machines, according to a lawsuit against Peters filed by the Colorado secretary of state’s office. Sensitive security information, including passwords, later appeared on far-right media sites and on social media, the lawsuit states. Peters’ attorney has denied that she did anything wrong.

Carew’s case is particularly troublesome because it “smells of political bullying” and reflects a wider rift in Texas among different factions of the GOP that has grown more pronounced since the election, said Carlos Cascos, a Republican who served as secretary of state for two years under Gov. Greg Abbott before leaving in 2017.

“They’re in power, they get somewhat cocky and they start eating their own. That’s what I’m seeing happening with the Texas GOP,” said Cascos, who this year helped form the Texas Republican Initiative, a group that was created to combat intraparty attacks led by former GOP Chairman Allen West, who is now running for governor.

This article could have landed in the "The Sickness of Christian Politics" as well because of course it could.

“Our elections are the representation of free will, and if we can’t trust that our free will is being represented legally and accurately, then God’s will is being thwarted,” Pressley, a failed Austin City Council candidate turned critic of electronic voting machines, told county commissioners in April. Dave Eagle, a county commissioner and critic of Carew’s, invited Pressley to speak at the meeting.

[goldenvalley]

I feel for the elections officials across the country.  Until 2020 they operated in relative obscurity, following the laws of their respective states, usually operating on minimal budgets because the entire political system doesn't care to fund them adequately. Now a bunch of people raise all sorts of issues and complaints, most of which are based on complete and utter ignorance, plus a healthy degree of paranoia and bad faith are making life miserable.  

[jackd]

And for the polling place officials, poll watchers, and various other volunteers who put in significant labor, without pay, out of a sense of civic duty.

[LFC]

Oct 5, 2021 21:49:10 GMT goldenvalley said:

I feel for the elections officials across the country.  Until 2020 they operated in relative obscurity, following the laws of their respective states, usually operating on minimal budgets because the entire political system doesn't care to fund them adequately. Now a bunch of people raise all sorts of issues and complaints, most of which are based on complete and utter ignorance, plus a healthy degree of paranoia and bad faith are making life miserable. 

And it's gone way past complaints to threats against them and their families. It's how the plaid-shirts operate.

[LFC]

"If you think the elections were legitimate then why are you so afraid of audits?"

This is why. We're not afraid of valid audits, many of which have been performed and which verified that the election was without widespread fraud. We're afraid of assholes like this making a complete mess of things.

Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who baselessly claimed the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump and who’s been appointed to lead the Wisconsin GOP’s Arizona-inspired review of the election results, is remarkably candid about his credentials.

• Election laws are “not intuitive,” and “no one can call elections laws common sense,” Gableman claimed in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel interview this week. “Once you understand them, it may be common sense but it’s not intuitive.”
• Here’s the kicker: “And so most people, myself included, do not have a comprehensive understanding or even any understanding of how elections work.”
• Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) has given Gableman $676,000 in taxpayer funds to run the so-called audit.
• Oh and Gableman went to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s ridiculous “Cyber Symposium” last month.

[goldenvalley]

Who says election laws need to be intuitive? This is his way of saying I don’t know how it works and I’m not going to bother to learn.

[pnwguy]

Oct 7, 2021 19:53:34 GMT goldenvalley said:

Who says election laws need to be intuitive? This is his way of saying I don’t know how it works and I’m not going to bother to learn.

More like "nobody can KNOW that this election was NOT stolen, so therefore we'll just select which electors to send for our state"

[LFC]

Oct 7, 2021 19:53:34 GMT goldenvalley said:

Who says election laws need to be intuitive? This is his way of saying I don’t know how it works and I’m not going to bother to learn.

Reminds me of the people who say that government intentionally makes the tax code really, really hard and they should just simplify it. They haven't a clue about how much of the tax code has been designed in response to tax attorneys and CPAs dodging those simpler regulations. I'm not saying it couldn't be simplified some but not nearly as much as many of those folks, who probably struggle to fill out their own tax returns, believe.

[LFC]

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) on the Arizona faudit. Maybe this should go in "flat out lost their minds."

Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., falsely claimed "we don't know" who won Arizona last November during a House hearing Thursday on Republicans' much-criticized ballot review that agreed President Joe Biden beat Donald Trump.

As the hearing got underway, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., asked Biggs whether he accepted the findings of the GOP-led review of ballots in Maricopa County, which last month affirmed Biden's victory and suggested he received even more votes over the former president than official counts had recorded.

"Who won the election in Arizona? Donald Trump or Joe Biden?" he asked.

"We don't know because as the audit demonstrates, Mr. Raskin, there are a lot of issues with this election that took place," Biggs responded.

"This is the problem we have," Raskin said, adding, "Unfortunately, we have one of the great political parties which has followed him off of the ledge of this electoral lunacy. It is dangerous for democracy. I am glad we are having this hearing today."

Biggs, a Trump ally, has previously refused to acknowledge that Biden won the presidency, but the moment underscored a dynamic that has only become more pronounced since Arizona Republicans first authorized the extraordinary ballot review, hiring outside contractors with little to no experience in elections to conduct it. In the 11 months since Biden's victory, challenging and questioning those results has emerged as a litmus test for Republicans as Trump, who continues to push the lie that the election was stolen from him, remains popular with the party's base. Demands for election investigations have proliferated, even in counties Trump won by large margins.

And I quote...

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” --George Orwell, "1984"

[LFC]

This asshat in NC simultaneously tried to destroy voting machine integrity (he failed) and destroy fashion sense (he succeeded).

WTF Am I Looking At Right Now
North Carolina state Rep. Jeff McNeely (R) announced on Thursday that he and several other Republican lawmakers were going to personally inspect the voting machines at the Durham County Board of Elections office on the basis of–you guessed it–voter fraud (there’s no evidence of voter fraud in Durham County). McNeely announced his Mission Impossible fantasy while dressed like a particularly fancy clown.

• The board flatly shot down McNeely’s plan. Derek Bowens, Durham County’s director of elections, told the News and Observer that his office has “no plans” to “allow anyone, as noted by law, to inspect our voting equipment.”
• McNeely vowed that he wouldn’t be dissuaded, saying that he could get the police to accompany him. “We will do whatever it takes to go about our mission,” he said.
• McNeely backed down from his threat by the end of day, saying he’d just drive by the elections office building instead, according to WRAL.

[LFC]

Sept 27, 2021 16:11:09 GMT LFC said:

Oh Tina, you little anti-democracy fascist. You've been working on the inside to destroy free and fair elections.

A judge barred Tina from working on the upcoming election. Her decision was pretty emphatic too.

Sept 27, 2021 16:11:09 GMT LFC said:

A Colorado judge has blocked Mesa County, Colorado Clerk Tina Peters from running the county’s elections this year — the result of a state lawsuit over Peters allowing an unauthorized person into a sensitive voting machine software update meeting, after which passwords and digital images of election software were leaked online.

Peters’ deputy, Belinda Knisley, was also barred from working on the upcoming election.

“The Court finds that Peters and Knisley breached their duties by failing to follow the rules and orders of the Secretary and the [Colorado Election] Code, neglected their duties by failing to take adequate precautions to protect confidential information, and committed wrongful acts by being untruthful,” Colorado District Court Judge Valerie J. Robison wrote.

Two officials currently filling in for the pair, former Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams and former Mesa County Clerk Sheila Reiner, now the county treasurer, will continue in their roles for the November 2021 elections, the judge said.

In a statement shared with TPM, Peters referred to the lawsuit as a “power grab” and a “stunning abuse of power” by Secretary of State Jena Griswold. She said she would appeal the decision.