Voter Suppression & Election Theft by the Republican Party

[goldenvalley]

Jan 28, 2022 20:11:49 GMT LFC said:

Daaaaamn! Alabama went too far even for two Trump appointed judges in their request to stall the rejection of their blatant racially biased electoral map.

A panel of three federal judges on Thursday denied Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill (R) and two GOP state lawmakers’ (R) emergency motion to pause the same panel’s order for a new district map that has two majority Black voter districts.

The judges on the panel, which includes two Trump appointees, called the request for a stay “effectively an unsupported motion for reconsideration” of the order, which the court issued in response to two lawsuits over the new Alabama map that allows only one district to have a majority of Black voters.

On Thursday, the judges reiterated their previous finding that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed in arguing that the new GOP-drawn map violates Section Two of the Voting Rights Act, which bans racial discrimination in district map drawing.

“This is a straightforward Section Two case, not a legal unicorn,” the court wrote before jabbing at the defendants’ “attention-grabbing but unsupported claims” later in the filing.

The Federalist Society may have screwed up in the vetting of these particular judges.  Some conservatives who oppose abortion may still believe that the rule of law is important.

[LFC]

Here's a bit of a roundup:

Georgia's new voter suppression law has made it 45x more likely to have your vote-by-mail application rejected.

A 95-yr old WWII veteran had his mail-in ballot application rejected twice in Texas.

Arizona Republicans want to give themselves the power to reject of the results of elections they lose. Read this one. There's more and it's pure fascism.

[LFC]

An Arizona Republican buried the crime of using the state seal to submit a fake slate of electors. This is treasonous.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow did not mince words when she criticized Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) for his failure to look into the fake electors' scandal after the case was forwarded to his office from the Secretary of State Katie Hobbs.

On Thursday, January 28, Maddow discussed the timeline of events noting that the investigation goes back to December 22, 2020. At the time, Hobbs' office had received fake electors' documents from two different sets of Republicans. Both sets of documents included the state seal.

In a letter to those who crafted the fake electors' documents, Hobbs pointed out a number of offenses, including the illegal and unauthorized use of the Arizona state seal. She also confirmed that her office would be forwarding the case to the attorney general's office for potential prosecution.

"By affixing the state seal to documents containing false and misleading information about the results of Arizona's November 3, 2020 General Election, you undermine the confidence in our democratic institutions," Hobbs wrote at the time.

The following day, on December 23, 2020, Hobbs' office made a formal criminal referral to Brnovich's office. The referral included all documents from the Arizona residents who purported to be state officials. Hobbs offered all of the material she'd received and laid out a clear case to support the charges she'd highlighted in the first letter.

However, after the case was turned over to Brnovich, nothing else happened. Now, it's been more than a year since any action was taken to advance the case.

She also raised two questions. Maddow wondered why only one of the cases had been reviewed when there were two cases of fake electors over the course of a number of days. She also wondered why no federal investigation was launched into the second case, as well. Or was it?

So what has Brnovich been doing in the meantime? According to Maddow, he has been more focused on appeasing former President Donald Trump in hopes of getting an endorsement for his U.S. Senate campaign. The MSNBC primetime host lambasted Brnovich for attempting to appeal to his constituents even though he is failing to do his current job.

Speaking of Arizona the Cyber Ninjas asshole is simply refusing to cooperate. I think a charge of contempt and parking his ass in jail is in order to give him time to ... reflect.

On Friday, The Arizona Republic reported that Doug Logan, the CEO of the Florida-based security firm Cyber Ninjas, refused to turn over records from his company's GOP-backed partisan "audit" of ballots in Maricopa County during a deposition this week.

"Logan answered questions during a contentious deposition with attorneys for The Arizona Republic and American Oversight," reported Ryan Randazzo. "The news organization and the left-leaning nonprofit have battled in court for months for the release of texts, emails and other documents related to the ballot recount and related investigations of the 2020 election ordered by Republicans in the Arizona Senate."

Of course he's the victim because ... of course he is.

"Logan said Hannah's November order to the company to turn over records was the result of a 'biased judge,' according to [Arizona Republic attorney Craig] Hoffman," continued the report. "Logan went on 'long soliloquies' during the deposition on how he did not believe his company was obligated to turn over records because they should not be public, Hoffman said."

This comes as Cyber Ninjas announces it is shutting down and laying off all its workers — citing, in large part, the $50,000 a day contempt of court fine for refusing to turn over the documents at issue in the dispute.

Remember when they told us the faudit would be completely transparent? Good times.

[pnwguy]

Even in the Dumpster era, you can't do your lynching in public. Wait for the coup in 2024.

[LFC]

This story has one foot in voter suppression and another in fascism. Welcome to Arizona.

Arizona Republicans, despite an embarrassing “audit” of the 2020 election results and the national mockery that followed, are back at it: The new legislative session has shown that the state will, once again, be at the forefront of the effort to restrict voting rights and champion the lie that 2020’s results were somehow tainted.

That starts with a proposal called HB 2596.

The election law community did a double-take when Arizona state Rep. John Fillmore (R) and 15 co-sponsors unveiled the bill, a proposal to radically overhaul the state’s elections — and, most significantly, give the legislature the ability to simply reject election results.

“The legislature shall call itself into session to review the ballot tabulating process for the regular primary and general elections and on review shall accept or reject the election results,” HB 2596 states.

Accept or reject! That’s not all: The bill would also eliminate early voting and no-excuse absentee voting — even though the vast majority of Arizonans vote by mail — and mandate that election officials count millions of ballots by hand.

“We need to get back to 1958-style voting,” Fillmore said last week.

But the focus on that one proposal shouldn’t eclipse the avalanche of election proposals on offer in Arizona, particularly given Republicans’ slim majority in the state (they only have one vote to lose in each chamber).

Last week, for example, the Senate Government Committee approved seven election bills during a hearing boycotted by several advocacy groups due to a ban on remote testimony. If every approved bill made it into law, they would collectively ban mail-in voting in local elections, require special security paper for ballots (think watermarks and holographic foil), and add additional scrutiny to “federal only” voters. Other committee-approved proposals would lower the recount threshold and require counties to make digital images of all ballots available publicly. (The latter had some notable bipartisan support from Adrian Fontes, former Maricopa County recorder and now a secretary of state candidate.)

[LFC]

Two old, worthless, lying, steaming piles of manure are going to bring us bipartisan voter protection? Yeah, I'm not holding my breath.

A bipartisan group of senators met Monday evening to continue work on election reform legislation, a new rallying point after Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) voted down Democrats’ attempt to reform the filibuster and pass voting rights bills.

“Everyone is still very focused on producing a bipartisan bill that can garner 60 or more votes in the Senate,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said on her way out of the meeting. “That is our goal.”

Collins said that 16 senators were involved in the effort, but did not specify party breakdown. Whatever legislation these meetings produce will need at least 10 Republicans on board to survive the filibuster.

The group is breaking down into subsections to deal with specific issues, each headed by a Democratic and Republican co-chair.

Manchin read the areas of focus off a piece of paper on his way out of the meeting: clarifying the Electoral Count Act, protecting election workers and officials, voting practices and rights, the Election Assistance Commission and presidential transitions.

Collins and Manchin are chairing the group focused on devising a proposal to reform the Electoral Count Act. Collins said that they’d already met with the Senate parliamentarian to iron out details.

[pnwguy]

Feb 1, 2022 18:29:52 GMT LFC said:

Two old, worthless, lying, steaming piles of manure are going to bring us bipartisan voter protection? Yeah, I'm not holding my breath.

With American democracy soon to be on life support, maybe it makes sense to have senators that are close to that themselves involved

[LFC]

Wow, that's blatant. And it's not even the first time Republicans did it.

Florida Seniors’ Voter Registration Unknowingly Changed To GOP

Several elderly residents at a South Florida public housing building were shocked to discover this week that their party affiliation had been switched to Republican without their knowledge when they received new voter registration forms.

• The seniors received those forms after staffers of a third-party voter registration organization who were wearing Republican Party of Florida caps knocked at their doors and offered to help them register.

• This has happened to South Florida seniors before: Florida outlet Local 10 News reported in December that an 84-year-old Miami resident who was a lifelong Democrat received a voter registration form that marked her as a Republican–and the “third-party voter registration organization” that had helped her with the paperwork was actually the Republican Party of Florida.

[LFC]

The Arizona fascist Republican (but I repeat myself) who sponsored the bill to allow the legislature steal any election they weren't happy with compared not be allowed to do so was the same as lynching. These people truly are insane.

Not giving a state legislature the power to freely throw out election results as it pleases is similar to mob murder, according to the Arizona state Republican who sponsored a bill to give the legislature that power.

The controversial bill’s sponsor, Arizona state Rep. John Fillmore (R) made the comparison while complaining to local CNN affiliate KPHO/KTVK on Wednesday that Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R) had effectively sunk his bill by assigning it to all 12 House committees for consideration.

Fillmore called Bowers’ move a “12-committee lynching” and doubled down when a reporter pressed him on drawing that kind of parallel.

“Yeah, it was a lynching,” said the lawmaker, who also declared last week that “we need to get back to 1958-style voting.”

There seems to be some resistance, though. I guess some Republicans are realizing where the party is going.

More than a dozen Arizona Republicans support Fillmore’s bill, according to CNN.

However, as the GOP’s nationwide crusade to make it easier to undermine election results expands, Fillmore might have managed to reach the ceiling: Bowers’ order for all 12 committees to take up the bill is unprecedented and will almost certainly doom the legislation.

[LFC]

New York Republicans are suing over redistricting because Democrats are doing what they did in 2010 and are doing again in 2020. No shock here.

A Republican-led group of voters is challenging the newly approved congressional districts in New York, arguing in a lawsuit that the new districts are unlawfully gerrymandered in Democrats’ favor.

In a 67-page complaint, filed in state court in Steuben County Thursday, the petitioners argued that “Democratic Party politicians who control the New York Legislature and Governor’s office brazenly enacted a congressional map that is undeniably politically gerrymandered in their party’s favor,” despite a 2014 constitutional amendment approved by voters.

The constitutional amendment barred partisan gerrymandering, as well as gerrymandering meant to favor incumbents.

It also created a so-called “Independent Redistricting Commission” consisting of 10 members: Four each appointed by the majority and minority leaders of both state legislative chambers, and the remaining two appointed by those initial eight.

When that commission deadlocked on a redistricting proposal this year, presenting two different maps rather than one, power to redraw district lines shifted to the legislature, which on Wednesday passed (along party lines) a congressional map that would net Democrats three additional congressional seats while stripping Republicans of four seats (New York lost one congressional seat due to population loss reflected in the 2020 census).

Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) signed the congressional map into law on Thursday.

I'm certainly not familiar with the details of the law but if Republicans dug their hills to to extract maximum advantage and the Democrats told them to go f*** off it seems they screwed themselves. They might have prevented some of the damage done by a purely Democratic map. But as my sig line says, "That's the problem with being implacable foes - no one has any incentive to treat you as anything more than an obstacle to be overcome."

[LFC]

Dumbest member of the Senate Ron Johnson just hopped aboard yet another crazy train.

On Friday, writing for MSNBC, commentator Steve Benen explored how Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), long a purveyor of conspiracy theories, has now endorsed the one conspiracy theory he spent a year refusing to touch — that the election results of his own state were fraudulent.

"As regular readers know, Johnson has spent the past few years becoming a far-right caricature who's increasingly seen as more of a partisan clown than a serious policymaker," wrote Benen. "The scope of his troubles is almost impressive. Johnson has, for example, cultivated a dreadful record on Covid-19. And the Jan. 6 attack. And support for foreign autocrats. And Russian disinformation."

However, noted Benen, for the longest time, Johnson avoided sowing doubt about the election results in Wisconsin. "There's nothing obviously skewed about the results," Johnson said to Republican voters as recently as last September. "If all the Republicans voted for Trump the way they voted for the Assembly candidates, he would have won. He didn't get 51,000 votes that other Republicans got, and that's why he lost."

But at a recent tele-town hall, the Huffington Post reported, Johnson gave in and promoted the conspiracy theory. "Our concern is Milwaukee," he said. "This is one of these big Democrat strongholds that just can't seem to get their votes counted until they know exactly how many votes they need. Whether anything's happening or not, this just looks suspicious."

"What's actually suspicious is that the Republican targeted his home state's most racially diverse city with claims of election irregularities that he hasn't even tried to prove," wrote Benen.

[goldenvalley]

Feb 4, 2022 18:43:58 GMT LFC said:

The Arizona fascist Republican (but I repeat myself) who sponsored the bill to allow the legislature steal any election they weren't happy with compared not be allowed to do so was the same as lynching. These people truly are insane.

Not giving a state legislature the power to freely throw out election results as it pleases is similar to mob murder, according to the Arizona state Republican who sponsored a bill to give the legislature that power.

The controversial bill’s sponsor, Arizona state Rep. John Fillmore (R) made the comparison while complaining to local CNN affiliate KPHO/KTVK on Wednesday that Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R) had effectively sunk his bill by assigning it to all 12 House committees for consideration.

Fillmore called Bowers’ move a “12-committee lynching” and doubled down when a reporter pressed him on drawing that kind of parallel.

“Yeah, it was a lynching,” said the lawmaker, who also declared last week that “we need to get back to 1958-style voting.”

There seems to be some resistance, though. I guess some Republicans are realizing where the party is going.

More than a dozen Arizona Republicans support Fillmore’s bill, according to CNN.

However, as the GOP’s nationwide crusade to make it easier to undermine election results expands, Fillmore might have managed to reach the ceiling: Bowers’ order for all 12 committees to take up the bill is unprecedented and will almost certainly doom the legislation.

Lynching involves death of a human, not of a piece of legislation.  I guess the next analogy will be to something related to the Holocaust...bills in a gas chamber or something.

[pnwguy]

Feb 4, 2022 18:43:58 GMT LFC said:

“we need to get back to 1958-style voting.”

Somehow, I think he really meant 1858-style voting...and lynching.  

[AnBr]

Feb 4, 2022 18:43:58 GMT LFC said:

“we need to get back to 1958-style voting.”

Just how many jelly beans were there in that jar?

[LFC]

More Colorado Republicans are being investigated for violating election laws. Voter fraud is a joke. Election fraud is here and Republicans are doing it all over the country.

We’re now at three Republican county clerks in Colorado who are facing questions over allegedly unauthorized copies of election system data.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) sent Douglas County Clerk and Recorder Merlin Klotz an election order on Thursday directing him to turn over documents and answer questions in writing in connection to a Telegram post attributed to him from last fall. The social media post indicated a “full image backup of our server” had been taken before a trusted build was done. The post also mentioned reaching out to MyPillow CEO-turned-election truther Mike Lindell with concerns about Dominion Voting Systems.

The secretary of state’s office is already investigating two other Republican county clerks in Colorado for potential security breaches with voting systems: Tina Peters of Mesa County and Dallas Schroeder of Elbert County.

[goldenvalley]

Feb 6, 2022 16:35:58 GMT LFC said:

More Colorado Republicans are being investigated for violating election laws. Voter fraud is a joke. Election fraud is here and Republicans are doing it all over the country.

I've known two elections officials in my county fairly well.  They were what I would call bloodless bureaucrats. They were people who stressed over any implication that they or their employees were political, who didn't accept volunteer help unless the volunteers went through a training. They were obsessive/compulsive about rule following...all rules.  I can't imagine them doing what these folks allegedly did.  

[goldenvalley]

Feb 6, 2022 16:35:58 GMT LFC said:

More Colorado Republicans are being investigated for violating election laws. Voter fraud is a joke. Election fraud is here and Republicans are doing it all over the country.

I've known two elections officials in my county fairly well.  They were what I would call bloodless bureaucrats. They were people who stressed over any implication that they or their employees were political, who didn't accept volunteer help unless the volunteers went through a training. They were obsessive/compulsive about rule following...all rules.  I can't imagine them doing what these folks allegedly did.  

[Bact PhD]

Feb 6, 2022 18:02:05 GMT goldenvalley said:

Feb 6, 2022 16:35:58 GMT LFC said:

More Colorado Republicans are being investigated for violating election laws. Voter fraud is a joke. Election fraud is here and Republicans are doing it all over the country.

I've known two elections officials in my county fairly well.  They were what I would call bloodless bureaucrats. They were people who stressed over any implication that they or their employees were political, who didn't accept volunteer help unless the volunteers went through a training. They were obsessive/compulsive about rule following...all rules.  I can't imagine them doing what these folks allegedly did.  

And the sad thing about all this grandstanding re “voter fraud,” the lion’s share of elections officials are just like GV’s acquaintances—doing their damndest to make sure there isn’t even a whiff of impropriety or a hint of putting the thumb on the scale. Alas, between the grandstanding and the actual wrong-doing, a Pandora’s Box of mistrust in our election process has been opened, and I have my doubts that said box can be closed for some time.

Cheery thought, isn’t it?

[indy]

Feb 6, 2022 20:28:18 GMT Bact PhD said:

Feb 6, 2022 18:02:05 GMT goldenvalley said:

I've known two elections officials in my county fairly well.  They were what I would call bloodless bureaucrats. They were people who stressed over any implication that they or their employees were political, who didn't accept volunteer help unless the volunteers went through a training. They were obsessive/compulsive about rule following...all rules.  I can't imagine them doing what these folks allegedly did.  

And the sad thing about all this grandstanding re “voter fraud,” the lion’s share of elections officials are just like GV’s acquaintances—doing their damndest to make sure there isn’t even a whiff of impropriety or a hint of putting the thumb on the scale. Alas, between the grandstanding and the actual wrong-doing, a Pandora’s Box of mistrust in our election process has been opened, and I have my doubts that said box can be closed for some time.

Cheery thought, isn’t it?

There are a number (a number that exceeds 30 by my count) of GOP candidates running for these local election positions who are, in fact, promising to put their thumbs on the scale (though they are couching it as 'fixing problems'). All of these positions are about to become extremely partisan, and it's unlikely they will ever revert.

[Bact PhD]

Follow the connections (and the $$$, too). Long article; in full due to paywall. You can’t make this shit up. You have to read to the end to realize what the end game is.

amp.heraldtribune.com/amp/9244145002

As Florida GOP leaders consider new restrictions on voting, they are getting a big push from a new conservative group that claims to have documented widespread “voting irregularities” across the state.

Started by the Lakewood Ranch leader of a pro-Donald Trump women’s organization, Defend Florida has mobilized an army of volunteers to collect “affidavits” that raise questions about whether voters cast legal 2020 ballots. The group has collected more than 5,000 affidavits in 34 counties, implying each is a possible instance of voter fraud.

The claims appear to be getting serious consideration from GOP officials. Defend Florida co-founder Caroline Wetherington said the group met with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ top staff on six occasions, while also securing meetings with Secretary of State Laurel Lee and top GOP legislators.

Local elections and law enforcement officials, however, have dismissed Defend Florida’s claims.

Manatee County, where Wetherington lives, has the largest number of alleged voting irregularities. Defend Florida posted on its website that it documented 758 possible fraud cases in Manatee as of Jan. 28.

Yet the Manatee County Sheriff’s Officeand the Manatee County Supervisor of Elections office say they’ve seen no evidence indicating that election fraud is a problem in the county.

“We looked into (it) and found no evidence of a crime,” Manatee County Sheriff’s spokesman Randy Warren said in an email.

Manatee County Supervisor of Elections Mike Bennett met with Wetherington, who runs the realty division of luxury homebuilder Lee Wetherington Homes, and other Defend Florida representatives last October. Bennett said he quickly debunked the example Wetherington gave to argue there are problems with the county’s voting roll.

“I caught them flat-footed,” Bennett said, adding: “Since she didn’t know how the system worked she thought there was something nefarious going on and we had all these unregistered voters. Simply not true.”

Despite being rebuffed by local authorities, Defend Florida still is highly active.

The group held a press conference in Tampa on Thursday to draw attention to its allegations. About 50 people held signs with slogans such as “We Want Election Integrity Now” and “Protect Our Votes.” One man had a Trump bumper sticker on his tricorn hat. Others had “Let’s Go Brandon” paraphernalia, a phrase used by conservatives to denigrate President Joe Biden.

A few days later, Defend Florida hosted prominent individuals involved in trying to overturn the 2020 election results, such as former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and Trump adviser Roger Stone, at a conference in Tampa.

Wetherington appears to have close ties to many of these individuals, making her a growing force on the far right in Florida and an increasingly influential player in GOP politics. Videos on Defend Florida’s website feature her and another Defend Florida leader interviewing Flynn and Sydney Powell, an attorney known for filing unsuccessful lawsuits to overturn 2020 election results.

While local elections officials have rebuffed Defend Florida’s efforts to raise questions about votes cast in 2020, the group still is pressing for changes in advance of the 2022 election, including purging voter rolls and overhauling state election laws during the legislative session that runs through early March.

Defend Florida’s ideas appear to be gaining traction among leading Florida Republicans, including DeSantis, even as the foundation for these proposals – that the election system is rife with fraud – crumbles upon examination. New election legislation unveiled by GOP leaders last week mirrors some of Defend Florida’s ideas.

Much like Trump, Wetherington and her collaborators are undeterred by those who dismiss their claims about widespread voting problems for lack of evidence. Even in a state Trump won easily, and where GOP leaders say the 2020 election went smoothly, they have turned the false stolen election premise into a rallying cry for a new wave of po litical activism that could have implications for 2022 and beyond.

A longtime California resident, Wetherington moved to Florida eight years ago after marrying Sarasota Countybased homebuilder Lee Wetherington, but only recently emerged as a force in state politics.

In 2019, Wetherington – who served as president of her college Republican club but says she wasn’t very politically active for years – founded Women for Trump Sarasota Manatee Inc. and later changed the group’s name to Women for Trump Florida Inc., growing it to about 3,000 members. She still serves as president of the organization, which was active in promoting Trump in the run-up to the 2020 election.

Defend Florida grew out of Wetherington’s Women for Trump activism.

Wetherington traveled to Washington, D.C., for Trump’s rally on Jan. 6, 2021 and watched the violence at the U.S. Capitol unfold from outside the building. In an interview the next day with a California television station, Wetherington described scenes of people being pepper sprayed and protesters taking helmets and shields from police.

Wetherington told the television station that she was “not happy” about the violence “but I’m proud of the patriots who went to peacefully protest, which is what the majority of the almost 2 million people who were there did.”

Raj Doraisamy, a Sarasota resident who co-founded Defend Florida with Wetherington, also was outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

“I didn’t go in the building, but I saw what happened; I filmed it,” Doraisamy told the Herald-Tribune. “It should never have happened but there were, I would say, 500 people from what I saw that went in ... We got 330 million people in this country, 500 people had bad judgment.”

More than 700 people have been charged so far in relation to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol.

Wetherington and Doraisamy were introduced a short time after Jan. 6 by a pastor.

“We say God brought us together,” Wetherington said.

Doraisamy met Wetherington at her house and they clicked.

“We sat around a table and we talked and decided that we needed to defend our state because we didn’t have any control over our federal government anymore,” Wetherington said.

Defend Florida formed in January 2021. In April, the group helped coordinate a rally that featured Flynn and Stone. The rally attracted a large number of individuals from the far right nationalist Proud Boys, some of whom appeared on stage with a pro-Trump rapper.

The Proud Boys are a self-described “western chauvinist” group. A number of their members, including some from Florida, were arrested for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Wetherington once wrote “God Bless the Proud Boys” in a Facebook post that is no longer viewable, according to a screen shot shared with the Herald-Tribune.

Before the Bradenton rally, Wetherington said in an interview that “people are very concerned about elections.”

“I mean, if the elections can be stolen in Georgia and Michigan and Arizona, other red states, they can be stolen here,” Wetherington said, repeating baseless claims made by Trump that he won those swing states. “So there’s a concern that that could happen here, and we know the left is coming after DeSantis in 2022 so we need to do some things preemptively to prevent the left from stealing the election here.”

At the time, Wetherington already was turning her attention to changing Florida’s election laws and voting systems.

Gathering ‘affidavits’ Last year as the Florida Legislature advanced S.B. 90, which put new restrictions on voting by mail, Defend Florida joined with other conservative groups to pressure GOP lawmakers to support the bill.

“As far as election integrity, one of our ... major emphasis is working with our state legislators,” Wetherington said in April.

With S.B. 90 poised for a final vote in both chambers, Defend Florida helped lead a coalition that bombarded lawmakers.

“They were flooded with phone calls and emails supporting those bills,” she said.

The legislation passed. Defend Florida was just getting started.

Across the state, a door-to-door canvassing effort swelled throughout 2021, attracting volunteers from the Panhandle to South Florida who worked to ferret out alleged voting problems.

Such canvassing efforts have been criticized. Republicans in the Arizona Senate backed away from using door-todoor canvassing as part of a controversial audit of ballots in Maricopa County after the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division sent a letter raising concerns about voter intimidation.

On Defend Florida’s website, the group says that of the 5,571 affidavits it has collected through Jan. 28 alleging “voting irregularities,” 89% of those involve voters who allegedly do not live at the address where they are registered.

Wetherington insisted in an interview last week that Defend Florida is not making accusations of voter fraud, saying that’s for authorities to determine.

“They are evidence of voting irregularities, I can’t say whether they are fraud or not,” she said of the affidavits.

But a Defend Florida graphic, which is posted on the group’s website and was distributed as a flyer at the Tampa rally, summarizing the group’s canvassing results states: “You’ve Got Fraud – By Mail!” And Wetherington told a tea party group in August that “we’re actually targeting the counties where we’re finding the most fraud, that’s the counties we need to audit.”

Wesley Wilcox, the Marion County Elections Supervisor and the head of a group representing supervisors in all 67 Florida counties, said he doubts “that the affidavits are valid.”

For one thing, officials said in recent interviews that Defend Florida hadn’t provided the affidavits to them. Bennett hadn’t seen any of them as of Friday morning. Neither had Wilcox. Warren said last month that the Manatee Sheriff’s Office hadn’t received them.

A Manatee sheriff’s detective participated in the October meeting between Bennett and members of Defend Florida.

“In that meeting, nothing was presented that showed evidence of wrongdoing,” Warren, the sheriff’s spokesman, wrote. “Wetherington and Doraisamy were also unable to provide copies of the mentioned affidavits.”

Wetherington said the detective “had the wrong understanding” of the intention of the meeting, which wasn’t about pushing for criminal charges.

“All of our meetings with the supervisors of elections are information gathering and information sharing,” she said.

Sarasota County Elections Supervisor Ron Turner and Charlotte County Elections Supervisor Paul Stamoulis also told the Herald-Tribune recently that no affidavits had been provided to them by Defend Florida, which claims to have uncovered 97 voting irregularities in Sarasota and 27 in Charlotte.

“If you’ve got an affidavit and you’re alleging fraud, let’s go clean it up,” Wilcox said. “But by you alleging it and then not showing proof, what does that do to the average person? It causes them doubt, and therefore I have doubts.”

Wetherington said Thursday that all of the affidavits have been shared with the governor’s office – they take up 17 binders, she said – and the secretary of state, and that they soon would be shared with local elections officials.

“Raj and I are only two people,” she said Thursday. “We have 34 people who manage the county level. We’ve asked our county level people to take the affidavits to their supervisor of elections. They’re not employees of ours, we can’t withhold their paycheck if they don’t do their job.”

Wetherington sent an email to the Herald-Tribune late Friday saying “the canvassing findings from our affidavits” were sent to elections officials. She forwarded an email sent by Defend Florida member Dan Heim to Wilcox Friday. Heim told Wilcox that he put a spreadsheet in a Dropbox folder Friday afternoon that details the “findings and date canvassed for each county.”

Elections officials are skeptical that there are widespread problems.

Wilcox noted that roughly 10% of the population moves every three months, so it’s highly likely that canvassers will come across situations where voters no longer live at residences where they are registered. That doesn’t mean they didn’t live there previously and cast a valid ballot.

Wilcox recently received a list of 8,000 voters whose registrations were flagged by Defend Florida. They want him to remove inactive voters from the rolls.

“I think the second voter I pulled up was an active duty member of the military who hadn’t voted in eight years,” Wilcox said. “So I said: ‘Ok, we have this young man serving overseas and you want me to remove his record?’ That’s not the case, that’s not what they want me to do.”

Defend Florida subsequently sent certified letters to Florida elections officials about cleaning voter rolls. Wilcox said the information he received from Defend Florida included a second list with more than 18,000 voters, and other elections officials received similar lists.

“What I believe to be the sole reason they were listed on the report is they have never voted, or not in the last 10 years, which in and of itself is not a requirement,” Wilcox said, noting that voters have the right to be registered and not cast a ballot.

Yet the push to purge voters from the rolls is gaining traction.

Wetherington told the Manatee County tea party group that she was meeting with an influential lawmaker to push for a voter roll purge, a proposal echoed by DeSantis in a recent speech and included in legislation filed last week by a Republican state senator.

Florida’s 60-day legislative session kicked off in early January and runs through March 11, and election issues will get significant attention.

In November, DeSantis announced a proposal to create a state police force aimed solely at investigating election fraud allegations.

Defend Florida put out a press release on Nov. 7 praising the governor’s proposal, but the group wants to go further.

Wetherington’s group has fixated on alleged problems with voting rolls. She said in August that Defend Florida planned: “to present that evidence and say: ‘Houston, we have a problem here, we have to clean up our voter rolls.’” The idea of purging voter rolls later made it into the governor’s State of the State speech last month. The GOP elections bill filed last week would require elections supervisors to conduct voter list maintenance every year, instead of every other year.

Efforts to remove voters from the rolls have been controversial in Florida over the years.

Former Gov. Rick Scott, who is now a U.S. senator, ordered his secretary of state to scour the rolls for any noncitizens, who are not allowed to vote, and remove them. An initial list of 182,000 flagged voter registrations was whittled down to 2,700 individuals, who received letters demanding they prove their citizenship. Among them was a 91-year-old World War II veteran from Broward County who was wrongly targeted.

Yet shortly after Defend Florida met with DeSantis’ staff in December, the governor highlighted the voter purge idea.

“We also need to ensure that supervisors clean the voter rolls,” DeSantis said in his speech kicking off the 2022 legislative session. “That only citizens are registered to vote and that mail ballots only go to those who actually request them before each individual election.”

DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw noted that the governor has long advocated for cleaning voter roles. He said in 2019 that: “We are confident that by improving the accuracy of our voter rolls, we will reduce the potential for voter fraud.”

“Yes, members of the Governor’s staff have met with representatives of Defend Florida, as well as other outside groups working on priority issues,” Pushaw said. “We share their goal of protecting the integrity and security of our elections. The Governor’s Office meets frequently with citizens and organizations interested in a range of policy areas.”

Wetherington said the governor’s office asked Defend Florida in early December “to bring as much evidence as we could, like hard evidence, affidavits of people who don’t live somewhere, or double voters or whatever, because they wanted to have that evidence to talk to the Legislature about what needs to be done.”

Pushaw ignored a question about whether the governor’s office has reviewed Defend Florida’s findings and drawn any conclusions.

Wetherington also has the attention of GOP lawmakers. Her group met with Sen. Travis Hutson, who introduced the election legislation in the Senate last week, Rep. Daniel Perez, who heads the elections committee in the House and is in line to be speaker, Rep. Blaise Ingoglia, who often is involved in elections bills, and the chief of staff for Senate President Wilton Simpson, she said.

Sarasota state Rep. Tommy Gregory, who participated in meeting between GOP lawmakers and Defend Florida members, said: “I applaud their goal, as we all should, to ensure we have safe secure and verifiable elections.”

Sarasota state Sen. Joe Gruters, the chair of the Florida GOP, said he met with Wetherington “a couple of times.”

“She is a wealth of knowledge,” Gruters said. “They have the same goal as a lot of other people, to make sure we have elections with voter confidence and there aren’t a lot of shenanigans going on. They have come up with ways we can strengthen voter protection laws.”

The elections bill that emerged in the Legislature last week that includes ideas that Defend Florida is advocating, although Wetherington said she wants to see it go further.

The legislation creates a new state office to investigation election fraud, requires individuals submitting mail ballots to include more personal identifying information and requires more frequent voter roll purges.

The bill appears likely to pass, as Defend Florida and others push GOP leaders to act based on false claims of widespread voting problems.

“I haven’t talked to anybody who thinks the election is fair,” Wetherington said.

Got that? All of the screeching, and they have yet to produce actual evidence…and law enforcement isn’t even buying it.

[goldenvalley]

Feb 7, 2022 18:39:53 GMT Bact PhD said:

Follow the connections (and the $$$, too). Long article; in full due to paywall. You can’t make this shit up. You have to read to the end to realize what the end game is.

amp.heraldtribune.com/amp/9244145002

Manatee County Supervisor of Elections Mike Bennett met with Wetherington, who runs the realty division of luxury homebuilder Lee Wetherington Homes, and other Defend Florida representatives last October. Bennett said he quickly debunked the example Wetherington gave to argue there are problems with the county’s voting roll.

“I caught them flat-footed,” Bennett said, adding: “Since she didn’t know how the system worked she thought there was something nefarious going on and we had all these unregistered voters. Simply not true.”

That is at the root of how these folks convince themselves and others that there is fraud.  They don't know how the system works which leaves them free to spin and believe all sorts of fantasy. That's how they collect XX number of affidavits to prove fraud.  

[LFC]

The claims appear to be getting serious consideration from GOP officials.

True, within a certain definition of "serious." Not serious as in they believe it but serious as in they think they can take advantage of a whole new pile of lies to further subvert democracy.

[LFC]

Looks like the bogus Florida door to door "audits" are being embraced by a county in New Mexico as well. And, of course, it's just as big a farce.

For months, fringe groups have been knocking on doors across the country, inquiring about residents’ 2020 votes. But in Otero County, New Mexico, those door-knocks might soon come as part of a nearly $50,000 contract between the county, a conspiracy-peddling tech group, and an even further-right Telegram channel.

Otero County is a Republican stronghold in New Mexico. More than 60 percent of Otero voters cast ballots for Donald Trump in 2020, in contrast to the state’s pro-Biden majority. That hasn’t stopped some locals, chiefly an Otero County commissioner currently facing charges related to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, from calling for an “audit” into the county’s vote.

In January, the county approved a nearly $49,750 audit contract with EchoMail, a company founded by election conspiracy promoter Shiva Ayyadurai. EchoMail, in turn, says it will contract the “New Mexico Audit Force” to conduct a “door-to-door canvas” of county voters.

But the audit effort could face early obstacles. New Mexico’s actual state auditor, Brian Colón, has opened a special examination into the Otero audit’s legality. Meanwhile, EchoMail’s recent work in an “audit” of votes in Maricopa County, Arizona received a damning rebuttal from local officials, and the “New Mexico Audit Force” is not a company at all, but a Telegram group that traffics in conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

Expect this to be the latest model of fascist voter purges. They'll use these as a model to go into districts with the most potential for "voter fraud" i.e. those that vote Democratic and create partisan purge lists. Rinse, wash, repeat.

[LFC]

If you ask me all of the Republicans involved in the faudits should be convicted as felons. Wisconsin is just short-cutting the process and tapping a felon convicted of fraud to perform a faudit.

Wisconsin Republicans have tapped a felon convicted of fraud to look into Donald Trump's claims of election fraud in that state.

Peter Bernegger, who was convicted in 2009 on bank fraud and mail fraud for deceiving investors in two startup companies, had been looking to election conspiracies on his own before Assembly Republicans decided to give him a platform Wednesday to describe what he found, reported the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Bernegger, the grandson of the founder of Hillshire Farms sausages, declined to comment on his testimony, which comes as GOP legislators are spending more than $670,000 in taxpayer funds to conduct an election audit to prove Trump's claims, but Democrats spoke out against his involvement.

“Hearing from Peter Bernegger will only further confirm what we have known about the so-called experts that Republicans keep bringing in: we can’t trust them," said Rep. Mark Spreitzer (D-Belot). "The only expertise Mr. Bernegger has is in being convicted of fraud. He is the last person I would trust to do anything with Wisconsin’s elections."

[LFC]

Sidney "Krakenhead" Powell showed off her legal prowess by screwing up an appeal for her penalty for ethics violations. Wow, unethical AND incompetent. Why hasn't she had her law license revoked yet?

One-time "Kraken" attorney Sidney Powell just flopped again with a legal filing to appeal a U.S. District Court Judge's penalty for ethics violations in court.

Powell and other lawyers filed a complaint appealing financial penalties ordering them to pay $21,964.75 for attorneys' fees for defendants Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. Judge Linda Parker also said that Powell and other lawyers had to pay $153,285.62 for legal fees to the city of Detroit.

"But prior and subsequent lawsuits have pointed to very similar problems. And dozens of laws have been enacted by state legislatures in response to concerns similar to those raised in the complaint. Millions of Americans believe the central contentions of the complaint to be true, and perhaps they are," the filing says.

Reuters justice reporter Brad Heath tweeted that the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the brief, saying it didn't comply with a variety of the rules of Appellate Procedure.