Voter Suppression & Election Theft by the Republican Party

[pnwguy]

Voter Fraud! Oh wait, let's not actually try to prevent any but just shout how it exists in Democratic strongholds.

www.npr.org/2022/02/09/1076529761/right-wing-conspiracies-have-a-new-target-a-tool-that-fights-actual-voter-fraud

[LFC]

Feb 9, 2022 15:59:10 GMT pnwguy said:

Voter Fraud! Oh wait, let's not actually try to prevent any but just shout how it exists in Democratic strongholds.

www.npr.org/2022/02/09/1076529761/right-wing-conspiracies-have-a-new-target-a-tool-that-fights-actual-voter-fraud

Oh, noes! Accurate residency data? Well THAT doesn't help with Republican voter purge lists.

[LFC]

Busted and goes out screeching like a bratty child about to be punished.

The notorious pro-Trump Mesa County elections clerk Tina Peters was detained at a bagel shop on Tuesday—and a video of the incident shows her resisting arrest and apparently attempting to kick a cop. Peters became one of Colorado’s most renowned elections officials last year after she was accused of aiding a QAnon-linked leak of voting-machine logins. The Denver Post reported that Tuesday’s arrest wasn’t linked to investigations of that possible election-security breach, but was related to Peters allegedly filming court proceedings on her iPad. Investigators were reportedly looking for that iPad when they detained Peters. In a video shared by 9News, Peters can be seen jostling with a cop and yelling “Let go of me!” She appears to attempt to kick an officer, who shouts: “Don’t kick!” Peters’ legal defense fund said she complied by handing over the iPad, but resisted when officers started trying to seize other items.

Assaulting an officer? Funny, I thought Republicans were against that shit.

[pnwguy]

Feb 9, 2022 22:59:48 GMT LFC said:

Busted and goes out screeching like a bratty child about to be punished.
Assaulting an officer? Funny, I thought Republicans were against that shit.

Not if the accused is a white Republican. 

A scary, angry Black Man?  Better shoot first, look for his George Soros supplied BLM iPad later. 

[goldenvalley]

Feb 9, 2022 22:59:48 GMT LFC said:

Busted and goes out screeching like a bratty child about to be punished.

The notorious pro-Trump Mesa County elections clerk Tina Peters was detained at a bagel shop on Tuesday—and a video of the incident shows her resisting arrest and apparently attempting to kick a cop. Peters became one of Colorado’s most renowned elections officials last year after she was accused of aiding a QAnon-linked leak of voting-machine logins. The Denver Post reported that Tuesday’s arrest wasn’t linked to investigations of that possible election-security breach, but was related to Peters allegedly filming court proceedings on her iPad. Investigators were reportedly looking for that iPad when they detained Peters. In a video shared by 9News, Peters can be seen jostling with a cop and yelling “Let go of me!” She appears to attempt to kick an officer, who shouts: “Don’t kick!” Peters’ legal defense fund said she complied by handing over the iPad, but resisted when officers started trying to seize other items.

Assaulting an officer? Funny, I thought Republicans were against that shit.

Kicking cops while white is no crime; it's just legitimate political discourse.

[LFC]

One Wisconsin MAGAt said authorities needed to find voter fraud. They did. Now he's charge with ... do I really have to even bother completing the sentence?

A supporter of former President Donald Trump who said authorities should root out voter fraud is among five people who were charged Thursday with election fraud by a Republican district attorney who’s running for Wisconsin attorney general.

All five voters, including a homeless person, improperly listed a post office box number at a UPS store as their address, rather than a residential address as is required under Wisconsin law, said Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney.

That brings the number of people charged with election fraud during the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin to 10, including seven in Fond du Lac County. Three of the five people charged cast ballots in the 2020 election.

[LFC]

Would-be election fraudster and indicted scumbag Tina Peters of Colorado is running to be secretary of state and top state elections official. These fascists know no shame. Of course her run is already off to an incompetent start.

Fresh off her arrest last week, Tina Peters, the Republican clerk of Mesa County, Colorado who pushed former President Trump’s Big Lie, on Monday announced her bid to become the state’s top elections official.

Peters announced her campaign during an appearance on former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. Peters told Bannon that she is running to “restore trust” and “put an end to government overreach in our election process.”

“Colorado deserves a secretary of state who will stand up to the Biden administration. … And, Steve, that’s why today I’m announcing that I’m running for Colorado secretary of state,” Peters said.

But as of Monday morning, Peters had not filed paperwork for her secretary of state candidacy, according to the Denver Post. Peters previously announced her intent to run for re-election as Mesa County clerk and recorder.

The announcement by Peters follows her arrest last week after she reportedly resisted a search warrant.

[goldenvalley]

Feb 15, 2022 23:03:08 GMT LFC said:

Would-be election fraudster and indicted scumbag Tina Peters of Colorado is running to be secretary of state and top state elections official. These fascists know no shame. Of course her run is already off to an incompetent start.

Money is pouring into these races about an office that many people had never paid any attention to before now.  

A new monthly series of Bren­nan Center reports confirms that the stakes have been raised in races to over­see state elec­tions. My colleague Ian Vandewalker found that across key battle­ground states, “contri­bu­tions are three times higher than they were at this point in the 2018 cycle and eight times higher than 2014.* The numbers are partic­u­larly high in Arizona, Geor­gia, and Michigan.”

[goldenvalley]

And while we're reading Brennan Center articles take a look at this:

The efforts to restrict voting have contin­ued into this year. As of Janu­ary 14, legis­lat­ors in at least 27 states have intro­duced, pre-filed, or carried over 250 bills with restrict­ive provi­sions, compared to 75 such bills in 24 states on Janu­ary 14, 2021.foot­note2_siu09102 These figures include carry­over bills, which are far more common this year (an even-numbered legis­lat­ive year) than last (an odd-numbered year). When carry­over bills are set aside to focus on new legis­lat­ive activ­ity — the pre-filed and intro­duced bills — the increase in restrict­ive bills is still stark: 96 bills would make it harder to vote in 12 states as of Janu­ary 14, 2022, compared to 69 such bills in 23 states, a 39 percent increase.

For example:

Restric­tions on mail voting. Over half of the restrict­ive bills pre-filed or intro­duced for the 2022 legis­lat­ive session target every stage of mail voting.

New barri­ers to apply­ing for mail ballots. At least 18 bills in five states would impose new iden­ti­fic­a­tion require­ments for absentee ballot applic­a­tions, includ­ing a voter’s Social Secur­ity number, driver’s license number, or vote record number.Bills in Missis­sippi and South Caro­lina would shorten the time period for submit­ting an absentee ballot.

Prohib­i­tion on send­ing unso­li­cited mail ballots or ballot applic­a­tions. At least six bills in five states would prohibit elec­tion offi­cials from send­ing out mail ballots or ballot applic­a­tions unless a voter has affirm­at­ively reques­ted one. One of these bills in Missouri would subject elec­tions offi­cials to crim­inal prosec­u­tion, includ­ing possible impris­on­ment. This is in stark contrast to the six states that have enacted laws requir­ing mail ballots to auto­mat­ic­ally be sent to all voters for all elec­tions. 

Restric­tions on return­ing mail ballots. Arizona and Virginia legis­la­tion would elim­in­ate the use of drop boxes alto­gether or prohibit the use of unmon­itored drop boxes. An Arizona bill would require voters to present iden­ti­fic­a­tion when return­ing a mail ballot, and if an eligible person is return­ing a mail ballot on behalf of a voter, that person would be required to present iden­ti­fic­a­tion and attest in writ­ing that they are the voter’s family, house­hold member, or care­taker. Fail­ure to comply with these require­ments would subject the indi­vidual to felony prosec­u­tion. Another Arizona bill would elim­in­ate this current narrow excep­tion for family and house­hold members or a care­taker to return a mail ballot on a voter’s behalf.

Limit­a­tions on who can vote by mail. Thir­teen bills in three states would curtail who can request an absentee ballot.­ A Missis­sippi bill would bar students who are away from the county where they are registered from cast­ing a mail ballot. A series of Missouri bills would require that the care­taker of an indi­vidual with an illness or disab­il­ity reside at the same address as that indi­vidual to vote absentee. Virginia lawmakers have proposed bills that would elim­in­ate no-excuse mail voting alto­gether.

New grounds for reject­ing mail ballots. Three bills in Missouri, New Jersey, and Wash­ing­ton propose new oppor­tun­it­ies to reject a mail ballot. The Missouri bill would allow mail ballots to be rejec­ted if the signa­ture “does not appear to be valid, ” a vague reason with no clear stand­ards.

Stricter voter ID. At least 37 bills pre-filed or intro­duced this year in eight states would impose new or more strin­gent voter ID require­ments for voter regis­tra­tion or in-person voting.

[LFC]

Restric­tions on mail voting.

They'll change their minds on that the instant it doesn't benefit them. If COVID continues to settle that may be more quickly than they were expecting. Prior to 2020 they LOVE vote by mail.

[LFC]

The Texass primary under their new voter suppression laws is a clusterfunk.

As Texas’ first-in-the-nation primary on March 1 approaches, election administrators and voters are struggling to follow its provisions, many of which make it harder to vote.

The state secretary of state’s office has been unable or unwilling to provide the counties with adequate resources and information, and one new ID requirement in particular has helped send unprecedented numbers of ballots and applications into the reject pile.

Older and disabled voters, some of the few that get to vote by mail in Texas, have borne the brunt of the chaos, said Grace Chimene, president of the League of Women Voters of Texas.

“They’re consistent voters,” she told TPM. “They’re very upset that after all these years of voting, suddenly now their ballots and applications are being rejected.”

Here's point #5 of 5 in the article:

5 Will The Law Backfire On Its GOP Supporters?

So far, one of the groups struggling the most with the law’s new provisions are older voters.

Older white voters in Texas comprise one of the Republican Party’s most reliable voting blocs. Voters 65 and older are among the very few who get to vote by mail in the state.

The potential rationales behind the provision vary: it could be an unintended consequence; it could be part of a plan to make voting hard across the board, and hope that the gains to the Republican Party ultimately outweigh the losses; it could just be an a-strategic outgrowth of former President Donald Trump’s war on mail-in voting.

It’s a big law, and the harms are many and diffuse. But at least in the lead-up to the primary, one of the biggest pain points has been concentrated among voters Republicans don’t want to lose.

[goldenvalley]

There is money to be made by a Texas company if these sorts of laws about ballots are passed.

Holographic foil. Special ink designed to be sensitive to temperature changes. Nearly invisible “stealth numbers” that can be located only using special ultraviolet or infrared lights.

Those are among the high-tech security features that would be required to be embedded on ballots under measures proposed in at least four states by Republican lawmakers — all promoters of false claims that the 2020 election was marred by mass fraud — in an attempt to make the ballots as hard to counterfeit as passports or currency.

But the specialized inks and watermarks also would limit the number of companies capable of selling ballot paper — potentially to just one Texas firm with no previous experience in elections that consulted with the lawmakers proposing the measures.

Imagine the cost of these things.  Who cares if there have never been any cases of fraudulent or counterfeit ballots proven by anyone.  This is going the way of voter id.  Vague complaints lead to states creating onerous laws.

[LFC]

Feb 18, 2022 16:07:53 GMT goldenvalley said:

There is money to be made by a Texas company if these sorts of laws about ballots are passed.

I wonder what the Republicans' cut of the take will be.

[pnwguy]

Feb 18, 2022 18:05:25 GMT LFC said:

Feb 18, 2022 16:07:53 GMT goldenvalley said:

There is money to be made by a Texas company if these sorts of laws about ballots are passed.

I wonder what the Republicans' cut of the take will be.

Just research who suddenly invests in the company before any laws are enacted.

[LFC]

Texass's registration is a total shit show.

Texas’ largest county has rejected thousands of absentee ballots and ballot applications due to Republicans’ restrictive new voting law — and now, officials there have asked the Department of Justice for help.

The new law, SB1, is “achieving exactly what its authors set out to do: erect more hurdles in front of the ballot box and systematically suppress the vote in Harris County,” wrote the county judge, county attorney and county elections administrator in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland flagged Thursday by Houston Public Media.

Harris County, home to Houston, has for weeks sounded the alarm about early warning signs that SB1 is resulting in unusually large rates of rejected ballot applications.

The trouble comes from Republicans’ new ID requirements for people eligible to vote by mail: The form of that required ID number (whether a driver’s license number, Social Security number, or state ID number) must match what the voter used to register with the state, sometimes decades earlier. Previously, absentee voters’ identities were confirmed by comparing their signatures to government records.

The results speak for themselves: Out of 33,270 mail ballot applications received by Harris County as of Feb. 15, 14% were flagged for rejection due to SB1’s new voter ID requirements, according to the county officials’ letter. And among 9,809 ballots received by the county by that date, a whopping 35.5%, or 3,491 votes, have been flagged for rejection for the same reason.

Voters can cure these rejections, but it’s unclear how many will be able to do so in time to be counted for Texas’ March 1 primary election.

[LFC]

There's no low that's too low for a Republican, "one rule for me and another one for thee" edition.

Texas Republicans Appear To Flex Voting Rules For Their Voters

­There’s a lot to say about what’s going on in TEXAS right now, particularly about the thousands of voters whose mail-in ballots have been rejected due to Republicans’ onerous new ID rules.

But I think another story details the double standards in the state.

The Texas Tribune reported Thursday on a change to the Republican secretary of state’s website: Last month, it included a warning that all voters sending applications for mail-in ballots to its office, rather than to county clerks' offices, “will be rejected.” That language is now gone.

Why?

Seemingly because Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) encouraged his supporters to send mail-in ballot applications to the office in a campaign mailer complete with the official seal of his office.

…Why? Because “many Republican voters are rightly suspicious of Blue County election officials,” the campaign said.

This adds an unnecessary extra step to the process, a troubling prospect so close to primary day. (The secretary of state’s office is simply forwarding requests it receives to county offices “as a courtesy to help the voter,” a spokesperson for the office said.)

It also shows that, when Republican voters need a favor, Republican officials in Texas are apparently willing to be flexible. Would they extend the same favor to Democrats?

[LFC]

More is coming out about how wide the Republican campaign to switch voters' registrations really is. They are targeting elderly voters. How "Christian." But hey, Republicans denied it so take that for what it's worth.

Miami-Dade Elections Department 2021-22 records show more than 5,000 registered Democrats switched their party affiliation to Republican.

The increase comes just as more victims of third-party registrations are coming forward to report that their voter registration was altered without their permission.

All of the victims were older than 65 years old, live in Miami-Dade County, and all of them were outraged when they learned they were registered as Republicans.

In November, Republicans celebrated that the number of registered Republican voters in Florida surpassed Democrats. They credited the change to an aggressive voter registration campaign.

After an 84-year-old woman who lives in Little Havana said she was a victim of the unauthorized change, The Republican Party of Florida released a statement in December:

“RPOF conducts its voter registration operation in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations. At no time was this voter registration changed without the registrant’s permission.”

Other victims were nearby at the Haley Sofge Towers in Little Havana. Armando Selva recently said he saw people wearing red baseball caps talking to residents about their voter registrations.

[goldenvalley]

Mar 3, 2022 14:17:11 GMT LFC said:

More is coming out about how wide the Republican campaign to switch voters' registrations really is. They are targeting elderly voters. How "Christian." But hey, Republicans denied it so take that for what it's worth.

Miami-Dade Elections Department 2021-22 records show more than 5,000 registered Democrats switched their party affiliation to Republican.

The increase comes just as more victims of third-party registrations are coming forward to report that their voter registration was altered without their permission.

All of the victims were older than 65 years old, live in Miami-Dade County, and all of them were outraged when they learned they were registered as Republicans.

In November, Republicans celebrated that the number of registered Republican voters in Florida surpassed Democrats. They credited the change to an aggressive voter registration campaign.

After an 84-year-old woman who lives in Little Havana said she was a victim of the unauthorized change, The Republican Party of Florida released a statement in December:

“RPOF conducts its voter registration operation in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations. At no time was this voter registration changed without the registrant’s permission.”

Other victims were nearby at the Haley Sofge Towers in Little Havana. Armando Selva recently said he saw people wearing red baseball caps talking to residents about their voter registrations.

Yeah, this has always been a concern about assisted voter registration.  I can see how unscrupulous political operatives convince a vulnerable population (old voters, new voters, occasional voters) that they must re-register to vote and then "help" them by filling in the form except for the signature line and not giving people a chance to review the form to see that the information was accurate.  The problem can happen whether the form is paper or online.  

[AnBr]

Wasn't there a big door-to-door registration drive by the right in '16 to register people where they later threw out all of those that had selected a Dem affiliation?

[LFC]

Another case of voter fraud, this time by none other than Mark Meadows! LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP!

Mark Meadows, who grew up in Florida, moved to North Carolina in the nineteen-eighties and opened Aunt D’s, a sandwich shop in Highlands. He later sold the restaurant and started a real-estate company with a line in vacation properties. (He showed a few to my parents, in the nineties.) He became active in local Republican politics, and, in 2012, ran for Congress and won, going on to represent North Carolina’s Eleventh District until March, 2020, when he resigned the seat to become President Donald Trump’s chief of staff. Earlier that month, he sold his twenty-two-hundred-square-foot home in Sapphire. He and his wife, Debbie, also had a condo in Virginia, near Washington, D.C. But, as the summer passed and the election neared, Meadows had not yet purchased a new residence in what had been his home state. On September 19th, about three weeks before North Carolina’s voter-registration deadline for the general election, Meadows filed his paperwork. On a line that asked for his residential address—“where you physically live,” the form instructs—Meadows wrote down the address of a fourteen-by-sixty-two-foot mobile home in Scaly Mountain. He listed his move-in date for this address as the following day, September 20th.

Meadows does not own this property and never has. It is not clear that he has ever spent a single night there. (He did not respond to a request for comment.) The previous owner, who asked that we not use her name, now lives in Florida. “That was just a summer home,” she told me, when I called her up the other day. She seemed surprised to learn that the residence was listed on the Meadowses’ forms. The property sits in the southern Appalachian mountains, at about four thousand feet, in the bend of a quiet road above a creek in Macon County. She and her husband bought it in 1985. “We’d come up there for three to four months when my husband was living,” she said. Her husband died several years ago, and the house sat mostly unused for some time afterward, she said, because she had “nobody to go up there with anymore.”

She only rented it out twice, she told me. The first renter, she said, was Debbie Meadows, who, according to the former owner, reserved the house for two months at some point within the past few years—she couldn’t remember exactly when—but only spent one or two nights there. The Meadowses’ kids had visited the place, too, she said. The former owner was in Florida at the time, but her neighbors, the Talleys, whom she described as friends of the Meadowses’, debriefed her later. As for Mark Meadows, she said, “He did not come. He’s never spent a night in there.”

[LFC]

Prepare for a level of election craziness in 2022 like you can't imagine, right down to personal attacks by crazy people who can now easily get their hands on your voter registration information. The nuttiness of 2020 ain't nuthin'.

Now, a new group is stepping into a more conspicuous role in that world by providing easily accessible tools for people in Wisconsin, other Midwest battleground states and, eventually, the entire country to forge ahead with a quest to prove election irregularities.

Calling its work unprecedented, the Voter Reference Foundation is analyzing state voter rolls in search of discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters credited by the rolls as having participated in the Nov. 3, 2020 election.

The foundation, led by a former Trump campaign official and founded less than a year ago, has dismissed objections from election officials that its methodology is flawed and its actions may be illegal, ProPublica found. But with its inquiries and insinuations, VoteRef, as it is known, has added to the volume in the echo chamber.

Its instrument is the voter rolls, released line by line, for all to see.

In early August, the foundation published on its website the names, birthdates, addresses and voting histories for 2 million Nevada voters, information that is normally public but only available on request, for a fee. It claimed to have found a significant discrepancy between the number of voters and the number of ballots cast, despite being warned by state election officials that its findings were “fundamentally incorrect.”

In the months since, VoteRef has reported similar discrepancies in rolls posted for 17 other states, including the 2020 election battlegrounds of Michigan, Georgia, Ohio and Wisconsin. It intends to post the rolls of all 50 states by year’s end.

“Voter File Transparency site adds Michigan; large discrepancy found,” read a headline on a Dec. 6 press release put out by the organization, which is led by Gina Swoboda, a high-ranking officer in the Republican Party of Arizona.

The project is still in its early stages, and the people at the Chippewa Falls conference did not mention VoteRef specifically.

Where did the money come from for this fascist tool?

A ProPublica review found that VoteRef’s origins and funders are closely linked to a super PAC predominantly funded by billionaire Richard Uihlein, founder of the mammoth Wisconsin-based packaging supply company Uline. A descendant of one of the founders of the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, Uihlein is a major Trump supporter and a key player in Wisconsin and Illinois politics. Among his political donations: $800,000 in September 2020 to the Tea Party Patriots political action committee, a group that helped organize the Jan. 6 rally that led to the Capitol insurrection.

Uihlein and his wife, Elizabeth Uihlein, have contributed in excess of $30 million combined over two decades to mainly Republican candidates on the state and local level, particularly in Illinois and Wisconsin, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan organization that tracks campaign donor information. The total includes money given to groups that advocate on behalf of candidates as well as direct contributions.

Voter rolls are public information, typically used by campaigns to identify potential supporters, target messages or persuade people to go to the polls. Journalists and some businesses also at times use the rolls for newsgathering or commercial purposes.

VoteRef has said its aim is to increase transparency in the elections process, echoing the language used to justify door-to-door address checks, painstaking ballot audits and other efforts that Trump supporters are continuing to employ to parse the 2020 election. To publicize the results of its analysis of ballot inconsistencies, it crafted press releases that then were parroted on sites that purport to be legitimate news outlets and were connected to a media network that received large sums of money from VoteRef.

"Door-to-door checks?" If this gains traction in Pennsylvania, where it is illegal and per the article had its data taken down, anybody coming to my front door will not be treated kindly. And God forbid they harass my wife. They'll get a taste of Second Amendment rights when I run them off of my property as I inform them "I'm standing my ground."

[AnBr]

www.newsandguts.com/link/cnn-supreme-court-denies-gop-challenges-to-congressional-maps-in-north-carolina-and-pennsylvania/

[LFC]

TPM update on Republican assaults on free and fair elections. Texass is a cluster-f*** right now with thousands of valid votes being rejected due to the insane laws they passed. There's more but I think this is a good one to quote since it's indicative of what we're going to see and how fascist Republicans continue to be set loose on democracy. It's only going to get worse. The GOP is no longer a party that support American democracy.

Partisan Wisconsin Investigator Produces Partisan Report
­Michael Gableman, the former WISCONSIN Supreme Court justice tasked by GOP legislators with “investigating” the 2020 election, has produced a report that traffics in months-old GOP bugaboos about the vote that have been dismissed and debunked over and over and over again.

In a hearing Tuesday, Gableman reiterated his report’s assertion that there are “very significant grounds” not just to believe something fishy happened in 2020, but to decertify the election. This, of course, is legally impossible and, in effect, nothing more than a fringe talking point.

Much of the report focuses on grant money from the Center for Tech and Civic Life that went to election offices in several states in 2020, funded by donations from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. It was intended to help those offices deal with administering an election amid a pandemic. Though most of Wisconsin’s counties received grant money, Gableman focused on the five largest recipients — which he called the “Zuckerberg Five,” and which also happen to be the largest cities in the state — and alleged that the money in fact represented a bribe to get Democrats to the polls.

It’s worth noting: Gableman hasn’t tried to hide his political beliefs. He attended MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s conspiracy-minded “symposium” last year, acknowledged Tuesday that he voted for Trump, and has campaigned for Republicans in Wisconsin while conducting his investigation. More dramatically, he’s urged judges to jail Democratic officials who refuse to sit for closed-door interviews.

Also notable: Gableman has shown little regard for supposed deadlines imposed by the legislature, blowing past his initial October deadline by several months. Even this latest development is not the end. “It's not going to end until we go through this entire process,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) said last month, referring to outstanding subpoenas.

[LFC]

Feb 9, 2022 22:59:48 GMT LFC said:

Busted and goes out screeching like a bratty child about to be punished.

Fascist election fraudster Tina Peters from Mesa County, CO has been charged along with her deputy. Oh, well. Sucks to be you.

Tina Peters, the Republican clerk of Mesa County, Colorado who was long suspected of aiding a leak of sensitive election machinery data from her own office, has been indicted on multiple counts, as has her deputy Belinda Knisley.

The charges against Peters include three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, one count of conspiracy to commit attempt to influence a public servant, criminal impersonation, conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, identity theft, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty, and failing to comply with the secretary of state, according to a press release from the Mesa County district attorney’s office.

Knisley was charged with three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, one count of conspiracy to commit attempting to influence a public servant, violation of duty, and failing to comply with the secretary of state, according to the release.

[LFC]

A judge is trying to hold back the bad faith crazies.

U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg was always worried that bad-faith actors would exploit a cybersecurity researcher’s report on voting machine vulnerabilities to cast doubt on the 2020 election. MyPillow magnate Mike Lindell is here to prove her right.

On Saturday, Lindell and his attorneys demanded a copy of the voting machine analysis that purports to show how a certain kind of Dominion ballot machine can be hacked. While that report was authored by a renown computer security expert who merely posits that theoretical flaws should be fixed for future elections, Lindell appears to see this as an opportunity to bolster his bogus assertions that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.

When Judge Totenberg took the rare step of sealing this expert report back in July, she did so out of concern that its release would fuel conspiracy theories. Totenberg refused to entertain ideas about releasing it to the public, saying she was “at the end of my rope about that.”

But as the months ticked by, pressure kept mounting. Totenberg wouldn’t budge when a voting rights group asked for the report’s release in order to create public pressure for the Georgia secretary of state to update the system. And she held her ground even when a cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security first expressed interest in reviewing the report.

Cybersecurity experts warned this continued secrecy would only draw more curiosity, an obvious case of the Streisand effect.

But Totenberg stuck to her guns last month, keeping even a redacted and “sanitized” version of the report secret while authorizing that government researchers at the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency assess the potential threat.

Now, Lindell has adopted this report as part of his conspiracy-riddled crusade.