Voter Suppression & Election Theft by the Republican Party

[LFC]

More on the attacks on Michigan voting machines. They include a candidate for AG and one of the "constitutional sheriffs." This one a conspiracy and they need to be prosecuted that way.

TPM has covered right-wing activists’ efforts to gain access to Michigan voting machines for more than a year: Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf — a so-called “constitutional sheriff” who views his own authority as superior to state or federal law enforcement — began sending a deputy and a private investigator from town to town last year, following a tip supposedly based on theories from MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

But the attorney general’s petition, based on months of investigation from the Michigan State Police, alleged that DePerno was “one of the prime instigators of this conspiracy” to convince local clerks to allow access to voting machines. The petition claims he worked with Leaf and others to get access to the equipment, and that the scheme was allegedly successful in taking possession of five election machines. The machines were allegedly then taken to hotel rooms and Airbnb rentals and broken into by technicians. The CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the company that spearheaded the politicized “audit” of Maricopa County, Arizona’s election results, was part of the alleged conspiracy, along with other prominent Big Lie activists, Nessel’s office wrote. DePerno and others named in the document have denied wrongdoing, and they have not been charged with a crime.

[goldenvalley]

Aug 16, 2022 21:00:39 GMT jackd said:

I'm not sure what the crime is.

Federal law has something to say about this.

The federal government classifies voting systems as “critical infrastructure,” important to national security, and access to their software and other components is tightly regulated. In several instances since 2020, officials have taken machines out of service after their chains of custody were disrupted.

State authorities have opened criminal investigations into alleged improper breaches of equipment in Michigan, a case that involves several people who appear in the new records. In Mesa County, Colo., a local elections official, Republican Tina Peters, was indicted on felony charges including conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation and attempting to influence a public servant.

The above comes from this and it's behavior designed to keep questions about the veracity of voting machines in the minds of those who don't like the results of the presidential and senatorial elections in GA, MI, CO.  

A team of computer experts directed by lawyers allied with President Donald Trump copied sensitive data from election systems in Georgia as part of a secretive, multistate effort to access voting equipment that was broader, more organized and more successful than previously reported, according to emails and other records obtained by The Washington Post.

As they worked to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat, the lawyers asked a forensic data firm to access county election systems in at least three battleground states, according to the documents and interviews. The firm charged an upfront retainer fee for each job, which in one case was $26,000.

Attorney Sidney Powell sent the team to Michigan to copy a rural county’s election data and later helped arrange for it to do the same in the Detroit area, according to the records. A Trump campaign attorney engaged the team to travel to Nevada.

And the day after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol the team was in southern Georgia, copying data from a Dominion voting system in rural Coffee County.

[jackd]

I'm not arguing; I'm simply asking what the crime is in infiltrating voting systems if no damage or manipulation is done. Could be state or federal but I don't know what the fact is.

[LFC]

Aug 17, 2022 1:16:58 GMT jackd said:

I'm not arguing; I'm simply asking what the crime is in infiltrating voting systems if no damage or manipulation is done. Could be state or federal but I don't know what the fact is.

The problem is that big "if." Once they leave chain of custody you have no idea if anything was or was not done. It's the reason they had to trash voting machines in Arizona when they were mishandled by the faudit crew.

[LFC]

Dinesh D'Souza is a fake and a liar? Say it ain't so!

True believers in Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election gathered in Arizona this weekend to examine what was promised to be a mountain of evidence showing a sophisticated, elaborate, and successful plot to steal the presidency.

What they got was: A mostly empty website.

Some context: The event, dubbed “The Pit” by its organizers, was headlined by the stars of this year’s break-out conspiracy theory hit, “2,000 Mules.” The Dinesh D’Souza film chronicles the efforts of True The Vote, the right-wing organization that has asserted, falsely, that a network of “mules” deposited fraudulent ballots for Joe Biden in drop boxes across the country.

D’Souza’s film infamously… didn’t actually show this. Despite promising incontrovertible evidence that drop box surveillance videos and cell phone tracking data would prove the existence of this extensive mule network, the film itself showed just a few isolated videos of people dropping regular-degular ballots off at drop boxes: Nothing illegal. Even a snazzy graphic of a map included in the film — which internet sleuths identified as, apparently, a map of Moscow — didn’t prove anything.

Cue Saturday’s event. The movie’s stars — True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, who pushed the lie that millions of undocumented people voted in 2016 — have hyped the gathering for months. It would be the moment when, finally, they would reveal the raw data purportedly behind their claims. Or, as a promotional video in May put it, the moment they would “pull the ripcord” and share their evidence.

“The part that was left out of the movie, we have available,” Phillips told Right Side Broadcasting Network ahead of the event. The media, he added, was afraid of the summit because “they have no idea how devastating some of these stories actually are.”

Yet when the big reveal came Saturday, it was a flop.

[LFC]

There's a group (because of course there is) who is working with state and local Republicans to break into voting machines all around the country. If elections truly do become insecure it will be because of a direct assault by the Republican Party, and odds are that it's coming.

Key Pro-Trump Lawyers, Technicians Worked Together To Breach Voting Machines Nationwide

I’ve spent the better part of the last two years covering Trump supporters’ efforts to break into voting machines in search of proof to substantiate their conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

So I didn’t want to let Monday’s Washington Post reporting go without comment: The Post flagged emails and other records produced for a lawsuit in federal court in Georgia. They concern, most immediately, Coffee County: Officials there recently replaced their election management system server out of concern it may have been compromised.

By whom? By a local businessman apparently working in tandem with a team of technicians under the direction of Sidney Powell.

Compromised voting machines are serious business: They often have to be replaced, which can cost thousands or millions of dollars. Having their digital detritus floating around the web can also allow bad actors to discover and exploit vulnerabilities in the system. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported Wednesday that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had launched a criminal investigation of the matter in Coffee County.

But the story goes far beyond Georgia: The records flagged by the Post confirm a sense I’ve had for a while, and one that’s been iteratively reported in various outlets: Much of the work behind infiltrating — breaking into, compromising — voting machines has been done by a relatively small group of people, working in tandem with locals. Let’s take a look in more detail.

Key lawyers and technicians worked in concert around the country, under Sidney Powell’s direction

TPM first reported last year that major players in the election theft ecosystem met at pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood’s South Carolina plantation in late 2020 to plan their next steps. Present around that time: Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, ex-Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, Doug Logan — who would become the right-wing Arizona “auditor” — and Jim Penrose, a former NSA official. ProPublica would later conclude that these meetings represented the “origins of the stolen election myth.”

The Post’s reporting fleshes this out further: Powell, according to the email records the paper reported, was at the helm of a small but fairly sophisticated operation to obtain county-level election machine data. Jesse Binnall, one of Trump’s current attorneys, was a key middleman for her work. Often, they worked with locals who were their contact points with elected officials — such as current Michigan GOP attorney general contender Matthew DePerno, who represented a plaintiff who was granted access to election machines in Antrim County; or Scott Hall, a Georgia businessman who convinced election officials in Coffee County to give him access to their equipment.

On the technical side, the firm SullivanStrickler pops up across the country: Its technicians, with Powell’s authorization, worked to image the election machines in Antrim County. An extremely flawed report using that data made it to the president’s desk, and Trump was reportedly obsessed with the document. “I am authorizing payment today for Michigan,” Powell wrote to the firm’s chief operations officer, Paul Maggio, on Dec. 8, 2020, according to the Post.

Similar arrangements with SullivanStrickler, under Powell’s approval, were set up in the Detroit area and Las Vegas, the Post reported. SullivanStrickler’s work was then used to support various Big Lie efforts in court. In Nevada in December 2020, Jesse Binall, who was representing the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the results, cited a supporting statement from Gregory Freemyer, SullivanStrickler’s director of forensics. The same man was an “expert” in DePerno’s Michigan suit and helped pick apart the machines there.

They broke into machines in at least 3 states: Colorado, Michigan, and Georgia. I'm sure there's more.

[LFC]

A Wisconsin state judge tore the "investigation" to shreds in a 90-page opinion. Here's a lot of it but read the whole article. I wouldn't be shocked if a move was made to disbar Gableman. He certainly seems to have earned it.

A state judge in Wisconsin tore into the disastrous, Trump-supported “investigation” of Wisconsin’s 2020 election results Wednesday, finding that lead investigator Michael Gableman had not only largely turned up nothing of substance, but also that attorneys working on the case had shown an unwillingness to abide by professional conduct rules.

The 90-page filing from Circuit Court Judge Frank Remington was actually a follow-up to a month-old decision not to recuse himself from a public records lawsuit against Gableman’s office, based on claims from Gableman’s office that Remington was biased. In July, Remington wrote, he didn’t have time to fully flesh out his thinking. What followed on Wednesday was akin to a judicial diss track.

“From August 30 through December 4, 2021, the evidence speaks for itself,” Remington wrote near the end of the filing Thursday.

“[The Office of Special Counsel] accomplished nothing. It kept none of the weekly progress reports the Wisconsin State Assembly required it to keep. It recorded no interviews with witnesses. It gathered no measurable data. It organized no existing data into any analytical format. It generated no reports based on any special expertise. It did commence lawsuits against other parts of our state and local government, although at the time of this writing, OSC has received no relief. Instead, it gave its employees code names like ‘coms’ or ‘3,’ apparently for the sole purpose of emailing back and forth about news articles and drafts of speeches. It printed copies of reports that better investigators had already written, although there is no evidence that any person connected with OSC ever read these reports, let alone critically analyzed their factual and legal bases to draw his or her own principled conclusions.”

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) fired Gableman last week, just a couple days after Vos beat a Trump- and Gableman-backed primary challenger. So Remington’s take on Gableman’s investigatory work was a response, in some ways, to the investigation overall — in addition to Gableman’s meltdown in Remington’s courtroom in June, in the course of one of several of the public records lawsuits facing the probe.

In addition to speaking his mind on Gableman’s investigatory work, Remington also revoked the pro hac vice admissions of five out-of-state lawyers who’ve represented Gableman’s office — the status that allowed them to work in Remington’s courtroom in the first place — based on what the judge said were their manifestations of incompetency and their unwillingness to abide by rules of professional conduct and decorum.

Remington wrote that Gableman’s office’s response to his July decision was “a fever dream version of the facts of this case” and “a pernicious and selfish attempt to repaint the truth.”

“If my prior estimation that OSC’s brief ‘contains inaccuracies’ was improvident, it was only in the suggestion that OSC’s brief also contains accuracies,” the judge wrote.

[goldenvalley]

How many taxpayer dollars went down the tubes (into the investigator's pocket?)?

“[The Office of Special Counsel] accomplished nothing. It kept none of the weekly progress reports the Wisconsin State Assembly required it to keep. It recorded no interviews with witnesses. It gathered no measurable data. It organized no existing data into any analytical format. It generated no reports based on any special expertise.

[LFC]

I thought DeSatanist was smarter than to create a spectacle that was this ripe for mockery. I don't see any gain. Even many in the hard-core MAGAt crowd would look at this and say, "huh?" and it sure won't move the needle with the mouth breathers who are already all in on election lies. Maybe he just felt the need to be on TV.

In a made-for-TV spectacle Thursday focused on the work of his new “election crimes” state law enforcement office, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) declared that 20 out of 11.1 million votes cast in the 2020 election in the state had been submitted by people allegedly voting illegally.

The event included all of the necessary law-and-order dress-up: Held in the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, DeSantis spoke in front of a wall of uniformed law enforcement officers and behind a podium labeled “ELECTION INTEGRITY.”

The governor’s remarks were punctuated by the cheers of an audience in the courtroom’s jury box and public gallery, which held up signs, distributed minutes earlier, that read “MY VOTE COUNTS.”

During Thursday’s event, Peter Antonacci, the DeSantis-appointed director of the Election Crimes office, claimed without evidence that illegal voting may have swayed a 2021 special congressional election — though the race he referred to was a Democratic primary in a single congressional district, not a statewide general election.

“You may think that 20 voters is not a lot. But you’re in Broward County and you know that you just elected a person to Congress here this year by five votes,” Antonacci said, adding: “I’m certain that in that tranche of voters, there were plenty of illegal ballots cast, and it is just awfully unfair to the supporters of political candidates, to the candidates and to the public at large.”

DeSantis didn’t go into detail about the alleged offenders, except to say that they had at some point been convicted of either murder or sexual assault, and then, at some time after that, “they went ahead and voted anyways.”

More important than the details of the alleged violations, apparently, was praising Ron DeSantis. Ashley Moody, Florida’s attorney general, commended “our very detail-oriented governor.” And DeSantis himself paused at one point to note the source of all the hubbub.

“This was my idea!” the governor exclaimed.

[LFC]

The "2,000 Mules" crowd came about as close to claiming the dog ate their homework as possible and still not sound completely like a 10 year old.

Alas! ‘2000 Mules’ Crew Falls Victim To Wiley Chinese Hackers!
­
­True The Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips, a researcher working with her who popularized the lie that millions of undocumented people voted illegally in 2016, were all set to — finally — present their evidence.

The Arizona event, dubbed “The Pit” for some reason, was months in the making, and the investigators were set to reveal the basis for “2000 Mules,” the Dinesh D’Souza film that had dramatized their work. While the film claimed that cell phone data and video surveillance showed a massive network of illegal ballot traffickers, it actually showed no such thing. Instead, it was an amalgam of “take our word for it” and spooky lighting effects.

Well, “The Pit” came and went without any proof: Phillips and Engelbrecht announced a website, open.ink, that they said would be an interactive storage facility of sorts for their election fraud evidence, but TPM’s membership at the website is apparently still under review. Days later, the website still boldly declares “No posts were found” under “Latest Posts.” It does, however, have an option for a premium membership… At The Pit, Phillips and Engelbrecht explained the problem: When they’d tried to upload their data, it was immediately hacked and cleared out by Chinese hackers! That’s a shame. Watch here.

“So… Did the Chinese really hack their databases and delete their files? lol. No,” Maricopa County, ARIZONA’s top elections official, Recorder Stephen Richer, said in response to my coverage. “No grand scheme by super criminals occurred. Instead what occurred is one of the oldest things in human history: A few people convinced a bunch of hopeful voters to pay $30 for snake oil.”

[LFC]

RonJohn continues to bounce all over the place, trying to appeal to a majority. Bold of floundering mine.

A recent Marquette University Law School found that Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) may not be as safely re-electable as he was ahead of his last reelection in 2016.

The poll was released last week, showing RonJohn is trailing a bit behind his Democratic rival — Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes has a 7-percentage point lead over Johnson with 51 percent of the vote compared to his 44 percent.

That’s just one poll and it’s hard to know what to make of it in a state like Wisconsin. But RonJohn seems to be reacting to it all a bit weirdly, taking a tossing-spaghetti-at-the-wall sort of approach to making headlines in recent days. But it’s not entirely clear what demographic of constituent he is aiming to court with these latest remarks.

He gave an interview on Friday that aired Sunday where he essentially tried to create some distance between himself and Donald Trump, at least when it comes to the former president’s fake electors scheme. As if faking a phone call to ignore reporters’ questions wasn’t avoid-y enough.

“I had nothing to do with the alternate slate. I had no idea that anybody was going to ask me to deliver those,” Johnson told a local ABC News affiliate Friday. “My involvement in that attempt to deliver spanned the course of a couple of seconds.”

There’s a specific subgroup of voters who might find some comfort in Johnson creating distance between himself and a crucial component of Trump’s election-stealing scheme, but it certainly isn’t Donald Trump’s most loyal base of voters in Wisconsin.

But Johnson may be trying to court far-right conservative voters in other ways. In a separate interview with the local Washington County Daily News, Johnson not only made it overwhelmingly clear that he is in complete agreement with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, but he also expressed support for Congress passing a national ban or national restrictions on the procedure.

“Maybe Congress can take a look at what the states have done and say ‘we probably ought to place this limit here,’ based on new information or whatever,” he told the local news outlet. It’s a move that certainly won’t do anything to get moderate Republican voters who aren’t opposed to abortion in his camp. And it may even help boost Barnes — the same Marquette poll that found Johnson trailing Barnes also found that 66 percent of Wisconsin residents support abortion being legal in all or most cases. Only 30 percent of those surveyed indicated it should be outlawed entirely.

Johnson’s remarks on marriage equality over the weekend were also a bit odd. During the interview with the local ABC affiliate, Johnson appeared to backtrack a bit on his previous support for a possible bill that could codify same-sex marriage rights into law. In weeks past, as some of his Republican and Democratic colleagues in the Senate weigh bringing forth a same-sex marriage bill that passed in the House, Johnson emerged as a potential Republican voice in support of the measure. And by voice of support I mean he simply has said he has “no reason to oppose it.”

But during the interview with WISN, Johnson pulled out a familiar GOP talking point that people like Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) have deployed in the weeks since Roe’s overturning to avoid engaging seriously on the issue — he argued it’s not even an issue at all.

“The decision on gay marriage will never be overturned,” he told WISN. “I do not see the Supreme Court overturning that because that would impact millions of people that have acted on that … This is just Democrats opening up a wound that had really healed.”

The problem is, as we know, Justice Clarence Thomas very explicitly nodded at the idea that same-sex marriage rights could be in jeopardy when the high court ruled in June to overturn Roe.

He doesn't want to talk about Trump despite refusing to shut up about him not that long ago. Despite being up to his ears in the coup he was really only lasted "a couple of seconds." He's anti-abortion in a state where legal abortion has a 66% approval rating. And he won't support same-sex marriage and instead uses a blatantly bullshit talking point. And yet, in Wisconsin, he could win. Sad.

[LFC]

Here's more on RonJohn's denial of involvement with the fake electors scheme. It's sad. The upshot is "I know NUH-THING!" and "If I had known I had to try to give it to Pence anyway." I like that he claims that they did their due diligence and yet never piped up about an attempt to present the VPOTUS with fake electors. That's damning in itself.

Johnson claimed that a few of those precious seconds dedicated to the fake electors plot involved him fielding three text messages and sending two, as well as speaking to his chief of staff about “someone” who wanted him to deliver “something.”

“I knew nothing about it,” Johnson said, adding that the slate of fake electors were never delivered because Pence’s staff did not want them.

Johnson then complained about the Jan. 6 Select Committee drawing attention to his staff’s involvement in the scheme, which he once again insisted had been “blown out of proportion.”

“They blew this up into some massive conspiracy,” Johnson complained. “I had virtually no involvement. My involvement lasted seconds.”

Asked what he would’ve done if the then-vice president’s chief of staff was willing to deliver the fake slates of electors, Johnson tensed up.

“In what way could have I? We did our due diligence. If somebody hands us something, we are supposed to deliver to the vice presidency — does he want it? Nope. OK, end of story.”

Johnson’s latest remarks add to his repeated squirming about the issue. The Jan. 6 Select Committee revealed his staff’s supposed involvement in the plot during a hearing in June focused on Trump’s pressure campaign targeting state officials — all part of Trump and his allies’ broader efforts to subvert the election.

Days after the committee’s revelation, Johnson faked a phone call and blamed an unnamed intern for his staff’s effort to deliver the fake electors to Pence.

“I was not involved in this at all. I don’t know why you’re asking me questions, so why don’t you just leave me alone?” Johnson snapped, when pressed by reporters in June.

[LFC]

Aug 16, 2022 21:13:03 GMT goldenvalley said:

The above comes from this and it's behavior designed to keep questions about the veracity of voting machines in the minds of those who don't like the results of the presidential and senatorial elections in GA, MI, CO.  

A team of computer experts directed by lawyers allied with President Donald Trump copied sensitive data from election systems in Georgia as part of a secretive, multistate effort to access voting equipment that was broader, more organized and more successful than previously reported, according to emails and other records obtained by The Washington Post.

As they worked to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat, the lawyers asked a forensic data firm to access county election systems in at least three battleground states, according to the documents and interviews. The firm charged an upfront retainer fee for each job, which in one case was $26,000.

Attorney Sidney Powell sent the team to Michigan to copy a rural county’s election data and later helped arrange for it to do the same in the Detroit area, according to the records. A Trump campaign attorney engaged the team to travel to Nevada.

And the day after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol the team was in southern Georgia, copying data from a Dominion voting system in rural Coffee County.

WaPo has a follow-up on how the information stolen voting machine information was shared widely and pretty freely.

Sensitive election system files obtained by attorneys working to overturn President Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat were shared with election deniers, conspiracy theorists and right-wing commentators, according to records reviewed by The Washington Post.

A Georgia computer forensics firm, hired by the attorneys, placed the files on a server, where company records show they were downloaded dozens of times. Among the downloaders were accounts associated with a Texas meteorologist who has appeared on Sean Hannity’s radio show; a podcaster who suggested political enemies should be executed; a former pro surfer who pushed disproven theories that the 2020 election was manipulated; and a self-described former “seduction and pickup coach” who claims to also have been a hacker.

Plaintiffs in a long-running federal lawsuit over the security of Georgia’s voting systems obtained the new records from the company, Atlanta-based SullivanStrickler, under a subpoena to one of its executives. The records include contracts between the firm and the Trump-allied attorneys, notably Sidney Powell. The data files are described as copies of components from election systems in Coffee County, Ga., and Antrim County, Mich.

Marilyn Marks, executive director of the nonprofit Coalition for Good Governance, which is one of the plaintiffs in the Georgia lawsuit, said the records appeared to show the files were handled recklessly. “The implications go far beyond Coffee County or Georgia,” Marks said.

[LFC]

The more we've seen about the Georgia grand jury the more it's obvious that this is some serious shit, not just a few phone calls. No wonder Little Lindsey is tapdancing furiously to avoid testifying under oath.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Wednesday launched another attempt to avoid testifying before a special grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia investigating efforts by former President Trump and his allies to overturn the election results in the battleground state.

Graham filed a brief in federal court on Wednesday, days after the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Trump ally does not have to comply with the subpoena from the grand jury until his attorneys and Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis outline arguments about what questions he can be asked in light of constitutional protections he has as a sitting member of Congress.

Another Republican saying they're above the law. What a shock.

[LFC]

Hyperbole much?

The GOP nominee for Minnesota secretary of state said changing voting rules after the “big rig” that was the 2020 presidential election was “our 9/11,” likening the election to the 2001 terrorist attacks when discussing proposed reforms to election laws.

Kim Crockett, who recently won the GOP nomination in the race to be the state’s top elections official, has boosted Trump’s baseless claims of widespread election fraud. Crockett previously characterized the 2020 election as “lawless” and “rigged.”

CNN reported on audio of Crockett’s previously unreported appearance on a local Christian talk radio program in Sept. 2021, in which she decried Trump’s 2020 loss as “our 9/11.”

“We realize people are discouraged and this is still an exceptional nation,” Crockett said. “We are still the American people and I’m betting on us. This is a challenge. Maybe we needed a wake-up call. This is our 9/11.”

In the interview, Crockett reportedly took aim at voting reform legislation. She characterized the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which ultimately did not come to fruition, as a “massive threat” to Republicans.

Crockett cast the unsuccessful voting reform bill, which would restore the federal government’s authority to oversee state voting laws to prevent discrimination against minority voters, as a measure that would “resurrect a really vicious, powerful architecture in Washington, DC, to take over our election laws.”

“And that’s the avenue to their permanent power, because they really don’t think we’re capable of governing ourselves at the local level … state level and they wanna be in charge,” Crockett said. “And they wanna be in charge permanently.”

Crockett used her appearance on the radio program to promote an upcoming event at the time that she said would focus on “the big rig” 2020 election.

“I’ve been doing it now for about 18 months, exclusively in the election space,” Crockett said earlier in the radio appearance. “Because if we lose our right to free and fair elections – and I don’t just need the right to vote, I need to know that it’s being counted fairly and that someone’s not cheating and canceling me out.”

[goldenvalley]

Aug 25, 2022 23:47:20 GMT LFC said:

Hyperbole much?

The GOP nominee for Minnesota secretary of state said changing voting rules after the “big rig” that was the 2020 presidential election was “our 9/11,” likening the election to the 2001 terrorist attacks when discussing proposed reforms to election laws.

Kim Crockett, who recently won the GOP nomination in the race to be the state’s top elections official, has boosted Trump’s baseless claims of widespread election fraud. Crockett previously characterized the 2020 election as “lawless” and “rigged.”

CNN reported on audio of Crockett’s previously unreported appearance on a local Christian talk radio program in Sept. 2021, in which she decried Trump’s 2020 loss as “our 9/11.”

“We realize people are discouraged and this is still an exceptional nation,” Crockett said. “We are still the American people and I’m betting on us. This is a challenge. Maybe we needed a wake-up call. This is our 9/11.”

In the interview, Crockett reportedly took aim at voting reform legislation. She characterized the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which ultimately did not come to fruition, as a “massive threat” to Republicans.

Crockett cast the unsuccessful voting reform bill, which would restore the federal government’s authority to oversee state voting laws to prevent discrimination against minority voters, as a measure that would “resurrect a really vicious, powerful architecture in Washington, DC, to take over our election laws.”

“And that’s the avenue to their permanent power, because they really don’t think we’re capable of governing ourselves at the local level … state level and they wanna be in charge,” Crockett said. “And they wanna be in charge permanently.”

Crockett used her appearance on the radio program to promote an upcoming event at the time that she said would focus on “the big rig” 2020 election.

“I’ve been doing it now for about 18 months, exclusively in the election space,” Crockett said earlier in the radio appearance. “Because if we lose our right to free and fair elections – and I don’t just need the right to vote, I need to know that it’s being counted fairly and that someone’s not cheating and canceling me out.”

Stunning, isn't it?  Just repeat words like "the big rig", offer no proof whatsoever beyond Trump didn't win, and expect to have the elections system turned over to you.  What's more stunning is that people will vote for that.

[LFC]

Stacey Abram needs to jam this down Kemp's throat at every turn. Why did he avoid testimony? Why is he afraid to tell the truth?

Keep An Eye On This One

Judge delays Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s grand jury testimony in Georgia election probe until after the November election.

[LFC]

DeSatanist performs as you'd expect a fascist to perform. If not one of the 20 people he dragged out of their homes and arrested is found guilty it won't matter. He got his propaganda moment.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made a spectacle out of the round of arrests made by his election police force earlier this month, jailing 20 people on charges of voter fraud and promising more prosecutions to come. At least one target was dragged to jail in his underwear by a SWAT team at 6 a.m. But it turns out that the individuals ensnared in DeSantis’ dragnet had no idea that they could not lawfully vote. The governor’s own appointees flubbed their legal duty to stop them from registering. And because of their sloppy errors, all 20 defendants may well be acquitted of crimes they did not intend to commit.

[Bact PhD]

Aug 30, 2022 16:34:21 GMT LFC said:

DeSatanist performs as you'd expect a fascist to perform. If not one of the 20 people he dragged out of their homes and arrested is found guilty it won't matter. He got his propaganda moment.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made a spectacle out of the round of arrests made by his election police force earlier this month, jailing 20 people on charges of voter fraud and promising more prosecutions to come. At least one target was dragged to jail in his underwear by a SWAT team at 6 a.m. But it turns out that the individuals ensnared in DeSantis’ dragnet had no idea that they could not lawfully vote. The governor’s own appointees flubbed their legal duty to stop them from registering. And because of their sloppy errors, all 20 defendants may well be acquitted of crimes they did not intend to commit.

(Bold mine) For the Supreme Emperor, the performance is the point.

[LFC]

The Georgia probe is likely targeting Roger Eastman.

In other Trump investigation-adjacent news today, election steal scheming attorney John Eastman’s lawyers think that he is “probably a target” of the Fulton County probe led by District Attorney Fani Willis, who is looking into Trump team efforts to overturn the election results in her state of Georgia.

Eastman was subpoenaed to testify before the Fulton County grand jury earlier this summer alongside Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and a batch of other Trump Big Lie attorneys — Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and Cleta Mitchell. His scheduled testimony was behind closed doors today and Eastman reportedly was advised by his lawyers to plead the fifth “where appropriate,” the New York Times reported.

While other Trump lawyers, like Rudy Guiliani, have been informed that they are targets of Willis’ probe, one of Eastman’s lawyers told the Times that his client hasn’t been identified as a target officially, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be eventually.

“I think he’s probably a target, but I don’t think he’s a legitimate target,” Eastman’s lawyer Harvey Silverglate told the Times. “I don’t think my client is going to be convicted of anything. … If he is indicted, a motion to dismiss will end the case.”

My biggest fear with this case is that Republicans will gain additional power and kill it. Blatant protection of their own in the face of clear crimes against our nation is well within their wheelhouse.

[jackd]

Well, if you give up in advance, they don't have to do anything.

[LFC]

Sept 1, 2022 19:16:42 GMT jackd said:

Well, if you give up in advance, they don't have to do anything.

True enough but as the Trump administration proved, delay, delay, and then more delay is their friend.

[LFC]

More shenanigans are being uncovered.

One of the sham Trump electors brought tech operatives hired by MAGA lawyer Sidney Powell to a Georgia county’s elections office on the day there was a breach in the office’s voting system, surveillance video footage reported by CNN, the Washington Post and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows.

The footage reportedly shows the fake elector, then-Coffee County GOP chair Cathy Latham, escorting four technicians for SullivanStrickler — a data forensics company Powell hired in her bid to overturn the 2020 election for Donald Trump — to the elections office on Jan. 7 last year.

That was the day the office’s elections system was breached. Two of the technicians seen in the video with Latham, Scott Hall and Paul Maggio, have admitted to accessing a voting machine in Coffee County, per CNN. The Washington Post reported last month on how SullivanStrickler operatives copied data from a Dominion voting machine in Coffee County on Jan. 7.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation is looking into the breach. Latham herself is a target in the Fulton County district attorney’s criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to steal the 2020 election in Georgia.

I really fear for the ability of America to survive the onslaught of fascism. How can free and fair elections survive with such a concerted effort to destroy them? I guess we'll see.

[LFC]

They're not even pretending anymore. Republicans in Michigan straight up told poll workers and observers to break the law.

The evening before Michigan’s state primary, Wayne County GOP leaders held a Zoom training session for poll workers and partisan observers – warning them about “bad stuff happening” during the election and encouraging them to ignore local election rules barring cell phones and pens from polling places and vote-counting centers.

“None of the constraints that they’re putting on this are legal,” former state senator Patrick Colbeck told trainees on the August 1 call.

As far as cell phones, “I would say maybe just hide it or something, and maybe hide a small pad and a small pen or something like that because you need to take accurate notes,” Cheryl Costantino, the GOP county chairwoman and host of the call, told participants.

Some participants raised concerns about being tossed out if they broke the rules. “That’s why you got to do it secretly,” Costantino replied.

While volunteer partisan observers have always been trained by political parties and non-profit groups in Michigan, the Wayne County GOP had also invited poll workers – people hired and paid by the local clerk’s office. They are in charge of running the election, and their responsibilities can include checking voter IDs, counting ballots, and even securing voting equipment at the end of the day. Poll workers are required to engage in non-partisan training overseen by the local clerk and are only identified as Republicans for the purposes of making sure there is equal representation of both major parties working the election, according to the Michigan Bureau of Elections.

During the Wayne County training call, obtained by CNN, the presumption that Democrats cheat – thus justifying Republican rule-breaking – permeated the discussion. It offers a snapshot of one of the ways Trump-backing, MAGA-minded conspiracy theorists are intervening in the election process across the country, sometimes encouraging poll workers or volunteer observers to violate election rules in hopes of finding evidence that Democrats might be doing the same.

It’s an approach election experts fear could spur chaos and conflict in November’s mid-term elections and in 2024.

[pnwguy]

Another denier who is preaching the gospel of the Big Lie

www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2022/09/08/an-ex-professor-spreads-election-myths-across-us-one-town-time/

Clements, who has no formal training or background in election systems, spent months crisscrossing the back roads in his home state of New Mexico in a battered Buick, trying to convince local leaders not to certify election results. His words had an impact: In June, officials in three New Mexico counties where he made his case either delayed or voted against certification of this year’s primary results, even though there was no credible evidence of problems with the vote.

Now, Clements has taken his message nationwide, traveling to small towns in more than a dozen states, with a focus, he said, on places that are “forgotten and abandoned and overlooked.” His crusade to prove that voting systems can’t be trusted has deepened fears among election experts, who say his meritless claims could give Trump allies more fodder to try to disrupt elections in November and beyond.

Republican primary candidates embracing Trump’s stolen election rhetoric have flourished this year. Clements’s strategy is to target his message locally: to county commissioners and clerks, jobs that are lower profile but that wield an outsize role in administering America’s decentralized election system. If local jurisdictions fail to certify their votes, it could throw the outcome of an election into chaos, raising doubt about the results and giving ammunition to losing candidates who refuse to accept their defeat.

Clements is one among a tightknit circle of Trump supporters who travel the country as self-appointed election fraud evangelists. They embrace the instructions of leaders like former Trump adviser turned podcaster Stephen K. Bannon, who has urged election deniers to run for local races and sign up to be poll workers in what he calls his “precinct-by-precinct” takeover strategy.