Voter Suppression & Election Theft by the Republican Party

[andydp]

Dec 29, 2022 0:04:06 GMT LFC said:

Always a Republican.

The Albany area on the west side of the Hudson is traditional heavily Democratic. Rensselaer is GOP leaning. Not to say the Democrats in the area aren’t doing any of this stuff.
It’s a “never ending cycle of love”.

[LFC]

Dec 29, 2022 0:24:44 GMT andydp said:

Not to say the Democrats in the area aren’t doing any of this stuff.

They must just be so much smarter because, for some reason, they never seem to get caught despite an army of Republican officials and attorneys hunting them.

[LFC]

Once again it just seem like it's always a Republican.

A woman was arrested in Sioux City, Iowa, on Thursday after being indicted for allegedly committing voter fraud during the state’s 2020 primary and general elections, according to the Justice Department.

Prosecutors claim that her goal was to get her husband Jeremy Taylor, a former Iowa House member, elected to Congress. Taylor was running in the GOP primary to represent Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, a seat held at the time by far-right politician Steve King, who had become infamous for a string of offensive statements, including wondering aloud whether there’d be a population without rape or incest and why the term “white supremacist” is offensive.

Both King and Taylor lost the primary to current Rep. Randy Feenstra, who won the general election and replaced King in Congress 2021. 

The indictment states that Jeremy Taylor’s wife, Kim Phuong Taylor, “visited numerous households within the Vietnamese community in Woodbury County,” collecting absentee ballots for voters who either “had limited ability to read and understand English and offering to help them vote.”

“Prior to both the primary and general elections in 2020, [Taylor] visited numerous households within the Vietnamese community in Woodbury County encouraging residents to fill out voter registration forms and absentee ballot request forms that she brought with her for each election,” the complaint says. “In some instances, [Taylor] either assisted the residents with filling out the forms or filled them out herself.” 

She also signed voter registration and absentee ballot request forms for voters who weren’t present at the time, prosecutors allege. She then allegedly either mailed the forms to the Woodbury County Auditor’s Office or submitted them through drop boxes.

[LFC]

F***ing red county Pennsylvania.

A recount of the 2020 presidential race conducted this week in a Pennsylvania county did not find any major discrepancies from the original results.

Lycoming County employees spent nearly three days hand-counting more than 59,000 ballots after a year’s worth of pressure from local elections skeptics resulted in the county commissioners voting along party lines to recount the 2020 presidential and state auditor general’s race.

The recount was completed more quickly than expected. After counting from 8:30 a.m. to roughly 5 p.m. on Monday and Tuesday, the ballots remaining Wednesday were counted in less than two hours, an overall average pace of 55.5 ballots per minute.

Lycoming County Elections Director Forrest Lehman hardly left the room, as he was eager to complete the process before his wife was scheduled to give birth next week.

Lycoming’s original results, tabulated by machines, showed 59,397 votes cast in the presidential contest, with 41,462 going to former President Donald Trump and 16,971 going to President Joe Biden. The hand recount resulted in a total of 59,374 votes in the presidential race, with Trump receiving 7 fewer votes and Biden receiving 15 fewer votes compared with the original tally.

In the auditor general’s race, the original tally was 58,627 votes cast, though the hand recount only found 58,615. Republican Auditor General Tim DeFoor’s winning vote total dropped by 10, and Democratic challenger ​​Nina Ahmad’s total increased by 11.

Lehman said the county is still reviewing the hand count and plans to have a more expansive version of the report explaining the small changes later this month.

[goldenvalley]

Jan 17, 2023 16:30:59 GMT LFC said:

F***ing red county Pennsylvania.

A recount of the 2020 presidential race conducted this week in a Pennsylvania county did not find any major discrepancies from the original results.

Lycoming County employees spent nearly three days hand-counting more than 59,000 ballots after a year’s worth of pressure from local elections skeptics resulted in the county commissioners voting along party lines to recount the 2020 presidential and state auditor general’s race.

The recount was completed more quickly than expected. After counting from 8:30 a.m. to roughly 5 p.m. on Monday and Tuesday, the ballots remaining Wednesday were counted in less than two hours, an overall average pace of 55.5 ballots per minute.

Lycoming County Elections Director Forrest Lehman hardly left the room, as he was eager to complete the process before his wife was scheduled to give birth next week.

Lycoming’s original results, tabulated by machines, showed 59,397 votes cast in the presidential contest, with 41,462 going to former President Donald Trump and 16,971 going to President Joe Biden. The hand recount resulted in a total of 59,374 votes in the presidential race, with Trump receiving 7 fewer votes and Biden receiving 15 fewer votes compared with the original tally.

In the auditor general’s race, the original tally was 58,627 votes cast, though the hand recount only found 58,615. Republican Auditor General Tim DeFoor’s winning vote total dropped by 10, and Democratic challenger ​​Nina Ahmad’s total increased by 11.

Lehman said the county is still reviewing the hand count and plans to have a more expansive version of the report explaining the small changes later this month.

So maybe I'm wrong but I'm more inclined to think machine tabulation of unambiguous votes is more accurate than human counting.  By unambiguous I mean clean ballots that don't have any marks on it like Xs across a mark for a candidate and a different candidate in the same race marked.  Those should be reviewed by human eyes to determine intent.  

And give 2 humans the same stack of $1 bills (a large one) and see how often their hand counting comes up with different totals. Humans lose track of what they counted and what they didn't.  

[LFC]

Another Texass sized attack on democracy.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called for a redo Monday of Harris County elections after voters faced difficulties casting their ballots in November when some voting centers did not have enough ballot paper for the number of voters who came in.

"How many people went to go vote that didn't go back? We don't know," Patrick said during a talk at the Magic Circle Republican Women's Club. "So we do need to have a new election."

A spokesperson for the secretary of state's office said only a court order could force a redo of an election.

Patrick joins other top lawmakers like Gov. Greg Abbott, who have said the issues may have affected the outcome of the hotly-contested local elections. County Judge Lina Hidalgo, a rising Democratic star, eked out a win against Alexandra del Moral Mealer, a well-funded GOP opponent, by only about 18,000 votes - less than 2% of the votes.

Of course all they know is that there were some issues but that they were actually handled fairly well. They have no evidence that it impacted the election. Of course, as Republicans, they have alternative facts so real evidence is meaningless, doubly so if it doesn't fit their narrative.

Here's reality.

Nadia Hakim, a spokesperson for the Harris County election administrator's office, said the news report Abbott and Patrick cited in their criticism was misleading. Hakim said the report compares turnout numbers at individual voting locations in 2018, before the county allowed voters to cast ballots from any voting center in the county, to the turnout numbers in 2022, when voters had that option.

"This apples-to-kale comparison never clarifies whether any site requested or received any additional paper," Hakim said.

She said the Harris County elections office started the November election with nearly 5 million sheets of ballot paper, and over 3 million sheets were returned after all ballots had been cast.

"There is no question that the supply of paper was more than sufficient for the 350,000 in-person voters who cast a two-page ballot on Election Day," Hakim said, adding that additional supplies of paper ballots were delivered to locations throughout the county on Election Day.

[LFC]

DeSatanist's attempt at reincarcerating people on false pretenses in order to score political points has failed. That doesn't mean he and his state gov't fascists aren't ready to try again.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) tried to get some good press and score points with Donald Trump supporters when he arrested 20 people accused of voter fraud last year, but the stunt hasn’t led to any real convictions. On Friday, Republicans in the state legislature introduced a bill to change that.

The stunt came in the form of the Office of Election Crimes and Security, a sham task force DeSantis launched within the Florida Department of State last August as the Big Lie still lingered following the 2020 election.

The governor admitted at the time that there was no evidence of widespread fraud in Florida, but he still seized on the opportunity to fight against the phantom menace: On Aug. 18, 2022, he announced that the office had already arrested 20 formerly incarcerated residents —mostly Black, mostly in South Florida— who’d been accused of voting illegally. Most of those arrested didn’t know they weren’t allowed to vote and some were told they could vote by election admistrators.

“Today’s actions send a clear signal to those who are thinking about ballot harvesting or fraudulently voting,” he said. “If you commit an elections crime, you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

That last part turned out to be harder to execute. To date, three of the arrestees had their cases dismissed while a fourth took a plea deal to avoid jail time.

All three dismissals occurred because the Office of the Statewide Prosecutor (OSP) didn’t have the jurisdiction to pursue the voters; statewide prosecutors can only go after crimes that occurred in two or more counties. The arrestees had only voted in one each.

Now the state GOP is trying to rectify that through a new bill introduced to the Florida House of Representatives during a special session on Friday.

[LFC]

Florida's fascist legislature passed the bill to enable DeSatanist's bogus voter assaults.

A GOP-led bill expanding statewide prosecutors’ jurisdiction in Florida just made it to Gov. Ron DeSantis’s desk. The proposal aims to make it easier to prosecute those arrested by DeSantis’s sham election crimes police force, and critics worry it could dissuade some residents from voting.

On Friday, the Florida Senate approved Senate Bill 4B which, among other things, authorizes the Office of Statewide Prosecution (OSP) to “investigate and prosecute crimes involving voting in an election for a federal or state office” across multiple counties.

The bill was proposed after three cases against formerly incarcerated citizens arrested by the task force and accused of voting illegally were dismissed on the grounds that the OSP didn’t have the jurisdiction to prosecute them.

While the sponsor of the Florida House version of the bill outright admitted that it was being proposed to help DeSantis act on his political stunt, the sponsor of the Senate proposal, state Sen. Jonathan Martin (R-Fort Myers), argued last week that allowing the OSP to step into cases in multiple jurisdictions would encourage local state prosecutors to make apolitical decisions.

Senate Democrats were quick to identify what they considered the real reason for the proposal: to make it easier to prosecute formerly incarcerated citizens for voting.

[LFC]

DeSatanist's assaults on democratic voting have gone waaaayyyy beyond political dirtiness and waaaayyyy into fascism. A person who targets specific people to incarcerate them and destroy their lives for political gain is a sociopath without a shred of human decency. To give a technical psychological diagnosis, this evil clown is f***ed up.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration has asked the Florida state legislature to expand the governor’s sham election police force.

Late last month, Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd filed a budget request to the Florida Senate proposing additional funding for the Office of Election Crimes and Security (OECS), a division launched within his department in the wake of 2020 to investigate supposed widespread voter fraud—and to signal to Trump supporters his commitment to the Big Lie as he flirted with presidential ambitions.

The DeSantis administration is looking to swell the office’s budget from $1.2 million to $3,145,527 in the next legislative session. In the budget request, Byrd also said the administration wants to expand the staff from 15 to 42 positions.

[LFC]

Republicans, who were for mail-in voting and early voting before they were against it, are becoming for it again. Apparently they looked at the numbers from 2022 and are pivoting ... again. Predictable. Predicted.

In 2020, roughly 60% of Democrats nationally voted by mail, compared with 30% of Republicans, after being about equal in 2016, according to Charles Stewart III, professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.

Fraud has happened with ballot collection and mail-in voting, “but usually it’s local and in small numbers,” Mr. Stewart told the Journal in December.

As the Trump campaign reorients, so too are some GOP officials in 2024 battleground states. In Michigan, for instance, the leading candidate for state Republican chair has called for “the biggest ballot-harvesting program this state has ever seen.”

Many national Republicans also say the party needs to use whatever legal avenues are available to chase votes and not be so reliant on Election Day. The Republican National Committee is studying the issue as part of its post-midterm election analysis.

“We simply have to beat them at this,” Blake Masters, the Arizona GOP candidate who lost to Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly in a closely watched battleground race, said on Twitter in November.

Mr. Masters and other major statewide GOP candidates had pushed Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud and urged voters to show up in person on Election Day. Now Mr. Masters is part of an RNC panel reviewing the 2022 performance.

“If you want to win races, you have to play by the rules that are given to you. You can cry all you want about what the rules are, but if you want to change them you’ve got to win elections,” said Jessica Millan Patterson, who has made a focus of her tenure as the chairwoman of the California Republican Party bolstering the party’s ballot-collection efforts.

[goldenvalley]

Feb 16, 2023 15:12:13 GMT LFC said:

Republicans, who were for mail-in voting and early voting before they were against it, are becoming for it again. Apparently they looked at the numbers from 2022 and are pivoting ... again. Predictable. Predicted.

In 2020, roughly 60% of Democrats nationally voted by mail, compared with 30% of Republicans, after being about equal in 2016, according to Charles Stewart III, professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.

Fraud has happened with ballot collection and mail-in voting, “but usually it’s local and in small numbers,” Mr. Stewart told the Journal in December.

As the Trump campaign reorients, so too are some GOP officials in 2024 battleground states. In Michigan, for instance, the leading candidate for state Republican chair has called for “the biggest ballot-harvesting program this state has ever seen.”

Many national Republicans also say the party needs to use whatever legal avenues are available to chase votes and not be so reliant on Election Day. The Republican National Committee is studying the issue as part of its post-midterm election analysis.

“We simply have to beat them at this,” Blake Masters, the Arizona GOP candidate who lost to Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly in a closely watched battleground race, said on Twitter in November.

Mr. Masters and other major statewide GOP candidates had pushed Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud and urged voters to show up in person on Election Day. Now Mr. Masters is part of an RNC panel reviewing the 2022 performance.

“If you want to win races, you have to play by the rules that are given to you. You can cry all you want about what the rules are, but if you want to change them you’ve got to win elections,” said Jessica Millan Patterson, who has made a focus of her tenure as the chairwoman of the California Republican Party bolstering the party’s ballot-collection efforts.

This leaves them with the argument that Dominion machines is bad.  That argument persists...in fact the County Board of Supervisors in Shasta Co California is ending their contract with Dominion. No sign of any problems with the existing system, just decided not to use it anymore. The presidential primary is one year from now (March 2024) which doesn't really leave enough time to procure new equipment and properly train for use of it and to run the verification tests that must be done prior to any election.  This will be a mess.

[LFC]

Georgia's grand jury proceedings are now over and the tiny snippets that have been revealed show support for indictments. Will this Republican controlled state do the right thing?

Over the past year, a special grand jury has been investigating if former President Donald Trump and his allies tried to unlawfully interfere in the 2020 election results in Georgia. For the first time, one of the jury members at the heart of the matter is offering some behind-the-scenes details of the months-long inquiry.

In interviews published by the Associated Press and the New York Times Tuesday, foreperson Emily Kohrs, a 30-year-old Fulton County resident, gave fresh insights into the investigation, revealing that the special grand jury recommended indictments of multiple people on a range of charges in its final report.

“It is not a short list,” Kohrs told the New York Times, adding that the jury appended eight pages of legal code that it “cited at various points in the report.”

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney ruled last Monday that three parts of the jury’s final report — the introduction, the conclusion and a section in which jurors expressed concern that some witnesses may have lied under oath — should be made public.

“The compelling public interest in these proceedings and the unquestionable value and importance of transparency require their release,” the judge said last week.

But most of the final report is still under seal.

And following advice from JudgeMcBurney, Kohrs and jurors are not allowed to disclose much of the details of the investigation or the report itself.

So Kohrs declined to answer who exactly was recommended for indictment. But when asked if Trump is one of those names, she revealed the names on the list won’t come as a surprise.

“You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science,” she told the New York Times. “You won’t be too surprised.”

“I will tell you that if the judge releases the recommendations, it is not going to be some giant plot twist,” she added. “You probably have a fair idea of what may be in there. I’m trying very hard to say that delicately.”

[LFC]

Some Texass Republicans are creating their own GOPstapo to punish those who vote incorrectly. Lone Star, Lone Star, über alles.

Dismaying AF

A glimpse into the ways in which the Big Lie has firmly embedded itself in the right-wing zeitgeist and become a “thing” for local officials to campaign on, investigate, police, and legislate. All of those dynamics are captured in the goings-on in Tarrant County, Texas, home to Ft. Worth and more than 2 million people where the district attorney and sheriff have created a new election integrity task force.

[pnwguy]

Feb 22, 2023 20:01:27 GMT LFC said:

Some Texass Republicans are creating their own GOPstapo to punish those who vote incorrectly. Lone Star, Lone Star, über alles.

Dismaying AF

A glimpse into the ways in which the Big Lie has firmly embedded itself in the right-wing zeitgeist and become a “thing” for local officials to campaign on, investigate, police, and legislate. All of those dynamics are captured in the goings-on in Tarrant County, Texas, home to Ft. Worth and more than 2 million people where the district attorney and sheriff have created a new election integrity task force.

There are only Republicans in Texas, or traitors.  Why should they be concerned with the latter?  

[LFC]

The upcoming Wisconsin supreme court election will determine if it has democratic elections or is a state-level flawed democracy.

We pay a lot of attention to SCOTUS picks, for very good reason, but less to state courts. But the most important election this year is arguably for the Wisconsin state Supreme Court seat that Wisconsin voters will choose in April. It will also be the most expensive judicial election in American history, and a test of whether donor money will be enough to elect an unpopular far-right candidate.

In the primary, Judge Janet Protasiewicz and Justice Daniel Kelly advanced, the former being the clear choice of Democrats in the state, and the latter favored by Republicans, though the elections are nominally nonpartisan.
Why is this election so important

Wisconsin is a purple state that governs like a deep red state. The most obvious reason for this is an extreme gerrymander that has ensconced a permanent Republican majority in the legislature regardless of how well Democrats perform. This gerrymander was created under a Republican trifecta, but persists into its second decade even with a Democratic governor because the 4-3 conservative majority picked Republican maps.

That gerrymander, and the court’s blessing of it, has contributed to democratic backsliding in large and small ways. Most obviously at stake is the right to an abortion. Right now, Wisconsin’s abortion laws date back to 1849, meaning abortion is not available in the state, even though about 60% of voters have expressed consistent support for legal abortion. If Republicans maintain control of the courts, the gap between people’s preferences and policy will continue.

In less dramatic ways, the courts have contributed to democratic backsliding by:

• Upholding an unprecedented powergrab in 2018, when the Republican legislature stripped the newly-elected Democratic governor and attorney general of powers for the crime of defeating their Republican opponents.

• Allowing former Governor Walker appointees to continue to keep positions in state government years after their term ended, while co-partisans in the legislature block the nomination of their replacements.

• Making it harder to vote, most recently by banning dropboxes after Republicans said they gave Democrats an unfair advantage by, uh, making it easier for people in more urban areas to vote.

But the most dangerous threats from the Wisconsin Supreme Court may lie ahead of us, and have national implications. In the last two presidential elections, Wisconsin was a swing state decided by about 20,000 votes. In 2020, Trump tried to get 221,000 votes from heavily Democratic counties tossed. He failed, but three of the four justices were shockingly open to going along with Trump’s suggestion. The gerrymandered legislature could easily have switched state electoral votes from Biden to Trump if the courts had given them the green light. This was a near miss, but as long as Wisconsin remains a swing state with a conservative majority on the court, the risk remains.

[goldenvalley]

Feb 23, 2023 16:25:51 GMT LFC said:

The upcoming Wisconsin supreme court election will determine if it has democratic elections or is a state-level flawed democracy.

Aside from the politics of the moment, the old Progressive movement in the early 1900's left a lot of states with huge ballots full of technical offices that were filled by elections. California elects a treasurer, a controller, an insurance commissioner, a Secretary of State, etc.  At the country level sheriffs are elected; some counties elect recorders, tax assessors, treasurers, elections office heads. And judges, omg back in the day in Tennessee judges didn't have to be lawyers even. (That's since changed)

These are all jobs for professionals with specific skills, not for people seeking to work their way up through offices to the state legislature.  In the days before there were professions for these offices I guess elections served to spread the jobs around to various people within the county and state so that no one person dominated.  And I suspect in California the idea might have been to create so many elected offices that even the railroads couldn't spread enough money around to influence the whole state apparatus. But those days are long gone, except for the money dominating politics part.  Electing people to those offices should be long gone too.

[Bact PhD]

Feb 23, 2023 16:46:43 GMT goldenvalley said:

Feb 23, 2023 16:25:51 GMT LFC said:

The upcoming Wisconsin supreme court election will determine if it has democratic elections or is a state-level flawed democracy.

Aside from the politics of the moment, the old Progressive movement in the early 1900's left a lot of states with huge ballots full of technical offices that were filled by elections. California elects a treasurer, a controller, an insurance commissioner, a Secretary of State, etc.  At the country level sheriffs are elected; some counties elect recorders, tax assessors, treasurers, elections office heads. And judges, omg back in the day in Tennessee judges didn't have to be lawyers even. (That's since changed)

These are all jobs for professionals with specific skills, not for people seeking to work their way up through offices to the state legislature.  In the days before there were professions for these offices I guess elections served to spread the jobs around to various people within the county and state so that no one person dominated.  And I suspect in California the idea might have been to create so many elected offices that even the railroads couldn't spread enough money around to influence the whole state apparatus. But those days are long gone, except for the money dominating politics part.  Electing people to those offices should be long gone too.

Agreed. It’s no different here in Flori-DUH as far as those sorts of offices go. We elect an Ag Commissioner statewide and a sheriff, election supervisor, tax collector, and property appraiser at the county level. Moreover, some counties (not mine) elect a school superintendent as well.

[LFC]

Go get him, Katie!

Katie Hobbs Goes After Former AG For Big Lie

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) has asked the state bar to examine whether former state Attorney General Mark Brnovich violated ethics rules when he buried findings from his office that debunked the Big Lie in the 2020 election.

[LFC]

The fascists are gearing up for 2024.

Since losing their midterm elections, several election deniers have sought leadership positions within their state Republican parties, all part of a national play by Trump supporters and Big Lie enthusiasts to keep election denialism alive and well, while they seek more control over local elections.

Two-thirds of the 345 election deniers who ran for office in 2022 won their races, according to a Brookings Institution study. But many, like former community college teacher Kristina Karamo, still lost, particularly in battleground states.

Karamo was running to become Michigan’s secretary of state during last fall’s midterm elections. The Trump-endorsed nominee argued as part of her campaign platform that the state’s election systems were vulnerable to fraud. True to form, Karamo even filed a lawsuit ahead of the election to try to force Detroit voters to either show up to polls or pick up absentee ballots in person, a legal challenge inspired by claims from Dinesh D’Souza’s debunked propaganda film. The suit was swiftly shot down.

She lost her race by 14 points, but that wasn’t the end of her election-denying crusade: On Feb. 19, Karamo beat out 10 predominantly far-right candidates to become chair of the Michigan Republican Party, which she said needed to be rebuilt into “a political machine that strikes fear in the hearts of Democrats.”

Karamo was just one part of a recent wave of election deniers who ran for secretary of state who are now seeking to take the reins of their state’s Republican Party. Kansas Republicans similarly elected Mike Brown, a former Johnson County commissioner and conspiracy theorist, to chair their party organization after he lost his bid to become the state’s chief elections officer in November.

In Colorado, Tina Peters – the former Mesa County Clerk and Big Lie truther facing felony charges for an alleged election equipment security breach tied to her 2020 election-overturning efforts – is also running for the state GOP’s chair after losing the Republican nomination for Colorado secretary of state. Her pitch? “There’s no way a jury of 12 people is going to put me in prison.”

[LFC]

Guilty. And this is just the first trial.

Tina Peters guilty on obstruction charge, not guilty on arrest charge
The former Mesa County clerk will be sentenced April 10

Former Colorado clerk Tina Peters, who has become a hero to election conspiracy theorists, was convicted Friday of a misdemeanor obstruction charge for refusing to turn over an iPad she allegedly used to videotape a court hearing.

The case is separate from Peters’ alleged involvement in a security breach of voting machines.

Jurors found Peters guilty of obstructing government operations but acquitted her of obstructing a peace officer, The Daily Sentinel reported.

She was charged last year after allegedly recording a court hearing involving a subordinate who was also charged in the alleged voting machine breach.

Testimony during the two-day trial included that Peters repeatedly told investigators that the iPad did not belong to her and that she could not provide the password because it belonged to someone else named Tammy Bailey. Peters’ lawyer, Harvey Steinberg, said that was an alias used by Peters, suggesting it was created for security reasons.

Peters, who is running to become the leader of Colorado’s Republican Party, is scheduled to be sentenced on April 10. The obstruction charge carries a sentence of up to six months in jail and a $750 fine. The charge Peters was acquitted of would have carried a sentence of up to a year in jail.

Peters has pleaded not guilty to seven felony charges related to her role in allegedly accessing confidential voting machine data in 2021 while she was clerk. That trial is scheduled for August.

[LFC]

These two assholes need to be imprisoned for their attempts at voter intimidation.

Far-right hoaxsters Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman violated federal and state civil rights law with a plot using robocalls to suppress the Black vote during the 2020 election, a New York judge ruled Wednesday.

Wohl and Burkman targeted about 85,000 voters across Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Ohio with robocalls that summer falsely claiming that voting by mail would risk handing their private information to the police, debt collectors and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against the duo in May 2021 after her office found that they may have violated state and federal law. Wohl and Burkman also faced criminal charges in Michigan and Ohio. They pleaded guilty to telecommunications fraud in Ohio in October.

In his 111-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero lambasted the operatives for attempting to “deter Black voters by exploiting fears and stereotypes.”

Despite Wohl and Burkman claiming that the victims of the scheme were “not intimidated or harmed in any way,” the judge affirmed that the full record shows they were “frightened, enraged, and distressed upon received the call,” with some plaintiffs “reliving their past traumas” after the call.

“That the Robocall induced these feelings of fright, rage, and distress confirms that the Individual Plaintiffs were in fact intimidated and threatened by the message,” the judge wrote.

Marrero wrote that Wohl and Burkman violated a bevy of federal statutes with their scheme: the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Ku Klux Klan Act, and several New York civil rights laws. The next phase of the case will allow the plaintiffs, including the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, to propose damages and other penalties.

This isn't the only trouble they're in.

Wohl and Burkman have already been sentenced in Ohio: Back in December, they were each sentenced to two years of probation, six months of monitoring with a GPS ankle bracelet, $2,500 a piece in fines, and 500 hours of registering voters in Washington, D.C. The pair are challenging charges in Michigan and the Federal Communications Commission has proposed a $5 million fine.

[LFC]

Another lying scumbag loses in court.

An Arizona judge ordered sanctions against Mark Finchem, an election denier who ran on the Republican ticket for Arizona’s secretary of state, for mounting a baseless challenge against the 2022 election results.

On Monday, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Melissa Iyer Julian said that Finchem and his attorney filed their lawsuit “without substantial justification.” She is now ordering him to pay $292 in court costs to his Democratic opponent Adrian Fontes, as well as attorneys’ fees for Fontes and Governor Katie Hobbs, which she gave the Democrats 20 days to submit.

His challenge to the election was “groundless,” she wrote in the order, and “filed in bad faith.”

Finchem lost his race to Fontes by 120,208 votes in November. He filed a lawsuit in December seeking to redo the election under the false claim that then-Secretary of State Katie Hobbs had engaged in misconduct and that illegal votes were cast due to technical issues, rendering the final result unreliable. The county judge threw out the lawsuit soon after it was filed.

Finchem still hasn’t conceded to Fontes, who’s since taken office.

[LFC]

Now the red states are pulling away from a system that helps them ID valid voters. That clearly doesn't work nearly as well as their bogus lists for suppressing registered voters. Look at all the fascist state governments who want to keep away from real data they can't manipulate for electoral victory.

Far-right activists are leading a campaign to get Texas to become the next state to withdraw from a multistate voter roll program, Votebeat first reported.

The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) is a voter roll cleanup program used by over 30 states in the U.S. And it has become the latest target of election deniers’ ire in recent months as baseless conspiracy theories about ERIC and its funding sources are pushed in right-wing media.

ERIC attracted the attention of the right-wing conspiracy theory machine in January, when the far-right media outlet Gateway Pundit published blog posts accusing the program of being part of some sort of lefty plot to control the democratic process, funded by George Soros and run by liberals.

The program was founded in 2012 as a joint bipartisan effort between seven states to compare voter data across state lines. Its funding was provided by the nonpartisan Pew Charitable Trusts, which once received a $500,000 donation from Soros’ Open Society Foundation. Pew hasn’t contributed financially to the program since; Soros, himself, never has.

Conspiracy theories around the program became so prevalent in recent months that ERIC Executive Director Shane Hamlin published an open letter on March 2 debunking them. “We are a member-run, member-driven organization,” he wrote.

But several states had already dropped from the program by then. Louisiana withdrew from ERIC last year, and Alabama joined them this past January. Florida, Missouri and West Virginia all cited “partisanship” as their reason for withdrawing, and Ohio’s Secretary of State Frank LaRose distributed a letter flirting with the idea of dropping out if the program didn’t adhere to a list of reforms—even though he’d praised the program just weeks beforehand.

And now, Texas could be next on the list. Over the past year, activists and Republican state legislators in Texas have held virtual meetings discussing the program and entertaining conspiracy theories about its leadership team. The Republican-controlled state legislature is currently considering a bill to cut ties with the program.

[LFC]

The red states are following DeSatanist's lead to create poll police. I'm sure it's all on the up and up. [/snark]

Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, a Republican, announced this week that he was launching an Election Integrity Unit to investigate nonexistent widespread voter fraud in the state. He’s not the first red-state Republican to push such a voter suppression tactic in recent months, and he likely won’t be the last.

The attorney general said on Monday that the unit would be created under his office’s Special Investigations Division, with the chief of investigations serving as its director. The initiative comes almost a year after Florida launched its Office of Election Crimes and Security and Georgia allocated nearly $580,000 to its Bureau of Investigation to look into supposed election crimes. Republican lawmakers in Missouri and Ohio have introduced legislation in their statehouses to try to create similar units.

To be clear, there’s little evidence of widespread fraud anywhere in the U.S., let alone these states.

“Given that fact,” Nicholas Stephanopoulos, an election law professor at Harvard Law School, said, “these ridiculous police forces are more solutions in search of a nonexistent problem.”

This could have just as easily gone in the fascism thread. Using the power of the state to attack free and fair elections is pretty damned textbook.

[LFC]

The League of Women Voters aren't explicitly working for the Republicans in Floriduh. DeStalinist and his GOPstapo have noticed.

The nonpartisan League of Women Voters has been facing a nationwide backlash after decades of going about its business of surveying candidates, registering voters, hosting debates and lobbying for its causes with little fuss.

ProPublica reported in August how the volatile political climate has caught up with the league, with conservatives increasingly portraying it as a decidedly liberal entity. Since that story was published, we’ve seen candidates reject invitations to debate and try to undermine the league’s work in registering new voters. In September in Illinois, then-Lake County Board member Dick Barr, a Republican, publicly apologized for a Facebook post in which he called the league “partisan hags.”

This week, the group found itself once again in the middle of a political controversy. This time it was in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has sought to reshape a wide range of discourse, including by making it easier for public officials to sue for defamation and restricting discussions of systemic racism in workplace trainings. The league revealed that it had been denied permission by the Florida Department of Management Services to hold an outdoor rally on the steps of the Old Capitol in Tallahassee under a new DeSantis administration rule requiring groups to first get sponsorship from a sympathetic state agency.

The rule took effect March 1 and says the requested use of the space must be “consistent with the Agency’s official purposes.” Its stated purpose is to ensure that demonstrations are “conducted in a manner that protects public health and safety and ensures that state employees and officials can fulfill their responsibilities.”

A department spokesperson did not answer specific questions about the matter, saying in an email to ProPublica: “DMS routinely examines all of its rules in accordance with Florida Law. This rule was updated as part of the DMS annual regulatory plan to clarify procedures and requirements for public use of the Capitol.”

Capitalizing on a loophole that allows for news conferences, the league on Wednesday set up a podium in a nearby plaza, where it publicly addressed what it sees as the state’s crackdown on civil rights, including free speech. At one point, league members applied red tape over their mouths, symbolizing what they say is the muzzling of people whose opinions are at odds with the government. (DeSantis’ office did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.)

ProPublica talked to the league’s Florida president, attorney Cecile Scoon, about the increasingly difficult environment the 103-year-old group faces in Florida in trying to promote civic discourse, freedom of academic thought and ready access to the ballot box. Scoon called the rule limiting rallies a “radical change” and said she is aware that some First Amendment groups are considering litigation. The league is already embroiled in an ongoing suit against the DeSantis administration over a 2021 voting law. A federal judge struck down several provisions that he ruled were designed to discriminate against Black people to reduce turnout for Democrats. The state has appealed.

The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.