Voter Suppression & Election Theft by the Republican Party

[LFC]

More on the whackjob that Arizona Republicans have pulled in to perform an "audit." He's a lifelong failure who changed his name after his biggest fail and is making wild claims without any evidence to back them up. In other words he's an absolutely perfect fit for the Republican Party.

The inventor behind one of the worst gadgets of all time has joined the motley crew of quasi-experts trying to defend President Donald Trump’s unfounded election fraud claims despite being wildly unqualified to do so.

His name is Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, and he testified before the Georgia State Judiciary Subcommittee this week, introducing himself as an “inventor and pattern recognition expert” whose “prolific” patents for computer-readable code are licensed by nearly every global tech giant and used on more than 12 billion devices worldwide.

It’s a wholely outrageous claim that you won’t be surprised to learn is far from the truth. In reality, Pulitzer didn’t invent QR codes or the technology that powers them, but he is the brains behind the CueCat, a relic of wacky early aughts gadgetry that failed so spectacularly that he later had his name legally changed, ostensibly to distance himself from this multi-million-dollar disaster.

Yeah, you can see now why it didn’t exactly catch on. However, with that sales pitch, Pulitzer (then going by Jeffrey Jovan Philyaw) managed to rack up $185 million in funding from high-profile corporate backers such as Coca Cola and General Motors. Needless to say, the CueCat bombed. Partly because the gadget received scathing reviews across the board, and partly because a massive security breach left the personal information of its 140,000 users open to hackers.

As flagged by tech analyst Christina Warren on Twitter, Pulitzer spoke before a subcommittee of state senators on Wednesday where he hawked his forensic voter fraud detection system and talked a lot about paper. His rambling diatribe, which you can check out on YouTube, painted an election-stealing conspiracy involving machine-generated ballots, “fake squiggles,” and the supposed clues that can be deciphered from paper folds—er, excuse me, “kinematic artifacts.” The day before his testimony, he posted a video on Twitter covering the same talking points and tagged the president, several conspiracy theorists, and far-right media personalities, presumably in an attempt to go viral among the diehards Trumpers still tantruming about supposed election interference. (Note: Twitter flagged the video for spreading disputed election fraud claims).

[goldenvalley]

Apr 29, 2021 13:56:25 GMT LFC said:

Yesterday I said the Arizona "audit" was a farce. I was too kind. This is the crank they're pulling out to perform an analysis using "kinematic artifact detection." NOW we understand why they are demanding that their methods be kept secret. It's because it's simply one asshole's claim that he can do something he's never proven he can do. Oh, yeah. The crank inventor also tried to pull the same bullshit on Georgia's ballots.

His claim to fame was creating something called CueCat. PC World rated it as one of the 25 worst tech products of all time.

In other words it's all a big grift, a con...making a buck from perpetuating the Big Lie.  And the marks swallow it whole, never questioning, never doubting, because all they want is to hear their grievances spoken out loud. 

[LFC]

Apr 29, 2021 14:38:19 GMT goldenvalley said:

In other words it's all a big grift, a con...making a buck from perpetuating the Big Lie.  And the marks swallow it whole, never questioning, never doubting, because all they want is to hear their grievances spoken out loud. 

Absolutely. In addition to angling for a career in fake invalidation of real ballots he's also surely hoping for some of the wingnut welfare with appearances on Faux, Newsmax, and OAN.

[LFC]

Florida Republicans are poised to push through their voter suppression measures. Right-wing fascism continues to goose step its way across America.

Republican legislation that would severely limit the use of mail ballot drop boxes in Florida and impose other restriction on voting is in its final push in the Florida legislature.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Florida House passed its version of a bill known as SB90. The House-passed version included several amendments tweaking the bill that were tacked on at at 1:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday. Now SB90 goes back to the Senate for final passage, but that would depend on the Senate accepting the changes House lawmakers made to the bill.

The GOP-controlled legislature is overhauling Florida’s election system — which had been widely praised in the 2020 election, including by former President Trump and other Republicans — at the urging of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).

Under the legislation, drop boxes will only be accessible during early voting hours and they must be monitored in person by a staff member of the county election supervisor office. These requirements will make drop boxes both less useful for voters and more costly for election officials to operate. Under the legislation, voters dropping off mail ballots will also be required to show IDs, which voter advocates worry could cause long lines.

More than 1.5 million Floridians used ballot drop boxes in the November 2020 election.

Additionally, once a drop box location is designated by a county election official — the bill requires that that designation be made by 30 days before an election — it cannot be moved, under the legislation. Voter advocates worry that will stymie their efforts to have election officials rework their drop box plans if certain communities are identified to be lacking in ballot access options.

That last part is part of a pattern. The GOP closes polling places / purges voters / who knows what else, the Dems prove they unfairly targeted their demographic, and the Dems win in court but it's too late for that election. Rinse, wash, repeat. Any mechanism that helps to alleviate voter suppression as it's occurring must be crushed.

[LFC]

More Arizona Republican skeeviness as they desperately try to hide their pet crank and his fraudulent claims.

A judge is letting the questionable audit of Arizona’s 2020 election continue while he hears a legal challenge brought by Democrats to its procedures. Judge Daniel Martin of Maricopa County’s superior court denied on Wednesday the request by the state Democratic Party that he impose a temporary restraining order halting the audit.

But the judge also ordered that the auditors file in court by noon local time Thursday —absent intervention from a higher court — their documents outlining plans and procedures for the audit.

Democrats last Thursday sued the Arizona Senate leaders who have ordered the audit, as well as Cyber Ninjas, the company the Senate hired to coordinate the review. Democrats, who are now being backed by Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) in the case, allege that the auditors are failing to follow Arizona policy and law regarding ballot security.

This is just delicious. It's what people say who can't back up their assertions with facts i.e. it's how they try to cover their lies.

At a hearing on the request Wednesday, the Senate’s lawyer, Kory Langhofer, admitted that the Senate wanted the documents withheld from the public because they believed that if the documents were produced, they would “not be treated fairly by opposing counsel” or “the press.”

[LFC]

Florida Republicans passed their voter suppression bill.

The GOP-controlled Florida Legislature passed an election overhaul bill on Thursday that is set to restrict voting in one of the nation’s most critical battleground states.

The bill passed largely along party lines in the state Senate — 23 to 17 — though one Republican state senator, Jeff Brandes, voted against it.

The development comes after the Florida House passed the bill known as SB 90 on Wednesday afternoon. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is expected to sign the legislation after indicating his support for the voting overhaul which is expected to limit access to voting in the state.

The move comes after a shift in the 2020 elections cycle demonstrated growing popularity among Democrats for an existing tradition of mail-in voting in the Sunshine State during the coronavirus pandemic.

More than 2.1 million Democrats cast mail ballots, compared with roughly 1.4 million Republicans. The practice was historically favored by Republicans — but former President Donald Trump had waged a concerted effort to falsely discredit mail-in voting ahead of the 2020 presidential elections.

The new measures — which limit the use of drop boxes and add stricter identification requirements for voters requesting absentee ballots — are anticipated by voting experts to disproportionately affect voters of color.

[LFC]

The Republicans are opening another front on their war on democracy. They want their fascist brownshirts to be able to wreak havoc on elections in real-time. Remember that the Republicans crowed about hundreds of signed affidavits about election fraud and not one of them ... not a single solitary one of them ... proved to be anything other than a lie or blatant ignorance. Giving these people more power to attack elections is a direct assault.

Former President Trump was an expert at sowing the doubt that’s now made it into proposals of at least 40 measures aimed at expanding the power of poll watchers — largely seen as an attempt to give legislative weight to former president’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and a stolen 2020 election.

“Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do,” the increasingly desperate candidate Trump told a crowd of supporters during a campaign stop in North Carolina weeks before the Nov. 3 election.

“I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully because that’s what has to happen. I am urging them to do it,” Trump said during a presidential debate last fall against the then-Democratic nominee who would become his successor, Joe Biden.

The message was clear: Trump was calling on his supporters to monitor voting activity, but that call was cached in a broader effort to sow distrust in the 2020 elections.

Now months into Biden’s presidency, Republican state legislators in at least 20 states are responding.

Thirty-three of those measures would give poll watchers more authority to observe voters and election officials and would impose fewer limitations on the watchers’ actions at polling places and other locations, according to a tally published by the Brennan Center for Justice.

The report comes as bills expanding the powers of poll watchers were enacted into law in Georgia and Iowa last month.

[LFC]

The bogus Arizona recount gets even more insane. It is well beyond the point of being anything other than fodder for the right-wing noise machine.

A reporter was kicked out of the Arizona GOP-controlled Senate’s audit of 2020 election results after publishing a photo showing that a former lawmaker who was present at the Jan. 6 Capitol attack was counting ballots.

Now, the audit’s Twitter account and Senate president are arguing with reporters online, justifying the expulsion of the reporter, Ryan Randazzo of the Arizona Republic.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant and the Republicans damn well know it.

[goldenvalley]

The bogus Arizona recount is exactly what the Trump types wanted from the Election Day onward...a bunch of people who know nothing about election laws and election security to get their hands on ballots. The point is to find esoteric, bogus signs that the ballots are tampered with...ah ha! stuff, not the standard recount techniques. They can't win on standard recount and they always knew that.

This recounting will then be used for the next 60 years as proof that something funny went on with the ballots and elections officials are not to be trusted. It's a good short term money raiser to for Trump loyalists and the grifters that make money from them.

[jackd]

They don't need the pretend recounting they're doing. They just need Trump to lie about it.

[LFC]

It's quickly accelerating from suppression to outright election theft (paywalled). The bogus Arizona recount is the model for throwing out valid votes that we can expect going forward. Georgia's election is already under assault.

As the Republican-driven audit into Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2020 election results proceeds, some of the former president’s biggest supporters cheering on the review have their eyes set elsewhere: Georgia.

As Tierney Sneed and I reported, the former Trump advisers Peter Navarro and Boris Epshteyn have both described the Arizona audit as a precursor of sorts for a similar review in Georgia.

If the audit shows the widespread fraud that Trump supporters expect, Epshteyn told Steve Bannon last week, “the freight train of audit is coming down the way. It’s on the train to Georgia.”

But they’re not alone. The firm leading the audit, Cyber Ninjas, apparently as its own project in Georgia.

A spokesperson for the company, Rod Thomson, first hinted at the firm’s Georgia work in a statement last week, in which Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan responded to criticism that his company didn’t have sufficient experience in the world of elections reviews.

“Each member of our team has been part of election audits, including Cyber Ninjas, which was part of election audits in Michigan and in Georgia,” the statement read.

Thomson told me in an email last night that the Michigan audit referred to here is Cyber Ninjas’ work in Antrim County: The firm is part of a larger group engaged in a legal back-and-forth with elections officials as part of a private individual’s lawsuit over election administration practices in that county.

But what about Georgia? Tierney and I weren’t aware of what Cyber Ninjas was up to in the state. Thomson told us why: The work isn’t public.

“We cannot comment because that project has not been released publicly,” he said of the firm’s work in Georgia, adding when I pressed for more detail, “there’s nothing more I can say on the subject.”

The most prominent private fundraisers for the nominally public audit have also hinted that more potential reviews are on the way.

Voices and Votes, a fundraising site led by One America News anchor Christina Bobb and others, has several options for states in which potential donors can fund election disputes: Arizona, Michigan, “Litigation,” and “General Fund.”

“If more is raised than the goal, The America Project will use the funds for other election integrity activities to included audits in other areas and related expenses,” reads a separate disclaimer on FundTheAudit.com, another fundraising site, which has been promoted by the official Arizona audit Twitter page. The America Project is led by former Overstock.com CEO and passionate Trumper Patrick Byrne.

Two weeks ago, Byrne shared a podcast episode titled “GEORGIA Audit: The Way Forward” on his Telegram channel.

In the podcast, host Steve Gruber interviewed the writer L. Todd Wood, who praised Byrne and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and hinted at the possibility of another audit in Georgia — just around the corner.

“The way forward is to delegitimize this regime,” Wood said of the Biden administration.”

He cited the work of the website voterga.org. Garland Favorito, a leader of the group, is suing for access to ballots in Fulton County.

Prominent officials in Georgia have made their opinion on the Arizona business clear.

“This ‘audit’ in Arizona is another step in undermining confidence in elections,” Gabe Sterling, a Republican and chief operating officer in the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, commented last week.

“This process is neither transparent nor, likely, legal,” Sterling added. “Any ‘findings’ will be highly suspect now that chain of custody has been violated by partisan actors.”

Sterling has reason for cynicism: All of the biggest names behind the Arizona audit — Bobb, Byrne, Lin Wood — spread a relentless stream of misinformation ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration.

But, reality be damned, Georgia is Trump’s white whale. Therefore, it’s a prize for 2020 revisionists.

The former President “frequently cites the possibility of exposing fraud in Pennsylvania and especially in Georgia,” the Washington Post reported last week, citing three unnamed Trump advisers.

On April 23, Trump himself wrote that Democrats were “desperate” to stop the Arizona audit “because, when [fraud is] revealed, the Great States of Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, New Hampshire, and the Great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, would be forced to complete the work already started.”

That’s not really how it works. But it’s understandable that Trump and his crew want to keep up the illusion that reversing his 2020 loss is just one audit away from a domino effect. It’s all he has left.

[LFC]

The Republican blueprint for election theft continues to be worked out using the bogus Arizona "audit." The way this occurring in AZ is to pick a county with a heavily Democratic vote (check!), comes up with bogus validity metrics (check!), and then throw away as many as possible (on its way). Here's some of the bogus validation they're pulling. Now we're just waiting for The Big Lie that massive numbers of ballots were fraudulent which the right-wing noise machine, Republicans, and the MAGAts will dutifully repeat through 2022 and beyond. Note that it took a court case to even get the rules dragged out into the sunlight.

What’s known about the recount rules is largely because of a court ruling last week that ordered rules materials be be filed publicly. The auditors are facing a lawsuit from Arizona Democrats alleging that the recount is not complying with the state’s rules for ballot security. The current audit — which was ordered by the GOP-controlled Senate — is centered on 2.1 million ballots cast in Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest county and one that propelled Biden’s victory in the state.

“This is not going to generate any information that would be remotely helpful,” David Becker, who leads the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told me last week. “It is an insecure process that is more likely to contaminate ballots than it is to reveal anything new.”

The documents released last week did not say what exactly what the UV lights are supposed to show; just that they should be used to compare the ballots to a “representative specimen.”

When the UV lamps were spotted on the counting floor, it was pointed out — included by Maricopa County itself — that Arizona ballots don’t contain watermarks. It’s not clear if the auditors, when constructing the policies, were aware of that. Regardless, use of the lamps was abandoned last week, according to reporters who have been allowed to observe the recount.

Another rule laid out in the materials asked counters to document when an early ballot — which tend to be mail ballots — lacked a fold and when an election day ballot — which are cast in person – had a fold.

This distinction between early ballots and election day ballots made no sense, Tammy Patrick, a former Maricopa County election official told me, as there are circumstances that both types could have folds or not have folds. Election day ballots will be folded if they were first cast provisionally. Ballots cast early may lack folds, particularly if there’s an issue with the machines reading a ballot and election workers must duplicate it.

The distinction the rules make about which ballots should have folds “ties back into the conspiracy of someone else printing the ballots,” Patrick said.

Other recount rules indicate a fixation on assessing the thickness of the ballot paper and the quality of the ink.

“There is no election audit in the country in any state, in any state law, that requires that level of that review, because there is no purpose behind it, other than to continue the fueling of this conspiracy flame that paper ballots were manufactured outside of the country and influenced in outcome of the election,” Patrick — now a fellow at the Democracy Fund — said.

Then there are the things the rules fail to specify. They instruct the use of “blank” USB drives for the audit, but the usual standard is not just blank USBs, but devices that are brand new and freshly removed from their packaging — because even blank USBs may contain malware.

The rules lack instructions for who should be allowed into the facilities where ballots are being stored under the security, and how to log who has access to those facilities. They don’t specify what counters should do in the case of an overvote — i.e. when a ballot appears to contain votes for more than one candidate — or provide any real guidance for determining voter intent.

And the steps it lay out for when personal identifying information is found among the ballot materials are also raising concerns. The rules say that in certain circumstances, the entire box of ballots must be set aside. But they never specify whether those ballots ultimately get added into the the count, and if not, how that absence is accounted for in the final tally.

“Does that mean that they’re now not going to count those ballots?” said Kim Wyman, Washington’s Republican Secretary of State who has been critical of the audit. On a press call Tuesday, she said the rules could create “a self-fulfilling prophecy” to make it look like something went amiss in what was a cleanly-run election.

[LFC]

The Arizona election faudit is using a classic Trump device to silence observers: non-disclosure agreements. Isn't it "interesting" that the side that was screeching about independent access to the ballot counting process is now blocking independent access to the ballot counting process? (And by "interesting" I mean "expected" of course.)

Volunteer observers of the GOP’s shady “audit” of Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2020 election results are being required to sign non-disclosure agreements, local station ABC 15 reported Tuesday night.

An unnamed volunteer told ABC 15 that all observers were being required to sign the document by Cyber Ninjas, the lead contractor for the audit. The so-called audit, which has faced legal challenges and criticisms over lack of transparency and poor logistics, was initiated by Arizona’s GOP-controlled state senate.

“I agree that unless I am authorized in writing by Cyber Ninjas, Inc. and the Arizona State Senate, I will not disclose any Confidential Information to any person who is not conducting the Audit,” the non-disclosure agreement reportedly reads in part.

The document also purports to restrict observers from making “public statements, social media posts, or similar public disclosures” about the audit without authorization, or until after the audit’s results are public.

The document notes potential “legal consequences” including punitive damages for violating the agreement.

Media suppression is, of course, also key.

Critics have focused on the audit’s lack of transparency: Journalists are forced to operate as a “pool” — only one reporter, photojournalist, and videographer at a time — and their movements are restricted within the audit venue.

[LFC]

A gang of Trump's liars and utter nutters have put together the oppositely named Election Integrity Alliance.

Some of Trump’s closest “Big Lie” allies along with one of his former lawyers are launching a new advocacy group to try to further cement former President Trump’s false claims about a stolen election into reality.

And, as NBC News first pointed out, the “national board” for this new group, the Election Integrity Alliance, includes a few allies who led his legal effort to overturn the results of the election as well as one former convicted felon — Former New York City Police Commissioner and Giuliani bud Bernie Kerik — and another member who is under indictment for fraud and being investigated by the FBI — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Other members: Jenna Ellis, Peter Navarro, Sebastian Gorka, Michael Donnelly and Mirna Tarraf. The “alliance” will operate as part of the Trump-aligned non-profit, the American Greatness Fund, and its goals are vague: “support Congress, the state legislatures, and the voters and together, continue building a more perfect Union,” the website says.

“The Election Integrity Alliance will unite groups and efforts across the nation focused on combating election fraud and will build solutions and provide resources to state legislators and the public on challenges to free and fair elections. The Election Integrity Alliance will be a centralized hub that gives tools to enact meaningful change for the American people,” the description on its web page says.

The concept of ballot fraud has become a sticking point for Trump supporters since the presidential election, obviously because the former president so aggressively claimed a second term was stolen from him. It’s a predictable, but concerning move; hyping false notions of a stolen election can clearly lead to violence, attacks and civil unrest. This new group is just the latest Trump-aligned advocacy group to form since the election. As Politico noted, Larry Kudlow, Ben Carson, Russ Vought and Stephen Miller have also started their own groups.

The worst of the worst of the worst.

[LFC]

The Arizona faudit continues to descend into the crankiest of crank crap.

The recount of Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2.1 million ballots includes an analysis of whether the ballots have any bamboo fibers, an audit leader said Wednesday. The official said that the auditors were seeking to vet a wild claim that 40,000 counterfeit ballots were shipped in from Asia.

[goldenvalley]

I'd laugh because the extent of willful delusion is almost comical, but

As Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman said during a press briefing about the audit on Tuesday, the reality is that with Pulitzer and Logan now in total—and secret—control of those ballots, the “chain of custody” for Maricopa’s election documentation has been completely compromised.

“Arizona and Maricopa County has opened up a lot of questions because, like I said, how do you know those ballots weren’t altered?” Wyman said. “And it doesn’t even matter if they were at this point, because I don’t think you can guarantee that they weren’t and that’s all you have to do is cast doubt on this process.”

“From a legal standpoint, chain of custody, ballot integrity has been so destroyed by a lack of procedures that moved into evolving procedures” Matthew Masterson, a former senior cybersecurity advisor at the Department of Homeland Security, said in the same briefing. “You can’t reestablish that chain of custody and integrity after the fact. So, from just a legal standpoint, I don’t know how you can establish proper chain of custody, evidence standards, anything for a court, or otherwise, it’s gone.”

And that is a seriously grave issue. The counters can do whatever they want to those ballots now to prove their points, including oops just destroying enough of them to "prove" that Trump actually won.

[jackd]

Which will only be of importance to the faithful who didn't need to be convinced in the first place. The fact that so many Republican representatives and senators voted to reject certification of the electoral college votes with no evidence at all tells the story. This is all pure theater and rather amateurish theater at that.

[goldenvalley]

And the Florida governor made Florida officially in the voter suppression law column of election related laws.  I liked this description of the signing ceremony:

The governor scheduled the bill-signing Thursday at the Airport Hilton in West Palm Beach, a short drive from Trump’s home at his Mar-a-Lago Club. The event was dubbed a rally “for the best governor in the USA.”
“This is DeSantis bringing home the little dead mouse in his teeth for Papa Trump to see,” said Joy Howell, a spokeswoman for the Palm Beach County Democratic Party, who observed the signing ceremony by looking through windows from outside the hotel. “That’s why he’s doing it here, because this is where Papa Trump lives.”

It was also broadcast on Faux News to be doubly sure that the Trump faithful see the governor do it.  

But will the older Republicans that routinely used vote by mail ballots be happy enough with this blow against fraud to bother to turn out and vote to re-elect the governor?

[jackd]

And the military.

[LFC]

The Justice Department is now making inquiries on the chain of custody issues with the Arizona faudit as those involved may have violated multiple federal election laws. If they did I hope they shut the faudit down and prosecute those involved to the fullest extent of the law. If there is non-compliance then jail them for contempt, obstruction, or anything else you can use. Rank and file Republicans need to be scared shitless of going to prison for not following the law. Wrist slaps won't be sufficient.

A Justice Department letter to the Arizona Senate leader who ordered the sketchy audit of the 2020 election was a first shot across the bow amid calls for a federal intervention into the ongoing recount.

The letter — signed by Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Pam Karlan, who is currently President Biden’s top appointee at the DOJ civil rights division — asked Senate President Karen Fann to explain the steps the audit is taking to comply with certain federal election laws.

The department’s interest in the review of the ballots of Arizona’s most populous county is rooted, in part, in a provision of civil rights law designed to preserve election materials in case the DOJ needs them for an election investigation.

The provision, known by the shorthand “20701”, requires that election officials hold on to “all records and paper” related to a federal election for 22 months after the election. It threatens jail time and fines for election officials who fail to retain the materials.

“We have a concern that Maricopa County election records, which are required by federal law to be retained and preserved, are no longer under the ultimate control of elections officials, are not being adequately safeguarded by contractors, and are at risk of damage or loss,” Karlan said in her letter to Fann.

The requirement exists so that DOJ lawyers have the ability to investigate an election after the fact for any alleged voting rights or election law violations.

“This is not about the partisan outcomes,” said David Becker, a former attorney in the DOJ voting section who now leads the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “This would be to enforce federal laws against racial discrimination, voter intimidation, disability access, etc. Since we’re looking at it as evidence, chain of custody and provenance of evidence is crucial.”

Without such preservation protections in place, DOJ lawyers — if they did pursue an election law violation case in court — would face the risk of defense counsel seeking to exclude as evidence ballots and other types of election materials on the argument that it wasn’t clear what had happened to them since the voters cast their votes.

“Therefore election officials are held to a very high standard of maintaining that evidence, and are held criminally liable if they fail. The current and ongoing contamination of ballots raises serious concerns,” Becker told me.

Karlan’s letter did not go into detail about what the department had seen of Arizona’s audit that was ringing alarm bells. But her letter came after the Brennan Center and other voting rights advocates requested DOJ intervention in the audit in a letter last week that cited, among other things, 20701.

“Unfortunately, immediately after the ballots were transferred into the custody of the senate and its agents, they began exposing the ballots to damage, destruction and loss, in violation of federal law,” the Brennan Center letter said. It pointed to reports of lax security around the recount site, the confusion by the auditors about what color pen ink was allowed around the ballots, the use of UV lamps to examine the allots, and the lack of transparency around the audit.

[LFC]

FFS! The people performing the Arizona faudit are contacting voters directly! If I received a call like that I'd be on the phone to the office of my Rep and both Senators screaming my head off.

Karlan then flagged a practice written out in a statement of work from Cyber Ninjas, the company leading the audit: Looking for voter registrations that, in some way, “did not make sense,” and then knocking on doors to confirm if actual voters lived there.

The same statement of work says that auditors will call and physically canvas voters in precincts that “have a high number of anomalies based on publicly available voting data and data from prior canvassing efforts.”

The federal government, Karlan wrote, is suspicious.

“This description of the proposed work of the audit raises concerns regarding potential intimidation of voters,” she said.

“Past experience with similar investigative efforts around the country has raised concerns that they can be directed at minority voters, which potentially can implicate the anti-intimidation prohibitions of the Voting Rights Act,” she wrote. “Such investigative efforts can have a significant intimidating effect of qualified voters that can deter them from seeking to vote in the future.”

Karlan cc’ed the acting U.S. attorney in Arizona, as well as the state’s attorney general and secretary of state, and the recorder in the Maricopa County. She asked Fann to respond to the DOJ’s concerns, but the message was clear: We’ve got our eyes on you.

[LFC]

LOCK THEM UP! LOCK THEM UP!

New York’s attorney general wrote to a federal judge on Thursday, asking to be tagged into an ongoing lawsuit against the right-wing hucksters Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, who allegedly sent robocalls targeting Black voters in an attempt to suppress voter turnout ahead of the 2020 election.

The lawsuit, filed in October by the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, focuses on a robocall that falsely warned thousands of recipients in several states that voting by-mail could be used against them — specifically, by sharing personal information with law enforcement pursuing old warrants, credit card companies pursuing debtors and public health officials seeking to administer “mandatory vaccines.”

“Don’t be finessed into giving your private information to the man, stay home safe and beware of vote by mail,” said a voice on the robocall, claiming to be “Tamika Taylor from 1599 Project.”

The robocall is already at the heart of two criminal cases against the duo — in Michigan, they face felony charges of conspiracy to violate election law, among other offenses. In Ohio, they’ve separately been indicted on eight counts of telecommunications fraud and seven counts of bribery. They’ve pleaded not guilty in both cases.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, in her request to intervene in the civil suit Thursday, alleged that it specifically targeted Black voters. She cited the pair’s own communications.

“We should send it to black neighborhoods in Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, Charlotte, Richmond, Atlanta and Cleveland,” Wohl allegedly wrote to Burkman in an email that included the audio file for the call.

[goldenvalley]

May 6, 2021 20:34:25 GMT LFC said:

FFS! The people performing the Arizona faudit are contacting voters directly! If I received a call like that I'd be on the phone to the office of my Rep and both Senators screaming my head off.

Karlan then flagged a practice written out in a statement of work from Cyber Ninjas, the company leading the audit: Looking for voter registrations that, in some way, “did not make sense,” and then knocking on doors to confirm if actual voters lived there.

The same statement of work says that auditors will call and physically canvas voters in precincts that “have a high number of anomalies based on publicly available voting data and data from prior canvassing efforts.”

The federal government, Karlan wrote, is suspicious.

“This description of the proposed work of the audit raises concerns regarding potential intimidation of voters,” she said.

“Past experience with similar investigative efforts around the country has raised concerns that they can be directed at minority voters, which potentially can implicate the anti-intimidation prohibitions of the Voting Rights Act,” she wrote. “Such investigative efforts can have a significant intimidating effect of qualified voters that can deter them from seeking to vote in the future.”

Karlan cc’ed the acting U.S. attorney in Arizona, as well as the state’s attorney general and secretary of state, and the recorder in the Maricopa County. She asked Fann to respond to the DOJ’s concerns, but the message was clear: We’ve got our eyes on you.

And this is why this Big Lie is a danger to our very democracy.  

[Bact PhD]

May 6, 2021 17:54:27 GMT goldenvalley said:

And the Florida governor made Florida officially in the voter suppression law column of election related laws.  I liked this description of the signing ceremony:

The governor scheduled the bill-signing Thursday at the Airport Hilton in West Palm Beach, a short drive from Trump’s home at his Mar-a-Lago Club. The event was dubbed a rally “for the best governor in the USA.”
“This is DeSantis bringing home the little dead mouse in his teeth for Papa Trump to see,” said Joy Howell, a spokeswoman for the Palm Beach County Democratic Party, who observed the signing ceremony by looking through windows from outside the hotel. “That’s why he’s doing it here, because this is where Papa Trump lives.”

It was also broadcast on Faux News to be doubly sure that the Trump faithful see the governor do it.  

But will the older Republicans that routinely used vote by mail ballots be happy enough with this blow against fraud to bother to turn out and vote to re-elect the governor?

The video footage that I saw of the event showed some attendees proudly sporting "Trump/DeSantis 2024" T-shirts. Uh, hello?? Does the Twelfth Amendment¹ ring any bells? Bueller? Bueller?

¹"The Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves; they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President,..."

[LFC]

It just keeps going further and further off the rails. The fauditors are demanding passwords ... F***ING PASSWORDS!!!!! ... for accounts with access to critical election infrastructure. If this had been a real audit they would have requested to have their own accounts set up in advance and they would have had only the read permissions they needed. Why didn't they? First, that takes competence. Second, once the faudit ended the accounts would be locked. Third, changes and inappropriate access can be tracked to individual accounts. They don't want ANY of that shit.

A Democratic lawsuit challenging the procedures of a sketchy audit of Arizona’s 2020 election may have been settled this week. But that hasn’t resolved all the disputes engulfing the recount of Maricopa County’s 2.1 million ballots, as the auditors head into the final week that they have reserved at the current counting site.

One prominent example: The state Senate Republicans who ordered the audit and the team of consultants they hired to coordinated it are beefing with Maricopa County over passwords to certain election infrastructure.

Ken Bennett, the former Arizona secretary of state who is acting as a Senate liaison for the audit, told The Arizona Republic this week that the Senate is considering subpoenaing the county for the passwords.

But the county, which is controlled mostly by Republicans, insists that it doesn’t even have the passwords that the auditors are seeking, and that it already turned over all the relevant passwords that it does have.

The county board of supervisors chairman Jack Sellers issued a statement Friday afternoon expressing his anger about “the allegations of corruption being thrown around — sometimes by elected officials who should know better — denigrating the good names of public servants who devoted the last two years of their lives to running quality elections in 2020.”

“I am not going to address every allegation that people cook up these days, but I do want to talk about passwords,” Sellers said. He reiterated that the county does not have the access to the passwords that the auditors want, as those passwords “provide access to proprietary firmware and source code.”

Sellers claimed that the county already provided the auditors with the information they need to run the reports that Bennett has referenced in discussing the passwords.

Yep, they want passwords that give them access to source code. How long before THAT tidbit of info ended up in Vladimir's hands?