Voter Suppression & Election Theft by the Republican Party

[LFC]

Dems on the House Oversight Committee are getting involved in the Arizona faudit.

Two senior Democrats on the House Oversight Committee want answers from the company running the politicized “audit” of Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2020 election results.

House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who chairs the panel’s subcommittee on civil rights to civil liberties, wrote to Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan — who before this past election had no experience in the world of election administration — with a lengthy request for information.

“We are concerned about your company’s role in this highly unusual effort, given Cyber Ninjas’ apparent lack of experience in conducting election-related audits; reports that the company engaged in sloppy and insecure audit practices that compromised the integrity of ballots and voting equipment and were questioned by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ); and evidence that you and other individuals funding the audit have sought to advance the ‘big lie’ of debunked voter fraud allegations in the November 2020 presidential election,” they wrote.

The audit has, in fact, been a disaster, running on weeks past its initial deadline, and costing Maricopa County millions of dollars in voting machines that the county decided to replace due to concerns about the auditors’ handling of them.

[LFC]

Manchin has decided to allow the Republicans to do whatever they wish. The era of remotely free and fair elections inside of Republican controlled states is dead. Thanks, Joe.

Coming out of a meeting with the Texas Democrats who fled their state to block the passage of Texas Republicans’ voter suppression bill, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) remained unswayed by their appeals to allow an exemption to the filibuster for the For The People Act.

- “Forget the filibuster,” the West Virginia Democrat told reporters after the meeting.

Apparently preservation of something that was created by accident and is currently being abused at a near 100% rate is more important than the preservation of free and fair elections. I think somebody's principles are a bit askew.

[LFC]

Another day in the life of the Arizona faudit, another sensationalized nothing burger. First they started a hearing with a set of propaganda materials and talking points that talked about how wonderful a job they were doing. The folks in Maricopa County had something to say about that. They've actually been publicly bashing the morons through the entire faudit.

Then, Ben Cotton, founder of the audit’s tech contractor CyFIR — you may remember him from his log cabin — went through some preliminary findings of his own work, noting that the county still hasn’t handed over routers and other materials the audit wants. (At the end of the hearing, the senators asked the crew what materials they’d like to be included in yet another round of subpoenas to the county. Without those subpoenaed materials, Peterson said, “it will be an incomplete report.”)

Maricopa County, meanwhile, spent much of the hearing heckling the uncertified auditors rummaging through Arizonans’ ballots.

Maricopa County
@maricopacounty

It’s “complicated” and “difficult” for Senate contractors to do this audit because they are not qualified to do this audit. It’d be like asking Doug Logan to play point guard for the Suns. That would also be “complicated” and “difficult.”

So here's one of the smoking guns.

Logan said at Thursday’s hearing that kinematic artifact detection had revealed what he asserted were printing errors in some ballots — specifically, that the fronts and backs of ballot sheets were printed slightly out-of-line with each other. That, he claimed, could result in an “overvote” if ink from one side of a ballot bled onto the other side.

[Senate President Karen] Fann saw an opening, pointing out that members of the media mocked the so-called “Sharpiegate” hysteria around Election Day, when Trump voters were made to believe that the markers they were given to fill out their ballots could have invalidated their votes.

“There was — in fact it was dubbed by some in the media, Sharpiegate, in the very beginning,” she noted.

It wasn’t true then, and it’s not true now, the county said.

Maricopa County
@maricopacounty

It all comes full circle. Now we have a #SharpieGate reference. How many conspiracies are we up to now?

Maricopa County
@maricopacounty

Also, we never said the paper wouldn’t bleed through. We said the alignment marks do not impact tabulation.#JustTheFacts

[LFC]

Republicans fought, and just lost, to keep the private donations that funded the Arizona faudit secret. The fact that their are people who still really believe in this bad joke makes me sad. So does the fact that plenty of Republicans know it's a complete sham but are still eager to ride it and other fascist attacks on democracy to power.

An Arizona judge on Thursday denied Republican senators’ motion to dismiss a lawsuit seeking records on the financial backers and other aspects of the sham “audit” of the 2020 elections in Maricopa County.

“It is difficult to conceive of a case with a more compelling public interest demanding public disclosure and public scrutiny,” Judge Michael W. Kemp wrote at the end of a seven-page decision.

The ruling, in favor of a lawsuit for records from the left-leaning watchdog group American Oversight, gets the public one step closer to learning behind-the-scenes details of the audit, including who’s funding it.

The audit was authorized by state Senate President Karen Fann (R) and has been performed by third-party vendors led by Cyber Ninjas, a tech firm with no elections experience prior to the 2020 elections. The firm’s CEO, Doug Logan, posted crazy conspiracy theories about that election before being hired for the audit.

The Senate paid its contractors $150,000 for their audit work — but that’s only a fraction of the expense. Private fundraisers — Trump supporters who see the audit as the “first domino” in a long line of investigations that will vindicate Trump’s lies about election fraud — rushed to fill the void.

Kemp said Thursday that records in those contractors’ possession were subject to Arizona’s public records law where they had a “substantial nexus” with a government agency’s activities. He rejected the argument that Cyber Ninjas and other private vendors working on the audit were exempt from public records laws. Allowing the Senate to circumvent public records law by retaining private companies would be “an absurd result,” he said.

“The ‘substantial nexus’ standard narrows the scope of the inquiry,” the judge wrote. “Records concerning how the audit was planned and conducted, the identity of third-parties subsidizing the audit, and the source and specifics of the audit procedures are matters of public record subject to disclosure under the [public records law].”

He separately wrote that the the amounts paid by the audit’s funders were also subject to public records law: “ll records disclosing specifically who is paying for and financing this legislative activity as well as precisely how much is being paid are subject to the PRL.”

Despite auditors’ claims that the review has been “transparent,” the audit’s funding has been a months-long mystery, though some funders have publicly announced their support.

[LFC]

Both-sideism is dying in the Arizona faudit. Good. There's just too many lies and too much incompetence.

‘Bordering on criminal’: Arizona reporters growing fed up with GOP’s audit

Political reporters in Arizona appear to be growing increasingly frustrated with the shenanigans by Republicans pushing Donald Trump's "Big Lie" about election fraud.

On Thursday, Republicans falsely claimed that there were 74,000 votes with "no clear record of being sent."

On Saturday, the Associated Press published a story titled, "FACT FOCUS: A false narrative of 74K extra votes in Arizona."

"Cyber Ninjas, the cybersecurity consulting firm hired by Arizona Senate Republicans to oversee a partisan review of the 2020 election, on Thursday pushed a false narrative that Maricopa County received thousands of mail-in ballots that had no record of being sent out to voters," the AP reported.

"The false claim has reverberated online in the day since Logan's comments, parroted by lawmakers and Republican commentators including Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward, Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert and former President Donald Trump," the AP explained. "Yet Maricopa County officials and election experts confirm that the claim isn't true and represents a misunderstanding of how early voting works in Arizona."

KPNX political reporter Brahm Resnik described the spread of the lie as "bordering on criminal."

And then there's this bit of sick, twisted, behavior that boggles the mind.

[goldenvalley]

Bordering on criminal? How about completely detached from any sense of reality and done solely for political gain and money?

[LFC]

A Michigan Sheriff is pulling his own little version of the Arizona faudit, desperate to find fraud with zero evidence that any exists.

A far-right sheriff in rural Michigan has sent a private investigator and a deputy sheriff on a tedious journey from township to township, grilling clerks about their election processes in an apparent attempt to dig up non-existent evidence of election crimes.

The whole thing, the sheriff said, was inspired by conspiracy theories about the election, including those peddled by MyPillow Guy Mike Lindell.

And the clerks are none too happy about it.

“It seemed like they were looking to accuse people or places of fraud, or potential fraud, is what it felt like,” said Cindy Willshire, clerk of Thornapple Township.

“They say they’re not questioning our integrity, but you almost kind of feel like they are,” said Anita Mennell, clerk of Hastings Charter Township.

“I’ve been a clerk for 18 years and I’ve had a spot-on election every time,” said Robin Hawthorne, clerk of Rutland Township. “We’re all a little upset about this.”

I recognized the guy's picture right away but couldn't remember why. The article reminded me.

The probe is being overseen by Sheriff Dar Leaf, one of a huddle of law enforcement officials around the country who self-describe as “constitutional sheriffs.” They assert that sheriffs’ legal authority trumps that of the state and federal government. Leaf made a name for himself last year by offering a hedged public defense of the men accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan’s governor.

He's a real interesting character. And by "interesting" I mean barking at the moon insane.

Leaf has been tight-lipped to media outlets about the probe. He didn’t return an email from TPM, nor a message left with his assistant, and his investigators have told clerks not to tell others they’ve been interviewed.

But he opened up about the investigation at an “Arise USA” rally on Friday, as Kalamazoo CBS affiliate WWMT first reported. The sheriff took the stage a few minutes after an organizer of the event, Robert David Steele, spoke about a “satanic masonic attempt to take over the world” and defined Zionism as “a criminal state run by Russian criminals who pretended to be Jews.”

Leaf, following Steele and Richard Mack, founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs & Peace Officers Association, said the election probe was “my biggest task I’ve got going on.” He went on to describe a complaint from a retired sergeant from his office that inspired the effort.

“She brought in some documentation from the MyPillow guy, what’s his name? Mike Lindell. And brought some documentation in from some attorneys from Michigan, and Barry County’s listed in there,” Leaf said. (Lindell has wasted millions pitching election lies.)

[LFC]

Republicans are at war with voting rights so they can rig elections and the Republicans on SCOTUS appear to be all in on helping them do just that. Roberts has shown hostility to the protection of voting rights virtually his entire career, even before he was a judge.

The Supreme Court, Justice Elena Kagan lamented in a dissenting opinion earlier this month, “has treated no statute worse” than the Voting Rights Act.

She’s right.

The Voting Rights Act is arguably the most successful civil rights law in American history. Originally signed in 1965, it was the United States’ first serious attempt since Reconstruction to build a multiracial democracy — and it worked. Just two years after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, Black voter registration rates in the Jim Crow stronghold of Mississippi skyrocketed from 6.7 percent to nearly 60 percent.

And yet, in a trio of cases — Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Abbott v. Perez (2018), and Brnovich v. DNC (2021) — the Court drained nearly all of the life out of this landmark statute. After Brnovich, the decision that inspired Kagan’s statement that the Court has treated the Voting Rights Act worse than any other federal law, it’s unclear whether the Supreme Court would rule in favor of voting rights plaintiffs even if a state legislature tried to outright rig an election.

These cases are the culmination of more than half a century of efforts by conservatives who, after failing to convince elected lawmakers to weaken voting rights, turned to an unelected judiciary to enact a policy that would never have made it through Congress. All of this is bad news for minority voters in America, who are most likely to be disadvantaged by many of the new restrictions currently being pushed in statehouses across America, and for the country’s relatively young commitment to multiracial democracy. And there are at least three reasons to fear that decisions like Shelby County and Brnovich foreshadow even more aggressive attacks on the right to vote.

The first is that Republican partisans can use race as a proxy to identify communities with large numbers of Democratic voters. In 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, 92 percent of non-Hispanic Black voters supported Democrat Joe Biden over Republican Donald Trump — and that’s after Trump slightly improved his performance among African Americans compared to 2016.

That means that state lawmakers who wish to prevent Democrats from voting can do so through policies that make it harder for Black voters (and, to a lesser extent, most other nonwhite voters) to cast a ballot. And Republican lawmakers haven’t been shy about doing so. As a federal appeals court wrote in 2016 about a North Carolina law that included many provisions making it harder to vote, “the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

An even starker example: Georgia recently enacted a law that effectively enables the state Republican Party to disqualify voters and shut down polling precincts. If the state GOP wields this law to close down most of the polling places in the highly Democratic, majority-Black city of Atlanta, it’s unclear that a Voting Rights Act that’s been gravely wounded by three Supreme Court decisions remains vibrant enough to block them.

The second reason to be concerned about decisions like Brnovich is that the Supreme Court’s attacks on the Voting Rights Act are not isolated; they are part of a greater web of decisions making it much harder for voting rights plaintiffs to prevail in court.

[LFC]

Republicans have now managed to cause election equipment to be decertified in Pennsylvania as well as Arizona because they used a completely unqualified company to perform a faudit. I'm so proud of my state.

Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state has decertified a county’s voting system for future elections after it was subjected to a review by a private company in an effort promoted by a group of state senators supporting former president Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

Acting secretary of state Veronica W. Degraffenreid said in a statement Wednesday that Wake TSI’s examination of the Fulton County ballots earlier this year violated the state’s election code.

Pennsylvania is the second state where officials have decertified election equipment because of questionable audits requested by Republicans. Arizona’s Maricopa County said in June that it will replace voting equipment that was turned over to a private contractor for a Republican-commissioned review of the 2020 election.

Trump backers in multiple states are trying to launch post-election audits in an effort to overturn President Biden’s election victory.

According to a statement from Degraffenreid’s office, Fulton County officials allowed Wake TSI, of West Chester, Pa., “to access certain key components of its certified system, including the county’s election database, results files, and Windows systems logs. The county officials also allowed the company to use a system imaging tool to take complete hard drive images of these computers and other digital equipment.”

The statement called Wake TSI “a company with no knowledge or expertise in election technology.”

“These actions were taken in a manner that was not transparent or bipartisan,” Degraffenreid wrote in a letter to county officials. “As a result of the access granted to Wake TSI, Fulton County’s certified system has been compromised and neither Fulton County; the vendor, Dominion Voting Systems; nor the Department of State can verify that the impacted components of Fulton County’s leased voting system are safe to use in future elections.”

[goldenvalley]

According to a statement from Degraffenreid’s office, Fulton County officials allowed Wake TSI, of West Chester, Pa., “to access certain key components of its certified system, including the county’s election database, results files, and Windows systems logs. The county officials also allowed the company to use a system imaging tool to take complete hard drive images of these computers and other digital equipment.”

Is there a market for these things?  Maybe a fraudit wasn't the true purpose of this exercise.

[LFC]

Jul 22, 2021 15:27:33 GMT goldenvalley said:

Is there a market for these things?  Maybe a fraudit wasn't the true purpose of this exercise.

I assume they can be wiped clean, refurbished, and recertified by the manufacturer but I'm 100% sure that it ain't cheap to do.

[goldenvalley]

Jul 22, 2021 16:14:00 GMT LFC said:

Jul 22, 2021 15:27:33 GMT goldenvalley said:

Is there a market for these things?  Maybe a fraudit wasn't the true purpose of this exercise.

I assume they can be wiped clean, refurbished, and recertified by the manufacturer but I'm 100% sure that it ain't cheap to do.

I meant the information contained in them.

[LFC]

Texass is the pushing forward with its own faudit. Coincidentally it's mostly of counties that voted for Biden.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) on Wednesday said he’d support an audit of his state’s 2020 election results days after a state representative introduced a bill to audit the state’s largest counties. It just so happens almost all of those counties voted for Joe Biden.

“I don’t know why we wouldn’t want to give people confidence in our elections, and give them the chance to know for sure that they’ve had an audit, and things are good or they’re bad,” Paxton told talk radio host Chad Hasty in an interview. “And it gives us an opportunity to figure out how we want to correct that.”

Hasty had asked Paxton what he thought in general of auditing the state’s results, but he’d also mentioned a new, two-page proposal from State Rep. Steve Toth (R), which would empower the state’s governor, lieutenant governor and speaker of the House — all Republicans — to appoint a third party to audit the 2020 results. The bill has several prominent co-sponsors, including the chair of the House Elections Committee and the vice chair of the House Republican Caucus.

But there’s a catch: Toth’s bill only authorizes a third-party audit of “each county with a population of 415,000 or more.”

According to state and federal data from 2019, there are 13 counties in Texas with a population of more than 415,000. And of those counties, all but three — Montgomery, Denton and Collin — voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

[pnwguy]

Jul 22, 2021 20:32:31 GMT LFC said:

Texass is the pushing forward with its own faudit. Coincidentally it's mostly of counties that voted for Biden.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) on Wednesday said he’d support an audit of his state’s 2020 election results days after a state representative introduced a bill to audit the state’s largest counties. It just so happens almost all of those counties voted for Joe Biden.

“I don’t know why we wouldn’t want to give people confidence in our elections, and give them the chance to know for sure that they’ve had an audit, and things are good or they’re bad,” Paxton told talk radio host Chad Hasty in an interview. “And it gives us an opportunity to figure out how we want to correct that.”

Hasty had asked Paxton what he thought in general of auditing the state’s results, but he’d also mentioned a new, two-page proposal from State Rep. Steve Toth (R), which would empower the state’s governor, lieutenant governor and speaker of the House — all Republicans — to appoint a third party to audit the 2020 results. The bill has several prominent co-sponsors, including the chair of the House Elections Committee and the vice chair of the House Republican Caucus.

But there’s a catch: Toth’s bill only authorizes a third-party audit of “each county with a population of 415,000 or more.”

According to state and federal data from 2019, there are 13 counties in Texas with a population of more than 415,000. And of those counties, all but three — Montgomery, Denton and Collin — voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

That's because Real American Texans are in those smaller counties.  No need to challenge their voting.  

[LFC]

More faudit fail from Arizona. They have no idea what they're doing.

The politicized “audit” of Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2020 election results has come under fire from an unexpected source: Ken Bennett, Arizona’s former Republican secretary of state and, now, the Republican-controlled Senate’s lead liaison to the audit.

Along with Senate President Karen Fann (R) and Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan, Bennett has been the public face of the audit since it began months ago.

But now, he’s been banned from the venue of yet another count of Maricopa County’s ballots, the consequence of sharing some data with an outside group that has attempted to verify the audit’s performance.

[LFC]

Aaaaaaand ... he's gone. Bold mine.

The face of the Arizona Senate’s “audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 election results is stepping down, saying he’s been shut out of the process and that he won’t put a rubber stamp on a report whose underlying data he hasn’t seen.

Ken Bennett, who Arizona’s Republican Senate president picked as the legislature’s “liaison” to the privately-contracted audit, was barred from the audit site a few days ago after sharing some preliminary data with an outside group that’s tried to confirm the audit’s legitimacy.

“I cannot put a rubber stamp on a product that I am being locked out of its development,” Bennett told talk radio host James Harris Wednesday morning. Bennett said he’d be open to staying in the position, but things would have to change: “I’ve got to have access to the source data, and everything that will be the building blocks to that final report. I can’t just come in at the last minute and be asked to endorse something that I can’t be a part of really building the way it needs to be built.”

As Arizona’s former secretary of state, Bennett was the only prominent official in the audit with elections experience. The audit is being run by a contractor with no prior experience in the field, Cyber Ninjas, whose CEO has appeared in a conspiracy theory film about the last election and spouted wild theories on Twitter prior to being hired for the job.

[LFC]

Twitter suspends accounts pushing faudits, including the official account of the the bogus Arizona team.

Twitter has suspended several accounts related to politicized “audits” of 2020 election results around the country, including the official account of the audit in Arizona.

Among the casualties: The official @arizonaaudit account, as well as the sharper @auditwarroom account, which provided a constant stream of attacks aimed at critics of the sham recount. The anonymous creator of the latter account was also behind several other now-suspended accounts: @auditmichigan, @auditwisconsin, @auditnevada, @auditgeorgia, @audit_PA, @audit_Arizona.

A Twitter spokesperson told TPM, “The accounts referenced were permanently suspended for violating the Twitter rules on platform manipulation and spam.”

The website’s platform manipulation and spam policy prohibits inauthentic behavior, including “operating multiple accounts with overlapping use cases, such as identical or similar personas or substantially similar content.”

[LFC]

The MAGAts are funding most of the Arizona faudit. A number of organizations tied to the Big Lie crazies are involved.

Groups run by by pro-Trump celebrities who’ve campaigned for months on the lie that Donald Trump’s second term was stolen for him have collectively given millions of dollars to the sham “audit” of Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2020 election results, constituting the vast majority of the audit’s funding.

In all, outside groups contributed $5.7 million to the audit, lead audit contractor Cyber Ninjas said in a statement.

By contrast, Arizona Senate Republicans — who authorized the audit and issued the subpoenas to Maricopa County that compelled the county to hand over its election materials to a bunch of inexperienced, conspiracy-theory-promoting tech professionals — provided just $150,000 for the audit.

I wonder if they'll cough up the cash required to replace the voting machines that were compromised by the blundering idiots with no election expertise or the ability to read the basic rules and laws governing the materials and equipment they've demanded access to.

[goldenvalley]

I wonder what Cyber Ninjas' profit margin on this project is. And when will Trump's celebrities get tired of funding BS and getting nothing in return?

[goldenvalley]

State legislators are in Washington to lobby for the voting/elections bills.  If Senators don't care what public opinion polls say about various aspects of the bill maybe they'll care what fellow politicians think?

More than 100 state legislators from across the country will converge in Washington on Monday to join their Texas counterparts in pushing the Senate and President Biden to take action on voting reform legislation.

The lawmakers represent more than 20 states, including some in which Republican-led legislatures have passed or are considering new voting restrictions, and will urge senators to pass the For the People Act, or at least show progress on a federal voting law, before their summer recess. They are scheduled to rally outside the Capitol on Tuesday and press their case during other public events and private meetings.

[AnBr]

In many ways this is the single most important thing to be accomplished. So much that is vitally important will not be done without it.

[goldenvalley]

The big and dark money behind the Big Lie.  Jane Mayer, New Yorker writer who follows dark money has found some sources of money.

One of the movement’s leaders is the Heritage Foundation, the prominent conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. It has been working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (alec)—a corporate-funded nonprofit that generates model laws for state legislators—on ways to impose new voting restrictions. Among those deep in the fight is Leonard Leo, a chairman of the Federalist Society, the legal organization known for its decades-long campaign to fill the courts with conservative judges. In February, 2020, the Judicial Education Project, a group tied to Leo, quietly rebranded itself as the Honest Elections Project, which subsequently filed briefs at the Supreme Court, and in numerous states, opposing mail-in ballots and other reforms that have made it easier for people to vote.

Another newcomer to the cause is the Election Integrity Project California. And a group called FreedomWorks, which once concentrated on opposing government regulation, is now demanding expanded government regulation of voters, with a project called the National Election Protection Initiative.

These disparate nonprofits have one thing in common: they have all received funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Based in Milwaukee, the private, tax-exempt organization has become an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules—a tactic once relegated to the far right. With an endowment of some eight hundred and fifty million dollars, the foundation funds a network of groups that have been stoking fear about election fraud, in some cases for years. Public records show that, since 2012, the foundation has spent some eighteen million dollars supporting eleven conservative groups involved in election issues.

It might seem improbable that a low-profile family foundation in Wisconsin has assumed a central role in current struggles over American democracy. But the modern conservative movement has depended on leveraging the fortunes of wealthy reactionaries. In 1903, Lynde Bradley, a high-school dropout in Milwaukee, founded what would become the Allen-Bradley company. He was soon joined by his brother Harry, and they got rich by selling electronic instruments such as rheostats. Harry, a John Birch Society founding member, started a small family foundation that initially devoted much of its giving to needy employees and to civic causes in Milwaukee. In 1985, after the brothers’ death, their heirs sold the company to the defense contractor Rockwell International, for $1.65 billion, generating an enormous windfall for the foundation. The Bradley Foundation remains small in comparison with such liberal behemoths as the Ford Foundation, but it has become singularly preoccupied with wielding national political influence. It has funded conservative projects ranging from school-choice initiatives to the controversial scholarship of Charles Murray, the co-author of the 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” which argues that Blacks are less likely than whites to join the “cognitive elite.” And, at least as far back as 2012, it has funded groups challenging voting rights in the name of fighting fraud.

Once again some obscure wealthy people use their money to pursue their ideology.  And the Bradley Foundation has Cleta Mitchell on its board of directors.  Remember her?

An animating force behind the Bradley Foundation’s war on “election fraud” is Cleta Mitchell, a fiercely partisan Republican election lawyer, who joined the organization’s board of directors in 2012. Until recently, she was virtually unknown to most Americans. But, on January 3rd, the Washington Post exposed the contents of a private phone call, recorded the previous day, during which Trump threatened election officials in Georgia with a “criminal offense” unless they could “find” 11,780 more votes for him—just enough to alter the results. Also on the call was Mitchell, who challenged the officials to provide records proving that dead people hadn’t cast votes. The call was widely criticized as a rogue effort to overturn the election, and Foley & Lardner, the Milwaukee-based law firm where Mitchell was a partner, announced that it was “concerned” about her role, and then parted ways with her. Trump’s call prompted the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, to begin a criminal investigation.

[andydp]

Even the GOP led Marciopa County Board of Supervisors has had it with the "Audit"

I underlined a part of the letter sent to the "auditors"

Arizona Republican Lambasts Auditors, Calling Election Scrutiny “Adventure in Never-Never Land”

The Arizona auditors have pursued outlandish conspiracy theories – including searching for traces of bamboo on ballots, an apparent indication that votes were shipped in from Asia. Sellers lambasted these misguided efforts in his letter, writing “I am confident that our staff and volunteers ran the election as prescribed by federal and state law. There was no fraud, there wasn’t an injection of ballots from Asia nor was there a satellite that beamed votes into our election equipment.”

Sellers alluded to a potential lawsuit: “It’s time for all elected officials to tell the truth and stop encouraging conspiracies. Please release your report and be prepared to defend any accusations of misdeeds in court. It’s time to move on.”

Entire letter and article here:


www.newsandguts.com/arizona-republican-lambasts-auditors-calling-election-scrutiny-adventure-in-never-never-land/?fbclid=IwAR3ZbRy4r5cDQKh2prc04_ZFQBRRbhi3yXJxXE6kesG8YvEF1YAq7GMM4tg

[goldenvalley]

The Texas governor is calling another special session to try to get his legislation passed. I wonder how long the legislators already in Wash DC will remain there.

“I will continue to call special session after special session to reform our broken bail system, uphold election integrity, and pass other important items that Texans demand and deserve,” Abbott said in a statement. “Passing these Special Session agenda items will chart a course towards a stronger and brighter future for the Lone Star State.”

This physical filibuster conducted by the Texas legislators seems to be getting under the governor's skin.

[LFC]

Wisconsin is at it as well though not as blatantly as Arizona. Utter nutter David Clarke is screeching. Big news.

Former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke thinks the top Republican in the Wisconsin state assembly is feeding voters a “crap sandwich.”

“And now he’s running around trying to tell you it tastes good,” Clarke told the crowd at a rally he hosted on the steps of Wisconsin’s capitol. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel was on hand to witness the festivities.

Clarke, like lots of wannabe right-wing influencers, is upset about election audits; more specifically, he thinks the multiple audits ongoing in Wisconsin aren’t enough.

Robin Vos (R), the speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, signed contracts a couple months ago with two retired police detectives to investigate the 2020 election, and he named retired Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman the “special counsel” handling the investigation.

Even though there was nothing amiss with Wisconsin’s 2020 elections, Vos recently even said he was expanding the probe — after the two retired detectives quit — allowing Gableman to hire whoever he wanted. And all of this is on top of yet another ongoing review by the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau.

For Clarke and the top Big Lie promoter in the state, State Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R), the head of assembly’s elections committee, that’s simply not enough.