Voter Suppression & Election Theft by the Republican Party

[Traveler]

Aug 5, 2021 18:46:10 GMT goldenvalley said:

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.

And then 10 repukes got the bug, so no quorum even possible.  Meanwhile judge has blocked abbotts fascist solution.  

[LFC]

Schumer is pushing the voting rights bill again.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) carried out a series of procedural moves very early Wednesday morning to tee up a new voting rights push when the chamber returns from a month-long recess.

He filed cloture on a vehicle that will be replaced with a bill being negotiated by a group of senators behind the scenes: a whittled-down For the People Act that incorporates some of Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) alterations to the original bill.

“Voting rights, voting rights, will be the first matter of legislative business when the Senate returns to session in September,” Schumer said Wednesday, adding: “It is my intention that the first amendment to the bill would be the text of a compromise bill that a group of senators are working on. Let me be very clear, this is a debate the Senate must have.”

He also brought up three votes on democracy-related legislation on the tail end of a 14-hour vote-a-rama on the budget resolution early Wednesday. The first was on the For the People Act, the second on redistricting legislation and the third on a bill that would enhance campaign donation disclosure requirements, the DISCLOSE Act.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) blocked all three bills; Schumer had asked for unanimous consent, so it only took one senator to reject them.

The reasoning per TPM is interesting, and likely Schumer's only course of action aside from giving up.

The voting rights push has been largely stagnant since Republicans filibustered the For the People Act back in June. The bill has no GOP support and won’t surpass the 60-vote threshold.

With Manchin’s recently reiterated opposition to carving out a voting rights exception from the filibuster and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (D-AZ) continued devotion to the Senate rule, the future of voting rights legislation has seemed dim.

So Schumer is using one of the only tactics left to him: a war of attrition. He hopes that by bringing up a series of bill votes like the one Wednesday morning, he can make crystal clear to his two recalcitrant members that Republicans oppose and will continue to block all types of voting reform. He’s hammering the point that with the filibuster intact, no voting protections will pass and state-level Republicans will continue to gleefully pass laws making it harder to vote. That problem will only compound later this month, when Republican legislatures start redistricting their states to favor GOP candidates.

[goldenvalley]

The For the People Act contains redistricting provisions and incorporates the DISCLOSE Act.  I don't know why Schumer would offer separate bills on them. The voting rights coalition wanted to force the Senate to stay in session until a substantive bill was passed.

[jackd]

Ultimately, no matter how it's presented, it all comes down to waiving the filibuster or not.

[LFC]

This is a direct assault on the election process. It's also incredibly incompetent.

Last week, Ron Watkins—conspiracy theorist, QAnon enthusiast, and former 8chan site admin—released photocopies of an installation manual for Dominion voting machines. The copied pages gave basic instructions for configuring BIOS passwords (necessary to change some system settings) and iDRAC, a standard network remote control tool (which the manual explicitly requires the administrator to disable).

The next day, Watkins released a video purporting to be from a "whistleblower" exposing Dominion's "most egregious lie"—that Dominion can remotely administer the machines, he said. He also released several screenshots of Election Management Systems hardware his "whistleblower" had access to.

Although none of Watkins' screenshots—which will be immediately familiar to anyone who's ever administered enterprise-grade hardware—are as damning to the voting machines as Watkins would clearly like, they did end up causing problems for one of Watkins' fellow travelers: county clerk Tina Peters of Mesa County, Colorado, whose office manages the machines in question.

The thrust of Watkins' accusations is that Dominion's Election Management Systems (EMS) voting machines are connected to the Internet and remotely controllable by Dominion itself. His grainy video, blurry screenshots, and hastily photocopied manual pages attempt to paint a picture of voting machines that are always connected to the Internet and remotely managed by Dominion.

Unfortunately for this narrative, all this leaked media really exposes is a generic set of server hardware, with explicit instructions to keep it off the Internet and lock down its remote management functions. Watkins' video cuts together footage of Dominion CEO John Poulos telling US senators that the machines aren't designed for Internet connectivity with footage of the EMS servers' BIOS setup interface. The BIOS shots include configuration options for iDRAC, a Dell-specific technology for remote control of server hardware.

Curiously, Watkins also includes—although he does not address—Poulos' statement that Dominion does not have access to the passwords necessary to access these technologies. He also leaves in the part of his "whistleblower" video in which the Dominion employee states, "[We don't have access to] the BIOS passwords... the state is keeping them." And he ignores the installation manual's explicit instructions to disable iDRAC entirely.

Here's the likely criminal who is, like any good Republican, screeching that she's a victim. Bold of now classic right-wing tactic of accusing others of what you're doing mine. In fact her accusation aligns exactly with one of the provisions rammed through by Georgia Republicans.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold put blame for the release of election system passwords last week on the internet squarely on Mesa County officials, saying the breach could have allowed someone to access the settings of the county’s voting equipment, all of which may now have to be decertified.

“I can say at this time that Mesa County appears to have allowed this breach in election security,” Griswold, a Democrat, told The Colorado Sun during an interview Tuesday.

Griswold’s office is investigating the situation. It believes that images containing the passwords that were posted online were taken during a so-called “trusted build” systems update to Dominion Voting Systems election equipment completed in late May. The Mesa County District Attorney’s office has launched a parallel criminal probe into the leak.

At the center of the case is Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, a Republican who as the investigation into her office heated up on Tuesday appeared at a “cyber symposium” hosted by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who continued to make unsubstantiated claims about fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

(There has been no evidence of widespread fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election on the state or national level.)

“I am being persecuted,” Peters said Tuesday night during the conference in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where she accused Griswold of “raiding” her office.

Peters also made baseless accusations that Griswold and Gov. Jared Polis are trying to “take over my office and control the way we vote.”

The leaked passwords are specific to Mesa County. State officials don’t believe that any other counties were affected by the breach. Since the breach didn’t happen during an election, state officials are also confident it didn’t and won’t affect any past or upcoming contests.

There's only one appropriate course of action; terminate, prosecute, imprison. This isn't some snapperhead voting with their dead mom's mail-in ballot. This is a massive breach of security on the very foundations of a free and fair election. If she leaked this information she needs to go to jail. If it somehow causes machines to be replaced she needs to be forced to repay the cost or go bankrupt trying. It's time to get tough. No more Garland treatment for these people.

[LFC]

The FBI is now involved in the leaked password scandal. Good. Somebody needs to go to jail for this.

The FBI Denver field office has joined a Colorado district attorney's investigation into the County Clerk's office and how voting machine logins from the county wound up in a QAnon-affiliated video, an FBI spokeswoman told CNN.
Voting machine logins from Mesa County were featured in an August 3 video posted on a QAnon-affiliated Telegram ​channel about 2020 election fraud claims.

In a press conference last week, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold blamed Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters for the leak, saying the secretary of state's office could not establish a verifiable chain of custody ​for the machines, and that Peters brought a "non-employee" to a May 25 "trusted build" meeting where closely guarded voting machine login credentials were visible to attendees. Griswold said her employees had been misled to believe that the "non-employee" in question was a county employee.

Griswold's office said Monday that the secretary of state would appoint a new person to oversee elections in Mesa County.

Dan Rubinstein, the Mesa ​County district attorney, had previously confirmed to CNN that the secretary of state's office contacted him last week, saying, "They believed that there were potential criminal matters which would be referred to my office for prosecution."

Courtney Bernal, spokeswoman for the FBI's Denver field office, told CNN in a statement that they are working with the district attorney's office, "on the forensic review and analysis of county voting systems to determine if there was a potential federal criminal violation."

[LFC]

All the truly patriotic knives are out for the perpetrators of the Arizona faudit and they are cutting deep in advance of what the Republican fascists hellbent on stealing the election hoped would be a sensational report of deep fraud and election theft. (Factual was never an issue.) It will be interesting to see if they still try it with all of the pre-bashing or if they fold quietly.

TPM has created a nice guide on the latest along with some links to "prebuttals." I've only read bits of them but the takedowns look brutal.

But you want to go deeper? Check out two “prebuttal” documents published in recent days, one each from Arizona’s Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and Maricopa’s Republican Recorder Stephen Richer. Here’s Hobbs’ topline conclusion:

“There are numerous examples of failures that all but guarantee inaccurate results, which would also be impossible to replicate. Any one of these issues would deem an audit completely unreliable, but the combination of these failures renders this review meritless.”

For more, check out this independent report from former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson and political scientist Barry C. Burden that rips into what we know about the process so far, explaining that it “does not meet the standards of a proper election recount or audit.”

The trouble doesn’t stop there: The House Oversight Committee is quite annoyed that Cyber Ninjas hasn’t responded to its request for documents, and threatened in a new letter to “consider other steps to obtain compliance.”

I wonder if the Cyber Ninjas are being lined up for some lawsuits. After all they did f*** up the integrity of multiple voting machines which had to be replaced at quite a cost to the AZ taxpayers.

[LFC]

The fake Florida candidate just plead guilty. I guess it seemed like a good idea when they waved a check in front of your face, eh?

Former NPA District 37 Florida Senate candidate Alex Rodriguez entered a plea of guilty Tuesday morning in a Miami court hearing.

He pleaded guilty to two of four felony counts in connection with election law violations.

Rodriguez appeared to be crying as he apologized in court.

"I am deeply sorry for my actions and I want to apologize to my family, my loved ones and my friends who have been through this," he said.

He will receive one year house arrest, followed by two years of probation, receive no jail time, and testify against Republican former State Sen. Frank Artiles, who is facing four felony charges.

The State alleges Artiles paid roughly $40,000 to Rodriguez to run as an NPA candidate in last November's Miami Senate race, successfully drawing more than 6,000 votes from the Democratic incumbent of the same last name, Jose Javier Rodriguez, and handing the Republican candidate a victory.

Dark money traced to Republican sources was used to send mailers promoting Rodriguez, and appear to have been created by the same entities that sent mailers in the Seminole-Volusia District 9 race to support another "ghost" candidate, NPA Jestine Iannotti.

Iannotti did no campaigning, but benefitted from the mysterious mailers. Democrat Patricia Sigman lost to republican Jason Brodeur.

That race was won by Republican Jason Brodeur, who has denied any knowledge of any scheme to promote ghost candidates to hurt Democrats in Senate races.

[LFC]

The FCC is looking to bury two scumbags who rammed thru piles of illegal, racist robocalls.

Right-wing hoaxters Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman face a proposed $5 million fine from the Federal Communications Commission for the racist robocalls they deployed during the last election.

The potential seven-figure fine adds to an ongoing lawsuit and two criminal cases against the pair — one each in Michigan and Ohio — for allegedly contacting thousands of voters, targeting Black voters in particular, with robocalls that falsely claimed that the information of people who vote by mail could be shared with police, debt collectors and even the CDC.

“Don’t be finessed into giving your private information to the man. Stay home safe and beware of vote by mail,” the robocall warned recipients.

In a press release Tuesday, the FCC said the proposed $5,134,500 fine against Burkman and Wohl was the largest the commission had ever proposed for robocalls under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which was passed in 1991. A newer law, passed in 2019, beefed up federal restrictions against unauthorized recorded calls. Earlier this year another pair of robocallers was slapped with a nine-figure fine.

In an 11-page notice, the FCC alleged that it had counted 1,141 unlawful robocalls to wireless numbers from Burkman and Wohl, just a fraction of the roughly 85,000 numbers to which robocalls were allegedly sent, according to a separate lawsuit against the pair. The commission proposed a fine of $4,500 per call.

Two people who’d received the robocalls allegedly confirmed to investigators “that they had not given consent to the calls, and had not heard of Burkman, Wohl, or Burkman & Associates prior to receiving the robocalls.”

The commission ordered the pair — as well as the firm Burkman runs out of his home, J.M. Burkman and Associates — to pay up within 30 days, or else file a written statement seeking a reduction or cancellation of the fine.

[goldenvalley]

Aug 25, 2021 15:22:49 GMT LFC said:

The fake Florida candidate just plead guilty. I guess it seemed like a good idea when they waved a check in front of your face, eh?

Well they got the easy defendant, but who provided the money to him?  Nothing has been fixed until the other people involved are found, arrested, convicted and/or plead.

[LFC]

The judge presiding over the bogus "Kraken" election fraud case involving Sidney Powell and Lin Wood did not hold back.

A federal judge on Wednesday granted the motion of sanctions filed by the state of Michigan and the city of Detroit against the so-called “Kraken” attorneys over their conspiracy-tinged litigation hoping to overturn the 2020 presidential election, ordering that they face “possible suspension or disbarment” and be referred for a professional conduct probe.

U.S. District Judge Linda Parker did not hold back in chastising the lawyers—including infamous pro-Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood—for “undermining the People’s faith in our democracy.”

“This lawsuit represents a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process,” Parker wrote in a lengthy 110-page ruling. “It is one thing to take on the charge of vindicating rights associated with an allegedly fraudulent election. It is another to take on the charge of deceiving a federal court and the American people into believing that rights were infringed, without regard to whether any laws or rights were in fact violated. This is what happened here.”

Among the attorneys impacted by Wednesday’s decision are Powell and Wood, who filed several election lawsuits across the nation alleging widespread voter fraud following former President Donald Trump’s electoral loss, all of which were subsequently tossed out of court.

[LFC]

The fact that a judge felt the need to issue this order tells you all you need to about the legitimacy of Cyber Ninjas. No legitimate auditor of any kind would need to be ordered to maintain records of an audit they performed.

An Arizona judge on Wednesday ordered Cyber Ninjas, the company Arizona Republicans hired to run a shoddy review of the 2020 elections, to preserve documents of its audit for public release.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge John Hannah’s decision marks the first time Cyber Ninjas has been ordered directly to keep its records amid multiple lawsuits seeking transparency in the politicized and largely secretive operation.

The judge’s order is part of the Arizona Republic’s lawsuit against Cyber Ninjas and the GOP-controlled Arizona Senate for documents about the audit.

“All defendants, including Cyber Ninjas, are ordered to carefully secure, protect and preserve from deterioration, mutilation, loss or destruction any and all records in their custody, possession or control that are reasonably necessary or appropriate to maintain an accurate knowledge of their official activities concerning the 2020 Maricopa County election audit, including records of the performance, funding and staffing of said audit,” Hannah wrote in his order.

The judge stated that unless the Arizona Supreme Court rules otherwise, Cyber Ninjas will have to turn over its documents in three business days once the Supreme Court lifts its stay on an order for the company’s records in a similar lawsuit against the Senate.

[LFC]

I meant to post this a few weeks back but Georgia Republicans took their new voter suppression law toy out for a spin almost instantly. They are lining up to steal elections in 2022 and beyond. Welcome to third world fake democracy politics.

Late last month, 27 Republican members of the Georgia state Senate sent an ominous letter to the state elections board, touting a misleading claim about the 2020 election popularized by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. A few days later, several Republican members of the state House sent a similar letter seeking a “performance review” of election officials in the Democratic stronghold of Atlanta.

In a post-Trump GOP, it might seem unremarkable that elected officials are spouting off about some lie or half-truth broadcast by conservative media. But these letters set in motion a chain of events that could end in mass disenfranchisement of voters in the Democratic stronghold of Atlanta for the 2022 statewide and midterm elections.

In March, Georgia Republicans passed SB 202, a sweeping new election law that erects obstacles between Georgia voters and their right to cast a ballot. While some are relatively minor or even popular, the most ominous provisions of this new law allow the state election board, which is dominated by Republicans, to seize control of county election boards. Those boards can disqualify voters, move polling precincts, and potentially even refuse to certify an election count.

The letters from Republican lawmakers are the first step in the legal process Republicans may use to take over elections in Fulton County, the most populous county in the state, which encompasses most of Atlanta. In 2020, nearly 73 percent of Fulton County voters cast a ballot for President Joe Biden. Biden won the county by nearly a quarter-million votes, enough to push him ahead of former President Donald Trump in a state decided by 11,779 votes overall.

Both letters ask the state elections board to begin a “performance review” of the local officials who oversee elections in Fulton County. The senators claim that such a review is justified because “nearly 200 ballots were scanned twice last fall” during the initial vote count in Fulton — a claim that was previously featured on Tucker Carlson’s show.

[LFC]

Arizona's fascist Republican Attorney General is still all in on the faudit. He's not the only one. The fascist Republicans have turned on the non-fascist Republicans with one state representative openly stating their desire to imprison those who do not OBEY!

Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich on Thursday threatened to withhold state funds from Maricopa County after it rejected new subpoenas from the Senate for election materials in the shoddy “audit” of its election results.

Earlier this month, Maricopa County’s board of supervisors pushed back on the Republican-controlled state Senate’s subpoenas for additional election materials. The latest round of subpoenas demanded ballot envelopes with voter signatures and internet routers from the county, among other things. The county has resisted handing over its routers, arguing that the request was based on a conspiracy theory about voting machines being connected to the internet — earlier, legitimate assessments determined they were not — and would represent a security risk to the county.

“So, there is nothing to gain and far too much potential harm to risk removing all of the County’s routers and producing them to the Senate’s designees,” the County said in an Aug. 2 reply to the state Senate.

[snip]

Brnovich wrote in his report that the county has 30 days to turn over the latest subpoenaed information to comply with the sham “audit” before it faces the possibility of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in state funds.

“If [Maricopa County] fails to resolve the violation within 30 days, the [attorney general’s office], in accordance with state law, will notify the Arizona Treasurer to withhold state revenue from Maricopa County until MCBOS complies,” a press release from Brnovich’s office said. “The Maricopa County Superior Court previously affirmed that the Senate has the power to issue legislative subpoenas related to election reform and has broad discretion to determine what additional information is needed.”

Following the county’s rejection of the latest subpoenas from the stateSenate earlier this month, state Sen. Wendy Rogers (R) suggested imprisoning the Republican-majority board of supervisors in Maricopa County.

“I would have arrested all of these people already if I had the power to do so. I vote to arrest. Arrest and put them in solitary,” Rogers tweeted.

I see no acknowledgement of the facts of the faudit. Nothing about the mishandling of ballots. Nothing about the mishandling of voting machines causing them to be scrapped. Nothing about the lies trumpeted out only to be slapped down. This ... is ... fascism.

[LFC]

Aug 17, 2021 21:21:48 GMT LFC said:

The FBI is now involved in the leaked password scandal. Good. Somebody needs to go to jail for this.

Tina Peters, the Mesa County, CO nutjob who illegally leaked passwords to voting systems, has "allegedly" been involved in outright election fraud before. Two things jump to mind. First, it's almost always a Republican. Second, it's clear that the place where election security needs to be firmed up is in the offices in charge of the systems and ballots, not with individual voters.

During Peters’ first year as clerk, in 2019, her office was blamed for leaving more than 570 uncounted ballots in a box, long past an election. Less than a year later, one of her office’s drop boxes leaked ballots, sending some floating in the summer breeze. Now Peters has gone underground, reportedly hiding in a safe house provided by Lindell, after she allegedly participated in a breach of Mesa County voting machine data this year. That data soon wound up on conspiracy websites, making Peters a folk hero among the MAGA set and the subject of an FBI investigation.

Let's put that fraudulently uncounted 570 ballots in perspective. IIRC the total cases of in-person voter fraud found for 2020 is in the dozens. George W. Bush set his attack dog U.S. Attorneys on this non-issue and they found 77 cases across the entire nation. Trump's "task force" lead by Kansas Kris Kobach didn't find squat. The total cases of in-person voter fraud found from 2000-2020 might be well below the total buried by one MAGAt with power. Of course her act pales in comparison to the tens of thousands of voters fraudulently thrown off the rolls in Georgia, Florida, Texas, and other Republican controlled states.

[LFC]

TPM has a good rundown on the current state of Republican assaults on voting and elections. First in the piece is Texass.

After A Fight, Republicans Have Made It Harder To Vote In Texas
­
Republicans in the Texas House have passed SB 1, the package of voting restrictions that Democrats briefly fled the state in order to stave off. The legislative body will now reconcile its bill’s differences with the Senate bill, and then the new restrictions will go to Gov. Greg Abbot (R).

Among the changes headed for Texas voters: No more late-night or drive-through voting. (Perhaps ironically, observers noted, an initial vote on the bill was taken at 11:18 p.m. local time.) The bill would also empower partisan poll watchers, add ID requirements to mail-in voting and prohibit elected officials proactively distributing mail-in ballot applications, among other things.

Referring to criticism that the restrictions would inordinately impact people of color in Texas, House Speaker Dade Phelan (R) made a modest proposal at the beginning of debate: “The chair would appreciate members not using the word ‘racism’ this afternoon.” The Texas Tribune noted one Democratic response.

“I know people bristle at certain terms that are used, so I’ll just say [the Legislature has] been intentionally discriminatory,” Rep. Rafael Anchía (D) of Dallas stated at one point.

Rep. Gina Hinojosa of Austin asked in response: “Intentional discrimination against people of a certain race — is that racism?”

[LFC]

Michigan's fascist Republicans (but I repeat myself) are trying to suppress the vote by going around the governor.

Michigan Republicans have launched an effort to institute new voter ID restrictions by circumventing Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) entirely.

The plan, which has been brewing for months, requires the support of just 3.4% of Michigan’s population and the approval of the Republican-controlled legislature. And after a frustrating legislative session in which numerous proposed voting restrictions withered on the vine, Republicans are eyeing the tactic with new urgency.

The changes would come via a petition drive: If “Secure MI Vote,” a group led by Republican operatives, succeeds in collecting just 340,000 signatures — the legal threshold of 8% of the total votes cast in the last gubernatorial election — then the new restrictions would need only be approved by the legislative branch, avoiding Whitmer altogether.

Among the proposed changes: A strict photo ID requirement for in-person voting, new ID measures for mail-in voters, and a prohibition on elections officials sending out unsolicited absentee ballot applications.

“Extreme Republicans in this state, like they are in others, are trying to impose these restrictions that will have a real impact and actually prevent eligible voters from voting,” said Nancy Wang, executive director of Voters Not Politicians, which is organizing volunteers in opposition to the proposed restrictions.

“There is actually no evidence, and no need, for these unnecessary restrictions,” Wang said.

As reported by The Detroit News and other outlets Monday evening, Secure MI Vote has announced its plans to turn in its proposed petition language to the secretary of state’s office. A spokesperson for that office told TPM Tuesday morning that Secure MI Vote has not yet submitted the petition language. The Detroit News noted that the group’s initial treasurer, upon its founding in December, was the chief of staff to the chairman of the Michigan Republican Party.

[LFC]

Just a reminder that this is the nutjob that nearly the entire GOP has fallen in line behind.

Trump went on at length to complain that his occasional difficulty with stairs was covered far more than an instance where Biden stumbled on his way onto Air Force One.

"When he fell up the stairs, fell up the stairs three times, it was not on any program," Trump said. "If that was me, it would have been the biggest story for months, career-ending. It was never on the media, never on mainstream media, his trip. It's okay, you can trip. Gerald Ford tripped, never lived it down. I would go very carefully down the stairs, I don't want to trip. You don't live it down with these people. With him they never put it on."

Trump then went on to repeat his baseless claims about election fraud.

"Why do they protect them, and with Biden, there's nothing -- the people get it, ultimately the people get it," he said. "I got 75 million votes. I had the media totally against my, outside of yourself and a few others, I had the media against me as much as anyone has ever seen. No one has seen anything like it. I had the vicious Democrats, communists socialists, call them whatever the hell they are or they'll impeach you if you sneeze, and just vicious what they do, and I had big tech against me, and I was told you can't win if you have big tech. I had 75 million votes, more than any sitting president has ever gotten. They said he had 81 million, there's no way he got 81 [million votes]."

Trump then claimed he couldn't have lost the election because his rally crowds were bigger than Biden, whose events were purposefully limited to prevent public exposure to COVID-19.

"I'd come into Arizona and draw 45,000 people at a rally," Trump said. "He'd come into Arizona and he had eight circles and couldn't fill them. He had to ask the press -- he didn't ask the press because he couldn't do that, he wouldn't know how -- but the press would be asked to fill the circles, please, because they had no people, and then I was upset in Arizona and Fox called it early when I was leading big. What did Fox know to do that?"

[LFC]

Ron Johnson admitted Trump lost his state. The "why" is interesting.

Although Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) has reliably been one of former President Donald Trump's most ardent defenders when it comes to challenging the integrity of the 2020 election, he admitted in a secretly recorded video that Trump very likely lost his state fair and square.

A video posted on Twitter by Lauren Windsor, who describes herself as an "undercover reporter," shows Johnson delivering a breakdown of numbers in Wisconsin in which he says Trump could have won if tens of thousands of traditional Republican voters not left his name off their ballots.

"Collectively, the state assembly candidates, just Republican state assembly candidates, got [1.661 million] votes," Johnson explained. "The eight congressional candidates also got [1.661 million], so we obviously counted enough Republican votes. The only reason Trump lost Wisconsin is that 51,000 Republican voters didn't vote for him."

The person filming Johnson then asked him if he believed that "Joe Biden won this state fair and square."

"Well, look at the totals," Johnson replied. "It's certainly plausible, there's nothing obviously skewed about the results. There isn't!"

Johnson further reiterated that Trump "didn't get 51,000 votes that other Republicans got, and that's why he lost."

In 2020, Biden only beat Trump in Wisconsin by around 20,000 votes, meaning that these apparent anti-Trump GOP voters were the difference between victory and defeat.

[LFC]

Holding a faudit is now a Republican purity test. "MAGA!"

Wyoming Republicans are rallying around the Big Lie claim that the 2020 election was rigged against Donald Trump -- even though their state gave him 70% of the vote, his largest victory margin in the nation.

"Wyoming officials are facing mounting pressure to audit the 2020 election from pro-Trump activists asserting, without evidence, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from the former president through wide-spread voter fraud," WyoFile, a not-for-profit news service covering the state, reported today.

"Activists across the state have flooded state lawmakers' inboxes and voicemails with demands to investigate the state's elections. These calls align with partisan efforts to relitigate election results in swing states like Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia.

"Activists have also repeatedly implored staffers of Gov. Mark Gordon and Sec. of State Ed Buchanan to pursue policies to bolster 'election integrity.'"

No discussion of "election integrity" would be complete without reference to Pillow Guy Mike Lindell's tin-hat "cyber symposium" two weeks ago in neighboring South Dakota. State Rep. Dan Laursen, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, traveled to it, Wyofile reports.

"What Lindell produced during the forum — even if only halfway or "a little bit" true — should be "concerning to everyone. Even the slightest bit of doubt should be enough to compel an audit,"(Laursen) said. " It's pretty darn important, I think."

It's especially darn important to Republicans in the crowded field challenging Rep. Liz Cheney for the state's lone seat in the House of Representatives. Cheney continues getting trolled all over the state for her vote to impeach Trump and her rejection of the Big Lie.

Her two leading opponents to date are Rep. Chuck Gray and Sen. Anthony Bouchard, and for them the "election integrity" has become a key wedge issue, Wyofile reports. Wyofile's Kerry Drake laid out their differences in a commentary today:

"Gray said he believes the presidential election was "rigged" and rife with voter fraud. He maintains it "created a lack of confidence" in the election process. Gray even traveled to Arizona to talk to the kooky senators who turned over ballots from a blue county to an outfit called Cyber Ninjas to conduct a sham audit.

[LFC]

And this is how democracy dies. There's nothing these insane, ignorant, angry morons can't justify in their own fever dream filled heads. And any attempt to uphold actual law is, of course, an attack that makes them the victims. If numbers of sane people don't step up these motivated MAGAts will destroy our country.

In May, a federal judge dismissed a Trumpy lawsuit over the 2020 election results in Antrim County, Michigan, where a clerk’s error had briefly resulted in a miscount of the vote. “Expert” witnesses in the suit had seized on the discrepancy, which they claimed was the result of Dominion voting machine technology “purposefully designed” to tamper with vote totals.

Crucially, while the judge had decided to allow the plaintiffs to make and analyze digital copies of the county’s election equipment, that material was put under a protective order — sealed behind a judicial decree, away from the public’s eyes.

That is, until last month.

The data surfaced at pillow magnate Mike Lindell’s “Cyber Symposium,” where some attendees were shown the digital image of the Antrim machines.

Not everyone took organizers up on the offer. “I said, ‘I haven’t seen the Antrim image because I didn’t sign a protective court order to obtain a copy of the image, but I bet they have stolen court evidence here,’” recalled Harri Hursti, a cybersecurity expert who focuses on voting equipment, and who attended the event.

Hursti opted not to evaluate the Antrim County image itself, but he did take a look at what’s known as “metadata” — logistical details including when the image was made, and by whom. It lined up, Hursti said, with the document that ought to be under seal: Created Dec. 6 by Greg Freemyer, one of several people listed in the Antrim lawsuit, in Freemyer’s case for his digital forensic imaging expertise.

The apparent leak of a sensitive digital image from Antrim County is just one of a wave of such leaks in recent weeks, as Trump supporters intent on proving that the 2020 election was stolen have increasingly taken things into their own hands.

Listen to this reality defying defense of Colorado clerk Tina Peters who allegedly illegally shared sensitive information including passwords with Mr. Pillow which, BTW, amounted to nothing in terms of showing fraud. She is literally giving full throated support of a crime based on nothing but her baseless beliefs. It's insanity.

The staffers in Peters’ office, accused by the state of facilitating a serious leak, have nonetheless continued to rally in support of her in recent days as she remains out of the public eye, as has Sherronna Bishop, an ally of Peters’ who was on stage with her at Lindell’s symposium, and who previously served as Rep. Lauren Boebert’s (R-CO) campaign manager.

At a public meeting Wednesday, Bishop denied personally sharing any passwords to county election equipment, then went on the offensive.

“This is appalling to see the script being flipped on citizens, and on a duly-elected clerk and recorder who was investigating on behalf of her people, and it was not criminal what she did,” Bishop said.

“You may not like how everything has played out now, that’s fine, but there’s no criminality here, except for Dominion voting machines — at least a suspicion of — and the secretary of state and her actions.”

Later, someone pointed out that surveillance cameras in Peters’ office had been turned off just before the digital images were captured.

“That does not mean that she’s guilty of anything,” Bishop insisted.

She urged those in attendance to see the light — soon.

“We’ve shown you the insecurities of the machine and, obviously, more is going to come out as they’re going through those images.”

[LFC]

They are literally screeching about nothing. It's like they claimed somebody was murdered and then picked up a random kitchen knife as they screamed, "SEE! SEE!!!!" Uh, yeah. We see. We see something that has nothing to do with what you're claiming. (paywalled)

Outtakes From Big Liars’ Attempts To Make Random Data Look Like Nefarious Election Schemes

We wrote yesterday about the trend of 2020 election truthers — Big Liars, Trumplicans, pick your title — exposing sensitive information about the inner working of election software, in the name of Truth and Transparency.

It’s a tricky business: One county clerk is currently under FBI investigation for allegedly allowing an unauthorized person access to her election machines, resulting in leaked passwords and digital images of the software. And people I spoke to said that organizers of Mike Lindell’s “Cyber Symposium” last month had violated a Michigan judge’s order by circulating an image of the election software from Antrim County, Michigan.

But for every potentially illicit leak, there are a number of flops: Meaningless digital fodder, dressed up as news. Hacker theater.

For example: Cybersecurity experts at Lindell’s conference, having determined that he had no evidence of China hacking the election, were shown more data sets: One each from Clark County, Nevada and Lake County, Ohio.

They were packet captures (PCAPs), or snapshots of internet traffic. And they were supposed to show nefarious goings-on. And they actually did show counties’ data. But the data they contained was… unimpressive.

Dan Kulin, a spokesperson for Clark County, which is home to Las Vegas, said the information shared at the conference didn’t reveal anything that wasn’t already publicly accessible.

“It looks like the individual [who captured the data] was on the public access wifi system, which is available to anyone, and doesn’t provide access to any sensitive information,” Kulin told TPM.

Picture some guy with a computer, sitting in the lobby of a county building in Las Vegas, taking snapshots of the digital breeze.

“It’s a tiny, tiny, tiny, useless, piece-of-shit file,” said Harri Hursti, a cybersecurity expert who attended the Lindell event.

In Lake County, things were slightly more unusual: The PCAPs apparently showed that whoever captured the data had a physical ethernet connection to a county machine — but nothing in the elections office.

“Our county’s IT team and the [secretary of state’s] analyzed the files and determined that it is not election data,” said Ross McDonald, director of the county’s board of elections. “It is important to note that the actor(s) did not have physical access to county election equipment. Lake County, Ohio, election data was not stolen nor was there unauthorized access to the Board of Elections’ network.”

“Although our name and property was invoked in this matter, it is not election-related data contained in the PCAPs,” McDonald added.

In other words: A nothingburger, dressed up as a Big Mac.

“It looks like they captured packets from the county office hoping they might show something. But they never made an argument that the packets actually did show something,” Rob Graham, a cybersecurity expert who attended Lindell’s symposium, told me of the Lake County data.

These examples are somewhat silly — and yes, at least one county spokesperson questioned whether this all was really worth a reporter’s time to explore. But it illustrates what I think is an important aspect of the Stop the Steal movement. It’s all smoke and mirrors: Computer code flashing on screens (a la “The Matrix,” pictured above) that, when you dig into it, doesn’t really mean anything.

Across the country, Trump supporters intent on litigating the 2020 election ad infinitum are pulling stunts like this in hopes of bamboozling local clerks and county commissioners. Next time you see that happen, first: let us know. Then: approach with skepticism.

[LFC]

Here's an "expert" on faudits. He's nuts, he's a serial liar, and he's a two-time electoral loser who screeched lies about the election being stolen. Sounds like a perfect representation of the Republican Party.

A two-time failed congressional candidate who has defended using the n-word and spouted COVID-19 conspiracy theories has apparently become a highly sought-after “expert” for Republicans conducting sham election audits.

Perhaps it is no surprise, as Shiva Ayyadurai’s baseless election fraud claims predate even those of Donald Trump. After losing his second congressional bid in 2020, Ayyadurai identified what he claimed was the cause of his loss: the mass destruction of ballots.

“Massachusetts Destroys Over 1 MILLION Ballots in US SENATE PRIMARY RACE committing #ElectionFraud,” Ayyadurai tweeted in September 2020, after losing his primary race.

Never mind that the ballots had not been destroyed, or that Massachusetts officials upheld Ayyadurai’s loss. His claim of election fraud foreshadowed Trump’s own claims of election malfeasance later that year. Now Ayyadurai, who backs Trump’s election fraud claims, has been hired by Arizona’s Republican-controlled state senate to work on an ongoing “audit” of the 2020 presidential election this summer, despite election officials there already repeatedly confirming that Joe Biden won.

In a recent podcast, a former Trump official suggested that Ayyadurai’s services were also being sought by Wisconsin legislators for a similar audit in their own state.

Ayyadurai has been hired twice to work on Arizona’s chaotic election audit: once by the state senate and once by Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based tech firm that is conducting the audit, despite complaints that its CEO has promoted election fraud conspiracy theories.

[LFC]

The Arizona faudit continues to be more and more of a farce. This expands on the vacant lot posted someplace earlier.

The original cover pictured a vacant lot in Goodyear with a caption that said it “cast two mail-in votes.”

But an aerial map of the property, available online at the Maricopa County Assessor’s website, shows a house with a pool on the 4.3-acre property. Looks like a pretty nice house, too. According to realtor.com, it has five bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms and upgraded maple cabinets in the kitchen. It was last sold in 2010.

It also has two registered voters, according to county records.

When ABC 15 reporter and former elections official Garrett Archer pointed this out, the cover of the canvass report was quickly changed to a vacant lot in Tempe “that cast a mail-in vote”.

But Archer reports that property was a mobile home park in December 2019 and a person was properly registered to vote at that address. That voter had his mail forwarded to another address within the county, which the county has confirmed can be done legally for a year.

Those are the only two actual examples of “fraud” offered in the report.

Let me repeat that. The only two hard pieces of information that could be verified both were shown to be bogus in a matter of minutes.

[LFC]

Here come the election stealing bogus lawsuits that have been predicted since before the 2020 election. Free and fair elections are a thing of the past. More and more will automatically be litigated over lies and Moscow Mitch has packed the courts.

In his Friday column for the Washington Post, Greg Sargent explained that Donald Trump has supplied Republicans with the playbook for every close election to come and it is already playing out in California's recall election.

GOP candidates who have been looking at the reception and support Trump has received after claiming the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him -- without a shred of evidence -- are already seeding doubt about election security over a year before the 2022 midterms.

Sargent notes that conservative radio personality Larry Elder has increased his attacks on how votes are being counted on Gov. Gavin Newsom's recall as more reports come out showing the California Democrat will survive in the heavily Democratic state.

"This week, Elder told reporters that 'there might very well be shenanigans' in the vote counting, just like 'in the 2020 election,' and vowed that his 'voter integrity board' of lawyers will 'file lawsuits,'" the columnist wrote before quoting the Republican claiming, "The 2020 election, in my opinion, was full of shenanigans. My fear is they're going to try that in this election right here and recall."

According to Sargent, "It's common for campaigns to prepare for post-election litigation. But Elder is going much further. He's hinting at a concerted effort to steal the recall and linking that to the 'big lie' that there were widespread problems in 2020. The goal is plainly to tap into the deep well of paranoia and conspiracy-mongering that Trump fed for years — and to undermine faith in a loss in advance."

As he goes on to note, Trump's hand-selected candidate for a U.S. Senate seat representing Nevada is already undermining the 2022 election with an even worse approach.

Republican Adam Laxalt -- grandson of former Nevada governor and U.S. Senator Paul Laxalt -- is already poisoning the well, Sargent reports.

"This week, Laxalt flatly declared his campaign will 'file lawsuits early' to 'secure this election,' as if it's a foregone conclusion that a loss will be dubious by definition. Worse, Laxalt vowed to avoid the supposed mistakes of 2020, in which the election was 'rigged' and the only failure was that Trump campaign lawsuits 'came too late,'" the columnist wrote before adding, "Laxalt, then, will begin contesting any eventual loss right now, because otherwise Democrats will succeed in stealing another election. This, too, is a declaration not to accept a loss as legitimate in advance."

Worse still he noted was Laxalt's response when he was called out for trying to undermine the integrity of the election.

"When the press covered his despicable threat, Laxalt rejoiced that he was 'triggering the media,' smarmily insisting the press is attacking anyone who wants 'secure' and 'fair' elections," Sargent wrote. "In fact, Laxalt is the one threatening to undermine secure and fair elections. Indeed, as this demonstrates, for Trumpist politicians, the refusal to commit to respecting legitimate election losses is now a badge of honor."