Voting Rights

[SCLaxAttack]

I see senseless page marks.

Best to put on ignore.

And it doesn't hurt to hope the next banishment will be permanent.

[CU88a]

New York Attorney General Letitia James celebrated a $1.25 million win on Tuesday as conservative activists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman reached a deal to pay James' office and others for running a voter suppression campaign during the 2020 election.

In March 2023, a federal judge ruled in James' favor in a lawsuit against Wohl and Burkman for their efforts to suppress Black voters ahead of the 2020 election. James had filed the lawsuit against Wohl and Burkman in May 2021 after an investigation by the Office of the Attorney General found that Wohl and Burkman orchestrated a broad voter suppression campaign that used robocalls to spread election-related misinformation to Black voters and others in an effort to discourage voting.


https://www.newsweek.com/letitia-james- ... it-1888687

[CU88a]

Yet another r guilty of voting fraud

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... ion-fraud/

State Rep. Austin Smith (R) — who was senior director at Turning Point Action, the campaign arm of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA — was accused by a Democratic activist of submitting petition sheets with rows of voter names, addresses and signatures that “bear a striking resemblance” to Smith’s handwriting, according to a complaint. Smith “personally circulated multiple petition sheets bearing what appear to be forged voter signatures,” the complaint said.

The complaint was sent to the Arizona secretary of state, who forwarded it to the Arizona attorney general for review. State election officials do not assess the veracity of allegations made against candidates. A spokesperson for the state prosecutor’s office, which runs a team that focuses on claims of voter and election fraud after widespread claims following the 2020 election, declined to comment. Both state offices are overseen by Democrats.

Smith submitted his resignation to Turning Point Action on Thursday, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about it publicly. Smith also publicly ended his reelection campaign.

Smith did not respond to a request for comment.

[NattyBohChamps04]

In news that The Onion couldn't make up,

RNC's Head of 'Election Integrity' Indicted over Fake Electors Scheme

She was a former Trump lawyer too. Only the best people.

[youthathletics]

I heard the FBI threatened to put child porn on their laptops if they did not comply.

[cradleandshoot]

In news that The Onion couldn't make up,

RNC's Head of 'Election Integrity' Indicted over Fake Electors Scheme

She was a former Trump lawyer too. Only the best people.

Election integrity...now there is an oxymoron for you.

[OCanada]

Not at all.

The best election for those issues was the last. Most of the de minimus illegal activity can be traced to the GOP. They are intending to ramp that up. Trump/RNC believe they can do a great job if they handle the ballots themselves

[Seacoaster(1)]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... integrity/

"When conservative lawyer and media personality Christina Bobb became the latest member of Donald Trump’s inner circle to be charged for her alleged role in the effort to reverse the 2020 presidential election results, it became immediately clear she would not have to give up her day job: senior counsel to the Republican National Committee’s election integrity team.

For some, there is a certain irony — if not outright conflict — that a leading purveyor of false claims that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud is a major player in the national GOP’s efforts to protect the integrity of the 2024 vote.

But not for Bobb, and not for her closest allies — including Trump himself, who through a spokesman defended only Bobb by name among all the 18 individuals indicted Wednesday in Arizona. If anything, Bobb’s indictment solidifies her identity as a dedicated Trump loyalist who fiercely fought to reverse his loss in the politically competitive state and potentially elevates her role within the RNC to help him win in November.

“Another example of Democrats’ weaponization of the legal system,” said the spokesman, Steven Cheung. “Christina Bobb is a former Marine Corps officer, who served our nation and the President with distinction. The Democrat platform for 2024: If you can’t beat them, try to throw them in jail.”

An Arizona grand jury on Wednesday indicted seven attorneys or aides affiliated with Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign as well as 11 Arizona Republicans who tried to cast the state’s electoral votes for Trump despite Joe Biden’s victory. All, including Bobb, face felony charges related to their alleged efforts to subvert that result. Other defendants include former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and John Eastman, and campaign aides Boris Ephsteyn and Mike Roman. Trump and several others were named as unindicted co-conspirators.

An initial arraignment for all of the defendants is scheduled for May 21, according to a person familiar with the detail who requested anonymity to disclose the date.

It is the fourth election-interference case brought against Trump allies by state or county prosecutors but the first charges for Bobb, a lawyer and former judge advocate in the Marine Corps who worked as an executive secretary in the Department of Homeland Security while Trump was in office and then launched a second act as a correspondent for the conservative network One America News. She volunteered to help Trump’s legal team after the 2020 election and became an advocate for false claims of election fraud. While working for OAN, she heavily focused on a widely discredited post-election review of more than 2 million ballots cast in Arizona’s most populous county. Bobb later wrote a book, “Stealing Your Vote: The Inside Story of the 2020 Election and What It Means for 2024.”

Bobb has also been pulled into an unrelated federal probe of Trump’s allegedly illegal handling of classified documents after he left the White House. As a custodian of some of those records, Bobb signed a document swearing that she had been told that “a diligent search” was conducted of boxes of records shipped from the White House to Florida when Trump left office.

According to the Arizona indictment, Bobb was an advocate for the elector strategy in key battlegrounds that Trump had lost and encouraged Trump’s electors to meet, cast their votes for Trump and send certified records of their votes to Washington to give Congress the opportunity to count Trump’s electoral votes rather than Biden’s.

Bobb testified to the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol that she heard about the elector plan “shortly before, probably a day or two before” the electors met.

According to a Dec. 12, 2020, email from Bobb to a Trump campaign operative, she participated in a campaign phone call that day in which plans were discussed for contingent electors to meet in seven states that Biden won, including Arizona. The email was published as part of the investigation by the House committee.

“Here are my notes from the call,” Bobb wrote, then listing the status of elector recruitment in each of the seven states.

“Arizona — all 11 electors are prepared to meet for Monday,” she wrote. “Kelli Ward will be there. Access shouldn’t be a problem. AZ law does not demand a specific location, so they can change location if building is closed.”

Bobb communicated with numerous Republicans during that time, in some cases sharing claims of fraud or irregularities that were eventually proved to be false.

“On December 14th, the states of Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia are appointing Democrat electors to cast their vote for Biden,” Bobb wrote to campaign officials on Dec. 13, 2020. “Each one of these states has clearly demonstrable evidence of voter fraud significant enough to change the outcome of the election.”

Bobb also huddled with Giuliani at the campaign’s informal headquarters at the Willard hotel in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, as a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol.

Bobb declined an interview request from The Post.

Bobb moved into her new role at the RNC in March, shortly after the Trump campaign cleaned house at the GOP’s top political committee, firing longtime operatives and encouraging others to leave voluntarily. She is part of a new department within the RNC that includes lawyers and political operatives who are focused exclusively on election integrity. Their mission includes making sure state and local election administrators are following the law — and filing lawsuits where they believe they are not — and recruiting and training tens of thousands of activists to volunteer as poll workers and poll watchers in battleground states.

“To have its own stand-alone permanent department inside the RNC has just been a real game changer,” said Josh Helton, a lawyer and senior adviser on election integrity for the RNC, in a February podcast. Helton did not reply to a request for comment this week. “It gives the department the attention, resources and bandwidth to develop a truly national program.”

Some who have left said they fear that the party’s new election-integrity operation, particularly with Bobb in its midst, will veer toward embracing unfounded conspiracy theories that alienate more moderate Republicans.

“That was a bad hire,” Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, said in a televised interview about Bobb’s new job. “Christina Bobb is part of the fringe element that I don’t think helps to build credibility, not only in our party but in the entire country.”

Stephen K. Bannon, the former senior Trump adviser, said in an interview Thursday that he recommended to the Trump team that people like Bobb and others who have strong connections to the election integrity movement be hired into the RNC because “we need that kind of will to fight — someone who is going to contest elections everywhere.”

With direct access to Trump by phone, Bobb can also serve as a direct link between the RNC and the former president, taking his input and sharing internal strategy with him, Bannon said. But that can cut two ways if Bobb pushes the party’s election integrity operation toward activity that draws legal scrutiny, several GOP operatives said, speaking candidly on condition of anonymity.

Until 2018, the RNC operated under a federal consent decree prohibiting the committee from participating in election-day operations — the result of a 1982 lawsuit from Democrats charging the committee with trying to discourage Black voters from casting ballots through targeted mailings and positioning armed, off-duty officers at polls in minority neighborhoods.

“What we worry about is Christina Bobb going rogue and doing something dumb and us getting thrown back into the consent decree,” one GOP strategist said.

If volunteers or campaign operatives misstep, “Marc Elias and his well-funded allies are going to try to get the consent decree reinstated, and that’s something we’re all concerned about,” said another GOP operative, referring to the Democratic elections lawyer.

Yet another operative, however, said the new team is acutely aware of that risk and plans to train activists carefully to avoid legal trouble. The reason the party is building such a massive election-integrity operation is precisely because the consent decree has expired. No one wants to blow it, the person said.

Last Friday, the party announced that it plans to recruit 100,000 activists across the country to serve as poll watchers, poll workers or attorneys who can watch or participate in the election process — or flag violations that warrant legal action. Already, the party is engaged in more than 75 lawsuits pending against election administrators around the country protesting or defending various election regulations.

The operation is targeting seven major battlegrounds — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — and will add six more as the year progresses: California, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Texas and Virginia.

“President Trump has said that the Republican victory in November needs to be too big to rig,” RNC lawyer Charlie Spies said in a statement at the time of the announcement. “The political team will be working to ensure a huge victory for Republicans at all levels, and RNC legal is committed to making sure that victory can’t be rigged.”

Meanwhile, lots of Trump allies are rallying around Bobb. “It’s a bogus, bulls--- indictment,” said senior Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita. “And Christina Bobb served her country honorably as a United States Marine Corps officer, has served her president and is an expert in dealing with election integrity.”

[Seacoaster(1)]

Interesting article about one of the most important issues of our time:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/30/opin ... ority.html

"On April 8, one day before the Arizona Supreme Court reinstated a ban on abortion from 1864, Donald Trump said the issue of abortion rights should be left to the states and “whatever they decide must be the law of the land.”

Mr. Trump’s statement — and the outcry over the Arizona decision — reinforced how state-level policy on issues like abortion can have major national ramifications. Though states’ rights have long been a rallying cry for conservatives opposed to the federal government’s policies on issues like civil rights and abortion, today the states offer Democrats the best opportunity to protect democracy and expand key rights.

For years Democrats have prioritized federal elections over state ones, but they should look to the states as the most effective avenue for progressive reform, especially since state power is very likely to only increase even as the federal system is stacked against Democrats. The Electoral College and the Senate are biased toward whiter, more rural, and more conservative areas while the Supreme Court is a product of those two skewed institutions.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority, in striking down federal abortion and voting rights, has delegated a tremendous amount of authority to the states and unexpectedly given progressive reformers a new opening to protect such rights at the state level. Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, for example, seven states have voted directly on abortion, and in all seven states — red and blue alike — abortion rights advocates have won.

Michigan is one promising national model for how state-level activists can retake the power of their state governments. This notion would have been laughable a decade ago. After Republicans took control of the state following the 2010 election, Michigan was a bastion of minority rule. Over the course of the decade, Republicans routinely received a minority of votes for the State Legislature but won a majority of seats thanks to extreme partisan gerrymandering that allowed them to “cram ALL of the Dem garbage,” in the words of one G.O.P. staffer, into as few seats as possible.

It was the failure of Michigan’s broken political institutions that led to an unlikely movement for reform. Two days after the 2016 election, dismayed by the Michigan government’s detachment from voters, Katie Fahey, a 27-year-old political novice from the Grand Rapids area, posted on Facebook before leaving for work: “I’d like to take on gerrymandering in Michigan. If you’re interested in doing this as well, please let me know.” She added a smiley face emoji for a millennial touch.

Ms. Fahey founded a group, Voters Not Politicians, to put an initiative on the ballot calling for an independent citizens commission, instead of the State Legislature, to draw new political districts. Within 110 days 428,000 signatures had been collected with the help of more than 4,000 volunteers, many recruited through social media, and no paid staff members; a rare feat in Michigan history.

In 2018, 61 percent of voters approved their ballot initiative. That same year, the state chapters of the A.C.L.U., League of Women Voters and N.A.A.C.P. spearheaded another ballot initiative, which passed by 67 percent of voters, that greatly expanded voter access in the state through policies like automatic and Election Day registration and no-excuse absentee voting.

Four years later, the two coalitions came together again, to pass a third ballot initiative, expanding early voting and combating election subversion after Mr. Trump’s 2020 attempt to overturn the presidential vote in the state; the new law requires election results be certified with no interference from partisan actors. Voters also approved ballot initiatives legalizing recreational marijuana in 2018 and enshrining the right to “reproductive freedom” in the State Constitution in 2022.

These pro-democracy measures transformed Michigan politics: In 2022, Democrats flipped control of the Legislature for the first time in 40 years after the distribution of seats finally followed the popular vote totals under new maps drawn by the citizens redistricting commission. The state set a record for voter turnout in a midterm, with the highest participation rate among young voters in the country. With the help of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, Michigan became a blueprint for how a state can shift from minority rule to majority rule.

Direct democracy, a crucial tool used in Michigan to expand democratic rights, is not a panacea. Only roughly half the states offer ballot initiatives, and even in those that do, lawmakers frequently try to undermine them, by making it harder to get such initiatives on the ballot through onerous signature requirements and other red tape or by raising the bar needed to approve them, from simple majorities to supermajorities.

From 2010 to 2022, state-level Republicans introduced 255 bills seeking to restrict the ballot initiative process. “You put very sexy things like abortion and marijuana on the ballot, and a lot of young people come out and vote,” the former Republican senator Rick Santorum complained in November 2023 after Ohio voters rejected an attempt to undercut the initiative process.

Still, state constitutions were specifically designed to be a majoritarian counterweight to the countermajoritarian features of America’s national political institutions. States like Michigan, Ohio and Arizona that allow citizen-led ballot initiatives offer a pathway toward expanding democracy that is currently foreclosed on the federal level, barring a huge national movement for systemic reform.

State constitutions empower popular majorities in ways that the federal Constitution does not. Unlike the U.S. Constitution, the Michigan Constitution can be amended by voters through a simple majority vote and has been rewritten three times through state constitutional conventions since its drafting in 1835, most recently in 1963. That constitution reflected the values of the civil rights movement, including protections against racial discrimination and safeguarding civil and political rights.

Of course, the fact that state institutions are more responsive to popular majorities than the federal Constitution, which was designed in part to limit democratic participation, means they can swing in both directions. In recent years, some states, like Michigan and Wisconsin, have shifted to the left, while others, such as North Carolina, have moved right. Pitched partisan battles are being waged over previously obscure and relatively apolitical institutions, like state supreme courts, as the stakes have grown.

Republicans currently control state legislatures in 28 states, and while Democrats have little chance of winning in some of the reddest areas, the Michigan model is a potential testing ground for other purple states like Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, where Republicans hold majorities in the legislature despite President Biden carrying the state in 2020.

The protection of key rights at the state level has major implications for 2024. Organizing around important state-level democracy issues — rolling back gerrymandering, expanding ballot access and combating election subversion, passing state constitutional amendments — could also aid Democrats nationally. These efforts would engage more voters and remind them that they have a voice in the political process, and when state governments become more responsive to the will of the people, voters come to see that there’s a real point to voting, and will be more willing to turn out in presidential elections, too.

This can benefit Democratic candidates by boosting turnout among the disaffected liberals who stopped participating in their local elections, convinced that their vote wouldn’t make a difference because Republicans had so rigged the system. Restoring legitimacy to the democratic process is one of the fundamental lessons Michigan has to offer."