Conservative Ideology 2024: NOTHING BUT LIES AND FEARMONGERING

[cradleandshoot]

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... sis-514180

"Rick Hasen isn't getting much sleep these days.

One of the nation’s foremost experts on the laws that hold together democracy in America, Hasen used to be concerned about highly speculative election “nightmare scenarios”: the electrical grid being hacked on Election Day, or the pandemic warping turnout, or absentee ballots totally overwhelming the postal service. But now, what keeps him up at night aren’t fanciful “what if” exercises: It’s what has actually happened over that past nine months, and how it could truly blow up in the next presidential election.

For the first time in American history, the losing candidate refused to concede the election — and rather than dismissing him as a sore loser, a startling number of Americans have followed Donald Trump down his conspiratorial rabbit hole. The safeguards that ensured he left office last January after losing the presidential election may be crumbling: The election officials who certified the counts may no longer be in place next time he falsely claims victory; if Republicans take Congress, a compliant Speaker could easily decide it’s simply not in his interest to let the party’s leader lose.

“You could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal,” says Hasen, a professor of law at UC Irvine.

To understand this fragile moment for American democracy, you could take a 30,000-foot view of a nation at the doorstep of a constitutional crisis, as Robert Kagan recently did for the Washington Post. Or you could simply look around you at what’s happening at the ground level, in broad daylight, visible to the naked eye, as Hasen has been doing. As he sees it, it’s time for us all to wake up.

“I feel like a climate scientist warning about the Earth going up another degree and a half,” Hasen told POLITICO Magazine in an interview this week. “The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts.”

Hasen has ideas about how to preempt some of this — they range from the legal to the political, and are the subject of a major conference that took place Friday at the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center, which he co-directs at UC Irvine. But even as he and other elections experts warn of a three-alarm fire, he’s troubled that Democrats in Washington seem to lack the same sense of urgency and focus.

“I think this should be the number-one priority, and I thought that Democrats wasted months on the For the People Act,” he says. “The Democrats’ answer … is ‘Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.’ There needs to be a plan B to that.”

If the same state and local election officials are in place in 2024 as in 2020 — many of them Republican — Hasen is confident they would be able to stand up to Trump’s pressure to disregard the vote count and declare him the winner. But Hasen isn’t confident they will be in place. Many election officials are fleeing and, he says, are “being replaced by people who do not have allegiance to the integrity of the process.” (We got a taste of that this week, when Texas announced an “audit” of the 2020 election results in four counties some eight-and-a-half hours after Trump publicly called for one despite no serious evidence of problems.)

Or consider how things might’ve played out in January if Congress’s makeup had been different. “What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House?” Hasen asks. “I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now.”

What realistically can be done to secure American democracy at this fragile moment? POLITICO Magazine spoke with Hasen this week to sort through it all. A transcript of that conversation follows, condensed and edited for length and readability.

When we spoke 17 months ago, you outlined a “nightmare scenario” for the 2020 election: That the pandemic would disenfranchise huge numbers of Americans, voting processes would be overwhelmed by absentee ballots, Trump would declare victory based on early returns and then once the absentees were counted and Biden was the victor, he’d claim fraud. I get the sense that the nightmare now is much worse. How did 2020 alter the way that you think through all of this?

In Sept. 2020, I wrote a piece for Slate titled, “I’ve never been more scared about American democracy than I am right now.” A month ago, I was on CNN and said I was “scared shitless” — the anchor badgered me into saying those words on cable TV. But I’m even more frightened now than in those past months because of the revelations that continue to come to light about the concerted effort of Trump to try to alter the election outcome: Over 30 contacts with governors, state legislative officials, those who canvass the votes; pressuring governors, pressuring secretaries of state; having his lawyer pass out talking points to have Mike Pence declare Trump the winner even though he lost the election. I mean, this is not what we expect in a democracy.

In 2020, there was a massive shift to absentee balloting; Donald Trump did denigrate absentee balloting despite using it himself and despite having his own ballot harvested for the primary; he lost the election but claimed he actually won; he made hundreds of false statements calling the election results into question; he’s convinced millions of people that the election has been stolen from him, and he is continuing to not only push the lie that the election was stolen, but also to cause changes in both elected officials and election officials that will make it easier for him to potentially manipulate an election outcome unfairly next time. This is the danger of election subversion.

“You could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal.”

The reason I’m so scared is because you could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal. And I’m afraid that with all of these people being put in place… when you’ve got Josh Mandel in the Senate [from Ohio] and not Rob Portman, I’m really worried.

Let’s dig into that. Traditionally, we talk about voter suppression. But what you’re describing is this whole other thing — not suppression, but subversion. Can you walk through that difference?

So, Georgia recently passed a new voting law. One of the things that law does is it makes it a crime to give water to people waiting in a long line to vote — unless you’re an election official, in which case you can direct people to water. That’s voter suppression — that will deter some people who are stuck in a long line from voting. Election subversion is not about making it harder for people to vote, but about manipulating the outcome of the election so that the loser is declared the winner or put in power.

It’s the kind of thing that I never expected we would worry about in the United States. I never thought that in this country, at this point in our democracy, we would worry about the fairness of the actual vote counting. But we have to worry about that now.

Given that shift from suppression to subversion, do you think the purpose of claims of voter fraud changed during the Trump era?

Sure. In two books of mine, I argue that the main purpose of voter fraud arguments among Republicans was twofold: one was to fundraise and get the Republican base excited about Democrats stealing elections; the other was to delegitimize Democratic victories as somehow illegitimate.

“It provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election.”

In 2020, things shifted. The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier “stolen” election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts. And if [you believe] Trump really won, then you might take whatever steps are necessary to assure that he is not cheated the next time — even if that means cheating yourself. That’s really the new danger that this wave of voter fraud claims presents.

So, at the risk of sounding flippant, when it comes to Trump’s claims of voter fraud, we should take them seriously, but not literally?

Well, I would never take them literally because they are false claims. But we should take his undermining of the election process extremely seriously. Words really matter here.

That seems a little tricky. There’s such a wide range of things that have come from Trump-adjacent figures since the election — including very serious real-world proposals, like the Texas voter law, as well as incredibly outlandish claims, like those from Mike Lindell or the “Italygate” conspiracy theory. Do we have to take even those seriously, or is there a way to taxonomize these things to focus on those that are most meaningful in terms of shaping the possibility of election subversion?

I don’t think we should look at any of these things in isolation. You look at “Italygate” and you laugh — how ridiculous to think of Italian satellites being used to change American election results. Or you look at the Trump tweet where he claimed fraud in a bunch of Democratic cities populated by African Americans — like Milwaukee and Philadelphia, [both] Democratic cities in swing states. You take any of these things in isolation and say, “Oh there’s no proof of that, it’s just cheap talk and doesn’t really matter.” But if you look at the sum total of everything, what you see is a denigration in public confidence in the election process.

One of the things I found stunning as I was writing this paper was that in a recent poll, more Republicans than Democrats — 57 percent, compared to 49 percent — believed that election officials in the near future will steal election results. Republicans are more worried about election subversion than Democrats — whereas there’s no indication of any Democrats plotting like Trump was plotting to try to overturn the results of a democratically conducted election.

The cumulative effect of these kinds of claims on what millions of people believe is tremendously damaging. And it’s hard to see how we get out from under this when no amount of facts could make a difference.

Running a clean election is necessary to prevent claims of fraud from going out of control, but it’s apparently not sufficient. That, I think, is something I really miscalculated in thinking about the dangers of 2020 — and I wrote a whole book about the dangers coming in 2020! I thought if we could hold a fair and clean election, there’d be nothing to point to say, “Look at all of this fraud,” and therefore any such claims would evaporate. What I didn’t understand was that you don’t need even a kernel of truth if you’re going to blatantly lie about a stolen election. I mean, we just saw this New York Times report that when Trump-allied lawyers like Sidney Powell were making claims of voting machine irregularities causing problems with vote counts, the Trump campaign already knew that these claims were bogus, and yet they made them anyway. Truth didn’t matter at all.

In your new paper, you write that the “solutions to these problems are both legal and political.” The law alone is not enough?

The law is only as powerful as people’s willingness to abide by it. If you put people in power who don’t follow the law, then the law is not constraining. We also need political action to bulk up the norms that assure we have fair counting.

The kinds of legal changes I advocate run the gamut: things like ensuring we have paper ballots that can be recounted by hand; conducting official risk-limiting audits to check the validity of a vote count; removing from power those who play essentially a ceremonial role in affirming election results; making sure that there are streamlined processes for bringing bona fide challenges in elections that are actually problematic.

“The law is only as powerful as people’s willingness to abide by it.”

Congress also needs to change the rules for how it counts Electoral College votes — rules that date back to an 1887 law called the Electoral Count Act that is both unclear and subject to manipulation, as we saw from the recent memos that leaked in connection with the [Bob] Woodward [and Robert] Costa book.

There are a lot of legal changes we could make, but people need to be organized for political action as well, because if you’re not willing to abide by the rules, then rules alone are not going to stop someone from stealing an election.

That’s a concrete target. Do you feel that the Electoral Count Act has received enough attention?

No. I don’t think any of this has gotten enough attention! I think this should be the number-one priority, and I thought that Democrats wasted months on the For the People Act when they should have started by looking at this unprecedented January 6 insurrection and what led here, and what could be done on a bipartisan basis to try to make it much harder to subvert election outcomes.

Earlier this year, President Biden gave a speech in Philadelphia where he described the assault on voting rights as the most serious threat to American democracy since the Civil War. But if he believes that, it’s odd that it wouldn’t take higher priority than, say, the bipartisan infrastructure bill — which, important as it may be, isn’t an existential question about democracy in America. Do you think the Democrats are mishandling this?

I feel like a climate scientist warning about the Earth going up another degree and a half, or an epidemiologist warning about what’s going to happen if we don’t take measures to control a new pandemic spreading.

I think the Democrats should have done something differently earlier. I’m heartened now that a part of the Freedom to Vote Act includes provisions against subversion, [though] I’d like to see more provisions in there addressed to subversion. And I think Democrats need to blow up the filibuster, if necessary, to get these things passed before they run a serious risk of losing power in 2022 and having someone like Kevin McCarthy in charge of counting the Electoral College votes — when he didn’t stand up to Trump after January 6th. If you control just the House [during the counting of Electoral Votes], you can make Kevin McCarthy president, at least temporarily. It’s a real danger. And, you know, the Democrats’ answer — at least, the statements that are in the news media — is “Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.” There needs to be a plan B to that.

“The Democrats’ answer … is ‘Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.’ There needs to be a plan B to that.”

It strikes me as a difficult situation: If pro-democracy legislation is seen as passed in a partisan manner, then it’s easier to write off as partisan. Do you see a way around that? Because that would seem to have dire consequences if democracy itself is seen as an inherently partisan exercise.

The way to have avoided it would have been to go to Mitch McConnell — and if he said “no,” go to Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski and Liz Cheney — and say, “sit with me and draft up a bill that would counter election subversion.” That wouldn’t convince all Republicans, but it would have gone a long way.

There was a moment — I mean, go back and look at the speech that McConnell gave after the insurrection and the condemnation of Trump. Trump has only strengthened his hand, and any Republican who might try to suggest legislation that would make it harder to steal elections is going to be attacked by Trump. Already, Mitch McConnell is being attacked by Trump — and he let him get so much of his agenda through. That moment passed, but there was that moment.

So, yes, it’s a danger. But what’s the alternative? Doing nothing?

Some Republicans note that large numbers of Democrats believed that George W. Bush was illegitimately elected. A Gallup poll from July 2001 even showed something around 36 percent of Democrats believed that Bush “stole the election.” How is that any different than what we’re seeing now from Trump supporters?

Well, first of all, the Trump supporters have been manipulated from the top down. Al Gore never claimed a stolen election. Al Gore conceded after the Supreme Court ended the recount, even as some people urged him not to. Democrats never organized to try to manipulate election results illegally [in order] to counter the supposedly stolen election. A poll by CNN recently found that 59 percent of Republicans say that believing in Trump’s claims of a stolen election is what it “means to be a Republican.” I mean, that’s just awful.

The reason Bush v. Gore undermined Democrats’ confidence in the process so much was that the margin of error in the election greatly exceeded the margin of victory of the candidate. When you essentially have a tie in an election, and the tie-breaking rules are political bodies — and I consider the U.S. Supreme Court to be a political body, just like the Florida Supreme Court — you’re going to have some disgruntled people.

But 2020 was not a close election. It was not a close election in the popular vote; it was not a close election in the Electoral College vote. There is no basis in reality for believing that the winner actually lost the election.

So they’re different a number of ways. And you did not see the leader of the party seeking to denigrate the democratic process through false claims of stolen election hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

You’ve noted that it would be constitutional for a state like, say, Georgia, to give the state legislature the power to directly appoint the state’s presidential electors. But you think that’s a political nonstarter because the legislators who sought to do so would face the voters’ wrath. How confident are you that voters would care in large enough numbers for it to matter?

Oh, I think it would be huge if voters were told that they no longer could vote for president. I think that’s why it has not been tried. If you poll them, voters don’t like to lose their ability to vote for judges. We know this. There was an attempt back in the 2000s to get Nevada to switch [from elected judges to appointed judges]. Former Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor even came out of retirement to do robocalls to get rid of the elected judiciary. And it lost. People didn’t want to give up their right to vote for judges; they certainly wouldn’t want to give up their right to vote for the most important office in the world.

Would all of this hand-wringing just be a moot point if we didn’t have the Electoral College?

Putting aside the merits of having the states vote through an Electoral College system as opposed to the popular vote, the problem is not the Electoral College; it’s how we translate the Electoral College votes into actual outcomes. First, you vote in the states, then the vote has to be certified — typically, that’s by the governor, but in some states there’s a whole certification process with room for objection. Then the Electoral College votes have to be mailed to Congress. It’s a very creaky system — which works fine when everyone abides by the norm that the winner is actually going to be the winner. But when people don’t abide by those norms, then there’s all this slack that could create room for chicanery and for manipulating outcomes.

Why do you think voting rights hasn’t been as potent a motivating issue for voters as, say, abortion?

I think it’s becoming an issue. It was an issue in the 2020 election — but was much more of a background issue. But I think it’s going to continue to be an issue as long as Trump and Trumpism are on the scene because Trump himself made voting an election issue.

You talk with a fair number of election officials and write that they’re dropping out of the field in large numbers. What effect does that have on elections?

I think it has two negative effects. First, you’re removing professionals who have experience and can withstand pressure, and new people that come in — even if they’re completely well-intentioned — are more apt to make errors because they’re going to be less experienced and potentially open to pressure. Second, it’s possible that some of those officials are being replaced by people who do not have allegiance to the integrity of the process, and would be willing to steal votes because they believe the false claims that votes were stolen from Trump.

“What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House? I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now.”

In 2020, we saw election officials refuse to bow to pressure campaigns from Trump and his associates after the vote ended. Are you confident they would withstand that pressure again in 2024?

If the same people are in place, I’m confident. But I don’t think the same people are going to be in place — that’s what makes me quite worried. I don’t think the people that showed integrity would lose their integrity, but I’m worried that people who didn’t show integrity might now be in positions of power.

What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House? I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now. I don’t know what we would have.

So with all that being said, how are you sleeping these days?

I’m up at night with it on my mind, even in the off-season. It is the greatest political threat this country faces. I mean, we face other threats. We have climate change. We face public health threats, obviously. But in terms of our political process, nothing comes close."

What was it that FDR said... " we have nothing to fear but fear itself"? I wonder if Rick is scared of roller coasters and has to sleep with a nightlight? It could be he is just being a drama queen? I hope that term does not upset Father Flanagan? It could be misogynistic in nature?

It's easy to just ignore this, keep gardening and walking the dog. But the country faces a real and serious crisis of its democratic institutions, and particularly the efficacy of the vote. It's sad that a former serviceman like you, who feels free to take folks to task for their lack of commitment to the Nation, should just laugh this off with bad jokes.

Mr Coaster I'm a round peg in a square hole on this forum. I read in amazement the back and forth between some posters here on another thread that are bike enthusiasts. It seems like their passion for their hobby allows them to own about every different type of bike that is made. You name it, mountain bikes, gravel bikes, mud bikes, hill bikes bikes with fat tires bikes with skinny tires maybe even some bikes that have a snorkel attachment so you can swim across rivers with bikes that have swim fin attachments. I only own one bike and it is piece of chit. i rescued it from a junk pile years ago and brought it back to life. I don't know how many gears it has or even if they work. The brakes still work for the most part. My point is I will never be the sophisticated, college educated, Lance Armstrong high brow type that most people on this forum are... i get that and have understood it for a very long time. I poked fun at your post because the author was sounding like a moron. What exactly was he suppose to be scared of?? One thing about being a former service member... i earned the right to my opinion. I just think it is silly to opine about things you have no control over. That is not meant as disrespect, that is just my opinion of the point the author was making.

[seacoaster]

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... sis-514180

"Rick Hasen isn't getting much sleep these days.

One of the nation’s foremost experts on the laws that hold together democracy in America, Hasen used to be concerned about highly speculative election “nightmare scenarios”: the electrical grid being hacked on Election Day, or the pandemic warping turnout, or absentee ballots totally overwhelming the postal service. But now, what keeps him up at night aren’t fanciful “what if” exercises: It’s what has actually happened over that past nine months, and how it could truly blow up in the next presidential election.

For the first time in American history, the losing candidate refused to concede the election — and rather than dismissing him as a sore loser, a startling number of Americans have followed Donald Trump down his conspiratorial rabbit hole. The safeguards that ensured he left office last January after losing the presidential election may be crumbling: The election officials who certified the counts may no longer be in place next time he falsely claims victory; if Republicans take Congress, a compliant Speaker could easily decide it’s simply not in his interest to let the party’s leader lose.

“You could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal,” says Hasen, a professor of law at UC Irvine.

To understand this fragile moment for American democracy, you could take a 30,000-foot view of a nation at the doorstep of a constitutional crisis, as Robert Kagan recently did for the Washington Post. Or you could simply look around you at what’s happening at the ground level, in broad daylight, visible to the naked eye, as Hasen has been doing. As he sees it, it’s time for us all to wake up.

“I feel like a climate scientist warning about the Earth going up another degree and a half,” Hasen told POLITICO Magazine in an interview this week. “The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts.”

Hasen has ideas about how to preempt some of this — they range from the legal to the political, and are the subject of a major conference that took place Friday at the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center, which he co-directs at UC Irvine. But even as he and other elections experts warn of a three-alarm fire, he’s troubled that Democrats in Washington seem to lack the same sense of urgency and focus.

“I think this should be the number-one priority, and I thought that Democrats wasted months on the For the People Act,” he says. “The Democrats’ answer … is ‘Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.’ There needs to be a plan B to that.”

If the same state and local election officials are in place in 2024 as in 2020 — many of them Republican — Hasen is confident they would be able to stand up to Trump’s pressure to disregard the vote count and declare him the winner. But Hasen isn’t confident they will be in place. Many election officials are fleeing and, he says, are “being replaced by people who do not have allegiance to the integrity of the process.” (We got a taste of that this week, when Texas announced an “audit” of the 2020 election results in four counties some eight-and-a-half hours after Trump publicly called for one despite no serious evidence of problems.)

Or consider how things might’ve played out in January if Congress’s makeup had been different. “What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House?” Hasen asks. “I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now.”

What realistically can be done to secure American democracy at this fragile moment? POLITICO Magazine spoke with Hasen this week to sort through it all. A transcript of that conversation follows, condensed and edited for length and readability.

When we spoke 17 months ago, you outlined a “nightmare scenario” for the 2020 election: That the pandemic would disenfranchise huge numbers of Americans, voting processes would be overwhelmed by absentee ballots, Trump would declare victory based on early returns and then once the absentees were counted and Biden was the victor, he’d claim fraud. I get the sense that the nightmare now is much worse. How did 2020 alter the way that you think through all of this?

In Sept. 2020, I wrote a piece for Slate titled, “I’ve never been more scared about American democracy than I am right now.” A month ago, I was on CNN and said I was “scared shitless” — the anchor badgered me into saying those words on cable TV. But I’m even more frightened now than in those past months because of the revelations that continue to come to light about the concerted effort of Trump to try to alter the election outcome: Over 30 contacts with governors, state legislative officials, those who canvass the votes; pressuring governors, pressuring secretaries of state; having his lawyer pass out talking points to have Mike Pence declare Trump the winner even though he lost the election. I mean, this is not what we expect in a democracy.

In 2020, there was a massive shift to absentee balloting; Donald Trump did denigrate absentee balloting despite using it himself and despite having his own ballot harvested for the primary; he lost the election but claimed he actually won; he made hundreds of false statements calling the election results into question; he’s convinced millions of people that the election has been stolen from him, and he is continuing to not only push the lie that the election was stolen, but also to cause changes in both elected officials and election officials that will make it easier for him to potentially manipulate an election outcome unfairly next time. This is the danger of election subversion.

“You could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal.”

The reason I’m so scared is because you could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal. And I’m afraid that with all of these people being put in place… when you’ve got Josh Mandel in the Senate [from Ohio] and not Rob Portman, I’m really worried.

Let’s dig into that. Traditionally, we talk about voter suppression. But what you’re describing is this whole other thing — not suppression, but subversion. Can you walk through that difference?

So, Georgia recently passed a new voting law. One of the things that law does is it makes it a crime to give water to people waiting in a long line to vote — unless you’re an election official, in which case you can direct people to water. That’s voter suppression — that will deter some people who are stuck in a long line from voting. Election subversion is not about making it harder for people to vote, but about manipulating the outcome of the election so that the loser is declared the winner or put in power.

It’s the kind of thing that I never expected we would worry about in the United States. I never thought that in this country, at this point in our democracy, we would worry about the fairness of the actual vote counting. But we have to worry about that now.

Given that shift from suppression to subversion, do you think the purpose of claims of voter fraud changed during the Trump era?

Sure. In two books of mine, I argue that the main purpose of voter fraud arguments among Republicans was twofold: one was to fundraise and get the Republican base excited about Democrats stealing elections; the other was to delegitimize Democratic victories as somehow illegitimate.

“It provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election.”

In 2020, things shifted. The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier “stolen” election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts. And if [you believe] Trump really won, then you might take whatever steps are necessary to assure that he is not cheated the next time — even if that means cheating yourself. That’s really the new danger that this wave of voter fraud claims presents.

So, at the risk of sounding flippant, when it comes to Trump’s claims of voter fraud, we should take them seriously, but not literally?

Well, I would never take them literally because they are false claims. But we should take his undermining of the election process extremely seriously. Words really matter here.

That seems a little tricky. There’s such a wide range of things that have come from Trump-adjacent figures since the election — including very serious real-world proposals, like the Texas voter law, as well as incredibly outlandish claims, like those from Mike Lindell or the “Italygate” conspiracy theory. Do we have to take even those seriously, or is there a way to taxonomize these things to focus on those that are most meaningful in terms of shaping the possibility of election subversion?

I don’t think we should look at any of these things in isolation. You look at “Italygate” and you laugh — how ridiculous to think of Italian satellites being used to change American election results. Or you look at the Trump tweet where he claimed fraud in a bunch of Democratic cities populated by African Americans — like Milwaukee and Philadelphia, [both] Democratic cities in swing states. You take any of these things in isolation and say, “Oh there’s no proof of that, it’s just cheap talk and doesn’t really matter.” But if you look at the sum total of everything, what you see is a denigration in public confidence in the election process.

One of the things I found stunning as I was writing this paper was that in a recent poll, more Republicans than Democrats — 57 percent, compared to 49 percent — believed that election officials in the near future will steal election results. Republicans are more worried about election subversion than Democrats — whereas there’s no indication of any Democrats plotting like Trump was plotting to try to overturn the results of a democratically conducted election.

The cumulative effect of these kinds of claims on what millions of people believe is tremendously damaging. And it’s hard to see how we get out from under this when no amount of facts could make a difference.

Running a clean election is necessary to prevent claims of fraud from going out of control, but it’s apparently not sufficient. That, I think, is something I really miscalculated in thinking about the dangers of 2020 — and I wrote a whole book about the dangers coming in 2020! I thought if we could hold a fair and clean election, there’d be nothing to point to say, “Look at all of this fraud,” and therefore any such claims would evaporate. What I didn’t understand was that you don’t need even a kernel of truth if you’re going to blatantly lie about a stolen election. I mean, we just saw this New York Times report that when Trump-allied lawyers like Sidney Powell were making claims of voting machine irregularities causing problems with vote counts, the Trump campaign already knew that these claims were bogus, and yet they made them anyway. Truth didn’t matter at all.

In your new paper, you write that the “solutions to these problems are both legal and political.” The law alone is not enough?

The law is only as powerful as people’s willingness to abide by it. If you put people in power who don’t follow the law, then the law is not constraining. We also need political action to bulk up the norms that assure we have fair counting.

The kinds of legal changes I advocate run the gamut: things like ensuring we have paper ballots that can be recounted by hand; conducting official risk-limiting audits to check the validity of a vote count; removing from power those who play essentially a ceremonial role in affirming election results; making sure that there are streamlined processes for bringing bona fide challenges in elections that are actually problematic.

“The law is only as powerful as people’s willingness to abide by it.”

Congress also needs to change the rules for how it counts Electoral College votes — rules that date back to an 1887 law called the Electoral Count Act that is both unclear and subject to manipulation, as we saw from the recent memos that leaked in connection with the [Bob] Woodward [and Robert] Costa book.

There are a lot of legal changes we could make, but people need to be organized for political action as well, because if you’re not willing to abide by the rules, then rules alone are not going to stop someone from stealing an election.

That’s a concrete target. Do you feel that the Electoral Count Act has received enough attention?

No. I don’t think any of this has gotten enough attention! I think this should be the number-one priority, and I thought that Democrats wasted months on the For the People Act when they should have started by looking at this unprecedented January 6 insurrection and what led here, and what could be done on a bipartisan basis to try to make it much harder to subvert election outcomes.

Earlier this year, President Biden gave a speech in Philadelphia where he described the assault on voting rights as the most serious threat to American democracy since the Civil War. But if he believes that, it’s odd that it wouldn’t take higher priority than, say, the bipartisan infrastructure bill — which, important as it may be, isn’t an existential question about democracy in America. Do you think the Democrats are mishandling this?

I feel like a climate scientist warning about the Earth going up another degree and a half, or an epidemiologist warning about what’s going to happen if we don’t take measures to control a new pandemic spreading.

I think the Democrats should have done something differently earlier. I’m heartened now that a part of the Freedom to Vote Act includes provisions against subversion, [though] I’d like to see more provisions in there addressed to subversion. And I think Democrats need to blow up the filibuster, if necessary, to get these things passed before they run a serious risk of losing power in 2022 and having someone like Kevin McCarthy in charge of counting the Electoral College votes — when he didn’t stand up to Trump after January 6th. If you control just the House [during the counting of Electoral Votes], you can make Kevin McCarthy president, at least temporarily. It’s a real danger. And, you know, the Democrats’ answer — at least, the statements that are in the news media — is “Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.” There needs to be a plan B to that.

“The Democrats’ answer … is ‘Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.’ There needs to be a plan B to that.”

It strikes me as a difficult situation: If pro-democracy legislation is seen as passed in a partisan manner, then it’s easier to write off as partisan. Do you see a way around that? Because that would seem to have dire consequences if democracy itself is seen as an inherently partisan exercise.

The way to have avoided it would have been to go to Mitch McConnell — and if he said “no,” go to Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski and Liz Cheney — and say, “sit with me and draft up a bill that would counter election subversion.” That wouldn’t convince all Republicans, but it would have gone a long way.

There was a moment — I mean, go back and look at the speech that McConnell gave after the insurrection and the condemnation of Trump. Trump has only strengthened his hand, and any Republican who might try to suggest legislation that would make it harder to steal elections is going to be attacked by Trump. Already, Mitch McConnell is being attacked by Trump — and he let him get so much of his agenda through. That moment passed, but there was that moment.

So, yes, it’s a danger. But what’s the alternative? Doing nothing?

Some Republicans note that large numbers of Democrats believed that George W. Bush was illegitimately elected. A Gallup poll from July 2001 even showed something around 36 percent of Democrats believed that Bush “stole the election.” How is that any different than what we’re seeing now from Trump supporters?

Well, first of all, the Trump supporters have been manipulated from the top down. Al Gore never claimed a stolen election. Al Gore conceded after the Supreme Court ended the recount, even as some people urged him not to. Democrats never organized to try to manipulate election results illegally [in order] to counter the supposedly stolen election. A poll by CNN recently found that 59 percent of Republicans say that believing in Trump’s claims of a stolen election is what it “means to be a Republican.” I mean, that’s just awful.

The reason Bush v. Gore undermined Democrats’ confidence in the process so much was that the margin of error in the election greatly exceeded the margin of victory of the candidate. When you essentially have a tie in an election, and the tie-breaking rules are political bodies — and I consider the U.S. Supreme Court to be a political body, just like the Florida Supreme Court — you’re going to have some disgruntled people.

But 2020 was not a close election. It was not a close election in the popular vote; it was not a close election in the Electoral College vote. There is no basis in reality for believing that the winner actually lost the election.

So they’re different a number of ways. And you did not see the leader of the party seeking to denigrate the democratic process through false claims of stolen election hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

You’ve noted that it would be constitutional for a state like, say, Georgia, to give the state legislature the power to directly appoint the state’s presidential electors. But you think that’s a political nonstarter because the legislators who sought to do so would face the voters’ wrath. How confident are you that voters would care in large enough numbers for it to matter?

Oh, I think it would be huge if voters were told that they no longer could vote for president. I think that’s why it has not been tried. If you poll them, voters don’t like to lose their ability to vote for judges. We know this. There was an attempt back in the 2000s to get Nevada to switch [from elected judges to appointed judges]. Former Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor even came out of retirement to do robocalls to get rid of the elected judiciary. And it lost. People didn’t want to give up their right to vote for judges; they certainly wouldn’t want to give up their right to vote for the most important office in the world.

Would all of this hand-wringing just be a moot point if we didn’t have the Electoral College?

Putting aside the merits of having the states vote through an Electoral College system as opposed to the popular vote, the problem is not the Electoral College; it’s how we translate the Electoral College votes into actual outcomes. First, you vote in the states, then the vote has to be certified — typically, that’s by the governor, but in some states there’s a whole certification process with room for objection. Then the Electoral College votes have to be mailed to Congress. It’s a very creaky system — which works fine when everyone abides by the norm that the winner is actually going to be the winner. But when people don’t abide by those norms, then there’s all this slack that could create room for chicanery and for manipulating outcomes.

Why do you think voting rights hasn’t been as potent a motivating issue for voters as, say, abortion?

I think it’s becoming an issue. It was an issue in the 2020 election — but was much more of a background issue. But I think it’s going to continue to be an issue as long as Trump and Trumpism are on the scene because Trump himself made voting an election issue.

You talk with a fair number of election officials and write that they’re dropping out of the field in large numbers. What effect does that have on elections?

I think it has two negative effects. First, you’re removing professionals who have experience and can withstand pressure, and new people that come in — even if they’re completely well-intentioned — are more apt to make errors because they’re going to be less experienced and potentially open to pressure. Second, it’s possible that some of those officials are being replaced by people who do not have allegiance to the integrity of the process, and would be willing to steal votes because they believe the false claims that votes were stolen from Trump.

“What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House? I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now.”

In 2020, we saw election officials refuse to bow to pressure campaigns from Trump and his associates after the vote ended. Are you confident they would withstand that pressure again in 2024?

If the same people are in place, I’m confident. But I don’t think the same people are going to be in place — that’s what makes me quite worried. I don’t think the people that showed integrity would lose their integrity, but I’m worried that people who didn’t show integrity might now be in positions of power.

What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House? I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now. I don’t know what we would have.

So with all that being said, how are you sleeping these days?

I’m up at night with it on my mind, even in the off-season. It is the greatest political threat this country faces. I mean, we face other threats. We have climate change. We face public health threats, obviously. But in terms of our political process, nothing comes close."

What was it that FDR said... " we have nothing to fear but fear itself"? I wonder if Rick is scared of roller coasters and has to sleep with a nightlight? It could be he is just being a drama queen? I hope that term does not upset Father Flanagan? It could be misogynistic in nature?

It's easy to just ignore this, keep gardening and walking the dog. But the country faces a real and serious crisis of its democratic institutions, and particularly the efficacy of the vote. It's sad that a former serviceman like you, who feels free to take folks to task for their lack of commitment to the Nation, should just laugh this off with bad jokes.

Mr Coaster I'm a round peg in a square hole on this forum. I read in amazement the back and forth between some posters here on another thread that are bike enthusiasts. It seems like their passion for their hobby allows them to own about every different type of bike that is made. You name it, mountain bikes, gravel bikes, mud bikes, hill bikes bikes with fat tires bikes with skinny tires maybe even some bikes that have a snorkel attachment so you can swim across rivers with bikes that have swim fin attachments. I only own one bike and it is piece of chit. i rescued it from a junk pile years ago and brought it back to life. I don't know how many gears it has or even if they work. The brakes still work for the most part. My point is I will never be the sophisticated, college educated, Lance Armstrong high brow type that most people on this forum are... i get that and have understood it for a very long time. I poked fun at your post because the author was sounding like a moron. What exactly was he suppose to be scared of?? One thing about being a former service member... i earned the right to my opinion. I just think it is silly to opine about things you have no control over. That is not meant as disrespect, that is just my opinion of the point the author was making.

Your response, above, is a small and quiet requiem for democracy in this country. Are you f*cking out of your mind? Of course you can "do something about it." There is an assault on this basic democratic institution known as the vote, and an assault on the efficacy of elections. Trump was the first President ever, in the long history of this country, to reject a peaceful transfer of power to an election winner. Al Gore's loss to Geoirge Bush was much, much, much closer than the 2020 election, and Gore -- for all of his faults -- had the decency and perspective to understand that the nation needed to be assured that the election had an outcome and some finality. It can happen here...as long as otherwise decent people put up their palms and say "well, I have no control over this" or there's nothing I can do about it. One think about not having served in the military: it doesn't matter to my rights as an American to be confident that the loser in an election, from whatever party or persuasion, will properly and decently concede the loss and move on to being an American.

The author is perhaps the leading election law lawyer in the country. He is a widely respected contributor to the Federalist and many, many other publications. And his views on election laws and electoral institutions are among the most widely respected commentators on election law and national election governance.

https://fedsoc.org/contributors/richard-hasen

The purpose of these pages is, at least a little, to learn about things. You should try it.

[MDlaxfan76]

That would have required him to have actually read it all the way through...and do so with an open mind.

The "I earned my right to have an opinion' through military service was a classic.

[Farfromgeneva]

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... sis-514180

"Rick Hasen isn't getting much sleep these days.

One of the nation’s foremost experts on the laws that hold together democracy in America, Hasen used to be concerned about highly speculative election “nightmare scenarios”: the electrical grid being hacked on Election Day, or the pandemic warping turnout, or absentee ballots totally overwhelming the postal service. But now, what keeps him up at night aren’t fanciful “what if” exercises: It’s what has actually happened over that past nine months, and how it could truly blow up in the next presidential election.

For the first time in American history, the losing candidate refused to concede the election — and rather than dismissing him as a sore loser, a startling number of Americans have followed Donald Trump down his conspiratorial rabbit hole. The safeguards that ensured he left office last January after losing the presidential election may be crumbling: The election officials who certified the counts may no longer be in place next time he falsely claims victory; if Republicans take Congress, a compliant Speaker could easily decide it’s simply not in his interest to let the party’s leader lose.

“You could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal,” says Hasen, a professor of law at UC Irvine.

To understand this fragile moment for American democracy, you could take a 30,000-foot view of a nation at the doorstep of a constitutional crisis, as Robert Kagan recently did for the Washington Post. Or you could simply look around you at what’s happening at the ground level, in broad daylight, visible to the naked eye, as Hasen has been doing. As he sees it, it’s time for us all to wake up.

“I feel like a climate scientist warning about the Earth going up another degree and a half,” Hasen told POLITICO Magazine in an interview this week. “The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts.”

Hasen has ideas about how to preempt some of this — they range from the legal to the political, and are the subject of a major conference that took place Friday at the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center, which he co-directs at UC Irvine. But even as he and other elections experts warn of a three-alarm fire, he’s troubled that Democrats in Washington seem to lack the same sense of urgency and focus.

“I think this should be the number-one priority, and I thought that Democrats wasted months on the For the People Act,” he says. “The Democrats’ answer … is ‘Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.’ There needs to be a plan B to that.”

If the same state and local election officials are in place in 2024 as in 2020 — many of them Republican — Hasen is confident they would be able to stand up to Trump’s pressure to disregard the vote count and declare him the winner. But Hasen isn’t confident they will be in place. Many election officials are fleeing and, he says, are “being replaced by people who do not have allegiance to the integrity of the process.” (We got a taste of that this week, when Texas announced an “audit” of the 2020 election results in four counties some eight-and-a-half hours after Trump publicly called for one despite no serious evidence of problems.)

Or consider how things might’ve played out in January if Congress’s makeup had been different. “What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House?” Hasen asks. “I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now.”

What realistically can be done to secure American democracy at this fragile moment? POLITICO Magazine spoke with Hasen this week to sort through it all. A transcript of that conversation follows, condensed and edited for length and readability.

When we spoke 17 months ago, you outlined a “nightmare scenario” for the 2020 election: That the pandemic would disenfranchise huge numbers of Americans, voting processes would be overwhelmed by absentee ballots, Trump would declare victory based on early returns and then once the absentees were counted and Biden was the victor, he’d claim fraud. I get the sense that the nightmare now is much worse. How did 2020 alter the way that you think through all of this?

In Sept. 2020, I wrote a piece for Slate titled, “I’ve never been more scared about American democracy than I am right now.” A month ago, I was on CNN and said I was “scared shitless” — the anchor badgered me into saying those words on cable TV. But I’m even more frightened now than in those past months because of the revelations that continue to come to light about the concerted effort of Trump to try to alter the election outcome: Over 30 contacts with governors, state legislative officials, those who canvass the votes; pressuring governors, pressuring secretaries of state; having his lawyer pass out talking points to have Mike Pence declare Trump the winner even though he lost the election. I mean, this is not what we expect in a democracy.

In 2020, there was a massive shift to absentee balloting; Donald Trump did denigrate absentee balloting despite using it himself and despite having his own ballot harvested for the primary; he lost the election but claimed he actually won; he made hundreds of false statements calling the election results into question; he’s convinced millions of people that the election has been stolen from him, and he is continuing to not only push the lie that the election was stolen, but also to cause changes in both elected officials and election officials that will make it easier for him to potentially manipulate an election outcome unfairly next time. This is the danger of election subversion.

“You could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal.”

The reason I’m so scared is because you could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal. And I’m afraid that with all of these people being put in place… when you’ve got Josh Mandel in the Senate [from Ohio] and not Rob Portman, I’m really worried.

Let’s dig into that. Traditionally, we talk about voter suppression. But what you’re describing is this whole other thing — not suppression, but subversion. Can you walk through that difference?

So, Georgia recently passed a new voting law. One of the things that law does is it makes it a crime to give water to people waiting in a long line to vote — unless you’re an election official, in which case you can direct people to water. That’s voter suppression — that will deter some people who are stuck in a long line from voting. Election subversion is not about making it harder for people to vote, but about manipulating the outcome of the election so that the loser is declared the winner or put in power.

It’s the kind of thing that I never expected we would worry about in the United States. I never thought that in this country, at this point in our democracy, we would worry about the fairness of the actual vote counting. But we have to worry about that now.

Given that shift from suppression to subversion, do you think the purpose of claims of voter fraud changed during the Trump era?

Sure. In two books of mine, I argue that the main purpose of voter fraud arguments among Republicans was twofold: one was to fundraise and get the Republican base excited about Democrats stealing elections; the other was to delegitimize Democratic victories as somehow illegitimate.

“It provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election.”

In 2020, things shifted. The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier “stolen” election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts. And if [you believe] Trump really won, then you might take whatever steps are necessary to assure that he is not cheated the next time — even if that means cheating yourself. That’s really the new danger that this wave of voter fraud claims presents.

So, at the risk of sounding flippant, when it comes to Trump’s claims of voter fraud, we should take them seriously, but not literally?

Well, I would never take them literally because they are false claims. But we should take his undermining of the election process extremely seriously. Words really matter here.

That seems a little tricky. There’s such a wide range of things that have come from Trump-adjacent figures since the election — including very serious real-world proposals, like the Texas voter law, as well as incredibly outlandish claims, like those from Mike Lindell or the “Italygate” conspiracy theory. Do we have to take even those seriously, or is there a way to taxonomize these things to focus on those that are most meaningful in terms of shaping the possibility of election subversion?

I don’t think we should look at any of these things in isolation. You look at “Italygate” and you laugh — how ridiculous to think of Italian satellites being used to change American election results. Or you look at the Trump tweet where he claimed fraud in a bunch of Democratic cities populated by African Americans — like Milwaukee and Philadelphia, [both] Democratic cities in swing states. You take any of these things in isolation and say, “Oh there’s no proof of that, it’s just cheap talk and doesn’t really matter.” But if you look at the sum total of everything, what you see is a denigration in public confidence in the election process.

One of the things I found stunning as I was writing this paper was that in a recent poll, more Republicans than Democrats — 57 percent, compared to 49 percent — believed that election officials in the near future will steal election results. Republicans are more worried about election subversion than Democrats — whereas there’s no indication of any Democrats plotting like Trump was plotting to try to overturn the results of a democratically conducted election.

The cumulative effect of these kinds of claims on what millions of people believe is tremendously damaging. And it’s hard to see how we get out from under this when no amount of facts could make a difference.

Running a clean election is necessary to prevent claims of fraud from going out of control, but it’s apparently not sufficient. That, I think, is something I really miscalculated in thinking about the dangers of 2020 — and I wrote a whole book about the dangers coming in 2020! I thought if we could hold a fair and clean election, there’d be nothing to point to say, “Look at all of this fraud,” and therefore any such claims would evaporate. What I didn’t understand was that you don’t need even a kernel of truth if you’re going to blatantly lie about a stolen election. I mean, we just saw this New York Times report that when Trump-allied lawyers like Sidney Powell were making claims of voting machine irregularities causing problems with vote counts, the Trump campaign already knew that these claims were bogus, and yet they made them anyway. Truth didn’t matter at all.

In your new paper, you write that the “solutions to these problems are both legal and political.” The law alone is not enough?

The law is only as powerful as people’s willingness to abide by it. If you put people in power who don’t follow the law, then the law is not constraining. We also need political action to bulk up the norms that assure we have fair counting.

The kinds of legal changes I advocate run the gamut: things like ensuring we have paper ballots that can be recounted by hand; conducting official risk-limiting audits to check the validity of a vote count; removing from power those who play essentially a ceremonial role in affirming election results; making sure that there are streamlined processes for bringing bona fide challenges in elections that are actually problematic.

“The law is only as powerful as people’s willingness to abide by it.”

Congress also needs to change the rules for how it counts Electoral College votes — rules that date back to an 1887 law called the Electoral Count Act that is both unclear and subject to manipulation, as we saw from the recent memos that leaked in connection with the [Bob] Woodward [and Robert] Costa book.

There are a lot of legal changes we could make, but people need to be organized for political action as well, because if you’re not willing to abide by the rules, then rules alone are not going to stop someone from stealing an election.

That’s a concrete target. Do you feel that the Electoral Count Act has received enough attention?

No. I don’t think any of this has gotten enough attention! I think this should be the number-one priority, and I thought that Democrats wasted months on the For the People Act when they should have started by looking at this unprecedented January 6 insurrection and what led here, and what could be done on a bipartisan basis to try to make it much harder to subvert election outcomes.

Earlier this year, President Biden gave a speech in Philadelphia where he described the assault on voting rights as the most serious threat to American democracy since the Civil War. But if he believes that, it’s odd that it wouldn’t take higher priority than, say, the bipartisan infrastructure bill — which, important as it may be, isn’t an existential question about democracy in America. Do you think the Democrats are mishandling this?

I feel like a climate scientist warning about the Earth going up another degree and a half, or an epidemiologist warning about what’s going to happen if we don’t take measures to control a new pandemic spreading.

I think the Democrats should have done something differently earlier. I’m heartened now that a part of the Freedom to Vote Act includes provisions against subversion, [though] I’d like to see more provisions in there addressed to subversion. And I think Democrats need to blow up the filibuster, if necessary, to get these things passed before they run a serious risk of losing power in 2022 and having someone like Kevin McCarthy in charge of counting the Electoral College votes — when he didn’t stand up to Trump after January 6th. If you control just the House [during the counting of Electoral Votes], you can make Kevin McCarthy president, at least temporarily. It’s a real danger. And, you know, the Democrats’ answer — at least, the statements that are in the news media — is “Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.” There needs to be a plan B to that.

“The Democrats’ answer … is ‘Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.’ There needs to be a plan B to that.”

It strikes me as a difficult situation: If pro-democracy legislation is seen as passed in a partisan manner, then it’s easier to write off as partisan. Do you see a way around that? Because that would seem to have dire consequences if democracy itself is seen as an inherently partisan exercise.

The way to have avoided it would have been to go to Mitch McConnell — and if he said “no,” go to Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski and Liz Cheney — and say, “sit with me and draft up a bill that would counter election subversion.” That wouldn’t convince all Republicans, but it would have gone a long way.

There was a moment — I mean, go back and look at the speech that McConnell gave after the insurrection and the condemnation of Trump. Trump has only strengthened his hand, and any Republican who might try to suggest legislation that would make it harder to steal elections is going to be attacked by Trump. Already, Mitch McConnell is being attacked by Trump — and he let him get so much of his agenda through. That moment passed, but there was that moment.

So, yes, it’s a danger. But what’s the alternative? Doing nothing?

Some Republicans note that large numbers of Democrats believed that George W. Bush was illegitimately elected. A Gallup poll from July 2001 even showed something around 36 percent of Democrats believed that Bush “stole the election.” How is that any different than what we’re seeing now from Trump supporters?

Well, first of all, the Trump supporters have been manipulated from the top down. Al Gore never claimed a stolen election. Al Gore conceded after the Supreme Court ended the recount, even as some people urged him not to. Democrats never organized to try to manipulate election results illegally [in order] to counter the supposedly stolen election. A poll by CNN recently found that 59 percent of Republicans say that believing in Trump’s claims of a stolen election is what it “means to be a Republican.” I mean, that’s just awful.

The reason Bush v. Gore undermined Democrats’ confidence in the process so much was that the margin of error in the election greatly exceeded the margin of victory of the candidate. When you essentially have a tie in an election, and the tie-breaking rules are political bodies — and I consider the U.S. Supreme Court to be a political body, just like the Florida Supreme Court — you’re going to have some disgruntled people.

But 2020 was not a close election. It was not a close election in the popular vote; it was not a close election in the Electoral College vote. There is no basis in reality for believing that the winner actually lost the election.

So they’re different a number of ways. And you did not see the leader of the party seeking to denigrate the democratic process through false claims of stolen election hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

You’ve noted that it would be constitutional for a state like, say, Georgia, to give the state legislature the power to directly appoint the state’s presidential electors. But you think that’s a political nonstarter because the legislators who sought to do so would face the voters’ wrath. How confident are you that voters would care in large enough numbers for it to matter?

Oh, I think it would be huge if voters were told that they no longer could vote for president. I think that’s why it has not been tried. If you poll them, voters don’t like to lose their ability to vote for judges. We know this. There was an attempt back in the 2000s to get Nevada to switch [from elected judges to appointed judges]. Former Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor even came out of retirement to do robocalls to get rid of the elected judiciary. And it lost. People didn’t want to give up their right to vote for judges; they certainly wouldn’t want to give up their right to vote for the most important office in the world.

Would all of this hand-wringing just be a moot point if we didn’t have the Electoral College?

Putting aside the merits of having the states vote through an Electoral College system as opposed to the popular vote, the problem is not the Electoral College; it’s how we translate the Electoral College votes into actual outcomes. First, you vote in the states, then the vote has to be certified — typically, that’s by the governor, but in some states there’s a whole certification process with room for objection. Then the Electoral College votes have to be mailed to Congress. It’s a very creaky system — which works fine when everyone abides by the norm that the winner is actually going to be the winner. But when people don’t abide by those norms, then there’s all this slack that could create room for chicanery and for manipulating outcomes.

Why do you think voting rights hasn’t been as potent a motivating issue for voters as, say, abortion?

I think it’s becoming an issue. It was an issue in the 2020 election — but was much more of a background issue. But I think it’s going to continue to be an issue as long as Trump and Trumpism are on the scene because Trump himself made voting an election issue.

You talk with a fair number of election officials and write that they’re dropping out of the field in large numbers. What effect does that have on elections?

I think it has two negative effects. First, you’re removing professionals who have experience and can withstand pressure, and new people that come in — even if they’re completely well-intentioned — are more apt to make errors because they’re going to be less experienced and potentially open to pressure. Second, it’s possible that some of those officials are being replaced by people who do not have allegiance to the integrity of the process, and would be willing to steal votes because they believe the false claims that votes were stolen from Trump.

“What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House? I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now.”

In 2020, we saw election officials refuse to bow to pressure campaigns from Trump and his associates after the vote ended. Are you confident they would withstand that pressure again in 2024?

If the same people are in place, I’m confident. But I don’t think the same people are going to be in place — that’s what makes me quite worried. I don’t think the people that showed integrity would lose their integrity, but I’m worried that people who didn’t show integrity might now be in positions of power.

What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House? I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now. I don’t know what we would have.

So with all that being said, how are you sleeping these days?

I’m up at night with it on my mind, even in the off-season. It is the greatest political threat this country faces. I mean, we face other threats. We have climate change. We face public health threats, obviously. But in terms of our political process, nothing comes close."

What was it that FDR said... " we have nothing to fear but fear itself"? I wonder if Rick is scared of roller coasters and has to sleep with a nightlight? It could be he is just being a drama queen? I hope that term does not upset Father Flanagan? It could be misogynistic in nature?

It's easy to just ignore this, keep gardening and walking the dog. But the country faces a real and serious crisis of its democratic institutions, and particularly the efficacy of the vote. It's sad that a former serviceman like you, who feels free to take folks to task for their lack of commitment to the Nation, should just laugh this off with bad jokes.

Mr Coaster I'm a round peg in a square hole on this forum. I read in amazement the back and forth between some posters here on another thread that are bike enthusiasts. It seems like their passion for their hobby allows them to own about every different type of bike that is made. You name it, mountain bikes, gravel bikes, mud bikes, hill bikes bikes with fat tires bikes with skinny tires maybe even some bikes that have a snorkel attachment so you can swim across rivers with bikes that have swim fin attachments. I only own one bike and it is piece of chit. i rescued it from a junk pile years ago and brought it back to life. I don't know how many gears it has or even if they work. The brakes still work for the most part. My point is I will never be the sophisticated, college educated, Lance Armstrong high brow type that most people on this forum are... i get that and have understood it for a very long time. I poked fun at your post because the author was sounding like a moron. What exactly was he suppose to be scared of?? One thing about being a former service member... i earned the right to my opinion. I just think it is silly to opine about things you have no control over. That is not meant as disrespect, that is just my opinion of the point the author was making.

Lance Armstrong
"Say what you want about about the guy, but he figured out how to do drugs for charity!"

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=425807835146976

[cradleandshoot]

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... sis-514180

"Rick Hasen isn't getting much sleep these days.

One of the nation’s foremost experts on the laws that hold together democracy in America, Hasen used to be concerned about highly speculative election “nightmare scenarios”: the electrical grid being hacked on Election Day, or the pandemic warping turnout, or absentee ballots totally overwhelming the postal service. But now, what keeps him up at night aren’t fanciful “what if” exercises: It’s what has actually happened over that past nine months, and how it could truly blow up in the next presidential election.

For the first time in American history, the losing candidate refused to concede the election — and rather than dismissing him as a sore loser, a startling number of Americans have followed Donald Trump down his conspiratorial rabbit hole. The safeguards that ensured he left office last January after losing the presidential election may be crumbling: The election officials who certified the counts may no longer be in place next time he falsely claims victory; if Republicans take Congress, a compliant Speaker could easily decide it’s simply not in his interest to let the party’s leader lose.

“You could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal,” says Hasen, a professor of law at UC Irvine.

To understand this fragile moment for American democracy, you could take a 30,000-foot view of a nation at the doorstep of a constitutional crisis, as Robert Kagan recently did for the Washington Post. Or you could simply look around you at what’s happening at the ground level, in broad daylight, visible to the naked eye, as Hasen has been doing. As he sees it, it’s time for us all to wake up.

“I feel like a climate scientist warning about the Earth going up another degree and a half,” Hasen told POLITICO Magazine in an interview this week. “The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts.”

Hasen has ideas about how to preempt some of this — they range from the legal to the political, and are the subject of a major conference that took place Friday at the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center, which he co-directs at UC Irvine. But even as he and other elections experts warn of a three-alarm fire, he’s troubled that Democrats in Washington seem to lack the same sense of urgency and focus.

“I think this should be the number-one priority, and I thought that Democrats wasted months on the For the People Act,” he says. “The Democrats’ answer … is ‘Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.’ There needs to be a plan B to that.”

If the same state and local election officials are in place in 2024 as in 2020 — many of them Republican — Hasen is confident they would be able to stand up to Trump’s pressure to disregard the vote count and declare him the winner. But Hasen isn’t confident they will be in place. Many election officials are fleeing and, he says, are “being replaced by people who do not have allegiance to the integrity of the process.” (We got a taste of that this week, when Texas announced an “audit” of the 2020 election results in four counties some eight-and-a-half hours after Trump publicly called for one despite no serious evidence of problems.)

Or consider how things might’ve played out in January if Congress’s makeup had been different. “What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House?” Hasen asks. “I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now.”

What realistically can be done to secure American democracy at this fragile moment? POLITICO Magazine spoke with Hasen this week to sort through it all. A transcript of that conversation follows, condensed and edited for length and readability.

When we spoke 17 months ago, you outlined a “nightmare scenario” for the 2020 election: That the pandemic would disenfranchise huge numbers of Americans, voting processes would be overwhelmed by absentee ballots, Trump would declare victory based on early returns and then once the absentees were counted and Biden was the victor, he’d claim fraud. I get the sense that the nightmare now is much worse. How did 2020 alter the way that you think through all of this?

In Sept. 2020, I wrote a piece for Slate titled, “I’ve never been more scared about American democracy than I am right now.” A month ago, I was on CNN and said I was “scared shitless” — the anchor badgered me into saying those words on cable TV. But I’m even more frightened now than in those past months because of the revelations that continue to come to light about the concerted effort of Trump to try to alter the election outcome: Over 30 contacts with governors, state legislative officials, those who canvass the votes; pressuring governors, pressuring secretaries of state; having his lawyer pass out talking points to have Mike Pence declare Trump the winner even though he lost the election. I mean, this is not what we expect in a democracy.

In 2020, there was a massive shift to absentee balloting; Donald Trump did denigrate absentee balloting despite using it himself and despite having his own ballot harvested for the primary; he lost the election but claimed he actually won; he made hundreds of false statements calling the election results into question; he’s convinced millions of people that the election has been stolen from him, and he is continuing to not only push the lie that the election was stolen, but also to cause changes in both elected officials and election officials that will make it easier for him to potentially manipulate an election outcome unfairly next time. This is the danger of election subversion.

“You could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal.”

The reason I’m so scared is because you could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal. And I’m afraid that with all of these people being put in place… when you’ve got Josh Mandel in the Senate [from Ohio] and not Rob Portman, I’m really worried.

Let’s dig into that. Traditionally, we talk about voter suppression. But what you’re describing is this whole other thing — not suppression, but subversion. Can you walk through that difference?

So, Georgia recently passed a new voting law. One of the things that law does is it makes it a crime to give water to people waiting in a long line to vote — unless you’re an election official, in which case you can direct people to water. That’s voter suppression — that will deter some people who are stuck in a long line from voting. Election subversion is not about making it harder for people to vote, but about manipulating the outcome of the election so that the loser is declared the winner or put in power.

It’s the kind of thing that I never expected we would worry about in the United States. I never thought that in this country, at this point in our democracy, we would worry about the fairness of the actual vote counting. But we have to worry about that now.

Given that shift from suppression to subversion, do you think the purpose of claims of voter fraud changed during the Trump era?

Sure. In two books of mine, I argue that the main purpose of voter fraud arguments among Republicans was twofold: one was to fundraise and get the Republican base excited about Democrats stealing elections; the other was to delegitimize Democratic victories as somehow illegitimate.

“It provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election.”

In 2020, things shifted. The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier “stolen” election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts. And if [you believe] Trump really won, then you might take whatever steps are necessary to assure that he is not cheated the next time — even if that means cheating yourself. That’s really the new danger that this wave of voter fraud claims presents.

So, at the risk of sounding flippant, when it comes to Trump’s claims of voter fraud, we should take them seriously, but not literally?

Well, I would never take them literally because they are false claims. But we should take his undermining of the election process extremely seriously. Words really matter here.

That seems a little tricky. There’s such a wide range of things that have come from Trump-adjacent figures since the election — including very serious real-world proposals, like the Texas voter law, as well as incredibly outlandish claims, like those from Mike Lindell or the “Italygate” conspiracy theory. Do we have to take even those seriously, or is there a way to taxonomize these things to focus on those that are most meaningful in terms of shaping the possibility of election subversion?

I don’t think we should look at any of these things in isolation. You look at “Italygate” and you laugh — how ridiculous to think of Italian satellites being used to change American election results. Or you look at the Trump tweet where he claimed fraud in a bunch of Democratic cities populated by African Americans — like Milwaukee and Philadelphia, [both] Democratic cities in swing states. You take any of these things in isolation and say, “Oh there’s no proof of that, it’s just cheap talk and doesn’t really matter.” But if you look at the sum total of everything, what you see is a denigration in public confidence in the election process.

One of the things I found stunning as I was writing this paper was that in a recent poll, more Republicans than Democrats — 57 percent, compared to 49 percent — believed that election officials in the near future will steal election results. Republicans are more worried about election subversion than Democrats — whereas there’s no indication of any Democrats plotting like Trump was plotting to try to overturn the results of a democratically conducted election.

The cumulative effect of these kinds of claims on what millions of people believe is tremendously damaging. And it’s hard to see how we get out from under this when no amount of facts could make a difference.

Running a clean election is necessary to prevent claims of fraud from going out of control, but it’s apparently not sufficient. That, I think, is something I really miscalculated in thinking about the dangers of 2020 — and I wrote a whole book about the dangers coming in 2020! I thought if we could hold a fair and clean election, there’d be nothing to point to say, “Look at all of this fraud,” and therefore any such claims would evaporate. What I didn’t understand was that you don’t need even a kernel of truth if you’re going to blatantly lie about a stolen election. I mean, we just saw this New York Times report that when Trump-allied lawyers like Sidney Powell were making claims of voting machine irregularities causing problems with vote counts, the Trump campaign already knew that these claims were bogus, and yet they made them anyway. Truth didn’t matter at all.

In your new paper, you write that the “solutions to these problems are both legal and political.” The law alone is not enough?

The law is only as powerful as people’s willingness to abide by it. If you put people in power who don’t follow the law, then the law is not constraining. We also need political action to bulk up the norms that assure we have fair counting.

The kinds of legal changes I advocate run the gamut: things like ensuring we have paper ballots that can be recounted by hand; conducting official risk-limiting audits to check the validity of a vote count; removing from power those who play essentially a ceremonial role in affirming election results; making sure that there are streamlined processes for bringing bona fide challenges in elections that are actually problematic.

“The law is only as powerful as people’s willingness to abide by it.”

Congress also needs to change the rules for how it counts Electoral College votes — rules that date back to an 1887 law called the Electoral Count Act that is both unclear and subject to manipulation, as we saw from the recent memos that leaked in connection with the [Bob] Woodward [and Robert] Costa book.

There are a lot of legal changes we could make, but people need to be organized for political action as well, because if you’re not willing to abide by the rules, then rules alone are not going to stop someone from stealing an election.

That’s a concrete target. Do you feel that the Electoral Count Act has received enough attention?

No. I don’t think any of this has gotten enough attention! I think this should be the number-one priority, and I thought that Democrats wasted months on the For the People Act when they should have started by looking at this unprecedented January 6 insurrection and what led here, and what could be done on a bipartisan basis to try to make it much harder to subvert election outcomes.

Earlier this year, President Biden gave a speech in Philadelphia where he described the assault on voting rights as the most serious threat to American democracy since the Civil War. But if he believes that, it’s odd that it wouldn’t take higher priority than, say, the bipartisan infrastructure bill — which, important as it may be, isn’t an existential question about democracy in America. Do you think the Democrats are mishandling this?

I feel like a climate scientist warning about the Earth going up another degree and a half, or an epidemiologist warning about what’s going to happen if we don’t take measures to control a new pandemic spreading.

I think the Democrats should have done something differently earlier. I’m heartened now that a part of the Freedom to Vote Act includes provisions against subversion, [though] I’d like to see more provisions in there addressed to subversion. And I think Democrats need to blow up the filibuster, if necessary, to get these things passed before they run a serious risk of losing power in 2022 and having someone like Kevin McCarthy in charge of counting the Electoral College votes — when he didn’t stand up to Trump after January 6th. If you control just the House [during the counting of Electoral Votes], you can make Kevin McCarthy president, at least temporarily. It’s a real danger. And, you know, the Democrats’ answer — at least, the statements that are in the news media — is “Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.” There needs to be a plan B to that.

“The Democrats’ answer … is ‘Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.’ There needs to be a plan B to that.”

It strikes me as a difficult situation: If pro-democracy legislation is seen as passed in a partisan manner, then it’s easier to write off as partisan. Do you see a way around that? Because that would seem to have dire consequences if democracy itself is seen as an inherently partisan exercise.

The way to have avoided it would have been to go to Mitch McConnell — and if he said “no,” go to Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski and Liz Cheney — and say, “sit with me and draft up a bill that would counter election subversion.” That wouldn’t convince all Republicans, but it would have gone a long way.

There was a moment — I mean, go back and look at the speech that McConnell gave after the insurrection and the condemnation of Trump. Trump has only strengthened his hand, and any Republican who might try to suggest legislation that would make it harder to steal elections is going to be attacked by Trump. Already, Mitch McConnell is being attacked by Trump — and he let him get so much of his agenda through. That moment passed, but there was that moment.

So, yes, it’s a danger. But what’s the alternative? Doing nothing?

Some Republicans note that large numbers of Democrats believed that George W. Bush was illegitimately elected. A Gallup poll from July 2001 even showed something around 36 percent of Democrats believed that Bush “stole the election.” How is that any different than what we’re seeing now from Trump supporters?

Well, first of all, the Trump supporters have been manipulated from the top down. Al Gore never claimed a stolen election. Al Gore conceded after the Supreme Court ended the recount, even as some people urged him not to. Democrats never organized to try to manipulate election results illegally [in order] to counter the supposedly stolen election. A poll by CNN recently found that 59 percent of Republicans say that believing in Trump’s claims of a stolen election is what it “means to be a Republican.” I mean, that’s just awful.

The reason Bush v. Gore undermined Democrats’ confidence in the process so much was that the margin of error in the election greatly exceeded the margin of victory of the candidate. When you essentially have a tie in an election, and the tie-breaking rules are political bodies — and I consider the U.S. Supreme Court to be a political body, just like the Florida Supreme Court — you’re going to have some disgruntled people.

But 2020 was not a close election. It was not a close election in the popular vote; it was not a close election in the Electoral College vote. There is no basis in reality for believing that the winner actually lost the election.

So they’re different a number of ways. And you did not see the leader of the party seeking to denigrate the democratic process through false claims of stolen election hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

You’ve noted that it would be constitutional for a state like, say, Georgia, to give the state legislature the power to directly appoint the state’s presidential electors. But you think that’s a political nonstarter because the legislators who sought to do so would face the voters’ wrath. How confident are you that voters would care in large enough numbers for it to matter?

Oh, I think it would be huge if voters were told that they no longer could vote for president. I think that’s why it has not been tried. If you poll them, voters don’t like to lose their ability to vote for judges. We know this. There was an attempt back in the 2000s to get Nevada to switch [from elected judges to appointed judges]. Former Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor even came out of retirement to do robocalls to get rid of the elected judiciary. And it lost. People didn’t want to give up their right to vote for judges; they certainly wouldn’t want to give up their right to vote for the most important office in the world.

Would all of this hand-wringing just be a moot point if we didn’t have the Electoral College?

Putting aside the merits of having the states vote through an Electoral College system as opposed to the popular vote, the problem is not the Electoral College; it’s how we translate the Electoral College votes into actual outcomes. First, you vote in the states, then the vote has to be certified — typically, that’s by the governor, but in some states there’s a whole certification process with room for objection. Then the Electoral College votes have to be mailed to Congress. It’s a very creaky system — which works fine when everyone abides by the norm that the winner is actually going to be the winner. But when people don’t abide by those norms, then there’s all this slack that could create room for chicanery and for manipulating outcomes.

Why do you think voting rights hasn’t been as potent a motivating issue for voters as, say, abortion?

I think it’s becoming an issue. It was an issue in the 2020 election — but was much more of a background issue. But I think it’s going to continue to be an issue as long as Trump and Trumpism are on the scene because Trump himself made voting an election issue.

You talk with a fair number of election officials and write that they’re dropping out of the field in large numbers. What effect does that have on elections?

I think it has two negative effects. First, you’re removing professionals who have experience and can withstand pressure, and new people that come in — even if they’re completely well-intentioned — are more apt to make errors because they’re going to be less experienced and potentially open to pressure. Second, it’s possible that some of those officials are being replaced by people who do not have allegiance to the integrity of the process, and would be willing to steal votes because they believe the false claims that votes were stolen from Trump.

“What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House? I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now.”

In 2020, we saw election officials refuse to bow to pressure campaigns from Trump and his associates after the vote ended. Are you confident they would withstand that pressure again in 2024?

If the same people are in place, I’m confident. But I don’t think the same people are going to be in place — that’s what makes me quite worried. I don’t think the people that showed integrity would lose their integrity, but I’m worried that people who didn’t show integrity might now be in positions of power.

What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House? I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now. I don’t know what we would have.

So with all that being said, how are you sleeping these days?

I’m up at night with it on my mind, even in the off-season. It is the greatest political threat this country faces. I mean, we face other threats. We have climate change. We face public health threats, obviously. But in terms of our political process, nothing comes close."

What was it that FDR said... " we have nothing to fear but fear itself"? I wonder if Rick is scared of roller coasters and has to sleep with a nightlight? It could be he is just being a drama queen? I hope that term does not upset Father Flanagan? It could be misogynistic in nature?

It's easy to just ignore this, keep gardening and walking the dog. But the country faces a real and serious crisis of its democratic institutions, and particularly the efficacy of the vote. It's sad that a former serviceman like you, who feels free to take folks to task for their lack of commitment to the Nation, should just laugh this off with bad jokes.

Mr Coaster I'm a round peg in a square hole on this forum. I read in amazement the back and forth between some posters here on another thread that are bike enthusiasts. It seems like their passion for their hobby allows them to own about every different type of bike that is made. You name it, mountain bikes, gravel bikes, mud bikes, hill bikes bikes with fat tires bikes with skinny tires maybe even some bikes that have a snorkel attachment so you can swim across rivers with bikes that have swim fin attachments. I only own one bike and it is piece of chit. i rescued it from a junk pile years ago and brought it back to life. I don't know how many gears it has or even if they work. The brakes still work for the most part. My point is I will never be the sophisticated, college educated, Lance Armstrong high brow type that most people on this forum are... i get that and have understood it for a very long time. I poked fun at your post because the author was sounding like a moron. What exactly was he suppose to be scared of?? One thing about being a former service member... i earned the right to my opinion. I just think it is silly to opine about things you have no control over. That is not meant as disrespect, that is just my opinion of the point the author was making.

Lance Armstrong
"Say what you want about about the guy, but he figured out how to do drugs for charity!"

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=425807835146976

There is only one person on the planet who should be justified in wearing spandex clothing... Pat Benatar.. end of conversation.

[cradleandshoot]

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... sis-514180

"Rick Hasen isn't getting much sleep these days.

One of the nation’s foremost experts on the laws that hold together democracy in America, Hasen used to be concerned about highly speculative election “nightmare scenarios”: the electrical grid being hacked on Election Day, or the pandemic warping turnout, or absentee ballots totally overwhelming the postal service. But now, what keeps him up at night aren’t fanciful “what if” exercises: It’s what has actually happened over that past nine months, and how it could truly blow up in the next presidential election.

For the first time in American history, the losing candidate refused to concede the election — and rather than dismissing him as a sore loser, a startling number of Americans have followed Donald Trump down his conspiratorial rabbit hole. The safeguards that ensured he left office last January after losing the presidential election may be crumbling: The election officials who certified the counts may no longer be in place next time he falsely claims victory; if Republicans take Congress, a compliant Speaker could easily decide it’s simply not in his interest to let the party’s leader lose.

“You could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal,” says Hasen, a professor of law at UC Irvine.

To understand this fragile moment for American democracy, you could take a 30,000-foot view of a nation at the doorstep of a constitutional crisis, as Robert Kagan recently did for the Washington Post. Or you could simply look around you at what’s happening at the ground level, in broad daylight, visible to the naked eye, as Hasen has been doing. As he sees it, it’s time for us all to wake up.

“I feel like a climate scientist warning about the Earth going up another degree and a half,” Hasen told POLITICO Magazine in an interview this week. “The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts.”

Hasen has ideas about how to preempt some of this — they range from the legal to the political, and are the subject of a major conference that took place Friday at the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center, which he co-directs at UC Irvine. But even as he and other elections experts warn of a three-alarm fire, he’s troubled that Democrats in Washington seem to lack the same sense of urgency and focus.

“I think this should be the number-one priority, and I thought that Democrats wasted months on the For the People Act,” he says. “The Democrats’ answer … is ‘Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.’ There needs to be a plan B to that.”

If the same state and local election officials are in place in 2024 as in 2020 — many of them Republican — Hasen is confident they would be able to stand up to Trump’s pressure to disregard the vote count and declare him the winner. But Hasen isn’t confident they will be in place. Many election officials are fleeing and, he says, are “being replaced by people who do not have allegiance to the integrity of the process.” (We got a taste of that this week, when Texas announced an “audit” of the 2020 election results in four counties some eight-and-a-half hours after Trump publicly called for one despite no serious evidence of problems.)

Or consider how things might’ve played out in January if Congress’s makeup had been different. “What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House?” Hasen asks. “I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now.”

What realistically can be done to secure American democracy at this fragile moment? POLITICO Magazine spoke with Hasen this week to sort through it all. A transcript of that conversation follows, condensed and edited for length and readability.

When we spoke 17 months ago, you outlined a “nightmare scenario” for the 2020 election: That the pandemic would disenfranchise huge numbers of Americans, voting processes would be overwhelmed by absentee ballots, Trump would declare victory based on early returns and then once the absentees were counted and Biden was the victor, he’d claim fraud. I get the sense that the nightmare now is much worse. How did 2020 alter the way that you think through all of this?

In Sept. 2020, I wrote a piece for Slate titled, “I’ve never been more scared about American democracy than I am right now.” A month ago, I was on CNN and said I was “scared shitless” — the anchor badgered me into saying those words on cable TV. But I’m even more frightened now than in those past months because of the revelations that continue to come to light about the concerted effort of Trump to try to alter the election outcome: Over 30 contacts with governors, state legislative officials, those who canvass the votes; pressuring governors, pressuring secretaries of state; having his lawyer pass out talking points to have Mike Pence declare Trump the winner even though he lost the election. I mean, this is not what we expect in a democracy.

In 2020, there was a massive shift to absentee balloting; Donald Trump did denigrate absentee balloting despite using it himself and despite having his own ballot harvested for the primary; he lost the election but claimed he actually won; he made hundreds of false statements calling the election results into question; he’s convinced millions of people that the election has been stolen from him, and he is continuing to not only push the lie that the election was stolen, but also to cause changes in both elected officials and election officials that will make it easier for him to potentially manipulate an election outcome unfairly next time. This is the danger of election subversion.

“You could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal.”

The reason I’m so scared is because you could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal. And I’m afraid that with all of these people being put in place… when you’ve got Josh Mandel in the Senate [from Ohio] and not Rob Portman, I’m really worried.

Let’s dig into that. Traditionally, we talk about voter suppression. But what you’re describing is this whole other thing — not suppression, but subversion. Can you walk through that difference?

So, Georgia recently passed a new voting law. One of the things that law does is it makes it a crime to give water to people waiting in a long line to vote — unless you’re an election official, in which case you can direct people to water. That’s voter suppression — that will deter some people who are stuck in a long line from voting. Election subversion is not about making it harder for people to vote, but about manipulating the outcome of the election so that the loser is declared the winner or put in power.

It’s the kind of thing that I never expected we would worry about in the United States. I never thought that in this country, at this point in our democracy, we would worry about the fairness of the actual vote counting. But we have to worry about that now.

Given that shift from suppression to subversion, do you think the purpose of claims of voter fraud changed during the Trump era?

Sure. In two books of mine, I argue that the main purpose of voter fraud arguments among Republicans was twofold: one was to fundraise and get the Republican base excited about Democrats stealing elections; the other was to delegitimize Democratic victories as somehow illegitimate.

“It provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election.”

In 2020, things shifted. The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier “stolen” election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts. And if [you believe] Trump really won, then you might take whatever steps are necessary to assure that he is not cheated the next time — even if that means cheating yourself. That’s really the new danger that this wave of voter fraud claims presents.

So, at the risk of sounding flippant, when it comes to Trump’s claims of voter fraud, we should take them seriously, but not literally?

Well, I would never take them literally because they are false claims. But we should take his undermining of the election process extremely seriously. Words really matter here.

That seems a little tricky. There’s such a wide range of things that have come from Trump-adjacent figures since the election — including very serious real-world proposals, like the Texas voter law, as well as incredibly outlandish claims, like those from Mike Lindell or the “Italygate” conspiracy theory. Do we have to take even those seriously, or is there a way to taxonomize these things to focus on those that are most meaningful in terms of shaping the possibility of election subversion?

I don’t think we should look at any of these things in isolation. You look at “Italygate” and you laugh — how ridiculous to think of Italian satellites being used to change American election results. Or you look at the Trump tweet where he claimed fraud in a bunch of Democratic cities populated by African Americans — like Milwaukee and Philadelphia, [both] Democratic cities in swing states. You take any of these things in isolation and say, “Oh there’s no proof of that, it’s just cheap talk and doesn’t really matter.” But if you look at the sum total of everything, what you see is a denigration in public confidence in the election process.

One of the things I found stunning as I was writing this paper was that in a recent poll, more Republicans than Democrats — 57 percent, compared to 49 percent — believed that election officials in the near future will steal election results. Republicans are more worried about election subversion than Democrats — whereas there’s no indication of any Democrats plotting like Trump was plotting to try to overturn the results of a democratically conducted election.

The cumulative effect of these kinds of claims on what millions of people believe is tremendously damaging. And it’s hard to see how we get out from under this when no amount of facts could make a difference.

Running a clean election is necessary to prevent claims of fraud from going out of control, but it’s apparently not sufficient. That, I think, is something I really miscalculated in thinking about the dangers of 2020 — and I wrote a whole book about the dangers coming in 2020! I thought if we could hold a fair and clean election, there’d be nothing to point to say, “Look at all of this fraud,” and therefore any such claims would evaporate. What I didn’t understand was that you don’t need even a kernel of truth if you’re going to blatantly lie about a stolen election. I mean, we just saw this New York Times report that when Trump-allied lawyers like Sidney Powell were making claims of voting machine irregularities causing problems with vote counts, the Trump campaign already knew that these claims were bogus, and yet they made them anyway. Truth didn’t matter at all.

In your new paper, you write that the “solutions to these problems are both legal and political.” The law alone is not enough?

The law is only as powerful as people’s willingness to abide by it. If you put people in power who don’t follow the law, then the law is not constraining. We also need political action to bulk up the norms that assure we have fair counting.

The kinds of legal changes I advocate run the gamut: things like ensuring we have paper ballots that can be recounted by hand; conducting official risk-limiting audits to check the validity of a vote count; removing from power those who play essentially a ceremonial role in affirming election results; making sure that there are streamlined processes for bringing bona fide challenges in elections that are actually problematic.

“The law is only as powerful as people’s willingness to abide by it.”

Congress also needs to change the rules for how it counts Electoral College votes — rules that date back to an 1887 law called the Electoral Count Act that is both unclear and subject to manipulation, as we saw from the recent memos that leaked in connection with the [Bob] Woodward [and Robert] Costa book.

There are a lot of legal changes we could make, but people need to be organized for political action as well, because if you’re not willing to abide by the rules, then rules alone are not going to stop someone from stealing an election.

That’s a concrete target. Do you feel that the Electoral Count Act has received enough attention?

No. I don’t think any of this has gotten enough attention! I think this should be the number-one priority, and I thought that Democrats wasted months on the For the People Act when they should have started by looking at this unprecedented January 6 insurrection and what led here, and what could be done on a bipartisan basis to try to make it much harder to subvert election outcomes.

Earlier this year, President Biden gave a speech in Philadelphia where he described the assault on voting rights as the most serious threat to American democracy since the Civil War. But if he believes that, it’s odd that it wouldn’t take higher priority than, say, the bipartisan infrastructure bill — which, important as it may be, isn’t an existential question about democracy in America. Do you think the Democrats are mishandling this?

I feel like a climate scientist warning about the Earth going up another degree and a half, or an epidemiologist warning about what’s going to happen if we don’t take measures to control a new pandemic spreading.

I think the Democrats should have done something differently earlier. I’m heartened now that a part of the Freedom to Vote Act includes provisions against subversion, [though] I’d like to see more provisions in there addressed to subversion. And I think Democrats need to blow up the filibuster, if necessary, to get these things passed before they run a serious risk of losing power in 2022 and having someone like Kevin McCarthy in charge of counting the Electoral College votes — when he didn’t stand up to Trump after January 6th. If you control just the House [during the counting of Electoral Votes], you can make Kevin McCarthy president, at least temporarily. It’s a real danger. And, you know, the Democrats’ answer — at least, the statements that are in the news media — is “Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.” There needs to be a plan B to that.

“The Democrats’ answer … is ‘Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.’ There needs to be a plan B to that.”

It strikes me as a difficult situation: If pro-democracy legislation is seen as passed in a partisan manner, then it’s easier to write off as partisan. Do you see a way around that? Because that would seem to have dire consequences if democracy itself is seen as an inherently partisan exercise.

The way to have avoided it would have been to go to Mitch McConnell — and if he said “no,” go to Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski and Liz Cheney — and say, “sit with me and draft up a bill that would counter election subversion.” That wouldn’t convince all Republicans, but it would have gone a long way.

There was a moment — I mean, go back and look at the speech that McConnell gave after the insurrection and the condemnation of Trump. Trump has only strengthened his hand, and any Republican who might try to suggest legislation that would make it harder to steal elections is going to be attacked by Trump. Already, Mitch McConnell is being attacked by Trump — and he let him get so much of his agenda through. That moment passed, but there was that moment.

So, yes, it’s a danger. But what’s the alternative? Doing nothing?

Some Republicans note that large numbers of Democrats believed that George W. Bush was illegitimately elected. A Gallup poll from July 2001 even showed something around 36 percent of Democrats believed that Bush “stole the election.” How is that any different than what we’re seeing now from Trump supporters?

Well, first of all, the Trump supporters have been manipulated from the top down. Al Gore never claimed a stolen election. Al Gore conceded after the Supreme Court ended the recount, even as some people urged him not to. Democrats never organized to try to manipulate election results illegally [in order] to counter the supposedly stolen election. A poll by CNN recently found that 59 percent of Republicans say that believing in Trump’s claims of a stolen election is what it “means to be a Republican.” I mean, that’s just awful.

The reason Bush v. Gore undermined Democrats’ confidence in the process so much was that the margin of error in the election greatly exceeded the margin of victory of the candidate. When you essentially have a tie in an election, and the tie-breaking rules are political bodies — and I consider the U.S. Supreme Court to be a political body, just like the Florida Supreme Court — you’re going to have some disgruntled people.

But 2020 was not a close election. It was not a close election in the popular vote; it was not a close election in the Electoral College vote. There is no basis in reality for believing that the winner actually lost the election.

So they’re different a number of ways. And you did not see the leader of the party seeking to denigrate the democratic process through false claims of stolen election hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

You’ve noted that it would be constitutional for a state like, say, Georgia, to give the state legislature the power to directly appoint the state’s presidential electors. But you think that’s a political nonstarter because the legislators who sought to do so would face the voters’ wrath. How confident are you that voters would care in large enough numbers for it to matter?

Oh, I think it would be huge if voters were told that they no longer could vote for president. I think that’s why it has not been tried. If you poll them, voters don’t like to lose their ability to vote for judges. We know this. There was an attempt back in the 2000s to get Nevada to switch [from elected judges to appointed judges]. Former Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor even came out of retirement to do robocalls to get rid of the elected judiciary. And it lost. People didn’t want to give up their right to vote for judges; they certainly wouldn’t want to give up their right to vote for the most important office in the world.

Would all of this hand-wringing just be a moot point if we didn’t have the Electoral College?

Putting aside the merits of having the states vote through an Electoral College system as opposed to the popular vote, the problem is not the Electoral College; it’s how we translate the Electoral College votes into actual outcomes. First, you vote in the states, then the vote has to be certified — typically, that’s by the governor, but in some states there’s a whole certification process with room for objection. Then the Electoral College votes have to be mailed to Congress. It’s a very creaky system — which works fine when everyone abides by the norm that the winner is actually going to be the winner. But when people don’t abide by those norms, then there’s all this slack that could create room for chicanery and for manipulating outcomes.

Why do you think voting rights hasn’t been as potent a motivating issue for voters as, say, abortion?

I think it’s becoming an issue. It was an issue in the 2020 election — but was much more of a background issue. But I think it’s going to continue to be an issue as long as Trump and Trumpism are on the scene because Trump himself made voting an election issue.

You talk with a fair number of election officials and write that they’re dropping out of the field in large numbers. What effect does that have on elections?

I think it has two negative effects. First, you’re removing professionals who have experience and can withstand pressure, and new people that come in — even if they’re completely well-intentioned — are more apt to make errors because they’re going to be less experienced and potentially open to pressure. Second, it’s possible that some of those officials are being replaced by people who do not have allegiance to the integrity of the process, and would be willing to steal votes because they believe the false claims that votes were stolen from Trump.

“What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House? I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now.”

In 2020, we saw election officials refuse to bow to pressure campaigns from Trump and his associates after the vote ended. Are you confident they would withstand that pressure again in 2024?

If the same people are in place, I’m confident. But I don’t think the same people are going to be in place — that’s what makes me quite worried. I don’t think the people that showed integrity would lose their integrity, but I’m worried that people who didn’t show integrity might now be in positions of power.

What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House? I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now. I don’t know what we would have.

So with all that being said, how are you sleeping these days?

I’m up at night with it on my mind, even in the off-season. It is the greatest political threat this country faces. I mean, we face other threats. We have climate change. We face public health threats, obviously. But in terms of our political process, nothing comes close."

What was it that FDR said... " we have nothing to fear but fear itself"? I wonder if Rick is scared of roller coasters and has to sleep with a nightlight? It could be he is just being a drama queen? I hope that term does not upset Father Flanagan? It could be misogynistic in nature?

It's easy to just ignore this, keep gardening and walking the dog. But the country faces a real and serious crisis of its democratic institutions, and particularly the efficacy of the vote. It's sad that a former serviceman like you, who feels free to take folks to task for their lack of commitment to the Nation, should just laugh this off with bad jokes.

Mr Coaster I'm a round peg in a square hole on this forum. I read in amazement the back and forth between some posters here on another thread that are bike enthusiasts. It seems like their passion for their hobby allows them to own about every different type of bike that is made. You name it, mountain bikes, gravel bikes, mud bikes, hill bikes bikes with fat tires bikes with skinny tires maybe even some bikes that have a snorkel attachment so you can swim across rivers with bikes that have swim fin attachments. I only own one bike and it is piece of chit. i rescued it from a junk pile years ago and brought it back to life. I don't know how many gears it has or even if they work. The brakes still work for the most part. My point is I will never be the sophisticated, college educated, Lance Armstrong high brow type that most people on this forum are... i get that and have understood it for a very long time. I poked fun at your post because the author was sounding like a moron. What exactly was he suppose to be scared of?? One thing about being a former service member... i earned the right to my opinion. I just think it is silly to opine about things you have no control over. That is not meant as disrespect, that is just my opinion of the point the author was making.

Your response, above, is a small and quiet requiem for democracy in this country. Are you f*cking out of your mind? Of course you can "do something about it." There is an assault on this basic democratic institution known as the vote, and an assault on the efficacy of elections. Trump was the first President ever, in the long history of this country, to reject a peaceful transfer of power to an election winner. Al Gore's loss to Geoirge Bush was much, much, much closer than the 2020 election, and Gore -- for all of his faults -- had the decency and perspective to understand that the nation needed to be assured that the election had an outcome and some finality. It can happen here...as long as otherwise decent people put up their palms and say "well, I have no control over this" or there's nothing I can do about it. One think about not having served in the military: it doesn't matter to my rights as an American to be confident that the loser in an election, from whatever party or persuasion, will properly and decently concede the loss and move on to being an American.

The author is perhaps the leading election law lawyer in the country. He is a widely respected contributor to the Federalist and many, many other publications. And his views on election laws and electoral institutions are among the most widely respected commentators on election law and national election governance.

https://fedsoc.org/contributors/richard-hasen

The purpose of these pages is, at least a little, to learn about things. You should try it.

There are 50 states that each have their own right to construct their own voting rules. You want to suggest federal guidelines for elections in national elections for all 50 states, I'm all for it. Your a lawyer, let me know how that plays out years from now in the Supreme court? That is where it will wind up.

[Farfromgeneva]

Should’ve listened to the clip.

Maybe this one will be better

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dF7fHo8SRGE

It’s like body wrapping for women

[cradleandshoot]

That would have required him to have actually read it all the way through...and do so with an open mind.

The "I earned my right to have an opinion' through military service was a classic.

Father Flanagan, how are you doing today? You hearing confessions later on? I've been a bad boy. how many Our Fathers and Hail Marys will i get?

[cradleandshoot]

Should’ve listened to the clip.

Maybe this one will be better

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dF7fHo8SRGE

It’s like body wrapping for women

Sorry, but i watch enough biker boys with their spandex shorts riding around here in Rochester. There is the incline on Empire Blvd going west from the mouth of Irondequoit Bay up to the 590 interstate. Never once have i seen a biker riding up that incline with a smile on their face. As a matter of fact it is not uncommon to see a lot of bikers escorting their chariots up the incline on foot. They have all kinds of fancy bikes but lack the intestinal fortitude knowing their lungs may reach the top before they do. I give em credit for trying. Lance Armstrong they are not. None of em are ever going to qualify for the Tour De France.

[MDlaxfan76]

That would have required him to have actually read it all the way through...and do so with an open mind.

The "I earned my right to have an opinion' through military service was a classic.

Father Flanagan, how are you doing today? You hearing confessions later on? I've been a bad boy. how many Our Fathers and Hail Marys will i get?

Take as many as you want.
We Episcopalians do our confessions in a collective way, but you (fallen) Catholics have your own special process.

[MDlaxfan76]

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... sis-514180

"Rick Hasen isn't getting much sleep these days.

One of the nation’s foremost experts on the laws that hold together democracy in America, Hasen used to be concerned about highly speculative election “nightmare scenarios”: the electrical grid being hacked on Election Day, or the pandemic warping turnout, or absentee ballots totally overwhelming the postal service. But now, what keeps him up at night aren’t fanciful “what if” exercises: It’s what has actually happened over that past nine months, and how it could truly blow up in the next presidential election.

For the first time in American history, the losing candidate refused to concede the election — and rather than dismissing him as a sore loser, a startling number of Americans have followed Donald Trump down his conspiratorial rabbit hole. The safeguards that ensured he left office last January after losing the presidential election may be crumbling: The election officials who certified the counts may no longer be in place next time he falsely claims victory; if Republicans take Congress, a compliant Speaker could easily decide it’s simply not in his interest to let the party’s leader lose.

“You could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal,” says Hasen, a professor of law at UC Irvine.

To understand this fragile moment for American democracy, you could take a 30,000-foot view of a nation at the doorstep of a constitutional crisis, as Robert Kagan recently did for the Washington Post. Or you could simply look around you at what’s happening at the ground level, in broad daylight, visible to the naked eye, as Hasen has been doing. As he sees it, it’s time for us all to wake up.

“I feel like a climate scientist warning about the Earth going up another degree and a half,” Hasen told POLITICO Magazine in an interview this week. “The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts.”

Hasen has ideas about how to preempt some of this — they range from the legal to the political, and are the subject of a major conference that took place Friday at the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center, which he co-directs at UC Irvine. But even as he and other elections experts warn of a three-alarm fire, he’s troubled that Democrats in Washington seem to lack the same sense of urgency and focus.

“I think this should be the number-one priority, and I thought that Democrats wasted months on the For the People Act,” he says. “The Democrats’ answer … is ‘Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.’ There needs to be a plan B to that.”

If the same state and local election officials are in place in 2024 as in 2020 — many of them Republican — Hasen is confident they would be able to stand up to Trump’s pressure to disregard the vote count and declare him the winner. But Hasen isn’t confident they will be in place. Many election officials are fleeing and, he says, are “being replaced by people who do not have allegiance to the integrity of the process.” (We got a taste of that this week, when Texas announced an “audit” of the 2020 election results in four counties some eight-and-a-half hours after Trump publicly called for one despite no serious evidence of problems.)

Or consider how things might’ve played out in January if Congress’s makeup had been different. “What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House?” Hasen asks. “I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now.”

What realistically can be done to secure American democracy at this fragile moment? POLITICO Magazine spoke with Hasen this week to sort through it all. A transcript of that conversation follows, condensed and edited for length and readability.

When we spoke 17 months ago, you outlined a “nightmare scenario” for the 2020 election: That the pandemic would disenfranchise huge numbers of Americans, voting processes would be overwhelmed by absentee ballots, Trump would declare victory based on early returns and then once the absentees were counted and Biden was the victor, he’d claim fraud. I get the sense that the nightmare now is much worse. How did 2020 alter the way that you think through all of this?

In Sept. 2020, I wrote a piece for Slate titled, “I’ve never been more scared about American democracy than I am right now.” A month ago, I was on CNN and said I was “scared shitless” — the anchor badgered me into saying those words on cable TV. But I’m even more frightened now than in those past months because of the revelations that continue to come to light about the concerted effort of Trump to try to alter the election outcome: Over 30 contacts with governors, state legislative officials, those who canvass the votes; pressuring governors, pressuring secretaries of state; having his lawyer pass out talking points to have Mike Pence declare Trump the winner even though he lost the election. I mean, this is not what we expect in a democracy.

In 2020, there was a massive shift to absentee balloting; Donald Trump did denigrate absentee balloting despite using it himself and despite having his own ballot harvested for the primary; he lost the election but claimed he actually won; he made hundreds of false statements calling the election results into question; he’s convinced millions of people that the election has been stolen from him, and he is continuing to not only push the lie that the election was stolen, but also to cause changes in both elected officials and election officials that will make it easier for him to potentially manipulate an election outcome unfairly next time. This is the danger of election subversion.

“You could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal.”

The reason I’m so scared is because you could look at 2020 as the nadir of American democratic processes, or you could look at it as a dress rehearsal. And I’m afraid that with all of these people being put in place… when you’ve got Josh Mandel in the Senate [from Ohio] and not Rob Portman, I’m really worried.

Let’s dig into that. Traditionally, we talk about voter suppression. But what you’re describing is this whole other thing — not suppression, but subversion. Can you walk through that difference?

So, Georgia recently passed a new voting law. One of the things that law does is it makes it a crime to give water to people waiting in a long line to vote — unless you’re an election official, in which case you can direct people to water. That’s voter suppression — that will deter some people who are stuck in a long line from voting. Election subversion is not about making it harder for people to vote, but about manipulating the outcome of the election so that the loser is declared the winner or put in power.

It’s the kind of thing that I never expected we would worry about in the United States. I never thought that in this country, at this point in our democracy, we would worry about the fairness of the actual vote counting. But we have to worry about that now.

Given that shift from suppression to subversion, do you think the purpose of claims of voter fraud changed during the Trump era?

Sure. In two books of mine, I argue that the main purpose of voter fraud arguments among Republicans was twofold: one was to fundraise and get the Republican base excited about Democrats stealing elections; the other was to delegitimize Democratic victories as somehow illegitimate.

“It provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier ‘stolen’ election.”

In 2020, things shifted. The rhetoric is so overheated that I think it provides the basis for millions of people to accept an actual stolen election as payback for the falsely claimed earlier “stolen” election. People are going to be more willing to cheat if they think they’ve been cheated out of their just desserts. And if [you believe] Trump really won, then you might take whatever steps are necessary to assure that he is not cheated the next time — even if that means cheating yourself. That’s really the new danger that this wave of voter fraud claims presents.

So, at the risk of sounding flippant, when it comes to Trump’s claims of voter fraud, we should take them seriously, but not literally?

Well, I would never take them literally because they are false claims. But we should take his undermining of the election process extremely seriously. Words really matter here.

That seems a little tricky. There’s such a wide range of things that have come from Trump-adjacent figures since the election — including very serious real-world proposals, like the Texas voter law, as well as incredibly outlandish claims, like those from Mike Lindell or the “Italygate” conspiracy theory. Do we have to take even those seriously, or is there a way to taxonomize these things to focus on those that are most meaningful in terms of shaping the possibility of election subversion?

I don’t think we should look at any of these things in isolation. You look at “Italygate” and you laugh — how ridiculous to think of Italian satellites being used to change American election results. Or you look at the Trump tweet where he claimed fraud in a bunch of Democratic cities populated by African Americans — like Milwaukee and Philadelphia, [both] Democratic cities in swing states. You take any of these things in isolation and say, “Oh there’s no proof of that, it’s just cheap talk and doesn’t really matter.” But if you look at the sum total of everything, what you see is a denigration in public confidence in the election process.

One of the things I found stunning as I was writing this paper was that in a recent poll, more Republicans than Democrats — 57 percent, compared to 49 percent — believed that election officials in the near future will steal election results. Republicans are more worried about election subversion than Democrats — whereas there’s no indication of any Democrats plotting like Trump was plotting to try to overturn the results of a democratically conducted election.

The cumulative effect of these kinds of claims on what millions of people believe is tremendously damaging. And it’s hard to see how we get out from under this when no amount of facts could make a difference.

Running a clean election is necessary to prevent claims of fraud from going out of control, but it’s apparently not sufficient. That, I think, is something I really miscalculated in thinking about the dangers of 2020 — and I wrote a whole book about the dangers coming in 2020! I thought if we could hold a fair and clean election, there’d be nothing to point to say, “Look at all of this fraud,” and therefore any such claims would evaporate. What I didn’t understand was that you don’t need even a kernel of truth if you’re going to blatantly lie about a stolen election. I mean, we just saw this New York Times report that when Trump-allied lawyers like Sidney Powell were making claims of voting machine irregularities causing problems with vote counts, the Trump campaign already knew that these claims were bogus, and yet they made them anyway. Truth didn’t matter at all.

In your new paper, you write that the “solutions to these problems are both legal and political.” The law alone is not enough?

The law is only as powerful as people’s willingness to abide by it. If you put people in power who don’t follow the law, then the law is not constraining. We also need political action to bulk up the norms that assure we have fair counting.

The kinds of legal changes I advocate run the gamut: things like ensuring we have paper ballots that can be recounted by hand; conducting official risk-limiting audits to check the validity of a vote count; removing from power those who play essentially a ceremonial role in affirming election results; making sure that there are streamlined processes for bringing bona fide challenges in elections that are actually problematic.

“The law is only as powerful as people’s willingness to abide by it.”

Congress also needs to change the rules for how it counts Electoral College votes — rules that date back to an 1887 law called the Electoral Count Act that is both unclear and subject to manipulation, as we saw from the recent memos that leaked in connection with the [Bob] Woodward [and Robert] Costa book.

There are a lot of legal changes we could make, but people need to be organized for political action as well, because if you’re not willing to abide by the rules, then rules alone are not going to stop someone from stealing an election.

That’s a concrete target. Do you feel that the Electoral Count Act has received enough attention?

No. I don’t think any of this has gotten enough attention! I think this should be the number-one priority, and I thought that Democrats wasted months on the For the People Act when they should have started by looking at this unprecedented January 6 insurrection and what led here, and what could be done on a bipartisan basis to try to make it much harder to subvert election outcomes.

Earlier this year, President Biden gave a speech in Philadelphia where he described the assault on voting rights as the most serious threat to American democracy since the Civil War. But if he believes that, it’s odd that it wouldn’t take higher priority than, say, the bipartisan infrastructure bill — which, important as it may be, isn’t an existential question about democracy in America. Do you think the Democrats are mishandling this?

I feel like a climate scientist warning about the Earth going up another degree and a half, or an epidemiologist warning about what’s going to happen if we don’t take measures to control a new pandemic spreading.

I think the Democrats should have done something differently earlier. I’m heartened now that a part of the Freedom to Vote Act includes provisions against subversion, [though] I’d like to see more provisions in there addressed to subversion. And I think Democrats need to blow up the filibuster, if necessary, to get these things passed before they run a serious risk of losing power in 2022 and having someone like Kevin McCarthy in charge of counting the Electoral College votes — when he didn’t stand up to Trump after January 6th. If you control just the House [during the counting of Electoral Votes], you can make Kevin McCarthy president, at least temporarily. It’s a real danger. And, you know, the Democrats’ answer — at least, the statements that are in the news media — is “Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.” There needs to be a plan B to that.

“The Democrats’ answer … is ‘Well, the Democrats just have to win elections.’ There needs to be a plan B to that.”

It strikes me as a difficult situation: If pro-democracy legislation is seen as passed in a partisan manner, then it’s easier to write off as partisan. Do you see a way around that? Because that would seem to have dire consequences if democracy itself is seen as an inherently partisan exercise.

The way to have avoided it would have been to go to Mitch McConnell — and if he said “no,” go to Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski and Liz Cheney — and say, “sit with me and draft up a bill that would counter election subversion.” That wouldn’t convince all Republicans, but it would have gone a long way.

There was a moment — I mean, go back and look at the speech that McConnell gave after the insurrection and the condemnation of Trump. Trump has only strengthened his hand, and any Republican who might try to suggest legislation that would make it harder to steal elections is going to be attacked by Trump. Already, Mitch McConnell is being attacked by Trump — and he let him get so much of his agenda through. That moment passed, but there was that moment.

So, yes, it’s a danger. But what’s the alternative? Doing nothing?

Some Republicans note that large numbers of Democrats believed that George W. Bush was illegitimately elected. A Gallup poll from July 2001 even showed something around 36 percent of Democrats believed that Bush “stole the election.” How is that any different than what we’re seeing now from Trump supporters?

Well, first of all, the Trump supporters have been manipulated from the top down. Al Gore never claimed a stolen election. Al Gore conceded after the Supreme Court ended the recount, even as some people urged him not to. Democrats never organized to try to manipulate election results illegally [in order] to counter the supposedly stolen election. A poll by CNN recently found that 59 percent of Republicans say that believing in Trump’s claims of a stolen election is what it “means to be a Republican.” I mean, that’s just awful.

The reason Bush v. Gore undermined Democrats’ confidence in the process so much was that the margin of error in the election greatly exceeded the margin of victory of the candidate. When you essentially have a tie in an election, and the tie-breaking rules are political bodies — and I consider the U.S. Supreme Court to be a political body, just like the Florida Supreme Court — you’re going to have some disgruntled people.

But 2020 was not a close election. It was not a close election in the popular vote; it was not a close election in the Electoral College vote. There is no basis in reality for believing that the winner actually lost the election.

So they’re different a number of ways. And you did not see the leader of the party seeking to denigrate the democratic process through false claims of stolen election hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

You’ve noted that it would be constitutional for a state like, say, Georgia, to give the state legislature the power to directly appoint the state’s presidential electors. But you think that’s a political nonstarter because the legislators who sought to do so would face the voters’ wrath. How confident are you that voters would care in large enough numbers for it to matter?

Oh, I think it would be huge if voters were told that they no longer could vote for president. I think that’s why it has not been tried. If you poll them, voters don’t like to lose their ability to vote for judges. We know this. There was an attempt back in the 2000s to get Nevada to switch [from elected judges to appointed judges]. Former Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor even came out of retirement to do robocalls to get rid of the elected judiciary. And it lost. People didn’t want to give up their right to vote for judges; they certainly wouldn’t want to give up their right to vote for the most important office in the world.

Would all of this hand-wringing just be a moot point if we didn’t have the Electoral College?

Putting aside the merits of having the states vote through an Electoral College system as opposed to the popular vote, the problem is not the Electoral College; it’s how we translate the Electoral College votes into actual outcomes. First, you vote in the states, then the vote has to be certified — typically, that’s by the governor, but in some states there’s a whole certification process with room for objection. Then the Electoral College votes have to be mailed to Congress. It’s a very creaky system — which works fine when everyone abides by the norm that the winner is actually going to be the winner. But when people don’t abide by those norms, then there’s all this slack that could create room for chicanery and for manipulating outcomes.

Why do you think voting rights hasn’t been as potent a motivating issue for voters as, say, abortion?

I think it’s becoming an issue. It was an issue in the 2020 election — but was much more of a background issue. But I think it’s going to continue to be an issue as long as Trump and Trumpism are on the scene because Trump himself made voting an election issue.

You talk with a fair number of election officials and write that they’re dropping out of the field in large numbers. What effect does that have on elections?

I think it has two negative effects. First, you’re removing professionals who have experience and can withstand pressure, and new people that come in — even if they’re completely well-intentioned — are more apt to make errors because they’re going to be less experienced and potentially open to pressure. Second, it’s possible that some of those officials are being replaced by people who do not have allegiance to the integrity of the process, and would be willing to steal votes because they believe the false claims that votes were stolen from Trump.

“What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House? I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now.”

In 2020, we saw election officials refuse to bow to pressure campaigns from Trump and his associates after the vote ended. Are you confident they would withstand that pressure again in 2024?

If the same people are in place, I’m confident. But I don’t think the same people are going to be in place — that’s what makes me quite worried. I don’t think the people that showed integrity would lose their integrity, but I’m worried that people who didn’t show integrity might now be in positions of power.

What would have happened if the election was exactly the same, except Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the House? I don’t know that we’d have a President Biden right now. I don’t know what we would have.

So with all that being said, how are you sleeping these days?

I’m up at night with it on my mind, even in the off-season. It is the greatest political threat this country faces. I mean, we face other threats. We have climate change. We face public health threats, obviously. But in terms of our political process, nothing comes close."

What was it that FDR said... " we have nothing to fear but fear itself"? I wonder if Rick is scared of roller coasters and has to sleep with a nightlight? It could be he is just being a drama queen? I hope that term does not upset Father Flanagan? It could be misogynistic in nature?

It's easy to just ignore this, keep gardening and walking the dog. But the country faces a real and serious crisis of its democratic institutions, and particularly the efficacy of the vote. It's sad that a former serviceman like you, who feels free to take folks to task for their lack of commitment to the Nation, should just laugh this off with bad jokes.

Mr Coaster I'm a round peg in a square hole on this forum. I read in amazement the back and forth between some posters here on another thread that are bike enthusiasts. It seems like their passion for their hobby allows them to own about every different type of bike that is made. You name it, mountain bikes, gravel bikes, mud bikes, hill bikes bikes with fat tires bikes with skinny tires maybe even some bikes that have a snorkel attachment so you can swim across rivers with bikes that have swim fin attachments. I only own one bike and it is piece of chit. i rescued it from a junk pile years ago and brought it back to life. I don't know how many gears it has or even if they work. The brakes still work for the most part. My point is I will never be the sophisticated, college educated, Lance Armstrong high brow type that most people on this forum are... i get that and have understood it for a very long time. I poked fun at your post because the author was sounding like a moron. What exactly was he suppose to be scared of?? One thing about being a former service member... i earned the right to my opinion. I just think it is silly to opine about things you have no control over. That is not meant as disrespect, that is just my opinion of the point the author was making.

Your response, above, is a small and quiet requiem for democracy in this country. Are you f*cking out of your mind? Of course you can "do something about it." There is an assault on this basic democratic institution known as the vote, and an assault on the efficacy of elections. Trump was the first President ever, in the long history of this country, to reject a peaceful transfer of power to an election winner. Al Gore's loss to Geoirge Bush was much, much, much closer than the 2020 election, and Gore -- for all of his faults -- had the decency and perspective to understand that the nation needed to be assured that the election had an outcome and some finality. It can happen here...as long as otherwise decent people put up their palms and say "well, I have no control over this" or there's nothing I can do about it. One think about not having served in the military: it doesn't matter to my rights as an American to be confident that the loser in an election, from whatever party or persuasion, will properly and decently concede the loss and move on to being an American.

The author is perhaps the leading election law lawyer in the country. He is a widely respected contributor to the Federalist and many, many other publications. And his views on election laws and electoral institutions are among the most widely respected commentators on election law and national election governance.

https://fedsoc.org/contributors/richard-hasen

The purpose of these pages is, at least a little, to learn about things. You should try it.

There are 50 states that each have their own right to construct their own voting rules. You want to suggest federal guidelines for elections in national elections for all 50 states, I'm all for it. Your a lawyer, let me know how that plays out years from now in the Supreme court? That is where it will wind up.

We've had national voting guidelines, restriction on discrimination, since 1965.
SCOTUS made a tragic error in assuming that some of those restrictions were no longer necessary, but yes, federal legislation can indeed set a floor for effective and fair election processes.

[jhu72]

Master clown Mike Lindell entertains the citizens of Idaho.

[dislaxxic]

The GOP Doesn’t Care That You Hate It

In the days and weeks after Texas’ controversial S.B. 8—the bounty scheme that has effectively halted providers from performing constitutionally protected abortions in the state—went into effect, a raft of articles sprang up suggesting the law would surely backfire. David Frum warned in the Atlantic that Texas Republicans had widely miscalculated constituents’ desires and that “anti-abortion-rights politicians are about to feel the shock of their political lives.” Texas, we’re told, is going to galvanize an electoral backlash; S.B. 8 may trigger a “fight” instead of “flight” response in Texans. The Wall Street Journal editorialized that the law was a huge misfire, while Olga Khazan traveled to Texas to report, persuasively, that even Texans who strongly oppose abortion hate this particular law. Opinion polling similarly suggests that passing a law so patently outside any mainstream view—56 percent of pro-lifers in Texas believe in exceptions for rape and incest and maternal life—will provoke an electoral backlash.

Here is where these observers go astray. As Frum correctly observes, the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature is well aware that its actions are not popular. That’s why it is already passing election suppression measures to hedge against the possibility that some voters will be put off by radical new legislation. But it’s even more than that: State legislatures are beginning to govern as though majorities of the electorate either cannot vote or won’t even bother. This phenomenon is partly attributable to dozens of recent voter suppression measures inspired by the Big Lie, which limit Americans’ ability to vote their own representatives out of office. But it also springs from the fact that many Republicans believe they no longer have to worry about popular opinion because an increasing number of GOP lawmakers are convinced they can just set aside election results they dislike. It’s why Texas last week ordered an Arizona-style “audit” of the 2020 election results in four counties and why Gov. Greg Abbott won’t countenance a rape exception to S.B. 8. They no longer think they’ll have to answer to the entire public, ever. That’s the frightening idea that lurks under the flurry of new voting laws. And it has gained so much traction, so quickly, that most of us still struggle to wrap our heads around it.

What federal legislation could Dems possibly conceive (and actually pass) that can combat this insidious assault on American Democracy?

...and, do they realize that if the Dems throw their hands up and just decide to fight on this same field, that the whole thing may boomerang back on them bigly??

..

[seacoaster]

Check this out and let me know if Marsha Blackburn is the stupidest person ever to hold a Senate seat. Just remarkable, and Bartiromo and her "listeners" just eat it up:

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1444674716644646915

Do Republicans in Congress ever offer anything other than "no" and "socialists!!"?

[youthathletics]

Nope....they are all just tree hugging, crying room, pu&&hat wearing, quad-gender, handout wantin', skinny jean wearin' sissy babies,

[seacoaster]

Nope....they are all just tree hugging, crying room, pu&&hat wearing, quad-gender, handout wantin', skinny jean wearin' sissy babies,

Quad-gender? Sounds complicated.

[jhu72]

Check this out and let me know if Marsha Blackburn is the stupidest person ever to hold a Senate seat. Just remarkable, and Bartiromo and her "listeners" just eat it up:

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1444674716644646915

Do Republicans in Congress ever offer anything other than "no" and "socialists!!"?

... Blackburn was a bad joke a total embarrassment when the republican party was not totally crazy. Today, she can't hold a candle to to the average office holding republican. What can you say when you have state representatives like Ken Wyler of New Hampshire claiming that COVID-19 vaccines contain tentacled creatures that enter the human body to harm it.

It is long past time to start a new thread. There is no equivalence, never has been between Conservatives and Republicans. Republicans today, office holders and rank and file alike are for the largest part pathetic mindless children not to be taken seriously in any regard other than their desire to destroy American Democracy. They are an embarrassment to human kind.

[seacoaster]

Interesting (warning: lots of words, some big):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine ... table-high

"n Wyoming, even Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid want to give Liz Cheney the boot. On a recent evening, they’re out committing mayhem in downtown Cody as part of a tourist attraction, the “Wild Bunch Gunfight” show. The gunfighters play cards, drink whiskey, rob a bank and take on the law. The script of their show is tuned to the political pitch of the Cowboy State, where 70 percent of voters chose to reelect Donald Trump, making it the Trumpiest state in the nation. At one point, when Sundance’s spirit flags, Butch scolds him: “I swear you give up your guns faster than somebody from California! … Haven’t you heard of BLM?” Sundance replies: "Butch’s Life Matters!”

Afterward, still in his Butch Cassidy costume, Bob Ferguson is relaxing on the porch of the Irma Hotel, a frontier landmark founded by Buffalo Bill Cody. I ask him about Cheney, 55, elder daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney and Wyoming’s lone representative to Congress. She’s been locked in a high-stakes political gunfight with Trump ever since she voted to impeach him for his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. “It’s kind of like a line in the sand was drawn,” says Ferguson, who voted for Cheney in 2020 but now sounds viscerally offended by her. “She hasn’t just turned on Donald Trump — she has turned on Donald Trump’s supporters. … She has insulted constituents in a very conservative state, called us insurrectionists. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Paul Lanchbury (Sundance) saunters over, spurs jangling. “She’s a puppet,” he practically spits. “Hell, she wants to be president.”

Cheney has insisted that her sole focus is serving the people of Wyoming and protecting the democracy from Trumpism, not angling to ascend to the White House as potentially the moral leader of a post-Trump GOP. But there’s no question that her showdown with Trump has assumed dimensions far beyond a sleepy midterm reelection campaign in the country’s least-populated state.

Since entering the House in 2017, Cheney has never had a close primary or general election. She was embraced by the Republican establishment in D.C., and quickly rose to the No. 3 position of leadership in the GOP caucus, giving Wyoming outsize clout for such a small population. She was reelected in November with nearly 69 percent of the vote.

Her problems began when she cast doubt on Trump’s false claims that the election had been stolen. Cheney circulated a 21-page white paper highlighting the judicial decisions striking down fraud claims by Trump’s allies, and describing why the Constitution doesn’t allow Congress or the vice president to overrule certified state electoral votes.

On Jan. 6, Trump called out Cheney by name during his speech on the Ellipse. She was on the House floor when rioters broke into the Capitol. When leading Trump advocate Rep. Jim Jordan from Ohio offered to help her from the aisle, she later recalled smacking his hand away and telling him, “Get away from me. You f---ing did this,” according to the book “I Alone Can Fix It” by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker.

Cheney went on to vote for Trump’s second impeachment in January (she had voted against the first impeachment, in 2019). She was ejected from the House leadership in May, but has since doubled and tripled down on her anti-Trump stance, taking a key role on the Democratic-led committee to investigate Jan. 6 and firing volley after gleeful volley at the former president. She tweeted in August that Trump “continues to use the same type of language he knows provoked violence in the past.” Five days later, she told the Commonwealth Club public affairs forum in San Francisco that Trump “continues to be an ongoing, clear and present danger to this democracy.”

Bob Ferguson, who acts in the “Wild Bunch Gunfight” show in Cody. He voted for Liz Cheney in 2020 but now says: “She has insulted constituents in a very conservative state, called us insurrectionists. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Meanwhile, in the months after the impeachment, a hodgepodge of seven state legislators, activists and novices came gunning for Cheney with primary bids. Such an early start to a congressional campaign, nearly two years before the general election, is unheard of in Wyoming.

Trump invited contenders to his New Jersey golf club to decide whom he would endorse to take down his No. 1 target in the midterms. In September he picked Harriet Hageman, who wasn’t even in the race yet, a land-use lawyer who had placed third in the 2018 GOP primary for governor. Trump’s endorsement of Hageman caused three of the others to drop out. At last count there are six in the race, including Cheney. “Unlike RINO Liz Cheney, Harriet is all in for America First,” Trump said in his endorsement. “Harriet has my Complete and Total Endorsement in replacing the Democrats number one provider of sound bites, Liz Cheney.” Responded Cheney on Twitter: “Here’s a sound bite for you: Bring it.”

Cheney’s conservatism is not in doubt; she is pro-gun, anti-abortion, pro-fossil fuels, pro-tax cuts, pro-defense spending, and voted with Trump 93 percent of the time. “If you look at it from a political philosophy standpoint, Liz Cheney is absolutely a conservative, right across the board,” says Matt Micheli, a former chairman of the Wyoming GOP who calls Cheney “a phenomenal representative for our state.” As he puts it, the question at stake in next year’s primary will be: “What is the future of the conservative movement in America? Is it one that’s styled after the Ronald Reagan brand of conservatism, or the more populist, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene brand of conservatism?”

I recently spent 10 days traveling 2,100 miles up and down the state, talking with more than 60 residents to see how Wyoming is processing this choice. Nearly everywhere I went, rage against Cheney erupted as regularly as a Yellowstone geyser. Support for her was harder to find, though equally passionate. But whatever side they are on, Wyoming voters draw their heat for this race from the same source: their knowledge that this is no ordinary political grudge match, but rather a test of the party’s future.

Early September was a strange time to be in Wyoming. California forest fires that scientists increasingly blame on climate change were belching a haze over a state where the economy has long relied on oil, gas, coal and cows. You couldn’t smell the smoke, but daily news bulletins updated air quality levels. The iconic Teton and Big Horn mountain ranges looked like ghosts of themselves. You’d wake up with a little tightness in the chest and wonder if it was the onset of covid-19 or just the smoke. Hardly anyone wore a mask, as far as I could tell, except in Teton County (which includes Jackson Hole) where — cue eye roll from the rest of the state — the ruling local Democrats insist. And yet even with the smoke and the virus, the land was beautiful — endless prairies, terrifying heights, infinite solitude.

The first person I interviewed, in Cheyenne at the southern edge of the state, was a retired elementary school teacher walking her dog near the state Capitol. She said she admired Cheney for standing up to Trump. She added, “I don’t know anyone else in Wyoming who supports her except me.” Passing the storefront office of the state GOP, I couldn’t help noticing a poster celebrating “Premier Wyoming Republican Women.” Of the seven women listed, two were dead and none was Liz Cheney.

To understand the origins of the grass-roots anti-Cheney movement, I knew I had to head west into Carbon County. Despite its name, the county is home to some of Wyoming’s most impressive wind farms. Herds of beef cattle grazed placidly beneath swooping turbines tilting at a carbonless future. I pulled into the town of Saratoga (population 1,615), where I found the Whistle Pig Saloon. Joey Correnti IV, chairman of the Carbon County GOP, was waiting for me. He wore a cap with a red, white and blue buffalo on the front, a white shirt, black vest, jeans, cowboy boots and a pistol on his hip. I mention the gun only because it was the first of many that I saw in this open-carry state, and soon I stopped noticing them. “I don’t see any reason not to have a firearm with me at all times,” Correnti told me in a rust-bucket baritone that I recognized from his appearances on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast.

If anyone gets credit for helping spark the prairie fire of resistance to Cheney, it’s Correnti. The day of the impeachment vote, Correnti found himself fielding spontaneous impassioned rants from members of the party in Carbon County. That night he put together a Zoom meeting with maybe 50 people. They vented and began to brainstorm. Three consecutive nights of Zooms culminated in a virtual town hall with about 150 people from around the state. “Being rural Wyoming, if you have 150 people in a captive audience, you’re actually talking to about 15,000 people,” Correnti says. “It’s literally some people’s jobs in communities to be the person to know about this and bring it back to the coffee shop or whatever.” The next day, Jan. 16, the county party passed the first censure of Cheney. In coming weeks, all but a few of the state’s 23 county GOP chapters followed, modeling their resolutions on Carbon County’s, and so did the state GOP.

“It’s not because we’re Trump fanatics,” Correnti insists. “My problem with my representative is she’s continuing to focus my voice as my representative on somebody who’s not president and may never be president again, and not focusing on fixing election concerns and the problems facing Wyoming.” Correnti lit one cigarette after another and drank diet soda as he continued. “If [Trump] chooses to never come back to running for office or politics again, he has still left us with … a reawakening of the grass-roots voice. It’s our responsibility to pick up that ball and run with it.”

I left Saratoga and headed north toward Buffalo. On the way, rocketing past Casper at the state speed limit of 80 mph, I spotted a Joe Biden banner outside a house beside the interstate. It would be the only Biden sign I saw in all of Wyoming. I made a mental note to go back and visit.

Buffalo is nestled below the Bighorn Mountains on the old Bozeman Trail gold rush route, where I met David Iverson at the Bozeman Trail Steakhouse. As creator and host of the “Cowboy State Politics” podcast, Iverson offers grass-roots conservative perspectives on a wide variety of topics, including local tax referendums and Washington follies. I knew how significant he considers this contest because earlier, on the phone, he had said: “If Liz Cheney wins this race, that’s going to send a signal to the left that they’ve pretty much flipped Wyoming, because Liz Cheney is by far the most liberal representative that we could possibly have right now. … If you can do it in Wyoming, you can do it across the country, no matter what the electoral makeup of that state happens to be.”

Cheney’s conservative credentials are not spotless, in Iverson’s view, citing her support for foreign interventions by American forces. Yet few had wanted to kick her out for that. Why, I asked him, in light of Cheney’s solid conservative record, has her vote on impeachment made all the difference? It’s complicated, but in the first place, Iverson said, by voting to impeach Trump, she was not “defending the Constitution.” Her action was constitutionally suspect because she voted before there was any time for hearings or investigations, he said, denying Trump “due process.”

Joey Correnti IV, chairman of the Carbon County GOP, which passed the first censure of Cheney after her impeachment vote in January.
Correnti had said the same thing. As I would discover, masses of people across Wyoming fervently insist that Cheney’s vote was somehow unconstitutional or illegal. Those people are misinformed: The Constitution says the House can basically run an impeachment any way it wants; there are no rules to break. Meanwhile, the Fifth and 14th Amendments define where due process pertains: No one shall be deprived of “life, liberty or property” without due process of law. Cheney’s vote, and the impeachment itself, deprived Trump of none of those things. Can a Cheney critic make a political argument that the Democratic-led impeachment was unfair or unnecessary? Sure. I began to think of “unconstitutional” as Wyoming-speak for “unfair.”

Two other reasons that Iverson and others say Cheney’s vote is so unforgivable are less rebuttable and may ultimately have more impact. First, on a matter of utmost importance to many residents, she unapologetically, enthusiastically went the other way. In the process, an unspoken bond was broken. Why should they trust her again? And second, the people of Wyoming are sensitive to any hint of someone talking down to them. To their ears, Cheney’s lectures about Trump are beginning to have that ring. “The reason why people live here is so we don’t have to be told how to live, how to believe,” Iverson said. “When you have a representative who’s saying, ‘President Trump is a bad person, President Trump started this riot, President Trump needs to be impeached’ … you’re telling people what they are to believe.”

The next day I reached Cody, a hotbed of bubbling-up anti-Cheney resistance, and attended the Park County GOP’s regular meeting in the Cody Cowboy Church. Bob Ferguson, former managing director of a major Wall Street investment firm, and Paul Lanchbury, a retired transmission lineman who raises cattle, were still wearing their Butch and Sundance get-ups because there was no time to change after that evening’s performance. The church walls were decorated with coiled ropes to which American flags had been tied with bandannas. County GOP chairman Martin Kimmet, a self-described “old cowboy” who raises cattle, called the meeting to order.

New business included planning for the upcoming Patriot’s Day Dinner fundraiser, with a live auction featuring a buffalo hunt, a pair of guns and other items. Cheney had not been invited; Hageman was scheduled to give a non-political talk on patriotism. Cheney used to be welcome at events like this. Kimmet recalls how she would give him a hug when they greeted. Not anymore; not since the Cody chapter of the party voted in August to tell Cheney she was “fired” as their representative. She can’t be trusted to represent the people anymore, Kimmet told me: “Seemingly she just doesn’t really care what we want her to do.”

Cowboys were roping steers and riding bucking broncs on an emerald field in the Bighorn foothills of Sheridan, at the northern edge of the state, as the campaign entered its retail-politics phase over Labor Day weekend. Three of Cheney’s challengers in the Aug. 16 primary worked the crowd of thousands gathered for this annual rodeo held in honor of a revered local saddle-making family. Wyoming primaries themselves are a bit like rodeos, with lots of contenders and dark-horse surprises. The state’s distinctive electoral mechanics present both tactical challenges and opportunities for Cheney, and all were on display at the rodeo.

Marissa Selvig, a musician and former mayor of Pavillion, greeted voters with her husband and four children in tow. She has musical notation for part of the chorus of the Christian anthem “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” tattooed on her arm. “I’m running against Liz Cheney,” she told a woman at the rodeo. “Yay, yay, yay!” the woman cheered in return. “I want to give the people of Wyoming someone who is like them,” Selvig said in an interview. “I’m just a mom and a musician who loves Wyoming and who loves America, just like they do. And I think that I could be a more relatable voice in Washington than what we currently have.”

Robyn Belinskey, who runs a business organizing people’s homes, arrived in her campaign car painted red, white and blue; “Don’t Tread on Me” was printed on the back. “This is a grass-roots conservative effort,” she told me. “I’m not a politician. I’m not an attorney. I am a we-the-people person, a patriot.”

Candidate Denton Knapp was at the rodeo, too, somewhere, but I missed him and caught up with him later in Gillette. The retired Army colonel told me that his 30-year military career — including deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq — gave him leadership experience that the other challengers lack. “I’m the best for Wyoming,” he said. “If [Cheney] wins, Wyoming is going to take a hard look at itself because that’s the last thing you want to happen.”

Analysts consider those candidates less formidable so far because of their relative lack of political experience and fundraising. But all have refused to drop out despite Trump’s endorsement of Hageman. A potentially stronger contender is Anthony Bouchard, a Republican state senator and gun rights advocate whom I’d met earlier at a Chick-fil-A in Cheyenne. “With the highest financial support coming from ordinary folks, and over a thousand donors in Wyoming, I’m not leaving this race,” he vowed. In the spring it emerged that nearly 40 years ago, when he was 18, he impregnated a 14-year-old girl. The couple married and had a child. The woman later died by suicide. “When push comes to shove, [voters] are going to see that I have the experience, not to mention the fortitude, to stand up to what’s really wrong,” he said.

Hageman, a lawyer who has specialized in protecting property rights and water rights, has better statewide name recognition than other challengers after her 2018 primary race for governor, though she got less than 22 percent of the vote. Trump’s endorsement should open a spigot of outside cash and assistance for her. The former president has dispatched a team of political advisers to boost her campaign, and Donald Trump Jr. will serve as honorary chair of a super PAC aiding the effort, Politico reported.

Hageman supported Cheney in earlier races. “When Liz Cheney voted to impeach President Trump, she betrayed Wyoming, she betrayed this country, and she betrayed me,” Hageman said in an email, in response to questions I sent via a former Trump campaign official who is now assisting her. “At a time when we needed all hands on deck, Liz Cheney jumped ship, dogpaddled to the other side, and is now shooting back at us.”

When I asked who she thinks won the presidential election, Hageman replied that there are “legitimate questions about what happened in 2020. … It won’t change the outcome, Joe Biden is the president today, but we ought to know what happened going forward so that people can begin to have faith in our electoral process again.”

Beyond Trump and the impeachment, I wanted to know what Hageman would do differently on conservative issues that matter to Wyoming. She offered few specifics but said Cheney’s prominent role in investigating Jan. 6 serves to generally enable Democrats and “deflect attention from the abject and total disaster that is the Biden administration.”

Cheney declined to comment for this story. Her campaign distributed a transcript of a recent conversation she had with Wyoming reporters. She called Hageman’s entry into the race with Trump’s endorsement “tragic opportunism” and said her old ally is “abandoning her duty to the people of Wyoming in order to pledge loyalty to Donald Trump. … If Harriet wants to cast her lot with those folks, you know, I would note that they’re the same people who were involved in misleading millions of Americans about the election in 2020.”

While not stepping back from her skirmishes with Trump and his congressional acolytes, Cheney is also trying to make the race about the rest of her conservative record. This year she has introduced bills to block moratoriums on oil and gas leases and to protect property rights — and she has taken advantage of every microphone and camera to bash Biden over Afghanistan and other issues. “Liz has been a rock star for our state,” says Landon Brown, a Republican state representative. “There is no better determination of Trump’s stranglehold on this country than the Liz Cheney race.”

In the end, though, Cheney’s fate may lie with those three candidates at the rodeo, and with Bouchard. Hardly anyone I talked with thinks she can win a head-to-head race against Hageman — not because Hageman is so strong, but because Cheney’s war with Trump has made her so vulnerable. If two or more challengers remain in the race, “it will be much closer than any of us would like, but Liz will walk away with the win,” says Brown. “If it goes down to a two-way race … I think Harriet wins.”

There’s no parallel pro-Cheney grass-roots movement working to counteract the anti-Cheney activists at the local level. Hard-right pro-Trump Republicans have taken control of the party apparatus in nearly all the counties. Still, more moderate (by Wyoming standards), less doctrinaire Republicans remain successful at getting elected to the state legislature — suggesting that plenty of Wyoming voters haven’t given up on the Cheney wing of the GOP.

Cheney herself is not holding any events that the general public can get into. Her supporters acknowledge that a public meeting in Wyoming would likely get ugly. Instead, she is attending small, private gatherings and holding invitation-only conference calls. She raised $3.4 million in two record fundraising quarters this year. Former president George W. Bush was scheduled to headline a fundraiser for her this month in Dallas.

A number of Cheney’s supporters told me that she could change the tone and improve her chances if she would lay off Trump. But she shows no inclination to do so. Last month on “60 Minutes,” Cheney offered an explanation for her continued drumbeat on the subject. “If Republican leaders don’t stand up and condemn what happened, then the voices in the party that are so dangerous will only get louder and stronger,” she said. “Silence enables the liar, and silence helps [misinformation] to spread. ... If we do that we are contributing to the undermining of our system.”

Dee Bott, a retired hospital executive in Torrington, told me over the phone she thought Cheney’s vote for impeachment was a mistake: “Why would you hang your hat on something that wasn’t going to do anything but cause you grief?” And yet, “I will definitely vote for her again,” Bott said, citing a list of Cheney’s accomplishments for her state. “She knows exactly what Wyoming is. How can you put that in your back pocket and be upset because she voted to impeach Trump?”

Bott also thinks significant Cheney support is flying under the radar because of all the hostility. “We have a ton of friends who are saying the same thing,” she said. “ ‘We’re not going to get out there and get yelled at and have eggs thrown at us. We’re just going to the polls and we’re voting for Liz.’ ”

There’s one more Wyoming primary dynamic to take into account: Democrats. They are so vanishingly rare in the state that they hardly count for anything — except, potentially, on primary day. Wyoming law allows people to change their affiliation right up to the primary. Past races have featured thousands of Democrats and unaffiliated voters doing so, conceivably to back more-moderate Republicans. There’s no evidence they’ve swung a major race before, but they could make the difference in a close one.

In the spring Cheney attended a small gathering in the Cody area. Scott Weber, who works in firearms sales, got a chance to talk with her about the race. “She is the most charismatic speaker, and she captivates the room,” he told me. “She’s got the right amount of humor. She knows everything about Wyoming. She’s deeply committed. She hates liberals, so she has all these jokes about” them. Weber was impressed and thought she might be running for president, which he said she denied when they chatted at the event. As they spoke, Weber made the obvious observation that she had so many challengers. She looked at him with a twinkle, he recalled, and said, “The more, the merrier!”

Martin Kimmet, a self-described “old cowboy” who raises cattle, says, “Seemingly she just doesn’t really care what we want her to do.”
Toward the end of my trip I headed to Jackson Hole, Cheney country. I commuted through Yellowstone National Park, past buffalo that looked noble even while chewing, stopping to check that the geysers remained faithful in spite of everything. The famous postcard view of the Grand Tetons appeared wan in the smoky exhales from California.

Across the Snake River from Jackson lay Wilson, the little community where Cheney has a house. I climbed onto the wooden front porch of Hungry Jack’s General Store. “I feel much more positive about her now than I have ever felt for her or any of the Cheneys ever,” said Jana Stearns, whose family has owned Jack’s for nearly 70 years. She told me she would consider changing her registration from Democrat to Republican to vote for Cheney in the primary. “I admire her courage to stand up for what’s right,” she said.

The front porch of Hungry Jack’s was the only place in the state where, in my experience, Cheney supporters — including Republicans — slightly outnumbered detractors. Photographer Jeff Foott stopped by. “I never thought I’d be rooting for Liz Cheney, but I am,” he said. He’s also thinking about changing his registration from Democrat to vote for her. “I don’t agree with most of her politics, but what she’s done is pretty courageous.” Registered Republican Caryn Haman said: “She comes closer to the old style of working back-and-forth when necessary to get something done.”

Until now, I’d experienced pro- and anti-Cheney sentiment as existing in separate bubbles, where separate realities prevailed. Back across the Snake, at the historic Wort Hotel in downtown Jackson, the bubbles merged.

Mary Martin, chair of the Teton County GOP, assembled a focus group in a private dining room at the Wort and invited me to listen and ask questions. Martin was one of a handful of state party officials who withstood enormous pressure and voted against censuring Cheney. But Martin’s vote didn’t necessarily mean she approved of Cheney’s vote for impeachment. Martin is a proud Trump supporter who feels her trust in Cheney has been damaged. (As a party official, she’s neutral in the primary.) Nevertheless, one of her personal missions is to create space in her party where people can disagree and, hopefully, learn from one another.

The group consisted of three Cheney critics and one supporter. For 90 spirited minutes the group batted around Cheney’s merits and demerits: Jan. 6, the impeachment, her service on the committee investigating the attack on the Capitol. “She decided that she did not want to be on the team,” said John Fox, an active conservative retired from Wall Street. “And I think Trump commands loyalty and deserves loyalty. … Now she’s not just off the loyalty train, but she’s actually, in my opinion, a Democrat.”

“We’re all Republicans here, so we’re very unhappy with what’s happened in the leadership in Washington, D.C., and yet I’m going to have a different perspective,” said Paul Vogelheim, a former county commissioner. He told the story of his late friend, the Rev. Ubald Rugirangoga, a Rwandan priest and survivor of that nation’s genocide, who died of covid the day after the Capitol riot. When the priest learned of the riot, among his last words to Vogelheim were how America must not tear itself apart like his country. “The violence that occurred in our capital, and how the world looked at that ... really hit me,” Vogelheim said. “So I appreciate that she’s made a stand.”

Steve Duerr, a lawyer, spoke up. “Conservative people have different ways of showing it. Trump’s conservatism was, in my opinion, individual rights, American enterprise, self-reliance, business, a strong military. Take care of America first, make America great again.” He continued: “Paul can say on principle, she’s defending the Constitution by voting to impeach Trump and giving her name to ‘Eva’ Pelosi on this committee. I don’t buy it. It’s pure hubris. … She wants to be the Trump opponent in 2024. … She’s not thinking about Wyoming.”

Vogelheim has certainly considered whether Cheney’s motivations include political gain. “But I still believe that she is coming from this place of principle, Constitution first,” he said. “ ‘This man has done something wrong and I’m going to expose it.’ ”

When the conversation was over, no one had changed their fundamental position, but they realized they had something in common that made them so passionate — on both sides — about the subject of Liz Cheney. “Just hearing the anger here today,” Vogelheim said, “a lot of [it] is a broader issue, a big-picture issue of: What’s happening to our country?”

One fan of Cheney’s couldn’t make it to the gathering, so I spoke to him by phone. His name is John Turner, and he’s a former wildlife and environmental official in both Bush administrations. “It’s absolutely insane that Wyoming voters would even consider jettisoning one of the most articulate, experienced, eloquent spokesmen for conservative values in Washington,” he told me. “There’s a lot at stake for this country. We’re really at a crossroads. We need experienced conservatives like Liz to stay in the saddle to combat the frightening foolishness we see in Washington right now.”

Turner and Vogelheim had both made explicit the subtext of many of the conversations I’d had in Wyoming: What has gone wrong in America? Pulling the lever for or against Cheney would be a Wyoming voter’s way of trying to answer that question. I recalled the anxious things Wyomingites had said. From Tim Wade, a fly fishing outfitter in Cody, who disapproves of Cheney: “The freedoms that we Americans expect under the Constitution are riding on this.” From Drew Perkins, a state senator finishing nine holes of golf after work in Saratoga, who admires Cheney: “We need problem solvers in Washington; we don’t need people back there making political statements.” From Joseph McGinley, a radiologist and entrepreneur in Casper, who also approves of Cheney: “We have to get rid of the extremism. We have to get back to principles.”

Paul Vogelheim, a former Teton County commissioner, says: “The violence that occurred in our capital, and how the world looked at that, really hit me.” He says he appreciates that Cheney has made a stand.

Just before my flight out of Casper, I made it back to that Joe Biden banner I had seen a week earlier. It was partially furled on a wire fence enclosing a lot filled with cars and equipment on the edge of the plains. Two dogs galloped toward me while I toed the property border, marked by a no-trespassing sign.

A shirtless man emerged from the house and hollered at me to state my business. I hollered at him about my story on Liz Cheney. He hollered that he couldn’t hear me and waved me forward. “They won’t bite,” he said of the dogs. As I crossed the fence line, a sudden gust of wind unfurled the banner. I saw a word I had missed before, above Biden’s name, in screaming capital red letters: “F---.”

The man introduced himself as Tom Hood. He had the same four-letter political analysis of Cheney. Didn’t care too much for the state’s senior U.S. senator either. To Hood, most politicians blur into one figure of indifference toward people like him. He’s 63 and had worked for 35 years in the oil fields, until a chunk of ice landed on his head and disabled him. He’d had to sell the cattle he used to keep behind his house. But he still owned the land where the cattle once grazed, he said proudly. Whatever else might have gone wrong, a piece of the American plains was his.

Trump and Cheney have done a lot to frame this race as a duel between two sworn enemies, but the people I talked with instinctively realize there’s more to it than that. In Hood’s case, if he votes in the primary — the challenger he mentioned liking has since dropped out — it’ll be for someone he thinks understands the view from his patch of ground. The Wyoming primary will be one of the first times voters get to have their say about the events of Jan. 6. People on the losing side will feel, I suspect, not just that their candidate has lost, but that it may no longer be their America."

[Farfromgeneva]

Opportunity cost is rarely understood or considered

https://voxeu.org/article/evidence-effe ... 58ebbc3361

Evidence on the effects of work requirements in safety net programmes

Colin Gray, Adam Leive, Elena Prager, Kelsey Pukelis, Mary Zaki 04 October 2021

Proponents of work requirements for social safety net programmes argue that they promote self-sufficiency by encouraging work, while opponents contend that they reduce benefits for the most vulnerable recipients in times of need. This column looks at the impact of the reinstatement of work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in the US following a hiatus during the Great Recession. The authors find that work requirements do not appear to improve economic self-sufficiency, while substantially reducing benefits paid to programme recipients.


20
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The US government responded to the Covid-19 pandemic with an unprecedented expansion of the social safety net. This effort is estimated to have kept 17 million people out of poverty in 2020 (Census Bureau 2021, Han et al. 2020). However, the unwinding of these temporary measures has reopened questions about the appropriate generosity of the social safety net.

At the heart of these debates is whether unconditional government aid harms society by discouraging work. Because government resources are finite, policy design must contend with how to best target support to households in times of need. Existing economic research has documented both benefits and costs of government programmes that do not make aid conditional on work (Corman et al. 2018, Dahl and Gielen 2018, Mosley 2021). In the 1990s, economists theoretically analysed how imposing barriers to receiving benefits can have the effect of steering programme dollars to those who benefit the most because they will try the hardest to overcome the barriers (Nichols and Zeckhauser 1982, Besley and Coate 1992). But this conclusion requires certain assumptions that may not hold in practice, such as assuming that the barriers are no higher for low-income people than for high-income people. Until recently, there has been little research testing these assumptions, but recent advances have shown that the assumptions often fail to hold (Deshpande and Li 2019, Homonoff and Somerville forthcoming).

Barriers to benefit receipt often take the form of work requirements, which make benefits conditional on employment. Since 1996, some form of work requirement has existed in many US means-tested programmes. Proponents argue that work requirements promote self-sufficiency by encouraging work (Editorial Board 2021). Opponents contend that the primary effect of work requirements is to reduce benefits for the most vulnerable recipients in times of need (Bernstein and Spielberg 2017).

In new work, we evaluate the competing narratives about the effects of work requirements for receipt of safety net benefits (Gray et al. 2021). We focus on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP; formerly known as Food Stamps), which reached 39.9 million Americans in 2020 (USDA 2021). We examine the effect of SNAP’s work requirements on benefit receipt and labour market outcomes when work requirements were reinstated following a multi-year hiatus during the Great Recession.

In SNAP, certain adults are required to work in order to receive benefits for more than a few months. The work requirement can be satisfied by engaging in paid employment, participating in qualifying job training programs, or doing approved community service for at least 80 hours each month. These requirements apply to childless adults who are able-bodied and younger than 50. If they do not meet these requirements, they can only receive benefits for a maximum of three months within a three-year period. The requirements disappear for people aged 50 or older, who do not have time limits on how long they can receive SNAP benefits.

Our research design leveraged this sharp change in time limits at age 50. Our analytic sample included childless adults both younger and older than 50 who were on SNAP in Virginia during the 2009–2013 period, when work requirements were suspended for everyone. When requirements were reinstated in 2013, nothing changed for SNAP recipients who were already 50 or older. Younger recipients, however, now stood to lose their benefits after just a few months unless they met the work requirements. We therefore compared what happened to recipients just under age 50 and just over age 50 following the reinstatement of work requirements until the end of 2015. The difference in outcomes between these groups reveals the effects of the policy.

Critics of work requirements claim that the primary effect of this policy is to take away government assistance from vulnerable people. To evaluate this claim, we examined how many people continued to receive SNAP benefits after work requirements were reinstated. In this and other analyses, we used administrative data from the state of Virginia. The state allowed us to link individuals’ longitudinal SNAP program records to their employment and wage records.

We found that recipients who faced work requirements in 2013 were substantially more likely to leave SNAP within 18 months than their older counterparts who did not face work requirements. Figure 1 displays this result graphically. The vertical axis shows the fraction of recipients still receiving SNAP, as a function of their age when work requirements were reinstated. Among recipients who had just turned 50, 63% were still receiving SNAP benefits 18 months later (solid line to the right of the red vertical line). By contrast, we estimate that fewer than 40% of their counterparts just under age 50 were still receiving benefits at that time (dotted line to the left of the red vertical line).1,2 These results are estimated by analysing only incumbent programme participants. When instead analysing aggregate programme use, we estimate that work requirements reduced the overall number of people receiving benefits by 53%.

Figure 1 Effect of work requirements on receipt of SNAP benefits



The validity of these estimates would be called into question if recipients who were just under age 50 were substantially different from recipients slightly older than 50. For example, eligibility criteria for disability insurance also loosen at age 50. Receipt of disability benefits changes labour market opportunities and income, and may therefore indirectly affect SNAP utilisation independent of the work requirements. To check whether the large difference in SNAP benefit receipt (see Figure 1) could be explained by such factors, we repeated our analysis using data from 2011 instead of 2013. During this time period, all SNAP recipients were exempt from work requirements regardless of age, so we can measure the differences in benefit receipt around age 50 caused by factors other than work requirements. Figure 2 shows there was no difference in benefit receipt across the age 50 threshold during this time period.3

Figure 2 Placebo test for work requirements



Our findings that work requirements remove government aid from many would-be recipients are exactly the concerns raised by critics of the policy. However, proponents of work requirements would point out that losing benefits may be a good thing for former recipients. The purpose of work requirements is to encourage people to become economically self-sufficient by incentivizing work. It is possible that recipients under age 50 leave SNAP not because they are unable to meet work requirements, but because responding to work requirements causes their employment income to rise above the SNAP eligibility income cut-off. If that is the case, then work requirements could be helpful to both recipients and taxpayers.

We found little support for this hypothesis. First, our analyses suggest that loss of benefits is disproportionately higher among those recipients under 50 who face the largest barriers to working. Specifically, work requirements cause homeless people to lose benefits at a higher rate than other SNAP recipients.4 Second, we checked directly whether work requirements caused the recipients under 50 to work at higher rates than the older recipients. We found no detectable difference in the fraction of recipients who have jobs on either side of the age 50 threshold. Figure 3 shows this result graphically. In contrast to our findings for benefit receipt, the impact on having a job is either quite small or zero. The only potential improvement in labour market outcomes that we observed was an increase in earnings for a small fraction of recipients near a key income eligibility threshold, but even this result was statistically fragile. In sum, we found little to no effect of SNAP work requirements on economic self-sufficiency, but large negative effects on benefit receipt.

Figure 3 Effect of work requirements on employment



As currently designed, SNAP work requirements do not appear to improve economic self-sufficiency while substantially reducing benefits paid to SNAP recipients. On one hand, this makes work requirements costly to society. On the other hand, work requirements save taxpayers money by reducing the number of people receiving benefits. This sets up a trade-off between savings to taxpayers and harm to would-be SNAP recipients. We analysed this trade-off, accounting for the impact on government budgets.5 The analysis showed that SNAP without work requirements would likely be more effective than other existing programmes at channelling public spending to low-income adults.

Debates are likely to continue regarding the shape and scope of the safety net. In designing off-ramps from the Covid-19 expansions, policymakers should consider the evidence: work requirements do more to remove people from benefits than to bolster employment.

Authors’ note: Mary Zaki is an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Maryland and Financial Economist at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Work on this paper was conducted while Mary Zaki was employed by the University of Maryland. The analysis, conclusions, and opinions set forth here are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or Wayfair.

[seacoaster]

We should probably have a death of democracy thread, but this one will carry the weight for now:

On October 13, at 3:30 in the morning, the Texas House passed extreme gerrymandered GOP state House map:

Whites: 40% population but control 59% districts;

Hispanics: 39% of population but control 20% districts;

Blacks: 12% of population but control 2.7% districts.

Politicians choosing their voters, locking into forever-incumbency, numbing the ability to participate and be heard in politics.

See also: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/09/29 ... dam-foltz/

"A Republican redistricting operative whose clandestine work helped drag Wisconsin into a legal morass last decade appears to now be on the payroll of the Texas Legislature as lawmakers work to redraw maps that will determine the distribution of political power for years to come.

The operative, Adam Foltz, was part of the team that helped craft Wisconsin’s legislative maps after Republicans took control of that state Legislature in 2010. Foltz played a key role in a tight-lipped and questionable redrawing process that shut out Democrats and drew the condemnation of federal judges who described it as “needlessly secret,” according to court records.

Foltz may now be playing a behind-the-scenes role in Texas. The Capitol’s internal staff directory, to which The Texas Tribune obtained access, shows Foltz is working for the House Redistricting Committee. His office and phone number in that directory match those of the committee’s staff office in the Capitol basement, but at least one Democrat on the committee said they had not been advised of his involvement. Foltz has not been a visible part of the committee's public-facing work."