National: GOP election reviews face battleground state legal tests | Zach Montellaro/Politico

Republicans running partisan reviews of the 2020 election results and Democrats trying to stop them are barreling toward court showdowns in two key swing states in the coming weeks. Nearly a year after President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Republican-led legislative chambers in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are still forging ahead with investigations similar to earlier efforts in states such as Arizona — which were sharply criticized by election experts — looking for evidence of fraud or other malfeasance in the 2020 vote. Now, an initial round of rulings and new court dates in lawsuits challenging the reviews is coming up, with Democrats and election experts hoping they will halt the drive by Republican lawmakers to revisit the results. Investigations in other states, most recently Texas, have failed to turn up evidence of serious issues. And election experts have long warned that the reviews — which supporters often call “audits,” a term professional election administrators and experts have rejected — are a political vehicle for former President Donald Trump and his followers to launder their conspiratorial beliefs about his 2020 loss into the mainstream under the guise of government investigation.

Full Article: GOP election reviews face battleground state legal tests – POLITICO

National: Here’s where election-denying candidates are running to control voting | Miles Parks/NPR

Mark Finchem was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. He says he didn’t go inside, but he snapped some photos of people who did. “What happens when the People feel they have been ignored, and Congress refuses to acknowledge rampant fraud. #stopthesteal,” he tweeted. The Arizona state representative was there to share what he called “evidence” of an “irredeemably compromised” 2020 election with Republican lawmakers from his home state of Arizona. To be clear, Republican election officials in the state deemed the results “free, fair, and accurate” and even a discredited GOP-led “audit” run in the state’s largest county agreed Biden won. More recently, Finchem also appeared at a QAnon conference, and in speaking with NPR declined to describe what happened at the Capitol as a riot or an insurrection, instead making allusions to some sort of conspiracy involving law enforcement. Now, he is running to oversee voting in Arizona in 2022. And he’s not alone. An NPR analysis of 2022 secretary of state races across the country found at least 15 Republican candidates running who question the legitimacy of President Biden’s 2020 win, even though no evidence of widespread fraud has been uncovered about the race over the last 14 months. In fact, claims of any sort of fraud that swung the election have been explicitly refuted in state after state, including those run by Republicans.

Full Article: Here’s where election-denying candidates are running to control voting : NPR

National: States prepare for new round of voting wars as midterms approach | Reid Wilson/The Hill

State legislatures will begin debating changes to voting rights and election administration laws in the coming days after an unprecedented wave of reforms passed in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. At least 74 such measures have been pre-filed in 11 states, according to a count maintained by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Of those, 13 measures filed in four states would restrict access to the ballot. That’s in addition to dozens of bills that would restrict or expand voting rights, or change the way elections are run, that were proposed last year and will carry over into the legislative sessions set to begin this week, including 88 bills across nine states the Brennan Center counted as “restrictive.” “There’s a lot more attention on election law,” said Arizona state Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita (R), who has sponsored election-related bills in recent years. “It’s not a game. It’s serious, and when you change something, especially in election law, it has significant ramifications and its ripple effect is felt far and wide.”

Full Article: States prepare for new round of voting wars as midterms approach | TheHill

National: At the Capitol on Jan. 6, a Day of Remembrance and Division | Katie Rogers/The New York Times

This anniversary of Jan. 6 marked a turning point for President Biden, who for much of his first year in office avoided direct confrontation with his predecessor, Donald J. Trump. On Thursday, Mr. Biden took deliberate aim at Mr. Trump, assailing him for watching television as the attacks unfolded, spreading a lie that the 2020 election was rigged, and holding “a dagger at the throat of America” when he encouraged his supporters to attack the United States Capitol. But Mr. Biden held on to one vestige from the past year: He still refused to call Mr. Trump by name. As president-elect in November 2020, Mr. Biden and his staff proceeded with the transition process by treating Mr. Trump’s attempts to reverse the election as little more than histrionics. The calculation made back then by Mr. Biden and his advisers was that America was simply ready to move on, but on Thursday, the president was more willing than usual to address Mr. Trump’s claims, calling him a loser in the process. “He’s not just a former president. He’s a defeated former president — defeated by a margin of over 7 million of your votes in a full and free and fair election,” Mr. Biden said. “There is simply zero proof the election results were inaccurate.”

Full Article: At the Capitol on Jan. 6, a Day of Remembrance and Division – The New York Times

National: GOP floats tweaks to vote counting law targeted by Trump as Democrats make voting rights push | Mike DeBonis and Seung Min Kim/The Washington Post

Ahead of the first anniversary of the Capitol insurrection, several Senate Republicans said they were open to overhauling the presidential vote certification procedure in Congress that was targeted by former president Donald Trump and allies as they sought to overturn his 2020 election loss. That procedure was interrupted on Jan. 6, 2021, by violent pro-Trump rioters who breached the Capitol as Republican challenges to electoral votes were being debated in the House and Senate. Only early the next morning was the process completed, after lawmakers voted to reject objections to two states’ electoral tallies and certify Joe Biden as the election’s winner. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Wednesday that changes to Electoral Count Act, the 1887 law governing the congressional certification process, were “worth discussing,” while several other GOP senators said they were interested in clarifying ambiguous provisions in the statute and potentially raising the threshold for a challenge to a state’s electoral results.

Full Article: Ahead of Jan. 6, Republicans float tweaks to vote counting law Trump targeted in effort to deny Biden the presidency – The Washington Post

Editorial: It’s Time for Democrats to Break the Glass – Defending Democracy Is No Longer Popular Within the GOP | Ronald Brownstein/The Atlantic

The next few weeks will likely answer the most crucial question that emerged from last year’s insurrection by supporters of Donald Trump: Can one political party defend American democracy on its own? In the days after the January 6 attack, it appeared possible that many Republicans would join Democrats in a cross-party coalition to defend democracy against the autocratic threat. But instead, Trump has consolidated his control over the GOP, led a movement to purge Republican elected officials who resisted his unfounded claims of fraud, and solidified the belief among the party’s voters that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president. Rather than renouncing Trump’s discredited claims, his Republican allies have cited them to justify passing dozens of laws in multiple red states reducing access to the ballot and increasing partisan control over election administration and tabulation. Since the Capitol attack, nothing has shaped the ongoing struggle over the fate of American democracy more than this refusal by almost all elected Republicans—and such GOP constituencies as national business groups and social conservative organizations—to lock arms in a cross-party “popular front” or “grand alliance” to defend the basic rules of democratic society. “I think the succumbing of the Republican Party to the Big Lie just swamps everything else,” Bill Kristol, the longtime conservative strategist who has become a leader in the Republican opposition to Trump, told me. Although it was possible last January to believe that the GOP would “repudiate” Trump, Kristol said, his dominance endures. To Kristol, it’s hard to make the case that the Republican surrender to Trump’s antidemocratic impulses “is a passing cloud, even a very big and unpleasant cloud. It’s going to be part of the scene for a while,” he said.

Full Article: Defending Democracy Is No Longer Popular Within the GOP – The Atlantic

Editorial: Jan. 6 attack on multiracial democracy requires Senate to protect freedom to vote | Spencer Overton/The Hill

Last year’s assault on the U.S. Capitol is not over. While our nation grows more diverse each day, the attack on multiracial democracy continues today through schemes to suppress votes across the nation. In 2021, Georgia, Florida, Texas and 16 other states enacted 24 laws restricting access to voting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The most popular restrictions make voter registration more difficult, expand opportunities to purge voters from the rolls, make it harder to vote by mail, limit early voting, reduce polling place availability and enact more restrictive photo ID requirements. Granted, these new voting restrictions are not as graphic as largely white insurrectionists parading Confederate flags and using violence to storm the Capitol in an attempt to overturn legitimate election results. However, we must not dismiss this wave of voting restrictions as typical partisan bickering over regulatory minutiae. The last 12 months alone accounted for one-third of restrictive state voting laws enacted in the last decade. Just like the Jan. 6 attack, the new voting restrictions seek to thwart the will of our diverse nation and are fueled by the false premise that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Trump.

Full Article: Jan. 6 attack on multiracial democracy requires Senate to protect freedom to vote | TheHill

Editorial: Fixing the Electoral Count Act is no substitute for real election reform | Fred Wertheimer and Norman Eisen/The Washington Post

With the Senate finally scheduling action to address the national epidemic of voter suppression and election hijacking laws, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and others in his party have suddenly found an alternative election reform they are signaling they will consider instead. They suggest reforming the Electoral Count Act (ECA), the statute that guides congressional handling of presidential elections once every four years. We should not fall for this bait and switch. We strongly support ECA reforms — but they are no substitute for addressing the larger election assault that is hitting every voter in every election. Indeed, ECA reform is meaningless without a fix for those more fundamental problems. It’s not just McConnell who is suddenly open to election reform. Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) just announced that the GOP could consider ECA fixes. The otherwise anti-reform Wall Street Journal editorial page took the same line. On “Meet the Press,” conservative commentator Jonah Goldberg contended that reforming the ECA would mean “dealing with the real problem.” Pieces in other prominent publications have sung the same tune. And news has now emerged of bipartisan discussions of the topic. Some of these individuals point to the fact that ambiguities in the ECA may have contributed to chaos exactly one year ago on Jan. 6, 2021. They also say that there might be bipartisan willingness to address these problems, as opposed to what they claim to be a partisan Democratic drive to pass the more comprehensive voting reforms of other bills that would counter open suppression of minority votes and the many other worst excesses of hundreds of state legislative efforts across the land. Last year, state lawmakers considered 440 bills that would restrict the vote or give legislatures the power to disregard it entirely. In 19 states, 34 of those bills have become law. And there is no reason to believe that the onslaught will stop in 2022.

Full Article: Fixing the Electoral Count Act is no substitute for real election reform – The Washington Post

Arizona GOP officials in Maricopa County affirm 2020 election was secure in rebuttal to Trump claims | Rosalind S. Helderman(The Washington Post

The November 2020 election in Arizona’s largest county was administered properly and not marred by fraud, the Republican-led local government concluded in a lengthy report released Wednesday. The 93-page document debunks, one by one, vague allegations of potential problems previously identified by the GOP-led state Senate and championed by former president Donald Trump and his allies. County officials said the blunt rebuttal, released on the eve of the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, was intended to highlight the ongoing dangers of unfounded claims of mass election fraud. “We have seen how people react when they think that an election has been stolen. They storm the U.S. Capitol. They threaten to kill and hang and shoot election workers. And they called other Americans traitors,” Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates (R) said Wednesday. “The American family cannot stand for that. I will not stand for that.”

Full Article: GOP officials in Arizona’s largest county affirm 2020 election was secure in rebuttal to Trump claims – The Washington Post

Florida: Insurrection’s toll evident a year later as fraud claims color political debate | Zac Anderson and Antonio Fins/Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop Joe Biden’s election victory from being certified, the rhetoric that led to the insurrection continues to reverberate in election offices across Florida and color the political debate in Trump’s home state. Florida had the most arrests stemming from Jan. 6 and the most members of two far right extremist groups arrested in connection with the insurrection, but there has been no effort to address extremism. Instead, Florida GOP leaders have worked to placate a Republican base inflamed by Trump’s unfounded election fraud claims, instituting new voting restrictions and likely pursuing other changes to election oversight this year. Trump continues to push the same rhetoric that drove his supporters to overrun the Capitol, and is likely to keep up his fraud drumbeat at a Jan. 15 rally in Florence, Arizona.

Full Article: Trump’s stolen election rhetoric putting pressure on Ron DeSantis, GOP

Georgia voting law wasn’t enough for Republican legislators | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In the aftermath of Georgia’s 2021 election changes, a fresh batch of Republican-backed bills could go even further in the upcoming legislative session. The election-year proposals would eliminate all remaining ballot drop boxes, discard the state’s recently purchased voting touchscreen machines, give the GBI authority to investigate voting fraud and create a constitutional amendment to prevent any future possibility that noncitizens could be allowed to vote. The tide of voting bills arrives as GOP legislators push beyond last year’s election overhaul following incumbent Republican Donald Trump’s narrow loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race. The sweeping law limited absentee voting drop boxes to early voting sites, required additional ID for absentee voting, allowed state takeovers of county elections and made many other changes. Voting rights groups warn that Republican legislators are seeking to limit voting access as a way to please constituents who believe false allegations that the 2020 election was stolen because Trump said it was.

 

Full Article: More Georgia election rules planned by Republican-led General Assembly

Maine secretary of state seeks to protect election officials, ballot and voting machine integrity | Phil Hirschkorn/WMTW

One year after the Capitol riot, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who oversees state elections, believes the nation’s democracy is living through a critical moment. “Because unfortunately, the events of January 6 were an attempt, a violent overthrow of the legitimate results of the election. What we have seen since are multiple efforts to threaten election workers,” Bellows said in an interview at the State House. Even in Maine, with one of the highest voter turnout rates and a reputation for smooth elections, in the past year, at least two election officials received credible threats to do them harm. In addition, Maine’s only incarcerated Capitol riot defendant, Kyle Fitzsimons, called Bellows’ office nine days after the riot. “I’m not gonna stop until I get the results and cleanliness I need in my government,” Fitzsimons told a staff member, according to the report filed with Maine State Police. Bellows said, “When you receive a call like that, you do not know how to differentiate between whether that person is actually then going to take physical action or not.”

Full Article: Maine secretary of state seeks to protect election officials

Michigan: Antrim County Tied to Election Fraud Claim Strategy | Mardi Link/The Traverse City Record-Eagle

Documents provided to a congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol show misinformation about Antrim County’s election was part of a coordinated, nationwide strategy aimed at certifying the 2020 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.
A “Strategic Communications Plan” of the “Giuliani Presidential Legal Defense Team,” which includes the former president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, references debunked claims about Antrim County’s voting equipment as part of an effort to put pressure on Republican senators in six states — including Michigan — between Dec. 27, 2020 and Jan. 6, 2021, the Plan states. The other states listed are Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, records show. The 22-page Communications Plan was provided Dec. 31 to members of the Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, by an investigator hired by Trump’s post-election legal team. The release was in response to a Nov. 5 subpoena, records show. Bernard Kerik is a former New York City Police commissioner who, his attorney said in a Dec. 31 letter to the committee, was hired by Trump’s legal team as an investigator tasked with looking into claims of election fraud.

Full Article: Antrim County, Mich., Tied to Election Fraud Claim Strategy

Pennsylvania court asked to require accredited lab in GOP ‘investigation’ | Associated Press

Dominion Voting Systems has asked a court to restrict any inspection of its voting machines as part of what Republican lawmakers call a “forensic investigation” of Pennsylvania’s 2020 election to a laboratory that has specific credentials. The Denver-based voting-system manufacturer filed paperwork in court Monday evening as Republican lawmakers move to inspect Dominion’s machines and software in southern Pennsylvania’s sparsely populated Fulton County using an unaccredited contractor that has no election experience. In its court papers, Dominion requested an order requiring that any inspection be conducted by a federally accredited voting system test lab or a national laboratory used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Fulton county heavily backed former President Donald Trump, whose baseless claims about election fraud in 2020′s presidential election have propelled various Republican endeavors to search for fraud in states Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

Full Article: Court asked to require accredited lab in GOP ‘investigation’ | AP News

Texas’ wasteful election audit leads to some easy predictions | Rick Casey/San Antonio Report

It may have been the last official act of 2021 by any Texas state official above the level of a state trooper. Secretary of State John Scott’s office on New Year’s Eve released findings from the first stage of the “forensic audit” of the 2020 election. It is an ancient tradition of political practice to release bad news at a time when it is least likely to cause ripples, and nothing fits that bill like New Year’s Eve. Not only are news organizations on holiday staffing, but who watches TV news on New Year’s Eve? For that matter, who is alertly reading the newspaper the next morning? What was the bad news? It was the good news that neither Russian hackers nor Venezuelan-based voting machine companies had manipulated or manufactured hundreds of thousands of Texans’ votes to elect Joe Biden president. It was hardly even news at all in that it is exactly what local officials had been saying for more than a year. But for conspiracy theorists it was, to say the least, disappointing. Perhaps the timing of the release was focused on one particular news consumer, a man who was presumed to be partying New Years Eve and golfing the next day at Mar-a-Lago.  Donald Trump has a special interest in the audit, which examined election data from four urban Texas counties: Collin, Dallas, Harris and Tarrant. State officials announced the audit in September a few hours after he released a letter to Gov. Greg Abbott pushing for it despite the fact that Trump had carried Texas by nearly 6 points. Since Abbott had recently appointed Scott secretary of state, it’s safe to assume that the governor was involved in generating the audit. Abbott already had put on the agenda and signed into law a special session bill that mandates such audits after future elections.

Full Article: Texas’ wasteful election audit leads to some easy predictions

Wisconsin: Top Senate Republican opposes effort to ‘dismantle’ elections agency | Shawn Johnson/Wisconsin Public Radio

The GOP leader of the state Senate said he does not support a major overhaul of the Wisconsin Elections Commission despite a push from some rank-and-file Republicans to dismantle the agency. Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, also voiced support for Sen. Kathy Bernier, R-Chippewa Falls, the outspoken chair of the Senate’s elections committee who has called for a swift end to an Assembly Republican investigation into the 2020 presidential election. Republicans created the Wisconsin Elections Commission in 2015 after they dismantled the Government Accountability Board, or GAB, that preceded it. The GAB came under fire from Republicans for its investigation into former GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign. Unlike the GAB, which was run by retired judges, the Elections Commission is run by a panel of three Republican and three Democratic appointees, a structure that has frequently led to 3-3 votes on high-profile disputes and issues. LeMahieu, who chaired the Senate’s election committee when the Legislature created the Elections Commission, said that while the 3-3 split can lead to gridlock, it also ensures that any guidance from the agency receives bipartisan support. “I think the Election Commission still might be a format that actually works,” LeMahieu said. “I would need to see a more superior way to do it before abandoning that.”

Full Article: Top Senate Republican opposes effort to ‘dismantle’ elections agency | Wisconsin Public Radio

Editorial: Our constitutional crisis is already here | Robert Kagan/The Washington Post

The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no doubt: First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running. Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest. Meanwhile, the amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to “find” more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office.

Full Article: Opinion | Our constitutional crisis is already here – The Washington Post

‘Slow-motion insurrection’: How GOP seizes election power | Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press

In the weeks leading up to the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, a handful of Americans — well-known politicians, obscure local bureaucrats — stood up to block then-President Donald Trump’s unprecedented attempt to overturn a free and fair vote of the American people. In the year since, Trump-aligned Republicans have worked to clear the path for next time. In battleground states and beyond, Republicans are taking hold of the once-overlooked machinery of elections. While the effort is incomplete and uneven, outside experts on democracy and Democrats are sounding alarms, warning that the United States is witnessing a “slow-motion insurrection” with a better chance of success than Trump’s failed power grab last year. They point to a mounting list of evidence: Several candidates who deny Trump’s loss are running for offices that could have a key role in the election of the next president in 2024. In Michigan, the Republican Party is restocking members of obscure local boards that could block approval of an election. In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the GOP-controlled legislatures are backing open-ended “reviews” of the 2020 election, modeled on a deeply flawed look-back in Arizona. The efforts are poised to fuel disinformation and anger about the 2020 results for years to come. All this comes as the Republican Party has become more aligned behind Trump, who has made denial of the 2020 results a litmus test for his support. Trump has praised the Jan. 6 rioters and backed primaries aimed at purging lawmakers who have crossed him. Sixteen GOP governors have signed laws making it more difficult to vote. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll showed that two-thirds of Republicans do not believe Democrat Joe Biden was legitimately elected as president.

Full Article: ‘Slow-motion insurrection’: How GOP seizes election power | AP News

National: Election Officials Fight Voter Skepticism After Trump’s False Fraud Claims | Alexa Corse/Wall Street Journal

At a warehouse here in north central Florida, county elections supervisor Wesley Wilcox led some two dozen local business and community leaders around a cavernous room full of cordoned-off voting machines, stacks of paper to be turned into ballots, and rolls of “I Voted” stickers. Mr. Wilcox encouraged the group to ask questions about everything from the security of mail ballots to the use of voting machines. One man asked about how results are reported: “The results have to be downloaded here, I assume?” “Good question, because there’s a lot of misinformation going on about that right now,” said Mr. Wilcox, who has overseen the Republican-leaning county’s elections for nearly a decade. He said that each polling site prints out paper copies of the results, and poll workers physically bring the paper and a memory stick to the county office. “My tabulators in no way whatsoever are connected to the internet,” he said. Educational efforts like this have taken on a new urgency in Florida and around the country as many supporters of former Republican President Donald Trump continue to question his election defeat. As skepticism about the election system has spread, some election administrators like Mr. Wilcox worry that voters might give up on participating and lose confidence in America’s democracy. To be sure, it isn’t new for supporters of a losing candidate from either party to question election results. But polls show increasing polarization on whether voters trust the election system. In 2020, 22% of Republicans were confident that ballots were counted accurately nationwide, compared with 93% of Democrats, according to a survey by MIT researchers. That represented a bigger gap than in 2016, when 80% of Republicans had that confidence in the results, which showed that GOP presidential candidate Mr. Trump had won, compared with 69% of Democrats.

Full Article: Election Officials Fight Voter Skepticism After Trump’s False Fraud Claims – WSJ

National: Key local election officials in battleground states still face threats over a year after 2020 election | Adam Brewster/CBS

The year after a presidential election is normally slow for Claire Woodall-Vogg, the executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission. There are local elections to administer, but the quieter schedule gives her a chance to start planning for the next big election year, organizing records and working on professional development. But 2021 wasn’t a traditional post-presidential election year. She and her colleagues have been dealing with new election law proposals in the Wisconsin Legislature and responding to mountains of record requests. And then there are also the threats that began after the 2020 election and kept coming, even after Joe Biden took the oath of office. “I have been told that I deserve to be hung in a public square,” Woodall-Vogg said. “I received a letter to my home calling me a traitorous c***.” At about 4 a.m. on the day after the election, the results from Milwaukee’s absentee votes catapulted then-candidate Joe Biden into the lead over former President Donald Trump in Wisconsin. Up until that hour, Mr. Biden was trailing Trump by about 107,000 votes. Like Woodall-Vogg, election workers around the country faced threats and pressure in the weeks following the November election, leading up to the attack at the Capitol on January 6, and continued afterward.

Full Article: Key local election officials in battleground states still face threats over a year after 2020 election – CBS News

National: Nearly a year after Jan. 6, US democracy remains perilously fragile | Tom Makaitis/The Hill

On Jan. 20, 2021, most Americans breathed a sigh of relief. President Biden’s inauguration went off without a hitch. Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the election had failed. Even conservative states attorneys, election officials and judges had rejected his spurious allegations of voter fraud. The FBI had arrested many of the terrorists who had stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and was aggressively pursuing the rest. Democracy itself seemed to be the big winner, and many of us believed politics was returning to normal. That hope proved forlorn. During the past year, Trump has doubled down on the “Big Lie,” the unfounded claim that he won the election. The myth that it was stolen from him through widespread voter fraud has become Republican orthodoxy, accepted by 56 percent of the party faithful. He has made accepting it a loyalty test in what is now his party. In May, Trump supporters formed the America Strong political action committee to target 10 house Republicans who voted to impeach the former president.

Full Article: Nearly a year after Jan. 6, US democracy remains perilously fragile | TheHill

National: U.S. Catches Kremlin Insider Who May Have Secrets of 2016 Hack | Henry Meyer, Irina Reznik, and Hugo Miller/Bloomberg

In the days before Christmas, U.S. officials in Boston unveiled insider trading charges against a Russian tech tycoon they had been pursuing for months. They accused Vladislav Klyushin, who’d been extradited from Switzerland on Dec. 18, of illegally making tens of millions of dollars trading on hacked corporate-earnings information. Yet as authorities laid out their securities fraud case, a striking portrait of the detainee emerged: Klyushin was not only an accused insider trader, but a Kremlin insider. He ran an information technology company that works with the Russian government’s top echelons. Just 18 months earlier, Klyushin received a medal of honor from Russian President Vladimir Putin. The U.S. had, in its custody, the highest-level Kremlin insider handed to U.S. law enforcement in recent memory. Klyushin’s cybersecurity work and Kremlin ties could make him a useful source of information for U.S. officials, according to several people familiar with Russian intelligence matters. Most critically, these people said, if he chooses to cooperate, he could provide Americans with their closest view yet of 2016 election manipulation. According to people in Moscow who are close to the Kremlin and security services, Russian intelligence has concluded that Klyushin, 41, has access to documents relating to a Russian campaign to hack Democratic Party servers during the 2016 U.S. election. These documents, they say, establish the hacking was led by a team in Russia’s GRU military intelligence that U.S. cybersecurity companies have dubbed “Fancy Bear” or APT28. Such a cache would provide the U.S. for the first time with detailed documentary evidence of the alleged Russian efforts to influence the election, according to these people.

Full Article: Kremlin Insider Klyushin Is Said to Have 2016 Hack Details – Bloomberg

National: Another Far-Right Group Is Scrutinized About Its Efforts to Aid Trump | Alan Feuer/The New York Times

Days after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 last year, federal law enforcement officials pursued two high-profile extremist groups: the far-right nationalist Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia. Members of both organizations were quickly arrested on attention-grabbing charges, accused of plotting to interfere with the certification of the 2020 vote count. Now congressional investigators are examining the role of another right-wing paramilitary group that was involved in a less publicly visible yet still expansive effort to keep President Donald J. Trump in power: the 1st Amendment Praetorian. Known in shorthand as 1AP, the group spent much of the postelection period working in the shadows with pro-Trump lawyers, activists, business executives and military veterans to undermine public confidence in the election and to bolster Mr. Trump’s hopes of remaining in the White House. By their own account, members of the 1st Amendment Praetorian helped to funnel data on purported election fraud to lawyers suing to overturn the vote count. They guarded celebrities like Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, at “Stop the Steal” rallies, where huge crowds gathered to demand that Mr. Trump remain in office. And they supported an explosive proposal to persuade the president to declare an emergency and seize the country’s voting machines in a bid to stay in power.

Full Article: Another Far-Right Group Is Scrutinized About Its Efforts to Aid Trump – The New York Times

National: Democrats Seek Filibuster Changes to Pass Elections Bills | Siobhan Hughes/Wall Street Journal

The Senate returns for a new session on Monday with Democrats focused on trying to change the chamber’s rules to muscle through elections legislation over Republican opposition, as lawmakers also hope to revive President Biden’s stalled economic and climate agenda. Many Democrats say they need to alter Senate filibuster procedures, which require 60 votes to advance most legislation, to pass bills designed to make it easier for people nationwide to vote. The party currently controls the evenly divided Senate, but some Democrats have resisted eliminating the filibuster outright, muddying the prospects for any legislative progress despite the fresh push. “You can think of January as a moment when two different forces are converging,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley (D., Ore.), who has been a leader in negotiations on both rules changes and voting legislation. “One is the functionality of the Senate and the other is the functionality of our republic.” Democrats have called passing new elections legislation their priority, arguing that minority voters need protections from new state rules. Republicans have blocked election-related bills in the Senate, and they paint calls to change the filibuster as a power grab. GOP lawmakers say the proposed changes to election law would put voting rules under the control of the federal government with little sensitivity to election security or local needs.

Full Article: Democrats Seek Filibuster Changes to Pass Elections Bills – WSJ

National: US could be under rightwing dictator by 2030, Canadian professor warns | Richard Luscombe/The Guardian

The US could be under a rightwing dictatorship by 2030, a Canadian political science professor has warned, urging his country to protect itself against the “collapse of American democracy”. “We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine,” Thomas Homer-Dixon, founding director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in British Columbia, wrote in the Globe and Mail. “In 2014, the suggestion that Donald Trump would become president would also have struck nearly everyone as absurd. But today we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the horrible commonplace.” Homer-Dixon’s message was blunt: “By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a rightwing dictatorship.” The author cited eventualities centered on a Trump return to the White House in 2024, possibly including Republican-held state legislatures refusing to accept a Democratic win. Trump, he warned, “will have only two objectives, vindication and vengeance” of the lie that his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud.

Full Article: US could be under rightwing dictator by 2030, Canadian professor warns | US politics | The Guardian

National: Trump acolytes vie for key election oversight posts in US midterms | Sam Levine/The Guardian

When Americans go to the polls in the 2022 midterms, the most important elections won’t be for office in Washington. The most high-stakes races will be statewide contests, in some cases for long overlooked offices, that have profound consequences for the future of free and fair elections in America. The races for governor and secretary of state, the chief election official in many places, will determine which officials have control over setting election rules and the post-election certification process. Allies of Donald Trump and others who have spread baseless conspiracy theories about the election have launched campaigns for several of those offices, both at the statewide and local level, in an effort to take control of election machinery. Trump is expected to run for president in 2024, and if his allies are successful, there are fears they could use their positions to block Trump’s opponent from taking office should Trump lose. Democrats are seeking to hold on to governor’s offices in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, three crucial swing states. The Democratic incumbents in all three states have blocked efforts by GOP-led legislatures to enact voting restrictions so far. There will also be hotly contested elections in Arizona and Georgia, where Republican candidates who have spread lies about the results of the 2020 election are running for governor.

Full Article: Trump acolytes vie for key election oversight posts in US midterms | US news | The Guardian

Editorial: Trump Won’t Let America Go. Can Democrats Pry It Away? | Thomas B. Edsall/The New York Times

Do you believe, as many political activists and theorists do, that the contemporary Republican Party poses a threat to democracy? After all, much of its current leadership refuses to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election and is dead set on undermining the concept of one person, one vote. If it does pose such a threat, does that leave the Democratic Party as the main institutional defender of democracy? If the Democratic Party has been thrust into that role — whether it wants it or not — recent election results and adverse polling trends suggest that it stands a good chance of losing both branches of Congress in 2022 and that Donald Trump or a Trump clone could win the presidency in 2024. The issue then becomes a question of strategic emphasis. Do Democrats’ difficulties grow more out of structural advantages for the Republican Party — better geographic distribution of its voters, the small-state tilt of the Electoral College and the Senate, more control over redistricting? Or do their difficulties stem from Democratic policies and positions that alienate key blocs of the electorate? If, as much evidence shows, working-class defections from the Democratic Party are driven more by cultural, racial and gender issues than by economics — many non-college-educated whites are in fact supportive of universal redistribution programs and increased taxes on the rich and corporations — should the Democratic Party do what it can to minimize those sociocultural points of dispute, or should the party stand firm on policies promoted by its progressive wing?

Full Article: Opinion | Trump Won’t Let America Go. Can Democrats Pry It Away? – The New York Times

Colorado: Mesa County drops lawsuit against Tina Peters over voting services contract | Sara Wilson/The Durango Herald

Mesa County will no longer pursue a lawsuit against Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters after she attested to county commissioner documents. The original lawsuit, filed on Dec. 21, alleged that Peters neglected her duty as clerk by failing to attest to legal action the county’s commissioners took to extend a contract with ​​Runbeck Election Services, as first reported by The Daily Sentinel. The company will print ballots and envelopes for the 2022 primary and general elections. Though Peters was stripped of her status to run elections in the county for the 2021 coordinated election, her duties as clerk still involve attesting to documents signed by the board. The deadline to attest to the voting services contract was Dec. 20, which Peters missed. That prompted the lawsuit. “Peters finally did attest to the Runbeck contract on Tuesday, Dec. 21, 2021, a week after all other documents were attested, one day after the given deadline and several hours after the county filed the lawsuit with the court,” Mesa County attorney Todd Starr wrote in a statement. It was necessary to expedite the contract with Runbeck because of a possible shortage of ballot envelopes and inserts next year, county officials said.

Full Article: Mesa County drops lawsuit against Tina Peters over voting services contract – The Durango Herald

Georgia county might close voting precincts and open one large site | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A replacement elections board is planning to close all seven polling places in Lincoln County north of Augusta, requiring in-person voters to report to one centralized location. The poll closures would reduce voting access for rural residents who would have to drive 15 miles or more to cast a ballot in a county with no public transportation options, leading to opposition from voting rights advocates. The plan is moving forward after a state law passed this year abolished the previous county elections board and gave a majority of appointments to the Republican County Commission. Lincoln is one of six counties where the Republican-controlled Georgia General Assembly reorganized local election boards. “This is about the powerful flexing their muscles and saying, ‘We can do whatever we want to do, and who’s going to stop us?’ ” said the Rev. Denise Freeman, who is organizing Lincoln voters to oppose the poll closures. “In Lincoln County, it’s always been about power and control.” The county’s elections director, Lilvender Bolton, said a central voting center near the city of Lincolnton would give voters a single site for both early and election day voting, and it would provide more space than small, little-used precincts.

Full Article: Georgia county might close voting precincts and open one large site

New Hampshire’s longtime guardian of its early presidential primary is stepping down | NPR

New Hampshire Secretary of State William Gardner, who earned a national reputation as gatekeeper of the state’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary, announced Monday that he will retire in the coming days. Gardner has held the office since December 1976, when he was elected at the age of 28. He’s the longest-serving secretary of state in the nation. As the state’s chief election official, Gardner is responsible for enforcing laws and regulations around voting in New Hampshire. But it’s as chief defender of the state’s presidential primary that Gardner has earned his loudest praise — and criticism. At a press conference in his cramped State House office Monday, Gardner waved away a suggestion that he was stepping down for health reasons. He said Dave Scanlan, his current deputy, will serve as the interim secretary of state. “I know the office which I leave will be in good hands,” Gardner said.

Full Article: New Hampshire’s longtime guardian of its early presidential primary is stepping down : NPR