Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has had Trump’s back. But his latest gambit has failed. | Arelis R. Hernández and Maria Sacchetti/The Washington Post

The Texas attorney general who tried to orchestrate President Trump’s last stand spent most of his career under indictment for state securities fraud, but his closeness to the president had buffed that tarnish. Trump listens to Ken Paxton. He called so often the White House once caught him in the shower. And the state attorney general had the digits to call him back. Paxton’s star seemed ascendant as he positioned himself as one of Trump’s biggest allies, willing to fight legal battles on sanctuary cities, the Affordable Care Act and now the outcome of the presidential election. But the shadows over Texas’s folksy attorney general have been growing longer. Trump has lost the election. Paxton’s last-gasp effort to overturn the outcome via the U.S. Supreme Court has failed. His top deputies recently reported him to the FBI for alleged crimes such as bribery. And the Associated Press has reported that he cheated on his wife, Angela Paxton, who is a Republican state senator in Texas. Paxton, a tea party darling known as a shrewd politician, did not respond to requests for comment, but he appeared cheerful Thursday as he spoke to a conservative commentator on YouTube before heading into the Oval Office to talk about his petition seeking to dismiss the election results. “It’s our last chance, and it may be our last chance forever,” Paxton said in an interview with conservative commentator Steven Crowder. “Because if this gets set this way, I mean, we may never have elections again that we can count on.” After he spoke, the Austin American-Statesman reported that FBI agents served at least one subpoena at his office 1,500 miles away. The FBI declined to comment.

Full Article: Ken Paxton has had Trump’s back. But the Texas attorney general’s latest gambit has failed. – The Washington Post

Wisconsin: A Stunning Passage from the Latest Court Rejection of Team Trump | Andrew C. McCarthy/National Review

The most telling aspect of the Wisconsin federal district court’s rejection of another Trump campaign lawsuit on Saturday is so obvious it is easy to miss. And no, it is not that the rejecting was done by a Trump-appointed judge, Brett H. Ludwig, or that it was done on the merits. After all that’s been said over the last six weeks, this fleeting passage near the start of the court’s workmanlike, 23-page decision and order should take our breath away (my highlighting):

With the Electoral College meeting just days away, the Court declined to address the issues in piecemeal fashion and instead provided plaintiff with an expedited hearing on the merits of his claims. On the morning of the hearing, the parties reached agreement on a stipulated set of facts and then presented arguments to the Court.

A “stipulated set of facts,” in this context, is an agreement between the lawyers for the adversary parties about what testimony witnesses would give, and/or what facts would be established, if the parties went through the process of calling witnesses and offering tangible evidence at a hearing or trial.… So what happened in Wisconsin? Judge Ludwig denied the state’s claims that the campaign lacked standing. Instead, he gave the campaign the hearing they asked for — the opportunity to call witnesses and submit damning exhibits. Yet, when it got down to brass tacks, the morning of the hearing, it turned out there was no actual disagreement between the Trump team and Wisconsin officials about the pertinent facts of the case. The president’s counsel basically said: Never mind, we don’t need to present all our proof . . . we’ll just stipulate to all the relevant facts and argue legal principles. In the end, after all the heated rhetoric, what did they tell the court the case was really about? Just three differences over the manner in which the election was administered — to all of which, as Ludwig pointed out, the campaign could have objected before the election if these matters had actually been of great moment.

Full Article: Trump Campaign Wisconsin Election Lawsuit: Court Rejects Allegations | National Review

Wisconsin GOP withholds Trump recount funds for Milwaukee, Dane counties | Patrick Marley/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The Republican-led Legislature’s budget committee is holding up reimbursements to two counties for their recount costs. President Donald Trump’s campaign paid $3 million for recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties, Wisconsin’s two most Democratic areas. But two top Republicans said Friday they were withholding the money from the counties for now. They did not explain why. Lawmakers “are playing politics with money that isn’t theirs,” said Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson. “It’s acting in bad faith,” he said. “It’s not their money. It’s Trump’s money and this is what he decided to spend it on.” Under state law, losing candidates can request recounts but must pay the cost upfront if they lost by more than 0.25 percentage points. Trump lost Wisconsin to Democrat Joe Biden by 0.6 points and paid in advance for the recounts in the two counties. The recounts resulted in Biden slightly widening his lead, and courts so far have upheld Biden’s victory in the state.

Full Article: Wis. GOP withholds Trump recount funds for Milwaukee, Dane counties

Wisconsin GOP election official says no evidence of voter fraud | Bill Glauber and Patrick Marley/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

A Republican member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission told legislative committees Friday that he has “not seen credible evidence of large-scale voter fraud in Wisconsin during the November election.” There were no dumps of ballots during the night, none,” Dean Knudson told lawmakers looking into the conduct of the Nov. 3 election that Democrat Joe Biden won by about 21,000 votes over President Donald Trump. “There is no evidence of any fraud related to Dominion voting machines in Wisconsin,” Knudson said. “Counting in Wisconsin did not stop and restart. Election observers were allowed to be present throughout Election Day and election night proceedings. The number of voters on our poll books match the number of ballots cast. “There has been no criminal evidence presented to the Elections Commission that any of these problems occurred in Wisconsin,” he said.

Full Article: Wisconsin GOP election official says no evidence of voter fraud

Wisconsin Trump lawsuit is thrown out, 5th adverse ruling in days | Patrick Marley/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

A state judge concluded Wisconsin’s election was conducted properly Friday, dealing President Donald Trump and his allies their fifth legal defeat in a little over a week. “There is no credible evidence of misconduct or wide-scale fraud,” Reserve Judge Stephen Simanek said. Simanek issued his decision from the bench 73 hours before the Electoral College is to meet Monday to officially deliver the presidency to Democrat Joe Biden. Wisconsin’s slate of 10 electors for Biden has already been certified, and Simanek’s decision upheld that finding. Over the last week, courts in Wisconsin have thrown out four other lawsuits brought by Trump and his backers. And after a daylong hearing Thursday, U.S. District Judge Brett Ludwig said he thought Trump might have taken too long to file yet another lawsuit. Ludwig is expected to rule in that case by Saturday. Trump lost Wisconsin by about 21,000 votes out of 3.3 million. That’s a margin of 0.6 percentage points. He paid $3 million for recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties, the state’s most populous and most liberal areas. The recounts slightly widened Biden’s winning margin. Trump then filed a lawsuit directly with the state Supreme Court, but the justices last week on a 4-3 vote rejected it. The majority concluded Trump should have started in circuit court rather than the state’s high court.

Full Article: Trump lawsuit in Wisconsin is thrown out, 5th adverse ruling in days

With Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton facing federal probe, lawsuit to help Trump comes amid whispers of pardons | Matthew Mosk,Katherine Faulders, andJohn Santucci/ABC

The Texas politician who filed the Supreme Court election challenge that President Donald Trump touted as “the big one” may have good reason to curry favor with the White House at this moment. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took the lead in the long-shot legal bid to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat just two weeks after reports surfaced that he is the subject of an FBI investigation into allegations he abused his office to benefit a wealthy donor — a thorny problem Trump could eliminate with a presidential pardon. Paxton and a group of Republican state attorneys general met with the president at the White House on Thursday, days after filing the case that now shoulders Trump’s hopes of holding onto his job for another term. Paxton’s attorney, Philip H. Hilder, declined to comment on the nature of Paxton’s discussions with the president. Democrats have gone public with speculation about Paxton’s possible motivation for filing the suit, which legal experts have assessed as a case unlikely to find favor with the Supreme Court, even with the court’s conservative majority. “This was an act of some bizarre-world desperation. I don’t know what drove it,” Marc Elias, the lead attorney for the Democrats fending off a barrage of election lawsuits from Trump and his allies, said in an appearance on CNN. “I don’t know if it’s politics, or I read that it may be because Paxton is fishing for a pardon,” Elias said. “I don’t know what’s behind it, but this is honestly a bizarre lawsuit.”

Full Article: With Texas AG facing federal probe, lawsuit to help Trump comes amid whispers of pardons – ABC News

National: In Blistering Retort, 4 Battleground States Tell Texas to Butt Out of Election | Adam Liptak and Jeremy W. Peters/The New York Times

In blistering language denouncing Republican efforts to subvert the election, the attorneys general for Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to reject a lawsuit that seeks to overturn the victories in those states by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., calling the audacious effort an affront to democracy and the rule of law. The lawsuit, filed by the Republican attorney general of Texas and backed by his G.O.P. colleagues in 17 other states and 106 Republican members of Congress, represents the most coordinated, politicized attempt to overturn the will of the voters in recent American history. President Trump has asked to intervene in the lawsuit as well in hopes that the Supreme Court will hand him a second term he decisively lost. The suit is the latest in a spectacularly unsuccessful legal effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn the results, with cases so lacking in evidence that judges at all levels have mocked or condemned them as without merit. Legal experts have derided this latest suit as well, which makes the audacious claim, at odds with ordinary principles of federalism, that the Supreme Court should investigate and override the election systems of four states at the behest of a fifth. The responses by the four states — represented by three Democratic attorneys general and, in Georgia, a Republican one — comprehensively critiqued Texas’s unusual request to have the Supreme Court act as a kind of trial court in examining supposed election irregularities with the goal of throwing out millions of votes. “The court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated,” a brief for Pennsylvania said.

Full Article: Four State A.G.s Ask Supreme Court to Reject Texas Election Lawsuit – The New York Times

National: Website targeting U.S. election officials draws attention of intelligence agencies | Andy Sullivan, Brad Heath, Mark Hosenball/Reuters

The harassment campaign against U.S. election officials following President Donald Trump’s defeat took an ominous turn on Thursday after a website surfaced that accused them of “treason” and included photographs and home addresses, drawing the attention of U.S. intelligence agencies. The site, along with several associated social media accounts, included photographs of Republican and Democratic officials, with rifle crosshairs superimposed on them. The FBI said on Thursday that it was aware of the issue. U.S. intelligence agencies are also looking into the website and its origins, a source said on Thursday. Several of the officials targeted said the messaging amounted to a call for violence against those who worked to oversee the Nov. 3 election, which Trump lost to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden. They urged Trump to denounce it. “If anyone needs to be reminded that public calls for violence beget violence, this is the clarion call. If blood is spilled, it is on the hands of the president, his campaign, his lawyers, and the silent Republicans standing in the president’s shadow,” said Jim Walden, a lawyer for Christopher Krebs, who oversaw cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security until he was fired by Trump after the election. Georgia’s deputy secretary of state, Jordan Fuchs, likewise pointed the finger at the president. “Trump and U.S. senators have refused to condemn these death threats,” she told Reuters. “In fact, he continues to support those who are actively calling for elections officials to be shot.”

Full Article: Website targeting U.S. election officials draws attention of intelligence agencies | Reuters

National: States targeted in Texas election fraud lawsuit condemn ‘cacophony of bogus claims’ | The Guardian

Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin on Thursday urged the US supreme court to reject a lawsuit filed by Texas and backed by Donald Trump seeking to undo Joe Biden’s victory, saying the case has no factual or legal grounds and makes “bogus” claims. “What Texas is doing in this proceeding is to ask this court to reconsider a mass of baseless claims about problems with the election that have already been considered, and rejected, by this court and other courts,” Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general, wrote in a filing to the nine justices.Texas filed the longshot suit against the four election battleground states on Tuesday directly with the supreme court. It asked that the voting results in those states be thrown out because of their changes in voting procedures that allowed expanded mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic.On Thursday afternoon, more than 100 Republican members of the House filed an amicus brief with the court in support of the Texas lawsuit. Trump’s campaign and his allies already have been spurned in numerous lawsuits in state and federal courts challenging the election results. Legal experts have said the Texas lawsuit has little chance of succeeding and have questioned whether Texas has the legal standing to challenge election procedures in other states.

Full Article: States targeted in Texas election fraud lawsuit condemn ‘cacophony of bogus claims’ | US elections 2020 | The Guardian

National: Two reasons the Texas election case is faulty: flawed legal theory and statistical fallacy. | Jeremy W. Peters, David Montgomery, Linda Qiu and Adam Liptak/The New York Times

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, has asked the Supreme Court to do something it has never done before: disenfranchise millions of voters in four states and reverse the results of the presidential election. The case is highly problematic from a legal perspective and is riddled with procedural and substantive shortcomings, election law experts said. And for its argument to succeed — an outcome that is highly unlikely, according to legal scholars — a majority of the nine justices would have to overlook a debunked claim that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s chances of victory were “less than one in a quadrillion.” Mr. Paxton is a compromised figure, under indictment in a securities fraud case and facing separate accusations, by several former employees, of abusing his office to aid a political donor. Here are some reasons this case is probably not “the big one” like President Trump has called it. Texas appears to have no claim to pursue the case, which would extend Monday’s deadline for certification of presidential electors in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It relies on a novel theory that Texas can dictate how other states run their elections because voting irregularities elsewhere harm the rights of Texans. The Paxton case fails to establish why Texas has a right to interfere with the process through which other states award their votes in the Electoral College, said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University and director of its election law program. The authority to manage elections falls to the states individually, not in any sort of collective sense that the Paxton suit implies.

Full Article: Two Reasons the Texas Election Case Is Faulty – The New York Times

National: The Trump team throws in the towel on proving voter fraud | Aaron Blake/The Washington Post

The GOP’s latest effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, like many such efforts before it, is a bit of a mess. The lawsuit, which was filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) and is now joined by the Trump campaign and 17 other Republican attorneys general, wrongly claims that no presidential candidate has lost both Florida and Ohio and won the presidency. (This would be news to John F. Kennedy.) It ridiculously suggests that late vote shifts in key states were astronomically improbable — to the tune of 1 in 1 quadrillion — a claim with which Philip Bump dispatches here. Its attempt to invalidate the vote in four states has already been rebuked by several top Republicans, and not exactly Mitt Romney Republicans. But the GOP’s new focus on this hail-Mary case is also notable for one key reason: It essentially throws in the towel on proving fraud. Ever since the election, President Trump’s legal team and allied lawyers have said they had myriad evidence of actual, provable fraud. This has been rejected in almost every case by the courts, but the Trump team has asserted that its evidence — based largely on affidavits from people involved in the vote-tabulating process — is sound and demonstrates malfeasance. The Texas lawsuit, though, effectively acknowledges that that effort has failed. Rather than claiming evidence of proven fraud, it instead claims that the fraud is actually “undetectable,” because election officials made it so by doing illegal things. And that’s why it wants the results overturned.

Full Article: The Trump team throws in the towel on proving voter fraud – The Washington Post

National: Legislatures across country plan sweeping election reform push | Reid Wilson/The Hill

State legislatures across the country are contemplating sweeping changes to the way elections are administered after a tumultuous presidential contest, one that ended with both the highest voter turnout in American history and the outgoing president baselessly calling its integrity into question. In its wake, election rules have become the hottest topic for state legislatures, especially in presidential battleground states. Lawmakers in a handful of states have begun introducing legislation in so-called pre-filing periods, windows that open before a session begins that enable lawmakers to propose bills. At least 60 election-related bills have been introduced in Texas, 26 are pending in New Hampshire and 41 in Montana, according to a count compiled by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). “We can expect a busier than ever elections agenda for the states in 2021,” said Wendy Underhill, director of the NCSL’s elections and redistricting programs. In some states, legislators plan to make permanent access to absentee and mail-in voting that were temporarily expanded by the coronavirus pandemic, while others are looking to enact new restrictions on how people can vote.

Full Article: Legislatures across country plan sweeping election reform push | TheHill

National: Security advocates see a possible silver lining in Trump’s election assaults | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

Attacks on the voting company Dominion and the integrity of the election by President Trump and his allies are posing a conundrum for election security advocates. On one hand, they’ve long battled with Dominion and other top voting machine vendors to take security more seriously and be more transparent about their operations so they can be vetted by outside security experts. “If there’s one positive piece that comes out of this it would be greater oversight of election vendors,” David Levine, elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, told me. Dominion, along with two other major vendors, control about 80 percent of the U.S. market for election systems. “If there’s a successful cyberattack against one of them, that could have devastating consequences,” he said.On the other hand, the attacks by Trump and his supporters are basically made up out of whole cloth and contrary to all available evidence. Security pros worry these conspiracy theories that go far beyond any legitimate concerns will corrode public faith in elections and convince people it’s not worth turning out to vote. “Unfortunately, there’s a danger that the entire effort to increase cybersecurity in elections will get tarred by the unfounded rantings of a few people,” Lawrence Norden, director of the Election Reform Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, told me. “There are legitimate things that need to be done to improve the security of our election systems and they should be done regardless of what some crazy people are alleging.”

Full Article: The Cybersecurity 202: Security advocates see a possible silver lining in Trump’s election assaults – The Washington Post

Matt Masterson, CISA’s top election security official, to step down | Sean Lyngaas/CyberScoop

Matt Masterson, one of the U.S. government’s top election experts, is leaving his post as of next week for a role in academia where he will continue to study the disinformation campaigns that have plagued the country, he told CyberScoop on Thursday. Masterson has been a senior adviser at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency since 2018. He led a team that reassured the public that the 2020 election was secure, despite President Donald Trump’s baseless assertions to the contrary. Masterson will join the Stanford Internet Observatory, a team of academics and tech experts led by former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos, which works on election security and social media challenges. Masterson said his last day at CISA will be Dec. 18. At Stanford, “We’re going to unpack what we’ve learned over the last few years [on election security],” Masterson said in an interview, including “what more needs to be done on a broader level.” Masterson said he wants to continue to tackle disinformation campaigns, which could extend to the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine. Experts fear that a large swath of Americans are distrustful of the efficacy of the vaccine, in part because of conspiracy theories that spread online. Masterson, a former election official in Ohio, was part of a team of CISA officials who rebuilt trust between election officials across the country and federal personnel after the 2016 election.

Full Article: Matt Masterson, CISA’s top election security official, to step down

Editorial: There’s Still a Loaded Weapon Lying Around in Our Election System | Richard H. Pildes/The New York Times

The 2020 election revealed longstanding fractures in the foundation of our system for conducting presidential elections. Before these lead to an earthquake in a subsequent presidential election, we need to shore up that foundation. The single most dangerous threat the election exposed was the prospect of legislatures directly appointing a state’s electors and overriding the vote of the people in that state. No state legislature has attempted to do this since at least the Civil War. But in the run-up to the 2020 election, this seemed the most likely means that might circumvent the voters and subvert the election. This concern has been proven warranted: After the Trump campaign’s postelection lawsuits failed around the country, its strategy was precisely to get state legislatures in key swing states to appoint the electors themselves. Indeed, President Trump continues to pursue that strategy even now — he reportedly twice called the Republican speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in recent days — despite these states having legally certified Joe Biden as the winner of their state’s popular vote. There is no legal basis for what the president is urging, but it calls attention to a previously obscure provision in federal election law. This provision, known as the “failed election” provision, lies around like a loaded weapon. It is the only place in federal law that identifies circumstances in which, even after a popular vote for president has been taken, a state legislature has the power to step in and appoint electors. The “failed election” provision traces back to the Presidential Election Day Act, first enacted in 1845. That act, after specifying the date for the presidential election, goes on to provide: “Whenever any State has held an election for the purpose of choosing electors, and has failed to make a choice on the day prescribed by law, the electors may be appointed on a subsequent day in such a manner as the legislature of such State may direct.”

Full Article: Opinion | There’s Still a Loaded Weapon Lying Around in Our Election System – The New York Times

Alaska will not join Texas-led election suit | Peter Segall/Juneau Empire

Gov. Mike Dunleavy said Wednesday Alaska will not be joining the state of Texas and 16 other Republican attorneys general in a lawsuit alleging unlawful election proceedings in several states where President Donald Trump lost in his reelection bid. In a post on Facebook Dunleavy said his office did not have enough time to review the facts of the case, but would be watching the results closely. “Electoral integrity remains a cornerstone of our democracy, and every American should know that their vote matters,” Dunleavy said in his post. The Supreme Court is set to hear the case which demands the 62 total Electoral College votes in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin be invalidated, but a date has not been set according to The Associated Press. Wednesday President Trump requested he be allowed to join as a plaintiff one day after the U.S. Supreme Court refused without comment to call into question the certification process in Pennsylvania, The AP reported.

Full Article: Dunleavy: Alaska will not join Texas-led election suit | Juneau Empire

Georgia: Here’s what happened when a state lawmaker scrutinized the Trump campaign’s list of allegedly illegal votes | Michelle Ye Hee Lee/The Washington Post

When Georgia state Rep. Bee Nguyen (D) reviewed a list of voters who President Trump’s campaign claimed cast illegal ballots in the state, three names caught her eye: two friends and a constituent. For days, Nguyen pored over public records, spoke with voters by phone and even knocked on doors in person to vet the Trump list. She found that it included dozens of voters who were eligible to vote in Georgia — along with their full names and home addresses. On Thursday, when a data analyst who compiled the list told a panel of state lawmakers that it proved thousands of voters cast ballots in Georgia who should not have, Nguyen was ready. “I do want to share with you some of the things that I found that appeared to be incorrect to me,” the two-term lawmaker told Matt Braynard, whose research has been cited in numerous suits filed by Trump and his allies, several of which have been tossed out of the courts. Nguyen’s 10-minute dissection of the data offered a rare real-time fact check of the unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud that the president’s allies have promoted in state hearings around the country, largely before friendly Republican audiences. “If you are going to take the names of voters in the state of Georgia and publish their first, middle and last name, their home address, and accuse them of committing a felony, at the very minimum there should have been an attempt to contact these voters,” she said in an interview after the hearing. “There was no such attempt.” Braynard said in an email to The Washington Post that he “appreciated her feedback and look forward to getting her records that are questionable. I was happy to make a statement and happy to hear feedback and questions.” The episode shows how quickly the allegations by Trump and his supporters have fallen apart under scrutiny, particularly in the courts, which have consistently rejected assertions that rampant irregularities tainted the vote.

 

Full Article: Here’s what happened when a Georgia lawmaker scrutinized the Trump campaign’s list of allegedly illegal votes – The Washington Post

At Georgia House Hearing, Republicans’ Baseless Claims Of Voting Fraud Persist | Stephen Fowler/Georgia Public Broadcasting

For the second week in a row, Georgia Republican lawmakers have invited the Trump campaign and other right-wing witnesses to spread baseless conspiracies and claims of voting fraud under the guise of improving elections in the state. The House Governmental Affairs committee, chaired by Bonaire Republican Shaw Blackmon, spent Thursday morning hearing from witnesses who have supported lawsuits and efforts to overturn Georgia’s certified election results that show President-elect Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump in the presidential race. Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal attorney, who was just released from the hospital after getting COVID-19, reiterated debunked claims of fraud in Fulton County by playing a short snippet of surveillance footage from State Farm Arena. State investigators and county officials have reiterated that there was no “suitcase” of ballots illegally added into vote totals and that the video shows normal vote-counting processes. Investigators also said that while some partisan monitors left when other election workers were done for the night, that nobody was instructed to leave. Georgia law does not require partisan monitors be present for counting to occur. Giuliani also brought forth several other witnesses who spread conspiracies about voting machines and election results being hacked and repeated claims about widespread absentee ballot fraud.

Full Article: At Georgia House Hearing, Republicans’ Baseless Claims Of Voting Fraud Persist | Georgia Public Broadcasting

Georgia House speaker takes aim at state’s top election official | Mark Niesse and David Wickert/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

House Speaker David Ralston said Thursday that he will seek a constitutional amendment for state legislators — not voters — to choose Georgia’s top election official, an attempt to blame Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger for perceived election problems. Ralston’s proposal came after a hearing in the state House of Representatives where supporters of Donald Trump made unsubstantiated claims of illegal voting following the president’s loss to Democrat Joe Biden by about 12,000 votes. But Ralston’s proposal would face a difficult path, and he lacks the votes to make it a reality without support from Democrats. A constitutional amendment would need to receive two-thirds majorities in both the state House and Senate, followed by majority approval of the state’s voters. Raffensperger’s staff called the move “a clear power grab” following a concerted election misinformation effort featuring Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, during the daylong hearing. Both Raffensperger and Ralston are Republicans. The strike against Raffensperger is the latest sign of a deep divide among Republicans over how to move forward after Georgia supported a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in 28 years. Raltson said he’s “dead serious” about holding Raffensperger accountable to legislators after he mailed absentee ballot applications to nearly 7 million voters before the primary election and instituted greater scrutiny of absentee ballot rejections in a court settlement earlier this year.

Full Article: Proposal introduced for legislators to choose Georgia elections chief

Michigan Attorney General says Texas ‘has no standing to disenfranchise’ millions of voters | Zach Budryk/The Hill

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) blasted a Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn the presidential election in four states, calling it “outrageous.”Nessel called the lawsuit “really one of the more outrageous that we’ve ever seen in the United States,” adding “Texas has no standing to disenfranchise the 5.5 million voters in the state of Michigan … there’s been no injury that’s been demonstrated to the state of Texas.”She noted that the results of the election in Michigan have already been certified, that challenges to the result have repeatedly lost in court and that “Texas has failed to identify a single voter who voted in Michigan who should not have.”“It’s outrageous that they filed this and the fact that they would try to disenfranchise the 39 million people that live in these four states,” Nessel told CNN’s Erin Burnett. “It’s really disturbing.” The lawsuit seeks to invalidate the results in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin.Nessel took aim at Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) and the other state attorneys general who have signed onto the lawsuit, saying that as attorney general, “I took an oath to uphold the Michigan constitution and the United States constitution to the best of my ability, so help me God.”

Full Article: Michigan AG says Texas ‘has no standing to disenfranchise’ millions of voters | TheHill

New York: 9 ways election officials failed in Brindisi-Tenney House race, judge says | Mark Weiner/Syracuse Post-Standard

A judge this week admonished election officials for failing to provide an accurate, transparent vote count in the undecided race for Congress between Rep. Anthony Brindisi and Claudia Tenney. State Supreme Court Justice Scott J. DelConte made it clear there was no vote fraud in the election. He also said election officials can’t blame the coronavirus pandemic and a record number of absentee ballots for the problems. Instead, he placed the blame squarely on election workers, noting that election boards in seven of the eight counties in the 22nd Congressional District simply didn’t do their job correctly. DelConte blamed the errors for delaying his review of disputed ballots in an election where more than 318,000 people voted. For now, Tenney leads Brindisi by a razor-thin 12 votes. Tenney led by 28,422 votes on election night. “Judicial review of the candidates’ challenges is now impeded because the Boards of Elections failed to follow the canvassing procedures set forth in the election law,” DelConte wrote in a decision Tuesday. “Those failures caused the candidates – who may be separated by as few as 12 votes – and their prospective constituents, to endure changing and confounding vote tallies, perplexing ballot rulings (or, at times, no rulings at all), and mysterious uncanvassed and ‘mislaid’ ballots.”

Full Article: 9 ways election officials failed in Brindisi-Tenney House race, judge says – syracuse.com

Texas: Carrollton Democrat proposes changing state law to let hand marked paper ballot counties to have countywide vote centers | James Barragán/Dallas Morning News

State Rep. Michelle Beckley wants to bring countywide voting centers to Denton, which would allow residents to vote at any polling location in the county. To do so, she is pushing a bill in the Legislature to allow counties with paper-based ballots, like Denton, to participate in the state’s countywide polling place program. “You run for office and you want to increase voter turnout,” said Beckley, a Carrollton Democrat who considers this bill her top priority for the 2021 session that begins next month. “You just need to make it easier and less confusing.” Currently, to operate a countywide polling program, a county must use all electronic equipment to count votes. Denton County uses paper-based ballots that voters fill out by hand and are then scanned electronically into the voting system. Beckley’s bill would add language into the election code allowing counties that use such technology into the state’s countywide vote center program. “I think that’s a positive development,” said David Jones, president of the nonpartisan Clean Elections Texas. “We’re in favor of anything that makes it easier for people to vote.”

Full Article: Carrollton Democrat proposes changing Texas law to let Denton have countywide vote centers

Editorial: Texas Tries an Election Long Shot | Wall Street Journal

Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General, seems intent on developing a name for himself as the patron saint of lost legal causes. He’s the father of the recent and long-shot case against ObamaCare, and this week he launched another implausible appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn state presidential election results.In Texas v. Pennsylvania, Mr. Paxton, joined by 17 other states and President Trump, claims that four states have harmed Texas by violating their election laws in ways that poisoned the result. He wants the Court to take the case directly, in “original jurisdiction,” and order the legislatures in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia to overturn election certifications for Joe Biden. The Court asked the four states to reply by 3 p.m. Thursday, but it would be a legal and political earthquake if the Court took the case. Cases of original jurisdiction—when a state bypasses lower courts and goes directly to the Supreme Court—are rare and typically involve interstate disputes. This one concerns election law in states other than Texas. The first issue is whether Texas has the legal standing to sue. To have standing, a plaintiff must point to a specific injury and there must be some possibility of a remedy. In this case, what is the injury? No one is interfering with Texas’s authority to deliver its Electoral College votes. Mr. Paxton argues that the four states have harmed his state and violated the Electors Clause of the Constitution by holding elections with major procedural irregularities. He’s saying Texas can be harmed by the way another state manages its elections. But if Texas can sue on these grounds, then some unhappy state will sue another state after every close election whose outcome it doesn’t like.

Source: Texas Tries an Election Long Shot – WSJ

Wisconsin Republicans are calling partisans instead of election professionals for their hearing on voting | Patrick Marley/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

A month ago, Republican lawmakers said they were prepared to issue subpoenas for the first time in decades to haul election officials before them to get answers about how the presidential contest was conducted. But they have now abandoned that plan and aren’t even bothering to invite them to attend a Friday hearing looking into an election that Democrat Joe Biden won by about 21,000 votes in the state. Instead, they’re asking to hear from a conservative radio talk show host, a former state Supreme Court justice, a postal subcontractor who has offered a debunked theory about backdated absentee ballots and an election observer whom President Donald Trump wants to testify in court in one of his lawsuits over the election. Friday’s hearing before two committees is being overseen by Rep. Ron Tusler of Harrison and Sen. Kathy Bernier of Lake Hallie. The two have not sought testimony from Meagan Wolfe, the director of the state Elections Commission, or Claire Woodall-Vogg, the director of the Milwaukee Election Commission. Tusler has spent the last month reviewing what he has said are thousands of complaints and concerns about the election, but he’s yet to talk to Woodall-Vogg about them, Woodall-Vogg said. “No one has contacted me during the course of their ‘investigation’ into claims over the past month,” Woodall-Vogg said by email.

Full Article: Wisconsin GOP election hearing will hear from partisans, not pros

National: 17 Republican Attorneys General Back Trump in Far-Fetched Election Lawsuit | Jeremy W. Peters and Maggie Haberman/The New York Times

Despite dozens of judges and courts rejecting challenges to the election, Republican attorneys general in 17 states on Wednesday backed President Trump in his increasingly desperate and audacious legal campaign to reverse the results. The show of support, in a brief filed with the Supreme Court, represented the latest attempt by Trump loyalists to use the power of public office to come to his aid as he continues to deny the reality of his loss with baseless claims of voter fraud. The move is an effort to bolster a lawsuit filed on Tuesday by the pro-Trump attorney general in Texas that seeks to delay the certification of the presidential electors in four battleground states the president lost. Mr. Trump has been holding out hope that the Supreme Court will hear the case and ultimately award him a second term. Legal experts are skeptical, however, and have largely dismissed it as a publicity stunt. Late Tuesday, the president asked Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican, if he would be willing to argue the case, according to a person familiar with their conversation. Mr. Cruz agreed, this person said. And the president has filed a motion with the court to intervene, which would make him a party to the case. The willingness of so many Republican politicians to publicly involve themselves in a legal campaign to invalidate the ballots of millions of Americans shows how singular a figure Mr. Trump remains in the G.O.P. That these political allies are also elected officials whose jobs involve enforcing laws, including voting rights, underscores the extraordinary nature of the brief to the court. Even in defeat — a reality that a significant number of Republicans refuse to accept, polls show — allegiance to Mr. Trump is viewed as the ticket to higher office.

Full Article: 17 Republican Attorneys General Back Trump in Far-Fetched Election Lawsuit – The New York Times

Michigan Secretary of State Benson to audit results of state, 200 jurisdictions including Wayne, Antrim counties | Beth LeBlanc/The Detroit News

The Michigan Bureau of Elections will conduct a raft of audits in the coming weeks, including reviews at the state level, in Antrim and Wayne counties, and in 200 other jurisdictions. The undertaking is the “most comprehensive post-election audits of any election in state history,” the bureau said Wednesday.  The preliminary plans come after more than a month of lawsuits, press conferences, committee hearings and protests questioning Michigan’s election results, which placed President-elect Joe Biden 154,000 votes ahead of President Donald Trump. Post-election audits are common, but those announced Wednesday by Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson are more than have ever been conducted before in an effort to demonstrate “the integrity of our election.” “Clerks across the state carried out an extremely successful election amidst the challenges created by record-breaking turnout and more than double the absentee ballots ever before cast in our state, a global pandemic and the failure of the Michigan Legislature to provide more than 10 hours for pre-processing of absentee ballots,” Benson said in a statement.

Full Article: Benson to conduct statewide audits, plus ones in Wayne, Antrim counties

National: Trump’s effort to steal the election comes down to some utterly ridiculous statistical claims | Philip Bump/The Washington Post

President Trump has moved all of his electoral eggs into a new basket. Now, his efforts to undermine the will of the electorate and seize a second consecutive term in office hinges upon a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a lawsuit that essentially argues that Texas is harmed by the election results in four states that flipped from red to blue last month. It is a lawsuit that people with much more legal expertise than myself have dismissed out-of-hand as ridiculous given the legal case being made. But it is also a lawsuit that makes statistical claims that are so bizarre, it falls well within my area of expertise to point out that on that rhetoric alone, it’s a disaster. The lawsuit’s statistical case comes down to this question: How many zeros will it take for you to be sufficiently impressed that you’ll ignore basic logic? The author of the lawsuit appears to have settled on the number 15. “The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — independently given President Trump’s early lead in those States as of 3 a.m. on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,” it reads at one point. “For former Vice President Biden to win these four States collectively, the odds of that event happening decrease to less than one in a quadrillion to the fourth power.” After citing the individual credited for this interesting math, it continues. “The same less than one in a quadrillion statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — independently exists when Mr. Biden’s performance in each of those Defendant States is compared to former Secretary of State Hilary [sic] Clinton’s performance in the 2016 general election and President Trump’s performance in the 2016 and 2020 general elections,” it reads. “Again, the statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in these four States collectively is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000.” Just complete nonsense.

 

Full Article: Trump’s effort to steal the election comes down to some utterly ridiculous statistical claims – The Washington Post

National: Trump pressures congressional Republicans to help his fight to overturn the election | Rachael Bade, Josh Dawsey and Tom Hamburger/The Washington Post

President Trump is shifting his focus to Congress after the courts roundly rejected his bid to overturn the results of the election, pressuring congressional Republicans into taking a final stand to keep him in power. Trump’s push is part of a multipronged approach as he also seeks to lobby state and federal lawmakers to give him cover for his unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud, as well as rally support for a last-gasp legal challenge in the Supreme Court that election law experts almost universally dismiss. The president has been calling Republicans, imploring them to keep fighting and more loudly proclaim the election was stolen while pressing them on what they plan to do. He spoke to Arizona GOP Party Chairwoman Kelli Ward and Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), head of the conservative Republican Study Committee, on Wednesday, and is expected to meet Thursday at the White House with several state attorneys general. Meanwhile, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer and point man in the legal fight, has been making similar calls from the hospital, where he is being treated for covid-19. The president also has enlisted Vice President Pence to reach out to governors and other party leaders in key states to see what else can be done to help the president. A person familiar with the calls said Pence has not exerted pressure on lawmakers to take specific actions and sees them as “checking in.” The individual spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly. The vice president’s office declined to comment. Tim Murtaugh of the Trump campaign also declined to comment. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Trump’s conservative allies in the House have been privately buttonholing GOP senators, seeking to enlist one to join in objecting to slates of electors on Jan. 6, according to multiple people familiar with their effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their plans.

 

Full Article: Trump pressures congressional Republicans to help his fight to overturn the election – The Washington Post

National: Trump’s Challenges to Election Results Face End of the Legal Road | Brent Kimbrell and Deanna Paul/Wall Street Journal

A sweeping multistate legal effort by President Trump and his supporters to override President-elect Joe Biden’s victory has reached the end of the line, with losses in courts at all levels including the U.S. Supreme Court. In the five weeks since Election Day, the Trump campaign and other Republicans have lost at least 40 times in six pivotal states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In several other cases, the campaign or allies withdrew claims after filing them. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court in a one-sentence order turned away a last-ditch effort by Pennsylvania Republicans to invalidate votes from the vote-by-mail system enacted by the state legislature last year. No justice noted a dissent to the order, which was released on the deadline for states to complete election results before the Electoral College meets and casts its vote on Dec. 14. Trump campaign lawyers promised to push forward. “The only fixed day in the U.S. Constitution is the inauguration of the president on January 20,” the Trump campaign’s legal team said. A handful of longshot election challenges remain, including an effort by Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton to sue four battleground states directly in the Supreme Court. He will need the court’s permission to do so, and legal experts say the case has almost no chance at success. In a tweet Wednesday, Mr. Trump called the Paxton case “the big one” and said his campaign would seek to intervene. Dana Nessel, the Democratic attorney general of Michigan, said Mr. Paxton’s lawsuit was a publicity stunt that would fail.

Full Article: Trump’s Challenges to Election Results Face End of the Legal Road – WSJ