Author Archives: Warren Stewart

National: New Right-Wing Conspiracies Threaten to Further Starve Local Election Systems | Spenser Mestel/Bolts

Michael Gableman, a former Wisconsin supreme court justice who said state election officials “stole our votes” days after Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential race, was granted wide latitude by Republicans to investigate voter fraud last year: a budget of $676,000, subpoena power, and months to pursue leads. But the report on the 2020 election that he presented to state lawmakers earlier this month was the usual hodgepodge of Trumpian recommendations, including decertifying the presidential results and outright eliminating the state’s election commission. Buried in the report was one proposal that has gone largely unnoticed, but is rapidly gaining steam as a new conservative cause celebre. Gableman called on Wisconsin to exit the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), which is a national organization that assists states in maintaining accurate voter rolls. Thirty states and the District of Columbia are part of ERIC, from Democratic Illinois to Republican Texas, but this bipartisan organization exploded on the radar for “Stop-the-Steal” activists after the far-right website Gateway Pundit published stories attacking it in January. The website falsely tied ERIC to George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist who supports an array of progressive causes, calling it a “left wing voter registration drive disguised as voter roll clean up,” even though ERIC is governed and financially supported by its member states.

Full Article: New Right-Wing Conspiracies Threaten to Further Starve Local Election Systems | Bolts

National: Election skeptics roil GOP contests for secretary of state | Christina A. Cassidy and Julie Carr Smyth/Associated Press

Full Article: Election skeptics roil GOP contests for secretary of state – The Washington Post

National: Coordinated phishing campaign targeted election officials in nine states, according to FBI | AJ Vicens/CyberScoop

An invoice-themed phishing campaign targeted elections officials in at least nine states in October 2021, according to a warning the FBI issued Tuesday. The attackers sought to steal login credentials and could have had “sustained, undetected” access to election administrators’ systems, the notice said. The emails — sent in batches on at least three separate days — “shared similar attachment files, used compromised email addresses, and were sent close in time, suggesting a concerted effort to target US election officials,” the notice reads. It’s unclear whether any of the phishing attacks were successful. The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “The FBI judges cyber actors will likely continue or increase their targeting of US election officials with phishing campaigns in the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections,” the notice reads. Phishing campaigns targeting election administrators through vendors, businesses, or other means was part of the Russian election interference campaign during the 2016 elections. In that case, emails purporting to be from Florida-based elections equipment vendor VR Systems was sent to 122 email addresses “associated with named local government organizations,” according to a National Security Agency assessment of the campaign. According to the new FBI warning, on Oct. 5, 2021, “unidentified cyber actors” sent emails originating from at least two email addresses to unidentified officials in nine unnamed states and to representatives of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS). The emails contained the same attachment titled “INVOICE INQUIRY.PDF,” which would redirect targets to a credential-harvesting website.

Full Article: Coordinated phishing campaign targeted election officials in nine states, according to FBI

National: Some states take steps to protect election workers as threats increase | Barbara Rodriguez/The 19th News

The people kept showing up at the small Northern California office where Natalie Adona and her co-workers help run elections. Three days in a row, they came to try to push a petition for recall elections, refusing to wear masks despite a mandate and physically pushing their way into the office, according to legal documents. Adona and her colleagues asked for a restraining order against the three people, worried about the trio who they say kept showing up to harass them at their jobs. A judge granted it, then later extended it for one of the people, finding “clear and convincing evidence” that the same person “engaged in unlawful violence or made a credible threat of violence.” An attorney for the trio has denied wrongdoing. The elections office briefly shut down walk-ins. Adona, who is an assistant clerk-recorder for the Nevada County Elections Office, said she has experienced several panic attacks. She still worries about her colleagues. “It was a really unfortunate incident that led to me and my staff feeling pretty afraid,” Adona told The 19th. “Certainly, I think that having a restraining order is an extreme way to settle a problem that I would have liked to have sort of settled by other means. But the circumstances and our county counsel felt it appropriate to go in that direction.”

Full Article: Some states take steps to protect election workers as threats increase

National: Jan. 6 White House logs given to House show 7-hour gap in Trump calls | Bob Woodward and Robert Costa/The Washington Post

Full Article: Jan. 6 White House logs given to House show 7-hour gap in Trump calls – The Washington Post

National: New Focus on How a Trump Tweet Incited Far-Right Groups Before Jan. 6 | Alan Feuer, Michael S. Schmidt and Luke Broadwater/The New York Times

Federal prosecutors and congressional investigators have gathered growing evidence of how a tweet by President Donald J. Trump less than three weeks before Jan. 6, 2021, served as a crucial call to action for extremist groups that played a central role in storming the Capitol. Mr. Trump’s Twitter post in the early hours of Dec. 19, 2020, was the first time he publicly urged supporters to come to Washington on the day Congress was scheduled to certify the Electoral College results showing Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the winner of the presidential vote. His message — which concluded with, “Be there, will be wild!” — has long been seen as instrumental in drawing the crowds that attended a pro-Trump rally on the Ellipse on Jan. 6 and then marched to the Capitol. But the Justice Department’s criminal investigation of the riot and the parallel inquiry by the House select committee have increasingly shown how Mr. Trump’s post was a powerful catalyst, particularly for far-right militants who believed he was facing his final chance to reverse defeat and whose role in fomenting the violence has come under intense scrutiny. Extremist groups almost immediately celebrated Mr. Trump’s Twitter message, which they widely interpreted as an invitation to descend on the city in force. Responding to the president’s words, the groups sprang into action, court filings and interviews by the House committee show: Extremists began to set up encrypted communications channels, acquire protective gear and, in one case, prepare heavily armed “quick reaction forces” to be staged outside Washington.

Full Article: New Focus on How a Trump Tweet Incited Far-Right Groups Before Jan. 6 – The New York Times

Editorial: Merrick Garland Has More Than Enough to Investigate Trump | Timothy L. O’Brien/Bloomberg

A federal judge thinks that former President Donald Trump likely committed fraud — and probably knew it — when he and one of his lawyers, John Eastman, plotted to block Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election so Trump could hold on to power. So how much longer will it take Attorney General Merrick Garland to draw the same conclusion about that attempted coup? Perhaps Garland has already gone down that path. But there are no outward signs that he is investigating Trump with an eye toward a possible criminal prosecution. He has every reason to be circumspect, of course, but he has no reason to ignore the mounting evidence of Trump’s crimes. The latest reminder of what’s at stake came in Monday’s ruling from David Carter, a U.S. District Court judge in California. “Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history,” Judge Carter noted in his Monday ruling. “The plan spurred violent attacks on the seat of our nation’s government, led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers, and deepened public distrust in our political process.” While ordering Eastman to turn over relevant email correspondence with Trump to the bipartisan House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Carter was also clear-eyed about the scope of his and the committee’s powers.

Full Article: Merrick Garland Has More Than Enough to Investigate Trump – Bloomberg

Virginia Thomas urged White House chief to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 election, texts show | Bob Woodward and Robert Costa/The Washington Post

Full Article: Virginia Thomas urged White House chief to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 election, texts show – The Washington Post

National: Biden administration to give federal employees time off to vote, work the polls | Niels Lesniewski/Roll Call

The Biden administration is directing federal agencies to let federal workers take leave to vote — and to serve as poll workers. Vice President Kamala Harris highlighted that new guidance from the Office of Personnel Management during a virtual event Thursday afternoon, delivering remarks from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. “We believe the federal government should serve as a model employer — and, by the way, we’re the largest employer in the country, so we can do this and we should do this — and then therefore serve as a model employer when it comes to helping employees participate in their democracy,” Harris said. “And we’re going to therefore call on all employers to do the same.” The new policy for federal workers was one of several deliverables tied to the anniversary of President Joe Biden’s March 7, 2021, executive order on efforts to expand voting access. Thursday’s event also focused on two new reports stating what can be done to help support voting access for people with disabilities, as well as in tribal communities. “I’m proud to announce that the National Institute of Standards and Technology is releasing a report that lays out a comprehensive assessment of the barriers that disabled Americans face when they’re voting and offers specific recommendations for what we must do with a sense of urgency to break down those barriers — for example, including more disabled people in the design of election procedures because, of course, we should be having the leaders lead and — and not replacing what we think is, is important with what leaders can tell us is important,” Harris said.

Full Article: Biden administration to give federal employees time off to vote, work the polls – Roll Call

National: Contentious Fringe Legal Theory Could Reshape State Election Laws | Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline

The U.S. Supreme Court this month left open the possibility that it could endorse a fringe conservative legal theory that would give state legislatures unchecked powers over election rules before the 2024 presidential election. Republican officials cited the theory, which asserts that state courts do not have jurisdiction over election policy, in two key cases filed in North Carolina and Pennsylvania over congressional maps selected by their highest courts. Groups in those states—which included voters, Republican state senators and representatives, an election official and a congressional candidate—petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out the respective maps. They argued in federal court filings that the U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures the sole power to set rules for federal elections. The high court rejected emergency requests to block the maps, allowing the ones chosen by state courts to stay in place for the 2022 midterm elections. But in a dissent to the North Carolina decision, three conservative justices endorsed the theory known as the “independent state legislature doctrine,” while another signaled he wanted to formally consider the question. That means there appears to be enough votes to put the issue—and the possible legitimization of the doctrine—on the court’s 2023 calendar.

Full Article: Contentious Fringe Legal Theory Could Reshape State Election Laws | The Pew Charitable Trusts

National: Where Does American Democracy Go From Here? | Charles Homans/The New York Times

Early last year, Freedom House, an American organization that since World War II has warned against autocracy and repression on the march around the world, issued a special report on a country that had not usually warranted such attention: its own. Noting that the United States had slid down its ranking of countries by political rights and civil liberties — it is now 59th on Freedom House’s list, slightly below Argentina and Mongolia — the report warned that the country faced “an acute crisis for democracy.” In November, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an influential Stockholm-based think tank, followed suit, adding the United States to its list of “backsliding democracies” for the first time. The impetus for these reassessments was Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that followed. But as the reassessments themselves noted, those shocks to the system hardly came out of nowhere; like the Trump presidency itself, they were both products and accelerants of a process of American democratic erosion and disunion that had been underway for years and has continued since. In states across the country, Republican candidates are running for office on the platform that the 2020 election was stolen — a view held by about three-quarters of Republican voters. Since the beginning of 2021, Republicans in at least 25 state legislatures have tried, albeit mostly unsuccessfully, to pass legislation directly targeting the election system: bills that would place election oversight or certification in the hands of partisan legislatures, for instance, and in some cases even bills specifically punishing officials who blocked attempts to overturn the 2020 election outcome in Trump’s favor. And those are just the new developments, happening against a backdrop of a decade-long erosion of voting rights and a steady resurgence of political extremism and violence, and of course a world newly at war over the principles of self-​determination and democracy.

Full Article: Where Does American Democracy Go From Here? – The New York Times

National: Trump Just Endorsed an Oath Keeper’s Plan to Seize Control of the Republican Party | Isaac Arnsdorf/ProPublica

Former President Donald Trump has officially endorsed a plan, created by a man who has self-identified with the Oath Keeper militia, that aims to have Trump supporters consolidate control of the Republican Party. The plan, known as the “precinct strategy,” has been repeatedly promoted on Steve Bannon’s popular podcast. As ProPublica detailed last year, it has already inspired thousands of people to fill positions at the lowest rung of the party ladder. Though these positions are low-profile and often vacant, they hold critical powers: They help elect higher-ranking party officers, influence which candidates appear on the ballot, turn out voters on Election Day and even staff the polling precincts where people vote and the election boards that certify the results. “Just heard about an incredible effort underway that will strengthen the Republican Party,” Trump said Sunday in a statement emailed to his supporters. “If members of our Great movement start getting involved (that means YOU becoming a precinct committeeman for your voting precinct), we can take back our great Country from the ground up.”

Full Article: Trump Just Endorsed an Oath Keeper’s Plan to Seize Control of the Republican Party — ProPublica

National: Securing the Midterms: Smarter Tools Watch Over Voter Records | Jule Pattison-Gordon/Government Technology

Can automated alerts and machine learning help midterm elections go smoothly and securely? That’s the hope of a Harvard University technology lab and Protect Democracy, a nonprofit focused on preserving democracy in the U.S. Each group offers its own free tool designed to monitor for any unwarranted changes to voter registration records and deliver timely alerts. Harvard Public Interest Tech Lab’s VoteFlare is designed to alert voters, while Protect Democracy’s VoteShield is for election officials’ use. If all goes well, the tools will help constituents and public officials closely monitor for any signs of honest errors or deliberate attacks, allowing them to sort out voting registration discrepancies quickly before they impede ballot casting. Constituents whose information does not match that on their voting records could run into difficulties. Having the wrong party affiliation down prevents voting in the closed primaries, for example. Meanwhile, a mismatch in addresses could block individuals from voting entirely, restrict them to casting a provisional ballot — which is not always counted — or require them to somehow figure out the address on record so they can vote in that precinct, warned Latanya Sweeney, Ji Su Yoo and Jinyan Zang in a 2017 report. Two of those report authors — Sweeney and Zang — helped create VoteFlare. Sweeney, a Harvard professor of the Practice of Government and Technology, led the team.

Full Article: Securing the Midterms: Smarter Tools Watch Over Voter Records

National: White House releases report on Native American voting rights | Felicia Fonseca/Associated Press

Local, state and federal officials must do more to ensure Native Americans facing persistent, longstanding and deep-rooted barriers to voting have equal access to ballots, a White House report released Thursday said. Native Americans and Alaska Natives vote at lower rates than the national average but have been a key constituency in tight races and states with large Native populations. A surge in voter turnout among tribal members in Arizona, for example, helped lead Joe Biden to victory in the state that hadn’t supported a Democrat in a White House contest since 1996. The Biden administration’s report comes a year after he issued an executive order promoting voting rights and establishing a steering committee to look at particular barriers to voting in Indigenous communities. Those include state laws and local practices that disenfranchise Indigenous voters, unequal access to early voting and reliance on a mail system that is unreliable, the report stated. “For far too long, members of tribal nations and Native communities have faced unnecessary burdens when they attempt to exercise their sacred right to vote,” the White House said. The administration called on Congress to pass voting rights legislation, including the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and another focused on Native Americans. But those bills are going nowhere. Republicans wouldn’t support them, and Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have been unwilling to override the filibuster to allow the legislation to pass.

Full Article: White House releases report on Native American voting rights | AP News