Author Archives: Warren Stewart

Republican push to recruit election deniers as poll workers causes alarm | Sam Levine/The Guardian

Republicans and other conservative groups are undertaking a huge effort to recruit election workers, a push that could install people with unfounded doubts about the 2020 election in key positions in voting precincts where they could exert considerable power over elections. At the forefront of this push is Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who was on Donald Trump’s legal team in 2020 and played a key role in his effort to overturn the election. Over the last few months, Mitchell has held “election integrity summits” in several battleground states, convening groups and citizens who continue to believe the 2020 election was stolen. The summits offer in-depth training on how to monitor election offices and how to work elections. At a mid-June summit in North Carolina, Mitchell mocked the term “election denier” and said “whether the outcome was correct, that’s all I deny”. Voter fraud is extremely rare and there was no evidence of widespread fraud in 2020. The effort, called the Election Integrity Network, underscores how Trump and allies are capitalizing on now deeply seeded Republican doubt about Joe Biden’s victory and are targeting key election offices and jobs that play a considerable role in determining how ballots are cast and counted. The summits are a project of the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), a group with close ties to Trump’s political operation, and where Mitchell is a senior legal fellow. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, is a senior partner at CPI.

Full Article: Republican push to recruit election deniers as poll workers causes alarm | US voting rights | The Guardian

National: Worries Grow About Election Safety and Security | Carl Smith/Governing

Controversy over election outcomes is not new. Overall voter confidence that votes were properly counted was lower after presidential elections in 2012 and 2016 than it was in 2020. What is new is the level of overt hostility toward the people who administer elections, manifested in an ongoing pattern of threats to their personal safety. Recent congressional hearings have included emotional accounts from election officials at all levels, from threats to the family members of a senior official to the crippling fallout when an election worker was falsely accused of fraud, by name, by the former president and his attorney. Spurred on by misinformation, including continued assertions from campaigning politicians that a national election was somehow “stolen,” members of the public have not backed off from such harassment. A Brennan Center poll of election officials, conducted more than two years after the 2020 election, found that one in six had experienced threats. Almost 80 percent said that threats had increased in recent years, and 30 percent knew election workers who left their jobs because they felt unsafe. More than three-fourths felt the federal government should be doing more to support them, and one in three said the same about their local government. Members of the election and law enforcement communities have joined together to help fill this void, forming the nonpartisan Committee for Safe and Secure Elections (CSSE).

Full Article: Worries Grow About Election Safety and Security

National: How the Supreme Court could radically reshape elections for president and Congress | Hansi Lo Wang/NPR

The U.S. Supreme Court announced Thursday that it has agreed to hear a case next term that could upend election laws across the country with the potential endorsement of a fringe legal theory about how much power state legislatures have over the running of congressional and presidential elections. The case, called Moore v. Harper, is centered on newly drawn maps of voting districts for North Carolina’s 14 seats in the next U.S. House of Representatives. Republican state lawmakers want to resurrect a map that North Carolina’s state courts struck down, finding that the map approved by the GOP-controlled legislature violated multiple provisions in the state’s constitution by giving Republican candidates an unfair advantage through partisan gerrymandering. A court-drawn map has been put in place instead for this year’s midterm elections. In their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, however, the Republican lawmakers argue that the U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause gives state legislatures the power to determine how congressional elections are conducted without any checks and balances from state constitutions or state courts.

Full Article: U.S. Supreme Court takes on the independent state legislature theory : NPR

National: Cyber Command urges private sector to share intelligence, aid defensive digital operations | Suzanne Smalley/CyberScoop

U.S. Cyber Command wants more tech companies and others on the front lines of the global fight to secure the internet to share more cybersecurity intelligence so that the organization can improve its defensive capabilities, Cyber Command Executive Director Dave Frederick said in an interview Monday. Frederick said Cyber Command regularly shares information it gleans during so-called “hunt forward” operations, defensive cyber missions carried out alongside partners, but needs more private companies to fully report cyber incidents so that Cyber Command can learn from them. Frederick, who was speaking during an industry webinar organized by Billington CyberSecurity, said the 27 hunt forward operations Cyber Command has conducted in the past two years have empowered partner countries to “immediately strengthen the defenses of their networks” and have given Cyber Command “unique insights into adversary malware which we then bring home.” Those insights inform not only Department of Defense cyber defense strategy, but also are shared with the private sector, he said. “We’re able to share the indicators of compromise, new samples of malware that we discover from hunt forward, with the broader cybersecurity community, and they’re able to then build signatures to detect that malware and basically disrupt adversary operations targeting the U.S. civil sector,” Frederick said. “It’s almost like giving an antidote to a virus, so it’s really turned out to be a great model.”

Full Article: Cyber Command urges private sector to share intelligence, aid defensive digital operations

National: Violent Threats to Election Workers Are Common. Prosecutions are Not. | Michael Wines and Eliza Fawcett/The New York Times

Full Article: Election Workers Don’t Feel Safe Despite Federal Effort to Combat Threats – The New York Times

National: The People v. Donald Trump – The evidence for a possible criminal case against the former president is piling up | David French/The Atlantic

From the moment the attack on the Capitol began, on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump’s moral culpability was clear. That mob would never have assembled on the National Mall but for Trump’s decision to relentlessly lie about the results of the 2020 election. His legal culpability, however, was more ambiguous. We did not possess any evidence that he directly coordinated with the rioters prior to the invasion of the Capitol, and although his speech to the mob on January 6 itself admonished his followers to “fight like hell” and warned them that “you will never take back our country with weakness,” it also contained an explicit statement that they should march to the Capitol to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard. Also hovering over the legal analysis was a prudential calculation. Former presidents shouldn’t be prosecuted under novel legal theories. If the government is going to prosecute, it should bring a case that’s easy to justify under existing precedent. Otherwise, the prosecution itself could be dangerous, further fracturing and destabilizing an already fragile American political culture. Those considerations are precisely why Trump’s conduct in the case of Georgia had seemed more obviously to involve potential criminal liability than his actions on January 6. In Georgia’s case, Trump was recorded telling Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” and then explicitly threatening Raffensperger with criminal sanctions if he didn’t accede to the president’s demand.

Full Article: The People v. Donald Trump – The Atlantic

Editorial: It’s Hard to Overstate the Danger of the Voting Case the Supreme Court Just Agreed to Hear | Richard L. Hasen/Slate

Michigan: Sheriff’s investigators used ‘scare tactics’ to grill county clerks on 2020 election | Craig Mauger/The Detroit News

A deputy and a private investigator working with Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf made unannounced visits last year to local election officials’ offices to question them about the 2020 presidential vote. Multiple clerks in Barry County said Leaf’s department used what they viewed as “scare tactics” as it examined and advanced unproven claims of fraud in the last presidential election. State authorities, including the Michigan State Police, are currently investigating whether those working with Leaf, a Republican, gained improper access to vote-counting machines that could have violated the law and compromised voting equipment in the battleground state. Some election clerks in Barry County said they believe their conversations with Leaf’s investigators — one of whom identified himself as a forensic auditor — were secretly recorded and said they were told not to inform other clerks about the probe, according to a series of interviews with officials in the county and emails obtained by The Detroit News through an open records request. “I asked if they were investigating all of the township & city clerks & was told yes, and I am to be questioned last,” Barry County Clerk Pam Palmer emailed a lawyer in June 2021. “They have purposely asked the clerks to not say anything to each other or myself because they want the element of surprise.”

Full Article: Sheriff Dar Leaf’s investigators used ‘element of surprise’ to grill Michigan clerks on 2020 election