National

Senate Democrats are inching closer to pushing floor action on their sweeping safety net and climate package into 2022 amid growing momentum in the caucus to make a last-ditch attempt to pass voting rights legislation before the end of the year. In a sign of the shifting mood, one of the top progressive voices on Capitol Hill who’s been leading the charge for much of this year to get President Joe Biden’s economic agenda enacted suggested maybe it was time to change gears. “Obviously voting rights have got to be dealt with immediately,” Senate Budget Chairman Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., told reporters Wednesday. “I would like to see a Build Back Better bill move as quickly as possible, but if we can’t deal with that right now, it’s a lot more important that we deal with the voting rights issue.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal also noted the “intensifying focus” on prioritizing voting rights legislation over the spending package. “We may not be able to do both, but certainly we should have votes and we should do at least one,” the Connecticut Democrat said. A month ago as the House passed its $2.2 trillion version of the social safety net and climate budget reconciliation package, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer set a Christmas deadline for the Senate to follow suit. Since then, the measure’s bogged down in the slow process of tweaking it to ensure it complies with the chamber’s “Byrd rule” that restricts what can be included in budget reconciliation bills. It also does not yet have buy-in from 50 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus. Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W.Va., continues to hold out, despite personal intervention from Biden and lobbying from colleagues.

Full Article: Momentum grows for Senate to take up voting bills ahead of budget package

National: Election denier who circulated Jan. 6 PowerPoint says he met with Meadows at White House | Emma Brown, Jon Swaine, Jacqueline Alemany, Josh Dawsey and Tom Hamburger/The Washington Post

A retired U.S. Army colonel who circulated a proposal to challenge the 2020 election, including by declaring a national security emergency and seizing paper ballots, said that he visited the White House on multiple occasions after the election, spoke with President Donald Trump’s chief of staff “maybe eight to 10 times” and briefed several members of Congress on the eve of the Jan. 6 riot. Phil Waldron, the retired colonel, was working with Trump’s outside lawyers and was part of a team that briefed the lawmakers on a PowerPoint presentation detailing “Options for 6 JAN,” Waldron told The Washington Post. He said his contribution to the presentation focused on his claims of foreign interference in the vote, as did his discussions with the White House. A version of the presentation made its way to the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, on Jan. 5. That information surfaced publicly this week after the congressional committee investigating the insurrection released a letter that said Meadows had turned the document over to the committee. “The presentation was that there was significant foreign interference in the election, here’s the proof,” Waldron said. “These are constitutional, legal, feasible, acceptable and suitable courses of action.”

Full Article: Phil Waldron, backer of Jan. 6 PowerPoint, says he met with Mark Meadows, briefed lawmakers – The Washington Post

National: The Pro-Trump Conspiracy Internet Is Moving From Facebook To Your Doorstep | Sarah Mimms/BuzzFeed

The man at the door said he was just there to verify some publicly available information. In the home security video, he seems nervous and out of breath as he waits at the doorway, glancing frequently at his phone. Strangers don’t knock on doors much in Waterville Valley, New Hampshire, a small ski town. For a decade, it had just 250 year-round residents, until the pandemic hit and a bunch of Massachusetts residents decided to cross state lines and turn their rural vacation spot into a home. But the man at the door wasn’t one of them. He said his name was Dean and he was with the New Hampshire Voter Integrity Group. The homeowner knew right away something was up, he said later in an interview. He didn’t go to answer the door, but spoke to the man through his Ring camera, pressing him on what exactly the New Hampshire Voter Integrity Group was and who they represented. In the video shared with BuzzFeed News, Dean, haltingly, says they are volunteers. They don’t represent anybody but themselves. They are just trying to verify the town’s voter rolls. The homeowner keeps pressing, and finally Dean gets to the point: “[We] took a look at the election so we’re a little concerned about what happened, so we’re, uh, checking.” The homeowner, a Democrat, tells him to go to hell and get off his property. “That’ll be a nice trip, thank you,” Dean replies cheerfully in the security footage as he turns to leave. “I’ll see you there.”

Full Article: Election Fraud Conspiracy Groups Go Door-To-Door

National: America’s Anti-Democratic Movement – It’s making progress | David Leonhardt/The New York Times

American politics these days can often seem fairly normal. President Biden has had both big accomplishments and big setbacks in his first year, as is typical. In Congress, members are haggling over bills and passing some of them. At the Supreme Court, justices are hearing cases. Daily media coverage tends to reflect this apparent sense of political normalcy. But American politics today is not really normal. It may instead be in the midst of a radical shift away from the democratic rules and traditions that have guided the country for a very long time. An anti-democratic movement, inspired by Donald Trump but much larger than him, is making significant progress, as my colleague Charles Homans has reported. In the states that decide modern presidential elections, this movement has already changed some laws and ousted election officials, with the aim of overturning future results. It has justified the changes with blatantly false statements claiming that Biden did not really win the 2020 election. The movement has encountered surprisingly little opposition. Most leading Republican politicians have either looked the other way or supported the anti-democratic movement. In the House, Republicans ousted Liz Cheney from a leadership position because she called out Trump’s lies. The pushback within the Republican Party has been so weak that about 60 percent of Republican adults now tell pollsters that they believe the 2020 election was stolen — a view that’s simply wrong.

Full Article: America’s Anti-Democratic Movement – The New York Times

National: Far too little vote fraud to tip election to Trump, AP finds | Christina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

An Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump has found fewer than 475 — a number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election. Democrat Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 Electoral College votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president. The disputed ballots represent just 0.15% of his victory margin in those states. The cases could not throw the outcome into question even if all the potentially fraudulent votes were for Biden, which they were not, and even if those ballots were actually counted, which in most cases they were not. The review also showed no collusion intended to rig the voting. Virtually every case was based on an individual acting alone to cast additional ballots. The findings build on a mountain of other evidence that the election wasn’t rigged, including verification of the results by Republican governors. The AP review, a process that took months and encompassed more than 300 local election offices, is one the most comprehensive examinations of suspected voter fraud in last year’s presidential election. It relies on information collected at the local level, where officials must reconcile their ballots and account for discrepancies, and includes a handful of separate cases cited by secretaries of state and state attorneys general.

Full Article: Far too little vote fraud to tip election to Trump, AP finds | AP News

National: The network of election lawyers who are making it harder for Americans to vote | Peter Stone/The Guardian

A powerful network of conservative election lawyers and groups with links to Donald Trump have spent millions of dollars promoting new and onerous voting laws that many key battleground states such as Georgia and Texas have enacted. The moves have prompted election and voting rights watchdogs in America to warn about the suppression of non-white voters aimed at providing Republicans an edge in coming elections. The lawyers and groups spearheading self-professed election integrity measures include some figures who pushed Trump’s baseless claims of fraud after the 2020 election. Key advocates include Cleta Mitchell with the Conservative Partnership institute; J Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation; Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation; Jason Snead of the Honest Elections Project; and J Kenneth Blackwell with the America First Policy institute. These conservative outfits tout their goal as curbing significant voter fraud, despite the fact that numerous courts, the vast majority of voting experts and even former top Trump officials, such as ex-attorney general Bill Barr, concluded the 2020 elections were without serious problems. Watchdogs say that tightening state voting laws endanger the rights of Black voters and other communities of color who historically back Democrats by creating new rules limiting absentee voting and same day registration, while imposing other voting curbs.

Full Article: The network of election lawyers who are making it harder for Americans to vote | US voting rights | The Guardian

National: Now in Your Inbox: Political Misinformation | Maggie Astor/The New York Times

A few weeks ago, Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, falsely claimed that the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda, a $1.75 trillion bill to battle climate change and extend the nation’s social safety net, would include Medicare for all. It doesn’t, and never has. But few noticed Mr. Crenshaw’s lie because he didn’t say it on Facebook, or on Fox News. Instead, he sent the false message directly to the inboxes of his constituents and supporters in a fund-raising email. Lawmakers’ statements on social media and cable news are now routinely fact-checked and scrutinized. But email — one of the most powerful communication tools available to politicians, reaching up to hundreds of thousands of people — teems with unfounded claims and largely escapes notice. The New York Times signed up in August for the campaign lists of the 390 senators and representatives running for re-election in 2022 whose websites offered that option, and read more than 2,500 emails from those campaigns to track how widely false and misleading statements were being used to help fill political coffers. Both parties delivered heaps of hyperbole in their emails. One Republican, for instance, declared that Democrats wanted to establish a “one-party socialist state,” while a Democrat suggested that the party’s Jan. 6 inquiry was at imminent risk because the G.O.P. “could force the whole investigation to end early.”

Full Article: Now in Your Inbox: Political Misinformation – The New York Times

‘Time is running out’: can Congress pass a voting rights bill after months of failure? | Sam Levine/The Guardian

For years, Helen Butler has been on a mission to increase voter turnout, especially among Black voters, in Georgia and across the south. She’s used to the skepticism. People she meets wonder why they should bother, because their vote won’t matter. No matter who’s in office, longstanding problems won’t get solved. More recently, she’s pushed back on efforts by Georgia Republicans to make it harder to vote. She’s seen things like overly aggressive efforts to remove people from the voter rolls and the rapid consolidation of polling places. Last year, she listened as Joe Biden promised he would protect the right to vote if he was elected president. “One thing the Senate and the president can do right away is pass the bill to restore the Voting Rights Act … it’s one of the first things I’ll do as president if elected. We can’t let the fundamental right to vote be denied,” he said in July last year. Months later, Butler and other organizers had a breakthrough that had been years in the making. After years of investing in voter mobilization, turnout among Black voters surged in the November election, helping Joe Biden win a state long seen as a Republican stronghold. In January, Black voters came out again and helped Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock win two upset Senate bids, giving Democrats control of the US Senate. On the night he was elected president, Biden called out the Black voters who helped him capture the presidency, saying: “When this campaign was at its lowest – the African American community stood up again for me. They always have my back, and I’ll have yours.” And so, after Biden was inaugurated, Butler and many others expected that voting rights would be one of the first things the president and Democrats addressed. Instead, during the president’s first year in office, Butler has watched with dismay as Biden and Democrats have failed to pass any voting rights legislation. Meanwhile, Republicans in Georgia passed sweeping new voting restrictions, one of several places across the country that made it harder to vote.

Full Article: ‘Time is running out’: can Congress pass a voting rights bill after months of failure? | US voting rights | The Guardian

National: Fearing a Repeat of Jan. 6, Congress Eyes Changes to Electoral Count Law Luke Broadwater and Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

Members of the select congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol are pressing to overhaul the complex and little-known law that former President Donald J. Trump and his allies tried to use to overturn the 2020 election, arguing that the ambiguity of the statute puts democracy itself at risk. The push to rewrite the Electoral Count Act of 1887 — enacted more than a century ago in the wake of another bitterly disputed presidential election — has taken on new urgency in recent weeks as more details have emerged about the extent of Mr. Trump’s plot to exploit its provisions to cling to power. Mr. Trump and his allies, using a warped interpretation of the law, sought to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to throw out legitimate results when Congress met in a joint session on Jan. 6 to conduct its official count of electoral votes. It was Mr. Pence’s refusal to do so that led a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters to chant “Hang Mike Pence,” as they stormed the Capitol, delaying the proceedings as lawmakers fled for their lives. Members of Congress and the vice president ultimately returned and completed the count, rejecting challenges made by loyalists to Mr. Trump and formalizing President Biden’s victory. But had Mr. Pence done as Mr. Trump wanted — or had enough members of Congress voted to sustain the challenges lodged by Mr. Trump’s supporters — the outcome could have been different. “We know that we came precariously close to a constitutional crisis, because of the confusion in many people’s minds that was obviously planted by the former president as to what the Congress’s role actually was,” said Zach Wamp, a former Republican congressman from Tennessee who is a co-chairman of the Reformers Caucus at Issue One, a bipartisan group that is pressing for changes to the election process.

Full Article: Fearing a Repeat of Jan. 6, Congress Eyes Changes to Electoral Count Law – The New York Times

National: Addressing Insider Threats in Elections | Lawrence Norden and Derek Tisler/Brennan Center for Justice

Election officials were some of the biggest heroes of the 2020 election. After a grueling year that saw a pandemic, unprecedented disinformation efforts, and the highest turnout in over a century, they stood up to pressure from political actors seeking to overturn or cast doubt on the election results in key states. This collective, bipartisan effort helped avoid a constitutional crisis last year. But the effort to sabotage our elections has only intensified, which is why Congress and state and local governments must take critical steps to protect against insider threats. Unfortunately, almost one-third of Americans still believe the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen. Given this fact, we shouldn’t be shocked that among the more than 8,000 local election officials — and tens of thousands of additional public and private sector employees that support their work — there are some who will also buy into these conspiracy theories. In fact, there has been an active effort to recruit and convince election officials to facilitate these conspiracy theories and push the goals of election deniers. There is reason to worry these efforts could gain traction and followers in the election official community. Following the threats, harassment, intimidation, political pressure, disinformation, and general exhaustion that election officials faced in 2020, many are choosing to leave the election administration field altogether. In Pennsylvania, for example, nearly a third of all county election officials left their posts between the beginning of 2020 and June of this year. And in many cases, the people seeking to fill these open positions are those who have been most activated by the conspiracies surrounding the 2020 election and the most determined to abuse their authority to ensure a different outcome in 2024. At least 10 candidates running for secretary of state and 8 running for attorney general have received former President Trump’s endorsement because they backed his false claims that the 2020 election was illegitimate.

Full Article: Addressing Insider Threats in Elections | Brennan Center for Justice

National: ‘An existential threat’: Violent harassment over the 2020 election haunts election workers, but few perpetrators have been held accountable | Grace Panetta/Business Insider

Ruby Freeman was among the tens of thousands of Americans who helped serve the need for more election workers in her community in 2020, joining her daughter Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, a full-time employee in the Fulton County, Georgia elections office, to process and count absentee ballots in the November election. Just two months later, Freeman was the target of a relentless online harassment campaign over the election lies perpetuated by former President Donald Trump and his allies. Freeman and Moss, represented by the nonprofit group Protect Democracy and their co-counsels, are now suing the popular right-wing website The Gateway Pundit, its founder Jim Hoft, and his brother and Gateway Pundit writer Joe Hoft, for defamation and intentional inflection of emotional distress. As Trump invoked her name over a dozen times on the January 2 phone call pressuring Georgia officials to “find” enough votes to win him the election, Freeman fled her home on the advice of the FBI at the beginning of January, staying in Airbnbs and avoiding using credit cards that could be used to trace her. The lawsuit outlines how online conspiracy theories can upend the lives of relatively low-level election workers. The suit also highlights how little protection besieged election workers currently receive from law enforcement, and how few people have been held accountable for threatening election officials.

Full Article: Lawsuit Shows Few Consequence for Those Who Threaten Election Workers

National: Federal Funding Sought to Protect Threatened Election Officials | Kenneth P. Doyle/Bloomberg

Federal election officials are seeking expedited legal guidance from the Government Accountability Office on whether funds allocated to states for election administration can be used to pay for personal security purposes. That’s one of the steps to improve the safety of state and local election officials that the U.S. Election Assistance Commission outlined in a letter responding to an inquiry last month from Senate Rules and Administration Committee Chairwoman Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and ranking member Roy Blunt(R-Mo.). The senators expressed concern for officials who’ve faced increased threats of violence since the 2020 elections. The commission is asking whether funds directed to states through the 2002 Help America Vote Act that are already being used to pay for securing election offices can also be used for physical personal protection. “HAVA election security grants were made available to states to improve the administration of elections for Federal office, and physical security falls under that umbrella,” the four commissioners said in a Dec. 3 letter obtained by Bloomberg Government. “We await a response from the GAO but stand ready to prepare guidance as soon as an opinion is issued,” they added. The commission hopes to allow states to use money leftover from funds Congress appropriated for the 2020 and 2018 elections.

Full Article: Federal Funding Sought to Protect Threatened Election Officials | Bloomberg Government

National: Trump allies are angling for election jobs up and down the ballot. That could have consequences in 2024 | Sara Murray and Jeremy Herb/CNN

As former President Donald Trump prepares for a potential comeback bid in 2024, his allies are flocking to election jobs all the way down to the local level in key battleground states, raising new concerns that the election officials who blocked Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election won’t be there the next time around. Trump himself has endorsed candidates for secretary of state and attorney general — statewide races that play a crucial role in administering elections — who have spread his lies about 2020. But in addition to statewide roles, Trump’s acolytes are pursuing local election posts, even trickling down to the precinct level, and seeking to gain more prominent roles in state GOP parties and state legislatures ahead of the 2024 presidential campaign. In Michigan, for instance, several new Republican appointees to county canvassing boards who have said they wouldn’t have certified the 2020 election are replacing the GOP members who did certify the election result. One appointee in Macomb County urged Trump after the election to invoke the Insurrection Act and suspend the Electoral College meeting to set up military tribunals to investigate claims of election fraud. Michigan is a microcosm of a broader, nationwide strategy being carried out by Trump allies like Steve Bannon, who has advocated for Trump’s backers to infiltrate local Republican Party positions as well as election posts. “We’re taking over the Republican Party through the precinct committee strategy. We’re taking over all the elections,” Bannon said on an episode of his “War Room” podcast last month.

Full Article: Trump allies are angling for election jobs up and down the ballot. That could have consequences in 2024 – CNNPolitics

National: Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun | Barton Gellman/The Atlantic

Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect. The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already. Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake. “The democratic emergency is already here,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine, told me in late October. Hasen prides himself on a judicious temperament. Only a year ago he was cautioning me against hyperbole. Now he speaks matter-of-factly about the death of our body politic. “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024,” he said, “but urgent action is not happening.” For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.

Full Article: How Donald Trump Could Subvert the 2024 Election – The Atlantic

National: Sidney Powell’s Defending the Republic raised more than $14 million as she spread election falsehoods | Emma Brown, Rosalind S. Helderman, Isaac Stanley-Becker and Josh Dawsey/The Washington Post

In the months after President Donald Trump lost the November election, lawyer Sidney Powell raised large sums from donors inspired by her fight to reverse the outcome of the vote. But by April, questions about where the money was going — and how much there was — were helping to sow division between Powell and other leaders of her new nonprofit, Defending the Republic. On April 9, many members of the staff and board resigned, documents show. Among those who departed after just days on the job was Chief Financial Officer Robert Weaver, who in a memo at the time wrote that he had “no way of knowing the true financial position” of Defending the Republic because some of its bank accounts were off limits even to him. Records reviewed by The Washington Post show that Defending the Republic raised more than $14 million, a sum that reveals the reach and resonance of one of the most visible efforts to fundraise using baseless claims about the 2020 election. Previously unreported records also detail acrimony between Powell and her top lieutenants over how the money — now a focus of inquiries by federal prosecutors and Congress — was being handled. The split has left Powell, who once had Trump’s ear, isolated from other key figures in the election-denier movement. Even so, as head of Defending the Republic, she controlled $9 million as recently as this summer, according to an audited financial statement from the group. The mistrust of U.S. elections that she and her former allies stoked endures. Polls show that one-third of Americans — including a majority of Republicans — believe that Trump lost because of fraud.

Full Article: Sidney Powell’s Defending the Republic raised more than $14 million as she spread election falsehoods – The Washington Post

National: Voting Battles of 2022 Take Shape as G.O.P. Crafts New Election Bills | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

A new wave of Republican legislation to reshape the nation’s electoral system is coming in 2022, as the G.O.P. puts forward proposals ranging from a requirement that ballots be hand-counted in New Hampshire to the creation of a law enforcement unit in Florida to investigate allegations of voting fraud. The Republican drive, motivated in part by a widespread denial of former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat last year, includes both voting restrictions and measures that could sow public confusion or undermine confidence in fair elections, and will significantly raise the stakes of the 2022 midterms. After passing 33 laws of voting limits in 19 states this year, Republicans in at least five states — Florida, Tennessee, South Carolina, Oklahoma and New Hampshire — have filed bills before the next legislative sessions have even started that seek to restrict voting in some way, including by limiting mail voting. In over 20 states, more than 245 similar bills put forward this year could be carried into 2022, according to Voting Rights Lab, a group that works to expand access to the ballot. In many places, Democrats will be largely powerless to push back at the state level, where they remain overmatched in Republican-controlled legislatures. G.O.P. state lawmakers across the country have enacted wide-ranging cutbacks to voting access this year and have used aggressive gerrymandering to lock in the party’s statehouse power for the next decade. Both parties are preparing to use the issue of voting to energize their bases. Democratic leaders, especially Stacey Abrams, the newly announced candidate for governor of Georgia and a voting rights champion for her party, promise to put the issue front and center. But the left remains short of options, leaving many candidates, voters and activists worried about the potential effects in 2022 and beyond, and increasingly frustrated with Democrats’ inability to pass federal voting protections in Washington.

Full Article: Voting Battles of 2022 Take Shape as G.O.P. Crafts New Election Bills – The New York Times

National: Senators urge funds to help election workers amid ‘unacceptable’ threats | Jason Szep/Reuters

The leaders of a Senate committee on Monday urged the Federal Election Assistance Commission to help election officials around the country tap federal money to strengthen security during a wave of threats and harassment following the 2020 U.S. election. “This onslaught of threats against election workers is unacceptable and raises serious concerns about the ability to recruit and retain election workers needed to administer future elections,” the Rules Committee’s Democratic chairwoman, Senator Amy Klobuchar, and top Republican, Senator Roy Blunt, said in a letter to the U.S. agency overseeing election administration. The senators asked the agency to provide state and local election officials with information on how to use federal election funds to improve security. They also asked it to provide guidance on other resources available “for identifying and responding to potential threats.” The letter follows a series of Reuters stories documenting a campaign of fear waged against frontline election administrators inspired by former President Donald Trump’s relentless false claims that the 2020 vote was “rigged” against him. Reuters has documented nearly 800 intimidating messages to election officials in 12 states, including more than 100 that could warrant prosecution, according to legal experts. “Reuters’ ongoing reporting on this issue has helped expose the extent and nature of threats against election workers and officials,” a Rules Committee staffer said.

Full Article: U.S. senators urge funds to help election workers amid ‘unacceptable’ threats | Reuters

National: Trump allies work to place supporters in key election posts across the country, spurring fears about future vote challenges | Amy Gardner, Tom Hamburger and Josh Dawsey/The Washington Post

Full Article: Trump allies work to place supporters in key election posts across the country, spurring fears about future vote challenges – The Washington Post

In Michigan, local GOP leaders have sought to reshape election canvassing boards by appointing members who expressed sympathy for former president Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 vote was rigged. In two Pennsylvania communities, candidates who embraced election fraud allegations won races this month to become local voting judges and inspectors. And in Colorado, 2020 doubters are urging their followers on conservative social media platforms to apply for jobs in election offices. A year after local and state election officials came under immense pressure from Trump to subvert the results of the 2020 White House race, he and his supporters are pushing an ambitious plan to place Trump loyalists in key positions across the administration of U.S. elections. The effort goes far beyond the former president’s public broadsides against well-known Republican state officials who certified President Biden’s victory, such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey. Citing the need to make elections more secure, Trump allies are also seeking to replace officials across the nation, including volunteer poll watchers, paid precinct judges, elected county clerks and state attorneys general, according to state and local officials, as well as rally speeches, social media posts and campaign appearances by those seeking the positions. If they succeed, Trump and his allies could pull down some of the guardrails that prevented him from overturning Biden’s win by creating openings to challenge the results next time, election officials and watchdog groups say.

National: Justice Department indicts two Iranian hackers over 2020 election disinformation campaign | Devlin Barrett/The Washington Post

Two Iranian men were indicted by the U.S. Justice Department on Thursday, accused of a brazen hacking and disinformation campaign that targeted American voters in the run-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Seyyed Kazemi, 24, and Sajjad Kashian, 27, allegedly sent threatening emails to try to scare voters, attempted to break into several states’ voting-related websites and gained access to a U.S. media company’s computer network. Officials say the pair emailed thousands of voters in October, including many Democrats. They allegedly claimed to be Proud Boys and threatened the email recipients with physical attacks if they did not change party affiliation and vote for President Donald Trump. The emails seemed to target primarily voters in Florida and Alaska, officials said at the time. The same illicit effort also pushed a video through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that claimed to show someone hacking into voter websites to create falsified overseas and absentee ballots, according to the indictment. The court filing said that video also falsely claimed to be affiliated with the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence that largely embraced President Donald Trump. Unlike the threatening emails, officials said the phony video about fake ballots was pushed at Republicans.

Full Article: Seyyed Kazemi and Sajjad Kashian, alleged Iranian hackers, indicted over U.S. election efforts – The Washington Post

National: RNC chair contradicts Trump: ‘Biden won the election’ | Julia Manchester/The Hill

Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel on Thursday acknowledged President Biden‘s electoral victory over former President Trump, marking the first time she has explicitly said Biden won the contest a year ago. “Painfully, Joe Biden won the election and it’s very painful to watch. He’s the president. We know that,” McDaniel told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast in Washington. The former president has continued to falsely claim that the 2020 contest was stolen from him, a claim that has been repeated by other Republicans, including many running in next year’s midterm elections. McDaniel said that there were “lots of problems” with last year’s presidential election. “We have to show our voters we are putting processes in place that will ensure the election is fair and transparent,” she said. The RNC created a “Committee on Election Integrity” in February. McDaniel also touted the importance of Trump to the party when it comes to getting voters to the ballot box.

Full Article: RNC chair contradicts Trump: ‘Biden won the election’ | TheHill

‘Terrifying for American democracy’: is Trump planning for a 2024 coup? | Ed Pilkington/The Guardian

At 1.35pm on 6 January, the top Republican in the US Senate, Mitch McConnell, stood before his party and delivered a dire warning. If they overruled the will of 81 million voters by blocking Joe Biden’s certification as president in a bid to snatch re-election for the defeated candidate, Donald Trump, “it would damage our Republic forever”. Five minutes before he started speaking, hundreds of Trump supporters incited by the then president’s false claim that the 2020 election had been stolen broke through Capitol police lines and were storming the building. McConnell’s next remark has been forgotten in the catastrophe that followed – the inner sanctums of America’s democracy defiled, five people dead, and 138 police officers injured. He said: “If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. We’d never see the whole nation accept an election again. Every four years would be a scramble for power at any cost.” Eleven months on, McConnell’s words sound eerily portentous. What could be construed as an anti-democratic scramble for power at any cost is taking place right now in jurisdictions across the country. Republican leaders loyal to Trump are vying to control election administrations in key states in ways that could drastically distort the outcome of the presidential race in 2024. With the former president hinting strongly that he may stand again, his followers are busily manoeuvring themselves into critical positions of control across the US – from which they could launch a far more sophisticated attempt at an electoral coup than Trump’s effort to hang on to power in 2020.

Full Article: ‘Terrifying for American democracy’: is Trump planning for a 2024 coup? | Donald Trump | The Guardian

Menace Enters the Republican Mainstream | Lisa Lerer and Astead W. Herndon/The New York Times

At a conservative rally in western Idaho last month, a young man stepped up to a microphone to ask when he could start killing Democrats. “When do we get to use the guns?” he said as the audience applauded. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” The local state representative, a Republican, later called it a “fair” question. In Ohio, the leading candidate in the Republican primary for Senate blasted out a video urging Republicans to resist the “tyranny” of a federal government that pushed them to wear masks and take F.D.A.-authorized vaccines. “When the Gestapo show up at your front door,” the candidate, Josh Mandel, a grandson of Holocaust survivors, said in the video in September, “you know what to do.” And in Congress, violent threats against lawmakers are on track to double this year. Republicans who break party ranks and defy former President Donald J. Trump have come to expect insults, invective and death threats — often stoked by their own colleagues and conservative activists, who have denounced them as traitors. From congressional offices to community meeting rooms, threats of violence are becoming commonplace among a significant segment of the Republican Party. Ten months after rioters attacked the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, and after four years of a president who often spoke in violent terms about his adversaries, right-wing Republicans are talking more openly and frequently about the use of force as justifiable in opposition to those who dislodged him from power.

Full Article: Menace Enters the Republican Mainstream – The New York Times

National: It’s been one year since Trump fired the CISA director | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency never reversed its position that the 2020 election was the most secure in history. Nor did it take down a rumor control page that had drawn the president’s ire because it knocked back many of the phony election conspiracy theories he’d embraced. And one year later, the agency has grown immensely in stature and importance, guiding the government through a string of cyber crises, including a wave of ransomware attacks that have threatened the economy and national security. CISA has strong support from both parties. There’s even a bipartisan bill aimed at shielding the agency from similar political interventions by giving the director a five-year term. Krebs’s firing was undoubtedly traumatic for CISA employees who had to soldier on without their leader and amid fear of political retribution from the White House. After Krebs’s high-profile ouster, several CISA political appointees were terminated more quietly in the succeeding days. But in the following months it became a galvanizing event, agency insiders and observers say. “It steeled our resolve. We saw what happened to Chris. We doubled down on the work and supporting election officials,” Matt Masterson, who was CISA’s senior adviser for election security at the time, told me. “It was something people could point to and say ‘we did a great job under tremendous pressure and this agency stood up for what was right,” Phil Reitinger, a former DHS cybersecurity official during the Obama administration, told me. Reitinger, who now leads the Global Cyber Alliance, compared it to the Saturday Night Massacre in which a series of Justice Department officials resigned rather than fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, thus paving the way for President Richard Nixon’s resignation. The events have become a symbol of pride for the agency for resisting political interference in its work.

Full Article: It’s been one year since Trump fired the CISA director – The Washington Post

National: New book says Trump allies pushed Defense Department to overturn election | Jordan Williams/The Hill

A newly released book claims that allies of former President Trump tried to push a top Defense Department official into overturning the 2020 election. According to the journalist Jonathan Karl’s book “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show,” which was published Tuesday, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and attorney Sidney Powell both made calls to Ezra Cohen-Watnick, who was then acting as under secretary of Defense for intelligence and security, while Cohen-Watnick was traveling in the Middle East, ABC News reported. Flynn and Powell were among Trump’s most vocal allies as the former president sought to overturn the 2020 election based on unproven claims of voter fraud. Powell has since been hit with multi-billion dollar lawsuits from Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic over her election claims. Flynn, who was previously Cohen-Watnick’s boss at the Defense Intelligence Agency and National Security Council, told the Pentagon official that he needed to immediately return to the United States because “there were big things about to happen,” per the book.

Full Article: New book says Trump allies pushed DoD to overturn election | TheHill

National: Trump adviser appointed to panel on US elections | Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has appointed to a federal election advisory board a prominent Republican attorney who assisted former President Donald Trump in his failed effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Cleta Mitchell was named to the Board of Advisors for the federal Election Assistance Commission. The advisory board does not have the ability to directly make policy but can recommend voluntary guidelines to the EAC. The EAC certifies voting systems and advises local election offices on compliance with federal election regulations. Mitchell was nominated by the Republican-appointed members on the commission and approved by a majority vote. Mitchell is a prominent Republican lawyer who joined Trump on a Jan. 2 phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. On the call, Trump implored Raffensperger to “find” him enough votes for him to be declared the winner in the battleground state, which was won by President Joe Biden. Mitchell claimed she had found possible examples of fraud in the state, but the secretary of state’s office told her that her data was incorrect. Mitchell’s involvement in the call caused an outcry in the legal community that led to her departure from her longtime job at the law firm Foley & Lardner. She has since taken major roles with conservative groups pushing to tighten voting laws, directing an election initiative at the small government group FreedomWorks and serving as a fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute, where she helps coordinate advocacy on voting issues.

Full Article: Trump adviser appointed to panel on US elections

National: Renewed urgency surrounds statewide campaigns as candidates cast doubts on elections | Alisa Wiersema and Meg Cunningham/ABC

Source: Renewed urgency surrounds statewide campaigns as candidates cast doubts on elections – ABC News

More than a year after Donald Trump’s efforts to undermine election results were rebuffed at the state and national levels, a wave of Republican candidates across battleground states have made election administration and “integrity” central campaign messages – with more than a dozen still voicing doubt about the results of last year’s general election. An ABC News analysis of 12 high-profile battleground states reveals a trend: Republican candidates for state offices are either questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election or casting significant doubt on how elections are conducted and votes are counted in their home states. The states examined include Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, Texas, Georgia and Florida. Across these states – five of which Trump won, and seven of which Joe Biden won – at least 15 Republican candidates running for statewide offices – governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state and attorney general – have refused to acknowledge Biden’s win or made other comments directly challenging the validity of the 2020 election, according to an ABC News review of public statements, interviews and campaign websites. At least 18 GOP candidates in those politically critical states have alleged broader fraud related to 2020 election results. Across these states, at least 12 are using “election integrity” as a campaign issue, and in some cases, these candidates are also casting doubt on the administration of last year’s election. Furthermore, at least two candidates are attempting to align the concept of “election integrity” with election-related conspiracy theories.

National: No, Constitutional Scholars Are Not “50/50” in Agreement With Donald Trump About Jan. 6 | Matthew A. Seligman/Slate

Donald J. Trump, constitutional scholar, has entered the chat. In a remarkable interview with Jon Karl published by Axios on Friday, Trump defended the Jan. 6 rioters chanting “Hang Mike Pence” on the grounds that “it’s common sense” that Pence should have overturned the Electoral College count.* Beneath the horrifying justification of political violence—the attempted assassination of the sitting vice president—there is a rotten foundation of truly terrible legal analysis. As I’ve explained in Slate and in scholarship, the vice president has no constitutional authority to reject electoral votes he doesn’t like. In the interview, Trump claimed that “50/50, it’s right down the middle for the top constitutional scholars when I speak to them” on the vice president’s authority to unilaterally throw out election results. He’s wrong—at least if “constitutional scholars” means people who have read and understand the Constitution. Donald J. Trump, constitutional scholar, has entered the chat. In a remarkable interview with Jon Karl published by Axios on Friday, Trump defended the Jan. 6 rioters chanting “Hang Mike Pence” on the grounds that “it’s common sense” that Pence should have overturned the Electoral College count.* Beneath the horrifying justification of political violence—the attempted assassination of the sitting vice president—there is a rotten foundation of truly terrible legal analysis. As I’ve explained in Slate and in scholarship, the vice president has no constitutional authority to reject electoral votes he doesn’t like. In the interview, Trump claimed that “50/50, it’s right down the middle for the top constitutional scholars when I speak to them” on the vice president’s authority to unilaterally throw out election results. He’s wrong—at least if “constitutional scholars” means people who have read and understand the Constitution. Who are these “constitutional scholars” feeding Trump this radical view? Johnny McEntee, a 31-year-old former college football player with no legal training, sent a “memo” by text message to Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, claiming that “Jefferson Used His Position as VP to Win” the presidency by manipulating the electoral count and so Pence could as well.* (As I’ve explained, Jefferson did no such thing.) Rudy Giuliani, whose law license has been suspended to “protect the public,” falsely told Trump that there “is no question, none at all, that the VP can do this. That’s a fact. The Constitution gives him the authority not to certify. It goes back to the state legislatures.” And of course John Eastman, whose memo baldly asserted that “the fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter.”

Full Article: Constitutional scholars are not “50/50” in agreement with Donald Trump about Jan. 6.

California: Legal Experts Reignite Call for John Eastman Ethics Investigation | Erin Snodgrass/Business Insider

A nonpartisan election security nonprofit urged the California Bar Association to investigate John Eastman, a conservative attorney who counseled President Donald Trump. In a letter addressed to the Office of Chief Trial Counsel earlier this week, legal experts with the States United Democracy Center called for the probe into Eastman, who penned a memo arguing how then-Vice President Mike Pence could overturn the 2020 election results during the January 6 election certification process. Six weeks after filing an initial complaint in October, the States United Democracy Center followed up on Eastman’s “potential legal ethics violations” with a new letter on Tuesday citing “a great deal” of new evidence that “strongly confirms the allegations of ethical conduct” in its initial complaint. A two-page memo first published by CNN in September and obtained by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa for their book “Peril,” detailed Eastman’s proposed argument for how the Trump administration could maintain the White House despite losing the 2020 presidential election. Insider later acquired a six-page version of Eastman’s memo, which suggested Pence toss out the results from seven states and then redirect the election to the House of Representatives. The memo prompted scrutiny surrounding Eastman, a former clerk for Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, for his advisory to Trump during the final year of his presidency.

Full Article: Legal Experts Reignite Call for John Eastman Ethics Investigation

National: Conspiracy theories are an election security threat, new report says | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

Conspiracy theories and phony fraud claims are one of the biggest threats to secure elections whose results are accepted by the American people, a report out this morning argues. The report from the Aspen Institute think tank’s Commission on Information Disorder urges a surge in federal funding to combat the sort of conspiracy theories promoted by former president Donald Trump and his allies. Given the new attacks on democracy, election officials need to be given more resources and more communication capabilities, Chris Krebs, one of the co-chairs of the commission, told me. “Even if elections are 100 percent bulletproof, there’s still plenty of opportunity for the bad guys to stoke fear and doubt,” Krebs said. During the 2020 election, Krebs led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which was the lead government agency working on election security. Trump fired him by tweet partly for disputing baseless claims that the election was rigged. Other co-chairs of the commission are longtime TV journalist Katie Couric and Rashad Robinson, president of the advocacy group Color of Change. The election security recommendations are part of a broad report that covers disinformation related to public health, climate change and a slew of other topics.

Full Article: Conspiracy theories are an election security threat, new report says – The Washington Post

National: Bipartisan commission urges US take immediate steps to curb online misinformation | Maggie Miller/The Hill