National

You are by now certainly familiar with the QAnon extremist ideology. It holds, in its more extreme iterations, that there is a secret group of prominent celebrities and Democratic politicians who engage in child abuse and cannibalism as part of their adherence to Satanism. It is, in short, as obviously extreme a conspiracy theory as can be imagined and one for which there is no evidence that doesn’t involve investigatory techniques such as picking every third letter off the back of a Cheerios box or interpreting a senator’s greeting of “hello” as being his attempt to say the word “hell.” Despite how extreme and obviously ludicrous the above formulation is, millions of Americans say they believe it. New polling from the Public Religion Research Institute and Interfaith Youth Core finds that 15 percent of Americans claim to believe specifically that a Satan-worshipping pedophile ring controls the world, with more than a fifth of Republicans somehow expressing that opinion. Perhaps those numbers are overstated, but that’s still a lot of people willing to publicly express confidence in one of the more demented ideas that’s ever emerged. So how do we combat the spread of this idea, one that’s already led to multiple acts of violence? Well, one way is to do our best to avoid treating it as in any way serious or legitimate or, ideally, to avoid giving it any oxygen at all. That is tricky for news organizations, for obvious reasons. Perhaps the worst way to combat what QAnon adherents say is to treat it as something falsifiable. That is, we wouldn’t want to simply assume it’s true or has obviously true components that we then work to validate or discredit. There’s no reason to believe it’s true, and even just launching an investigation suggesting that it might be lends it credence.

Full Article: When it comes to ad hoc election investigations as in Arizona and Wisconsin, elevating doubt is the point – The Washington Post

National: On Voting Rights, Biden Prefers to Negotiate. This Time, It Might Not Be Possible. | Katie Rogers/The New York Times

As President Biden confronts intense Republican opposition to the broad voting rights bill that Democrats have made a top priority this year, he might remember back to 1982 and an earlier partisan clash over the issue, one of a number across the years that shaped his views on deal making — and its limits. A key provision of the Voting Rights Act, prohibiting states from denying the vote to people on the basis of race, was facing a high-profile Senate debate over its extension. The Senate Judiciary Committee, the panel handling the legislation, was led by Senator Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina, but aware of the optics of having a former segregationist as their public face for negotiations, Republicans instead chose Senator Bob Dole of Kansas to lead them in talks about a deal. Representing the other side was Mr. Biden, then in his second term as a senator from Delaware. Mr. Biden was not as well known as another Democrat on the committee, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, but he did have one advantage: Republicans tended to listen to him. “He wanted to do the right thing, but he wanted to do it in a way that built consensus,” Sheila Bair, who served as a longtime counsel to Mr. Dole, said in an interview. “Biden recognized that if you want this to be lasting, we needed a big margin.”

Full Article: On Voting Rights, Biden Prefers to Negotiate. This Time, It Might Not Be Possible. – The New York Times

National: Democratic state legislators form voting rights council amid GOP push for restrictions | Tal Axelrod/The Hill

Democratic state legislators from across the country are forming a voting rights council as the party searches for ways to fight back against a wave of GOP-led states codifying restrictions to the ballot box. The council, which is being convened under the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), will “convene legislators to strategize about fighting GOP voter suppression — legislatively or judicially — and access national resources in the fight to preserve Americans’ political freedoms.” “Republicans’ embrace of voter suppression is an existential threat to the future of our democracy,” said DLCC President Jessica Post. “As we’ve seen before, Republicans are so terrified of being held accountable by the voters that they’ll stop at nothing to strengthen their grip on power. Our country was founded on the principle that Americans should have a say in how they’re governed, and state Democrats are ready to stand up and fight for the right to vote.” Nevada Assembly Speaker Jason Frierson and Michigan Senate Democratic Leader Jim Ananich will serve as co-chairs on the council. Members include North Carolina Senate Democratic Leader Dan Blue, Georgia House Democratic Leader James Beverly and Arizona House Democratic Leader Reginald Bolding, among others.

Full Article: Democratic state legislators form voting rights council amid GOP push for restrictions | TheHill

National: Cozy Bear revisits one of its greatest hits, researchers say: election skulduggery | Tim Starks/CyberScoop

It looks like the Russian government-linked hacking group Cozy Bear is back in the election trickery business. The security firm Volexity publicized a spearphishing campaign on Thursday that it identified only days ago, a scheme that uses an election fraud document as a lure. The emails purport to be from the the United States Agency for International Development, with targets including government agencies, research institutions and nongovernmental organizations in the U.S. and Europe. Volexity said it had concluded, with moderate confidence, that Cozy Bear — the group also known as APT29 or the Dukes — was behind the emails. If true, it would be a return to an old favorite subject for Cozy Bear, which the U.S. government and others implicated in the 2016 hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, among other election interference efforts.

Full Article: Cozy Bear revisits one of its greatest hits, researchers say: election skulduggery

Wisconsin Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos hires ex-cops to investigate November election | Patrick Marley/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is hiring retired police officers to investigate aspects of the November election, joining with Republicans from around the country who have questioned President Joe Biden’s victory. Vos, of Rochester, said he recognizes Biden narrowly won Wisconsin and is not trying to change the results with his taxpayer-funded investigation. He said he hopes the investigators can get to the bottom of issues Republicans have raised unsuccessfully in court, such as how the state’s largest cities used more than $6 million in grants from a private group to run their elections. Vos in a Wednesday interview said he was giving the investigators a broad mandate to spend about three months reviewing all tips and following up on the most credible ones. In addition to the grant spending, he said they may look into claims of double voting and review how clerks fixed absentee ballot credentials. “Is there a whole lot of smoke or is there actual fire? We just don’t know yet,” Vos said. Ann Jacobs, a Democrat who leads the Wisconsin Elections Commission, said she was worried the investigation would undermine confidence in an election that was conducted properly.

Full Article: Wisconsin Republican Robin Vos hires ex-cops to investigate election

National: It’s not just Arizona: Push to review 2020 ballots spreads | Kate Brumback and Nicholas Riccardi/Associated Press

Six months after Donald Trump’s loss, conspiracy theorists and Trump backers are continuing their push for repeated examinations of ballots and finding limited successes. A Georgia judge last week awarded a group the chance to review mail ballots in a large Georgia county that includes Atlanta. Officials in a rural Michigan county have expressed interest in a review of their voting machines. A similar debate has caused sharp divisions in a New Hampshire town. In some cases, the efforts have been inspired by an audit of the votes in Arizona’s Maricopa County, an elaborate exercise engineered by the GOP-led state Senate. The efforts are unlikely to yield any new revelations about President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. The votes have been counted — and often recounted — and certified by local officials. Still, the lingering debate and legal wrangling have propelled suspicions and advanced debunked theories. And their sometimes misleading conclusions have been amplified by Trump, whose false allegations of election fraud sparked the push. The profusion of audits alarms election experts, who note that the Arizona audit has set a troubling new precedent of third-party, partisan review of the ballots, long after elections are over. “This is bad enough to see it happen once,” said Eddie Perez, an expert on voting systems at the OSET Institute, said of Arizona, but seeing it elsewhere in the country is “dangerous for democracy.’” The audits are serving a clear political purpose in firing up the Republican Party’s base. At a rally outside Phoenix last week featuring GOP Reps. Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, references to the Arizona audit drew much more enthusiastic applause than even immigration, normally the top hot-button issue on the right in the border state.

Full Article: It’s not just Arizona: Push to review 2020 ballots spreads

National: They tried to overturn the 2020 election. Now they want to run the next one. | Zach Montellaro/Politico

Republicans who sought to undercut or overturn President Joe Biden’s election win are launching campaigns to become their states’ top election officials next year, alarming local officeholders and opponents who are warning about pro-Trump, “ends justify the means” candidates taking big roles in running the vote. The candidates include Rep. Jody Hice of Georgia, a leader of the congressional Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 Electoral College results; Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem, one of the top proponents of the conspiracy-tinged vote audit in Arizona’s largest county; Nevada’s Jim Marchant, who sued to have his 5-point congressional loss last year overturned; and Michigan’s Kristina Karamo, who made dozens of appearances in conservative media to claim fraud in the election. Now, they are running for secretary of state in key battlegrounds that could decide control of Congress in 2022 — and who wins the White House in 2024. Their candidacies come with former President Donald Trump still fixated on spreading falsehoods about the 2020 election, insisting he won and lying about widespread and systemic fraud. Each of their states has swung between the two parties over the last decade, though it is too early to tell how competitive their elections will be. The campaigns set up the possibility that politicians who have taken steps to undermine faith in the American democratic system could soon be the ones running it. “Someone who is running for an election administration position, whose focus is not the rule of law but instead ‘the ends justifies the means,’ that’s very dangerous in a democracy,” said Bill Gates, the Republican vice chair of the Board of Supervisors in Maricopa County, Ariz. “This is someone who is trying to tear at the foundations of democracy.”

Full Article: They tried to overturn the 2020 election. Now they want to run the next one. – POLITICO

National: Defending Elections from Cyberattacks: A New US Information Security Strategy | Pieter-jan Dockx/The Dispatch

In 2016, the US presidential election fell victim to Russian information warfare. In an effort to influence the outcome, Kremlin-backed hackers stole and leaked compromising documents from the Clinton campaign. This material was then spread on social media by Russian bots as part of a broader campaign to delegitimise the presidential candidate. Russian intelligence also breached digital election infrastructure to cast doubt on the integrity of the election process. More recently, during the 2020 presidential election, foreign adversaries again attempted disruption. However, as a result of a new election security strategy, these attacks only resulted in minor incidents. The first aspect of Washington’s four-pronged strategy focused on bolstering the election’s cyber defences. In 2016, state and local election authorities were faced with insufficient resources, leaving them with legacy voting equipment and outdated software vulnerable to attacks. Arguably, an even bigger issue was the lack of coordination between the various actors responsible for securing election infrastructure. With the responsibility scattered across the local, state, and federal levels, election officials were often ill-informed about the correct reporting authority. To address these concerns, the US Congress approved funding for election jurisdictions to upgrade their defences. The Department of Homeland Security also designated election infrastructure as critical infrastructure, unlocking additional funds and giving it the authority to enhance communication mechanisms. It further set up a centralised hub to gather and disseminate intelligence on cyber threats to the elections.

Full Article: Defending Elections from Cyberattacks: A New US Information Security Strategy – The Dispatch

National: Kristen Clarke likely first Black woman to lead DOJ civil rights | Del Quentin Wilbur/Los Angeles Times

Kristen Clarke was looking for a new athletic challenge during her junior year in high school. Girls’ basketball didn’t interest her because she couldn’t dribble. Girls’ ice hockey? She didn’t skate. Volleyball didn’t seem intense enough. Then she recalled how hard the boys’ wrestling team worked out. They ran until they sweated off enough pounds to make a weight class. They lifted weights. They left practice exhausted. So, in an audacious move for the early 1990s, Clarke joined the boys’ team. “They were giving it everything. If she was going to do a winter sport, she said, ‘might as well do the most difficult one,’” recalled Window Snyder, a friend and classmate of Clarke’s at the prestigious Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. “I don’t think she ever even thought about it being a boys’ sport. That is who she was. Whatever she was doing had to be challenging.” That Clarke took to the boys’ mat doesn’t surprise friends or colleagues of a 46-year-old civil rights attorney whom President Biden has nominated to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. They say she has spent two decades breaking down barriers and fighting discrimination, and it does not surprise them Biden would select her to become the first woman of color to formally lead a unit that former Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. called the agency’s “crown jewel.” Though Clarke is expected to be confirmed as early as Tuesday by a simple majority in the U.S. Senate, her path to the job has been contentious.

Full Article: Kristen Clarke likely first Black woman to lead DOJ civil rights – Los Angeles Times

National: Democrats searching for a path forward on stalled voting rights bill | Ted Barrett, Lauren Fox and Ali Zaslav/CNN

Senate Democrats will huddle privately next week to continue their internal deliberations over how to advance a sweeping voting rights, government ethics and campaign finance bill that is one of their party’s top legislative priorities but is currently doomed to fail in the Senate because it is opposed by one of their own members as well as all 50 Republicans. The Wednesday meeting, which was confirmed by a Senate Democratic aide, is a follow up to a session last week that left some Democratic senators concerned that significant changes to the bill are needed to bring around Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and attract at least 10 GOP senators to break a filibuster and make a law. Democrats are anxious to pass the legislation to counteract new legislation in several Republican-led states that Democrats believe will curtail voting, particularly by minorities. The bill is titled the For the People Act but is known as S-1, a symbolically important designation as the first legislation introduced by the Democratic-controlled Senate. Similar legislation has already passed the Democratic-controlled House on a party line vote. The measure was debated last week during a lengthy and contentious Senate Rules Committee hearing where it deadlocked in the evenly divided panel. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer will be able to take procedural steps to put it on the floor but has not said when he would do that except that it will be before the August recess.

Full Article: Democrats searching for a path forward on stalled voting rights bill – CNNPolitics

Arizona: Maricopa County is showing how not to audit an election | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

A partisan election audit in Maricopa County, Ariz., is turning into a lesson in how not to manage cybersecurity and elections. The GOP-controlled state Senate launched it despite the objections of top county officials and hired Cyber Ninjas to conduct it — a company with no election audit experience and whose CEO Doug Logan has echoed false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Since then, the audit has been beset by unforced security errors including laptops with election information being left unattended and WiFi routers connecting to laptops that contain vital election information. Ballots themselves were also left unattended in poorly secured storage facilities and ballot images are being taken with cameras that seemingly haven’t undergone security vetting or been certified by a government body. “In more than a decade working on elections, audits and recounts across the country, I’ve never seen one this mismanaged,” Jennifer Morrell, a partner at the Elections Group consulting firm and a former local election official in Colorado, wrote in a Post op-ed. The coup de grace came when Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) warned the county that it should replace nearly 400 ballot tabulators at a cost of millions of dollars because it couldn’t verify that Cyber Ninjas hadn’t tampered with them in a way that would make them more vulnerable to hacking — or left them unattended while someone else did so. “The lack of physical security and transparency means we cannot be certain who accessed the voting equipment and what might have been done to them,” Hobbs wrote to county leaders. Maricopa County leaders, who are contemplating suing the state Senate and the auditors, said they will not use any equipment that isn’t verified to be secure. The county board of supervisors is also majority Republican.

Full Article: The Cybersecurity 202: Maricopa County is showing how not to audit an election – The Washington Post

I watched the GOP’s Arizona election audit. It was worse than you think. | Jennifer Morrell/The Washington Post

When Arizona’s secretary of state asked me whether I would serve as an observer of the Arizona Senate’s audit of Maricopa County’s ballots, I anticipated that I would see some unusual things. Post-election audits and recounts are almost always conducted under the authority of local election officials, who have years of knowledge and experience. The idea of a government handing over control of ballots to an outside group, as the state Senate did when hiring a Florida contractor with no elections experience, was bizarre. This firm, Cyber Ninjas, insisted that it would recount and examine all 2.1 million ballots cast in the county in the 2020 general election. So I expected it to be unconventional. But it was so much worse than that. In more than a decade working on elections, audits and recounts across the country, I’ve never seen one this mismanaged. I arrived at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum on the morning of May 4. Security was conspicuously high: At three stations, guards checked my ID and my letter from the secretary of state. No bags were permitted on the floor, and I had to surrender my phone, laptop and smartwatch. I was allowed a yellow legal pad and red pen to take notes, and provided with a pink T-shirt to wear so I would be immediately identifiable. The audit observers hired by Cyber Ninjas, in orange T-shirts, followed me wherever I went and reported random things about me they found suspicious. Several times someone asked to test my pen, to ensure it really had red ink. Once, they even demanded that I empty my pockets, in which I carried that pen and a pair of reading glasses. I was allowed only to ask procedural questions of the Cyber Ninjas attorney; I couldn’t talk to anyone else performing the work. The atmosphere was tense.

Full Article: I watched the GOP’s Arizona election audit. It was worse than you think. – The Washington Post

National: GOP legislators shift from voting rights attacks to election interference schemes | Benjamin Barber/Facing South

Earlier this year the U.S. witnessed an attempt to overturn the results of last November’s presidential election, which was certified by all 50 states and deemed “the most secure in American history” by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. President Donald Trump lost resoundingly to Democrat Joe Biden in both the popular vote and Electoral College, but Trump refused to concede for weeks and allied himself with Republican leaders to continue spreading false claims of fraud — including during the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, D.C., where he urged his supporters to march on the Capitol. According to a recent national survey, six in 10 Republicans still believe the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, and they’ve had their beliefs reinforced by many Republican lawmakers including U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri. As they continue to stoke distrust in the U.S. electoral system, Republicans nationwide are working to erect new barriers to the voting process with bills that would restrict access to the ballot and give the GOP an advantage in future elections. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, state legislators have introduced 361 restrictive voting bills this year alone, many of them in Southern states including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. The proposals would among other things implement stricter voter ID requirements, limit absentee voting, make voter registration more difficult, and allow aggressive voter roll purges. The Brennan Center calls what’s happening a “backlash to historic voter turnout in the 2020 general election, and grounded in a rash of baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities.” Now Republicans are taking their attacks on democracy a step further with proposals that would undermine the integrity of election administration and vote counting itself. According to a recent report by Protect Democracy, Law Forward, and the States United Democracy Center titled “Democracy Crisis in the Making: How State Legislatures are Politicizing, Criminalizing, and Interfering with Elections,” GOP lawmakers this year have introduced at least 148 bills in 36 states that could lead to the manipulation of election results. Some of these measures have already been passed into law.

Full Article: GOP legislators shift from voting rights attacks to election interference schemes | Facing South

National: Inspired by Arizona recount, Trump loyalists push to revisit election results in communities around the country | Amy Gardner and Rosalind S. Helderman/The Washington Post

At a public meeting last week in Cheboygan County, Mich., a lawyer from Detroit told county commissioners that the voting machines they used in 2020 could “flip” votes and throw an election. She offered to send in a “forensic team,” at no charge to the county, to inspect ballots and scanners. In Windham, N.H., supporters of former president Donald Trump showed up to a town meeting this month chanting “Stop the Steal!” and demanding that officials choose their preferred auditor to scrutinize a 400-vote discrepancy in a state representative race. And at a board of supervisors meeting May 4 in San Luis Obispo County, on California’s Central Coast, scores of residents questioned whether election machines had properly counted their votes, with many demanding a “forensic audit.” The ramifications of Trump’s ceaseless attacks on the 2020 election are increasingly visible throughout the country: In emails, phone calls and public meetings, his supporters are questioning how their elections are administered and pressing public officials to revisit the vote count — wrongly insisting that Trump won the presidential race. The most prominent example is playing out in Arizona’s Maricopa County, where Republican state lawmakers have forced a widely pilloried audit of the 2020 vote. That recount is being touted as an inspiration by small but vocal cohorts of angry residents in communities in multiple states. “I think there is clearly a justification to do that type of audit that they’re doing in Maricopa County. That’s what I wanted to see done here,” said Ken Eyring, a local activist in Windham who recently appeared at a rally with former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. Eyring said his only goal is to make sure Windham’s machines are accurate.

Full Article: Inspired by Arizona recount, Trump loyalists push to revisit election results in communities around the country – The Washington Post

National: Election officials can fight fraud; fighting misinformation is tougher | Brooke Newman/Cronkite News

Maricopa County’s chief information security officer said the county was able to handle cyberthreats to the 2020 elections, but handling public perception of the results in the face of rampant social media misinformation has been more of a challenge. “We all saw in 2020 that the vast majority of what was communicated through media, social and traditional, just frankly wasn’t true, but it led itself toward giving the sense that there was fraud,” said Lester Godsey, the county CIO. “But there’s no evidence of that across the board.” Godsey’s comments were echoed by federal election security officials, who said the 2020 elections were secure but one of the lessons learned is that “perception is reality”: Government agencies will have to do a better job of fighting misinformation in the future, they said. “CISA (the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) will begin working with election officials specifically on how they are tracking information, and how they are being transparent about their election safety measures,” said Geoff Hale, a senior adviser to the federal agency, who was on the panel. The discussion was taped in early April but aired Thursday with Arizona embroiled in a feud between Maricopa County officials and the state Senate, whose Republican leaders have ordered a controversial, headline-grabbing audit of the county’s elections. This despite the fact that the results were verified in two separate forensic audits ordered by the county in February.

Full Article: Election officials can fight fraud; fighting misinformation is tougher | Cronkite News – Arizona PBS

Editorial: Trump couldn’t steal the election in 2020. His allies are laying the groundwork to try again | Doyle McManus/Los Angeles Times

Donald Trump’s campaign to steal the 2020 election after clearly losing at the ballot box failed for a couple of reasons. His baseless claims of fraud were thrown out by virtually every court that heard them. Perhaps most important, many GOP officials refused to play along — including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who declined to “find” the 11,780 more votes Trump needed, and then-Vice President Mike Pence, who turned down a demand from the president that he block Joe Biden’s victory from being certified by Congress. But the former president and his allies aren’t done. Pro-Trump forces in dozens of states are now working to change election laws to make it harder for Democrats to win — and easier for Republicans to challenge the results if their candidate loses. If they’re successful, the chaotic aftermath of the 2020 election may only have been a rehearsal for a second round in 2024. “What was really scary about 2020 was how close we came to a meltdown,” Edward B. Foley, an election law expert at Ohio State University, told me. “It’s not too early to worry about Jan. 6, 2025.”

Full Article: Column: Trump’s allies are prepping to steal 2024 election – Los Angeles Times

National: How The Republican Push To Restrict Voting Could Affect Our Elections | Geoffrey Skelley/FiveThirtyEight

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Republican lawmakers have pushed new voting restrictions in nearly every state. From making it harder to cast ballots early to increasing the frequency of voter roll purges, at least 25 new restrictive voting laws have been enacted, with more potentially on the horizon. The GOP has introduced such measures in the name of “election integrity,” but at the heart of this effort is former President Donald Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. “I liken it to a quack doctor holding up an X-ray, pointing to something going, ‘See, see, see?’ and getting the person to believe that there’s something really there on that X-ray that requires expensive and dangerous surgery,” said Carol Anderson, a professor of African American studies at Emory University, of Republican efforts to pass new voter restrictions even though there is no evidence of voter fraud in the election. “We had an election that was amazing in the midst of a pandemic. And instead of applauding themselves for it, they went with a Trumpian lie.” Understanding how new voting restrictions will influence our elections is difficult. Political science hasn’t found that these types of laws have that big of an effect, at least as individual measures. But, while laws that make it more taxing to vote are not new, the current onslaught of voting restrictions and changes to how elections will be administered is not something we’ve grappled with on this scale. Additionally, there is their nakedly partisan origins — nearly 90 percent of the voting laws proposed or enacted in 2021 were sponsored primarily or entirely by Republican legislators — and the fact that these laws are likely to have a greater impact on Black and brown voters, who are less likely to vote Republican. Republican efforts to pass new voter restrictions have been so aggressive and widespread that their effects are hard to predict. Elections, moreover, don’t run themselves; they’re run by people. And these new laws point to an even more troubling problem that threatens to undermine our democracy: the GOP’s eroding commitment to democratic values, like free and fair elections. In many ways, the most concerning change our elections face may not be any one law, but rather the GOP’s increased willingness to take such anti-democratic actions.

Full Article: How The Republican Push To Restrict Voting Could Affect Our Elections | FiveThirtyEight

National: Sweeping election reform bill faces Senate buzz saw | Jordain Carney/The Hill

One of Democrats’ biggest priorities — a sweeping bill to overhaul elections — is facing long odds of passing the Senate. Democrats are set to meet Thursday to talk about the For the People Act, a roughly 800-page measure that would set national standards aimed at expanding access to voting. Progressives view the bill as a must-pass, and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) has vowed to bring it to the floor. Senate Democrats are tamping down expectations for Thursday’s meeting, characterizing it as largely educational after the Senate Rules Committee held an hours-long markup Tuesday full of high drama, and hope to use the gathering as a way to solidify unity around the bill. “My goal is … to convince everybody that we have to be together on this. We were the subject of a physical attack on Jan. 6 that was designed to disenfranchise 80 million people,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.). Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who has been spearheading the bill in the Senate, said the meeting will allow members who haven’t been involved with the legislation to ask questions. “It’s just a kind of a ‘let’s make sure we understand what this bill is,’ ” he said. “Between now and when we can get it to the floor, we’re totally open to other insights.” But Democrats face big challenges in the Senate, alongside intense pressure from their base, to make good on their promise to send the legislation to President Biden’s desk.

Full Article: Sweeping election reform bill faces Senate buzz saw | TheHill

National: Senate Panel Deadlocks on Voting Rights as Bill Faces Major Obstacles | Nicholas Fandos/The New York Times

A key Senate committee deadlocked on Tuesday over Democrats’ sweeping proposed elections overhaul, previewing a partisan showdown on the Senate floor in the coming months that could determine the future of voting rights and campaign rules across the country. The tie vote in the Senate Rules Committee — with nine Democrats in favor and nine Republicans opposed — does not prevent Democrats from moving forward with the 800-page legislation, known as the For the People Act. Proponents hailed the vote as an important step toward adopting far-reaching federal changes to blunt the restrictive new voting laws emerging in Republican-led battleground states like Georgia and Florida. But the action confronted Democrats with a set of thorny questions about how to push forward on a bill that they view as a civil rights imperative with sweeping implications for democracy and their party. The bill as written faces near-impossible odds in the evenly divided Senate, where Republicans are expected to block it using a filibuster and at least one Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, remains opposed. With their control in Washington potentially fleeting and Republican states racing ahead with laws to curtail ballot access, Democrats must reach consensus among themselves on the measure, and decide whether to attempt to destroy or significantly alter the Senate’s filibuster rules — which set a 60-vote threshold to overcome any objection to advancing legislation — to salvage its chances of becoming law.

Full Article: Senate Panel Deadlocks on Voting Rights as Bill Faces Major Obstacles – The New York Times

National: House Panel Advances Bipartisan Postal Overhaul Measure, USPS Board Gets New Members | Eric Katz/Government Executive

Congress on Thursday took multiple actions to support the U.S. Postal Service, advancing legislation to relieve the agency of some of its financial burdens and providing it with additional leadership. The House Oversight and Reform Committee unanimously approved the 2021 Postal Reform Act after Republicans begrudgingly offered their support. Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., co-authored the bill and emphasized at Thursday’s markup it represented a compromise. Virtually all Republicans who spoke on the measure said they were supporting it despite their significant reservations. Committee Chairwoman Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said Comer was a “tough negotiator” and told colleagues it was the hardest she had ever worked on a bill. A Republican committee aide told Government Executive that the GOP side successfully fought to remove a provision Democrats had originally included to restrict USPS from altering its service standards. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is in the midst of implementing his business plan, which includes a slowing down of delivery for some mail. The negotiations also led to more thorough public reporting requirements on mail delays through regular, online postings, required updates to Congress on the implementation of DeJoy’s plan and a facilitation of his proposal to shift more mail delivery away from the air and toward ground transportation, the aide said. The core of the bill will shift more postal retirees to Medicare for their health care and require most postal workers to select postal-specific health care plans. It would take onerous payments toward health care benefits for future retirees off the agency’s balance sheets.

Full Article: House Panel Advances Bipartisan Postal Overhaul Measure, USPS Board Gets New Members – Government Executive

National: Republicans Pursue Harsh Penalties for Poll Workers | Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

Anita Phillips has been an election judge in Texas for 17 years, responsible for managing a precinct in Waco, a city of roughly 135,000 people. But over the last four years, the civic duty she prized has become arduous. Harassment by partisan poll watchers has grown increasingly caustic, she has found, and helping voters is ever more treacherous amid a thicket of new rules. Those regulations are likely to grow stricter: Republican lawmakers in Texas, following in the footsteps of their counterparts across the country, are pressing forward with a voting bill that could impose harsh penalties on election officials or poll workers who are thought to have committed errors or violations. And the nationwide effort may be pushing people like Ms. Phillips to reconsider serving their communities. “It’s just so taxing,” Ms. Phillips said. “And if me — I’m in my 40s, and I’m having this much stress — imagine every election worker and election judge that is 65 and over with severe health issues. This is supposed to be a way for them to give back. And it’s supposed to be something that makes them feel good about what they’re doing, but now they’re starting to feel like, ‘Are we going to be safe?’” Ms. Phillips is one of millions of citizens who act as foot soldiers of the American democratic system, working long hours for low pay to administer the country’s elections. Yet this often thankless task has quickly become a key target of Republicans who are propagating former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. In their hunt for nonexistent fraud, they have turned on those who work the polls as somehow suspect.

Full Article: Republicans Pursue Harsh Penalties for Poll Workers – The New York Times

National: Purges, poll watchers and gridlock: Five developments in the voting battles | Fredreka Schouten/CNN

Arizona just became the latest Republican-led battleground to impose new voting restrictions, enacting a law that could purge tens of thousands of voters from the state’s early mail-in ballot list. And in other key states, GOP lawmakers are charging ahead with efforts to change the ground rules for future elections — with big bills pending in Texas, Michigan and elsewhere. As Republicans erect barriers to the ballot box, voting rights advocates are putting fresh pressure on congressional Democrats to pass a sweeping federal rewrite of election rules to counter the new laws. But a contentious committee meeting in an evenly divided Senate only underscores the near-insurmountable hurdles Democrats face in passing their elections overhaul. Here’s a look at recent developments in the battles over voting rights: A law signed last Tuesday by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey targets the state’s Permanent Early Voting List. Under that system, people on the list automatically receive a ballot for every election. The new law removes voters from the list if they fail to cast an early mail-in ballot in at least one primary or general election in a four-year period and don’t respond to mailed notices warning them of their removal. But voting in person during that window won’t count as casting a mail ballot.

Full Article: Voting rights battles: Latest news and developments – CNNPolitics

National: Group that can’t find systemic voter fraud eager to help combat systemic voter fraud | Philip Bump/The Washington Post

Mother Jones magazine published video on Thursday obtained by the group Documented and depicting a donor meeting in Arizona last month hosted by the advocacy group Heritage Action. You’re likely familiar with the nonprofit conservative think tank Heritage Foundation; Heritage Action is its sibling that raises often-anonymous money to focus on political advocacy. In the video from the meeting in Tucson, the organization’s executive director, Jessica Anderson, boasts about the group’s efforts to influence legislation aimed at restricting voting in states. “We’re working with these state legislators to make sure they have all of the information they need to draft the bills,” Anderson says at one point. “In some cases we actually draft them for them.” She also tells the donors, according to Mother Jones’s Ari Berman and Nick Surgey, that the organization has also “hired state lobbyists to make sure that in these targeted states we’re meeting with the right people” to advance the proposals. At another point, she and her colleague Hans von Spakovsky discuss a call with a number of secretaries of state a few weeks prior. They brag that they’d managed to share information with “the best conservative secretaries of state” without a single leak to their political opponents. This sort of privacy is a focal point; Anderson also crows about the work the organization did in Iowa that “honestly? Nobody noticed.” Both Anderson and von Spakovsky have ties to the Trump administration. Anderson worked in the Office of Management and Budget as an associate director. Thanks to his years of focus on the issue, von Spakovsky was an instrumental part of former president Donald Trump’s ill-fated voter-fraud commission that collapsed early in his term. Given that shared background, it’s not surprising that Anderson articulated Heritage Action’s goal as being to “take the fierce fire that is in every single one of our bellies to right the wrongs of November.”

Full Article: Group that can’t find systemic voter fraud eager to help combat systemic voter fraud – The Washington Post

National: Conservative group boasts of secret role in voting laws | Nicholas Riccardi and Anthony Izaguirre/Associated Press

The head of a national conservative group told supporters it secretly helped draft legislation in Republican-controlled statehouses across the country as part of a coordinated network of organizations pushing to tighten voting laws across the country. Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action, made the claim during a recent meeting with supporters in Arizona. A recording of the event was released by the liberal investigative website Documented, which made a copy available for The Associated Press to review. Heritage Action confirmed its authenticity. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” Anderson said of legislation written for state lawmakers. “Or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation, so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.” Anderson’s comments shed additional light on precisely how well-funded national organizations have seized on false claims about the 2020 election to try to tighten state voting laws. While it is known that Heritage Action and several other groups are working with state lawmakers on legislation, it is rare to hear a leader detail how a group masks involvement to give the bills the appearance of broad political support. Anderson gave the example of Georgia, where she said an activist affiliated with Heritage had given a letter outlining the group’s recommendations to key legislators. The activist first had the proposal signed by thousands of other activists. Other states where she said the group helped write bills included Iowa and Texas — though in Iowa, the authors of the voting legislation said they never spoke with Heritage. In a statement Friday, Anderson said: “Heritage Action is proud of our work to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. That work begins at the state level through our grassroots and continues in state legislatures throughout the country.”

Full Article: Conservative group boasts of secret role in voting laws

National: Here’s How Disinformation Drives Voting Laws | Maggie Astor/The New York Times

When State Representative Bobby Kaufmann of Iowa spoke in February in support of a restrictive voting bill he was sponsoring, he made what might once have been a startling acknowledgment: He could not point to any problems with November’s election that demonstrated a need for new rules. But many Iowans believed there had been problems, he said. And that was reason enough to allow less early voting, shorten Election Day polling hours, put new limits on absentee balloting and forbid counties to have more than one ballot drop box. “The ultimate voter suppression is a very large swath of the electorate not having faith in our election systems,” Mr. Kaufmann, a Republican, said in defense of his bill, which was signed into law in March. “And for whatever reason, political or not, there are thousands upon thousands of Iowans that do not have faith in our election systems.” Former President Donald J. Trump’s monthslong campaign to delegitimize the 2020 election didn’t overturn the results. But his unfounded claims gutted his supporters’ trust in the electoral system, laying the foundation for numerous Republican-led bills pushing more restrictive voter rules. The bills demonstrate how disinformation can take on a life of its own, forming a feedback loop that shapes policy for years to come. When promoted with sufficient intensity, falsehoods — whether about election security or the coronavirus or other topics — can shape voters’ attitudes toward policies, and lawmakers can cite those attitudes as the basis for major changes.

Full Article: Here’s How Disinformation Drives Voting Laws – The New York Times

National: Manchin, Murkowski call on Congress to reauthorize Voting Rights Act | Sahil Kapur/NBC

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, wrote a letter Monday calling on Congress to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act, seeking to jump-start a debate on a bipartisan path to bolstering voting access. “Protecting Americans’ access to democracy has not been a partisan issue for the past 56 years, and we must not allow it to become one now,” they wrote to the top four congressional leaders. While the letter didn’t name the bill, a Manchin aide said the senators are referring to the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which aims to require states with a recent record of discrimination in voting rights to get federal pre-approval before changing their election laws. The Supreme Court in 2013 gutted the formula established by Congress to determine which states are subject to the rule, calling it outdated. The issue has since languished on Capitol Hill, with Republicans uninterested in re-establishing a “preclearance” requirement, and GOP-led states around the country moving to pass restrictive voting laws. The Manchin-Murkowski letter is designed to show that there is some bipartisan support for the cause of protecting voting rights. It comes as Manchin faces progressive criticism for being the lone Democratic holdout on the “For The People Act,” a sweeping bill that aims to allow more ballot access and that all states must follow. The Democratic-controlled House approved that bill but it hasn’t taken up the bill named for John Lewis. Manchin has insisted that any attempt to overhaul federal voting laws have support from both parties.

Full Article: Manchin, Murkowski call on Congress to reauthorize Voting Rights Act

Arizona: Cyber Ninjas, UV lights and far-right funding: inside the strange Arizona 2020 election ‘audit’ | Sam Levine/The Guardian