National

Michele Carew would seem an unlikely target of Donald Trump loyalists who have fixated their fury on the notion that the 2020 election was stolen from the former president. The nonpartisan elections administrator in the staunchly Republican Hood County, just an hour southwest of Fort Worth, oversaw an election in which Trump got some 81% of the vote. It was among the former president’s larger margins of victory in Texas, which also went for him. Yet over the past 10 months, Carew’s work has come under persistent attack from hard-line Republicans. They allege disloyalty and liberal bias at the root of her actions, from the time she denied a reporter with the fervently pro-Trump network One America News entrance to a training that was not open to the public to accusations, disputed by the Texas secretary of state’s office, that she is violating state law by using electronic machines that randomly number ballots. Viewing her decisions as a litmus test of her loyalty to the Republican Party, they have demanded that Carew be fired or her position abolished and her duties transferred to an elected county clerk who has used social media to promote baseless allegations of widespread election fraud. Republican politicians and conspiracy theorists continue to cast doubt on the election process across the country, particularly in areas where President Joe Biden won. They have demanded audits in states like Arizona, where the results of a Republican-led review in Maricopa County confirmed Biden’s victory. They have also moved to restrict voting in multiple states, including Texas, which passed sweeping legislation that has already drawn lawsuits alleging the disenfranchisement of vulnerable voters. Last week, Trump issued a public letter demanding an audit in Texas. Hours later, the Texas secretary of state’s office announced that it had begun a “comprehensive forensic audit” in four of the state’s largest counties: Dallas, Harris, Tarrant and Collin. Biden won three of the four.

Full Article: “God’s Will Is Being Thwarted.” Even in Solid Republican Counties, Hard-Liners Seek More Partisan Control of Elections. — ProPublica

National: False election claims undermine efforts to increase security | Maggie Miller/The Hill

Officials say the biggest threat facing U.S. elections isn’t Russian hacking or domestic voter fraud but disinformation and misinformation increasingly undermining the public’s perception of voting security. Since the 2016 vote, Congress has allocated millions of dollars to states in an attempt to shore up cybersecurity and replace outdated, vulnerable voting machines, but even as improvements are made, faith in the system is being eroded. “I believe that the biggest vulnerability is disinformation, that these machines are not functioning in the way that they were intended,” Election Assistance Commission (EAC) Commissioner Thomas Hicks, who was nominated by former President Obama, said Thursday during a virtual event hosted by Freedom House, the Bush Institute, Issue One and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. EAC Chairman Donald Palmer, nominated by former President Trump, agreed with Hicks, telling The Hill Friday that “our systems are secure, and they have been tested and are secure, and the misinformation about those systems, that hurts voter confidence.” Concerns over misleading claims undermining elections are nothing new, but gained widespread public attention after 2016. In the months leading up to November, Russian government hackers targeted election infrastructure in all 50 states, successfully accessing voter registration systems in two of them, though no votes were changed.

Full Article: False election claims undermine efforts to increase security | TheHill

National: New legislation seeks to expand protections for election workers | Linda So/Reuters

A U.S. senator introduced legislation on Monday to broaden protections for election workers, their family members and physical polling locations in response to a Reuters investigation into threats against election administrators. The Election Worker and Polling Place Protection Act aims to make the workers who help administer America’s elections safer — from officials to volunteers and the contractors who set up and maintain voting equipment. The protections would extend to family members of election officials and prohibit threats of damage to polling places, tabulation centers or other election infrastructure. The measure, sponsored by Georgia Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff, cites two recent Reuters reports about threats of physical harm and death against election workers across the country, from senior officials to volunteer poll workers along with their families. The barrage, fueled by former President Donald Trump’s ceaseless false claims that the 2020 vote was stolen, has continued nearly a year after the November election. There have only been four known arrests in response to the threats and no convictions. “Threats of violence targeting election officials and polling places are threats against our Constitution and the right to vote,” said Ossoff, 34, elected this year. “At this moment of peril for our democracy, my bill will strengthen federal laws protecting election workers and polling places from violent threats and acts of violence.”

Full Article: New U.S. legislation seeks to expand protections for election workers | Reuters

National: Trump seeking to elevate Republicans who refuse to accept Biden victory | Sam Levine/The Guardian

Donald Trump and allies are seeding one of their most dangerous efforts to undermine US elections to date, seeking to elevate candidates who refuse to accept Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 to crucial offices where they could do significant damage in overturning the 2024 elections. The former president has endorsed several Republican candidates running to be the secretary of state, the chief election official, in their respective states. If elected, these candidates would wield enormous power over elections, and could both implement policies that would make it harder for Americans to cast a ballot and block the official certification of election results afterwards. Ten of the 15 candidates running for secretary of state in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada have either said the 2020 results were stolen or that they need to be further investigated, Reuters reported earlier this month. The endorsements from the former president underscore the enormous power that secretaries of state have over election rules and procedures, both before and after the election. One of the main reasons Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election failed in many places were election officials, including Republican and Democratic secretaries of state, who refused to go along with his effort. If those officials are voted out of office next year, it would be a serious blow to the guardrails of US democracy.

Full Article: Trump seeking to elevate Republicans who refuse to accept Biden victory | Donald Trump | The Guardian

National: Alex Jones and pro-Trump conspiracy theorists face legal consequences | Aaron Blake/The Washington Post

Misinformation has always been a problem in politics. What has changed over the last six years or so is how much one movement in particular — the one led by former president Donald Trump — has embraced it as an organizing principle. Trump and his allies have also aligned with the kind of extremist purveyors of conspiracy theories who were once given the cold shoulder in polite society. Increasingly, though, a bit of a reckoning is taking place. Trump allies spouting wild, baseless theories and otherwise taking our political discourse down misinformation rabbit holes are confronting consequences in court or otherwise facing bona fide legal penalties for their actions. The question, as ever, is whether it will change anything — whether those penalties will serve as the deterrent they are supposed to be. Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is the latest to be ordered to pay up by a court. As The Post’s Timothy Bella reported Friday, a judge ruled Jones was liable for all damages in lawsuits over his claims that the massacre of 20 schoolchildren and six others at Sandy Hook Elementary was a “false flag” and a “giant hoax.” The conspiracy theory has led to the harassment of the victims’ families.

Full Article: Alex Jones and pro-Trump conspiracy theorists face legal consequences – The Washington Post

National: There’s a Bipartisan Voting Rights Bill. Yes, Really. | Maggie Astor/The New York Times

A bipartisan elections bill is the rarest of creatures, one many Americans have never seen in the wild. Congressional Democrats are united behind sweeping voting rights legislation that won’t pass the Senate so long as the filibuster exists, because Republicans are united against it. Republican legislators in Texas, Georgia, Florida and elsewhere have passed numerous voting restrictions over united Democratic opposition. But on one sliver of voting issues, it seems lawmakers might — might! — be able to agree. The Native American Voting Rights Act, or NAVRA, was introduced in the House last month by Representatives Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, and Sharice Davids, Democrat of Kansas. Senator Ben Ray Luján, Democrat of New Mexico, introduced companion legislation in the Senate. It would let tribes determine the number and location of voter registration sites, polling places and ballot drop boxes on their reservations; bar states from closing or consolidating those sites without tribal consent; require states with voter identification laws to accept tribal ID; and create a $10 million grant program for state-level task forces to examine barriers to voting access for Native Americans. The bill — endorsed by many Native American tribes, as well as advocacy groups such as the Native American Rights Fund, the National Congress of American Indians and Four Directions — is in the earliest stages of the legislative process. It hasn’t even had a committee hearing. Congress has been rather preoccupied with matters like stopping the government from shutting down or defaulting on its debt. While the broad voting rights measures are a high priority for Democrats, NAVRA is much lower on the list. And there is no telling how many Republicans besides Mr. Cole will get on board.

Full Article: There’s a Bipartisan Voting Rights Bill. Yes, Really. – The New York Times

Here’s what Congress can do to keep the next Trump from stealing an election | Richard L. Hasen/The Washington Post

We know from the Bob Woodward and Robert Costa book “Peril” that the country came closer to a stolen presidential election than was previously reported. President Donald Trump’s lawyer John Eastman advised Vice President Mike Pence that he would be justified in single-handedly accepting some fake alternative slates of electors for states that Joe Biden won — on the grounds of supposed fraud in various states — and simply declare Trump the winner of the election. Pence would have done so on Jan. 6, when he sat in his ceremonial role as president of the Senate. Pence supposedly seriously considered the possibility, only to reject it upon getting sounder legal advice. These machinations involving Pence came on top of at least 30 direct Trump contacts with election officials, elected officials and others to cajole Republican state legislatures to send in those alternative slates of electors. (None did, but Eastman’s plan pretended that they had.) We dodged a bullet last time, and things are much worse now. Election officials have been leaving their jobs as they face threats of violence and harassment, and some of the people who will replace them have bought into the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. Those are the people who will be in charge of counting the votes in some places next election. Simply put, we face a serious risk that election results will not reflect the will of the people in 2024 or some other future American presidential election. Congress has the power to put up barriers to election theft, but the window is quickly closing. That’s because Democrats may soon lose control of one or both Houses of Congress, and Republicans, fearful of Trump or complicit in his plans, cannot be expected to take the lead on deterring election subversion.

Full Article: Here’s what Congress can do to keep the next Trump from stealing an election – The Washington Post

National: Election Security Problems Still Must Be Addressed | Susan Greenhalgh and J. Alex Halderman

Since last November, Donald Trump and his allies have attempted to undermine our democratic framework with a relentless barrage of lies, fantasies and falsehoods about imaginary vote-rigging schemes. They have enabled supporters of the former president to grasp onto the most arrant nonsense and farcical theories to convince themselves that Trump did not lose to President Joe Biden by 7 million votes nationwide and 74 Electoral College votes. It shouldn’t need saying, but the lies are not true. As the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and Republican and Democratic election officials have affirmed, there is no evidence whatsoever of large-scale electoral fraud. Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. Period. But the fact that the presidential outcome was correct this time does not mean that our elections are well enough secured. Plenty has been written about how the Big Lie is corroding public trust and tearing at the fabric of our democracy. But in addition to these obvious harms, Trump’ insidious disinformation is also inhibiting legitimate and necessary election security reforms. Well before the 2020 election, bipartisan investigations from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee documented significant weaknesses in U.S. voting equipment. These findings only confirmed what previous studies from state election officials and academic researchers revealed—voting machines are computers with inherent vulnerabilities and weak security protocols.

Full Article: Election Security Problems Still Must Be Addressed | Opinion

National: As Trump hints at 2024 comeback, democracy advocates fear a ‘worst-case scenario’ for the country | Ashley Parker/The Washington Post

A year before the 2020 election, about two dozen constitutional scholars and democracy advocates traveled to Washington to work through a range of scenarios where something goes awry on Election Day. The country’s political system was being tested by a campaign like no other in modern history, with an incumbent president, Donald Trump, who showed little regard for the democratic traditions and constitutional norms that had guided his predecessors — and who repeatedly claimed that the only way he could lose was through rampant fraud. So the group considered a slew of hypothetical catastrophes: “What do we do if a vigilante group takes over a major county tabulation facility and burns it to the ground? What do we do if there is a military coup?” But, as Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser to the elections program at Democracy Fund tells it, the experts were too quick in retrospect to dismiss the outrageous as unlikely to happen in a country like the United States. Either we were not creative enough or the norms of civility our nation has seen over centuries were not reliable enough,” said Patrick, a former elections official in Maricopa County, Ariz. The challenges for American democracy were on stark display almost exactly two months after Election Day, on Jan. 6, when a violent mob of Trump supporters mounted a deadly insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. And the challenges have been clear in the eight months since the riot, as Trump and his allies have intensified false claims of election fraud and the former president has remained the Republican Party’s most popular leader.

Full Article: As Trump hints at 2024 comeback, democracy advocates fear a ‘worst-case scenario’ for the country – The Washington Post

National: The Push For Internet Voting Continues, Mostly Thanks To One Guy | Miles Parks/NPR

By 2028, Bradley Tusk wants every American to be able to vote on their phones. It’s a lofty goal, and one that most cybersecurity experts scoff at. But it’s a quest that the venture capitalist and former political insider continues to chip away at. His nonprofit, Tusk Philanthropies, announced a $10 million grant program Thursday to fund the development of a new internet-based voting system that he says will aim to win over security skeptics, who have long been wary of votes being cast via digital networks rather than through the paper ballots or ATM-type machines that most Americans currently use. NPR is the first to report on the announcement. “My goal is to make it possible for every single person in this country to vote in every single election on their phone,” Tusk said in an interview with NPR. Tusk was Uber’s first political adviser, and he is also a former staffer for Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He has already bankrolled a number of small-scale mobile-phone voting pilot projects across the U.S. over the past few years, in which voters with disabilities and Americans living abroad from a select few districts have been able to return their ballots digitally. However, the vendors that conducted those pilots have faced heavy scrutiny for security flaws in their systems as well as for a general lack of transparency around their software, as the source code for the underlying technology has remained private.

Full Article: Despite Security Concerns, Online Voting Gets $10 Million Push : NPR

Editorial: The GOP isn’t just re-litigating 2020. It’s pre-litigating 2022. And 2024. | Olivier Knox/The Washington Post

The best way to understand the aggressive Republican push to cast doubt on the 2020 election results and rewrite voting procedures in states the GOP controls is not as re-litigating President Biden’s victory, though that is a tool for trying to undermine him. Instead, it’s better understood as pre-litigating 2022 and 2024: Laying the foundation for challenging or even overturning Democratic victories of the lowercase “d” democratic variety in the future. Yes, I know that this has been blindingly obvious for some time. (Also, I offer my apologies to all of my English teachers for “pre-litigating.” I blame years of covering State of the Union “preactions.”) But consider what we’ve learned — though “confirmed” might be a better word — over the past week about former president Donald Trump’s avalanche of false claims he was cheated out of a second term. And consider he’s flirting with running again and has been repeating this nonsense at campaign-style rallies. First, Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) — hardly “Never Trump” politicians — personally investigated the Trump camp’s claims of widespread irregularities and found nothing to deter them from voting to certify Biden’s victory.

Full Article: The GOP isn’t just re-litigating 2020. It’s pre-litigating 2022. And 2024. – The Washington Post

Arizona audit debunks Trump’s false claims, but the poison of misinformation still threatens the electoral process | Dan Balz/The Washington Post

Source: Arizona audit debunks Trump’s false claims, but the poison of misinformation still threatens the electoral process – The Washington Post

Another door slammed shut Friday on the ceaseless and fraudulent campaign by Donald Trump to claim fraud about the 2020 election. The fact that the door closed will not stop Trump from continuing to make his baseless claims about last year’s vote. It should but probably won’t chasten Republican leaders who have refused to fully face up to the consequences of what Trump is doing. The consequences are the threat to future elections. The consequences are the danger that future close elections will be subjected to similar false claims that inspire more doubts about the integrity of the vote and more disputed outcomes. The consequences are the distinct risk that partisanship will be routinely injected into the counting of votes. The idea that it can’t happen here should be tossed aside if Trump and his acolytes maintain their current course, which they will. The door that closed Friday was the biggest one out there, the convoluted and contentious review of the vote in Arizona’s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix. The review, described by some as an audit, was ordered by the Republican-controlled state Senate and handed to a firm known as Cyber Ninjas, which had no real experience with election reviews. The outfit spent months reviewing 2.1 million ballots that had been cast in Arizona’s most populous county. They pursued all manner of conspiracy theories, including an examination of the ballots to see if any contained traces of bamboo, based on the wild claim that there were counterfeit ballots printed in Asia and that were somehow sneaked into Arizona. The auditors far exceeded their expected timeline. They moved ballots from one location to another. Their work forced the county to decide it should replace its election machinery, fearing that the existing machines had been tainted. Along the way, the Cyber Ninjas team drew constant criticism, from both Democrats and some Republican officials in Maricopa County, who blistered the effort as needless and the examiners as ill-equipped for the job. In the end, what the review found was that Biden not only won the county, just as the initial vote tallies and certified final results had said, but also that he gained a net of 360 votes. Whatever else the lengthy report said about the ballots, the bottom line was that Trump’s claims were found to be bogus, which frankly was predictable.

National: Special Report: Backers of Trump’s false fraud claims seek to control next elections | Tim Reid, Nathan Layne and Jason Lange/Reuters

One leading candidate seeking to become Georgia’s chief elections official, Republican Jody Hice, is a Congressman who voted to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential win in the hours after the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol. Hice had posted on social media earlier that day: “This is our 1776 moment,” referencing the American Revolution. In Arizona, the contenders for the elections-chief office, secretary of state, include Republican state lawmaker Mark Finchem, who attended the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally before the deadly insurrection and spoke at a similar gathering the previous day. In Nevada, one strong Republican candidate for elections chief is Jim Marchant, who unsuccessfully sued to have his own defeat in a 2020 congressional race reversed based on unfounded voter-fraud claims. The three candidates are part of a wider group of Republican secretary-of-state contenders in America’s swing states who have embraced former President Donald Trump’s false claims that he lost a “rigged” election. Their candidacies have alarmed Democrats and voting-rights groups, who fear that the politicians who tried hardest to undermine Americans’ faith in elections last year may soon be the ones running them – or deciding them, in future contested votes. Jena Griswold, chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State and Colorado’s top elections official, said the secretary-of-state races reflect a much broader exploitation of phony voter-fraud claims by Republicans seeking all levels of elected office. “That is ‘code red’ for democracy,” she said in an interview.

Full Article: Special Report: Backers of Trump’s false fraud claims seek to control next elections | Reuters

National: Trump Campaign Knew Lawyers’ Dominion Claims Were Baseless, Memo Shows | Alan Feuer/The New York Times

Two weeks after the 2020 election, a team of lawyers closely allied with Donald J. Trump held a widely watched news conference at the Republican Party’s headquarters in Washington. At the event, they laid out a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that a voting machine company had worked with an election software firm, the financier George Soros and Venezuela to steal the presidential contest from Mr. Trump. But there was a problem for the Trump team, according to court documents released on Monday evening. By the time the news conference occurred on Nov. 19, Mr. Trump’s campaign had already prepared an internal memo on many of the outlandish claims about the company, Dominion Voting Systems, and the separate software company, Smartmatic. The memo had determined that those allegations were untrue. The court papers, which were initially filed late last week as a motion in a defamation lawsuit brought against the campaign and others by a former Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, contain evidence that officials in the Trump campaign were aware early on that many of the claims against the companies were baseless. The documents also suggest that the campaign sat on its findings about Dominion even as Sidney Powell and other lawyers attacked the company in the conservative media and ultimately filed four federal lawsuits accusing it of a vast conspiracy to rig the election against Mr. Trump.

Full Article: Trump Campaign Knew Lawyers’ Dominion Claims Were Baseless, Memo Shows – The New York Times

National: Disinformation May Be the New Normal, Election Officials Fear | Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline

As voting wound down last week during the California recall election, Natalie Adona, the assistant registrar of voters in Nevada County, got an irate phone call. A voter, driven by disinformation that Republican politicians had pushed for weeks, berated Adona over the state’s lack of a photo ID law, saying election officials exposed the voting system to fraud. Adona explained that election officials follow state law and verify signatures on mail-in ballots. After a tense back-and-forth, the voter called her a Nazi. Election officials across the country say such attacks have become commonplace. “It’s escalated to an unhealthy and dangerous level,” Adona said in an interview. “We are trying to talk over others who have a further reach, more money, more power and basically are more interested in winning elections than American democracy, even though they know what they’re saying is not true.” The lies about election fraud, which range from false claims about the winner of the 2020 presidential race to accusations about this month’s California recall process, have state and local election officials worried about the future. As gubernatorial contests in New Jersey and Virginia approach this fall, and next year’s national midterms near, election officials are struggling to combat disinformation and assure voters their ballots are secure.

Full Article: Disinformation May Be the New Normal, Election Officials Fear | The Pew Charitable Trusts

National: Harassed and Harangued, Poll Workers Now Have a New Form of Defense | Michael Wines/The New York Times

It is perhaps a metaphor for the times that even the volunteer who checked you into the polls in November now has a legal defense committee. The Election Official Legal Defense Network, which made its public debut on Sept. 7, offers to represent more than just poll workers, of course. Formed to counter the waves of political pressure and public bullying that election workers have faced in the last year, the organization pledges free legal services to anyone involved in the voting process, from secretaries of state to local election officials and volunteers. The group already has received inquiries from several election officials, said David J. Becker, the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research, which oversees the project. Without getting into details, Mr. Becker said their queries were “related to issues like harassment and intimidation.” The network is the creation of two powerhouses in Republican and Democratic legal circles, Benjamin L. Ginsberg and Bob Bauer. In a Washington Post opinion piece this month, the two — Mr. Ginsberg was a premier G.O.P. lawyer for 38 years and Mr. Bauer was both a Democratic Party lawyer and White House counsel in the Obama administration — wrote that such attacks on people “overseeing the counting and casting of ballots on an independent, nonpartisan basis are destructive to our democracy.”

Full Article: Harassed and Harangued, Poll Workers Now Have a New Form of Defense – The New York Times

National: ‘It’s spreading’: Phony election fraud conspiracies infect midterms | David Siders and Zach Montellaro/Politico

It started as one big, false claim — that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. But nearly a year later, the Big Lie is metastasizing, with Republicans throughout the country raising the specter of rigged elections in their own campaigns ahead of the midterms. The preemptive spin is everywhere. Last week it was Larry Elder in California, who — before getting trounced in the GOP’s failed effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom — posted a “Stop Fraud” page on his campaign website. Before that, at a rally in Virginia, state Sen. Amanda Chase introduced herself as a surrogate for gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin and told the crowd, “Because the Democrats like to cheat, you have to cast your vote before they do.” In Nevada, Adam Laxalt, the former state attorney general running to unseat Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, is already talking about filing lawsuits to “tighten up the election” — more than a year before votes are cast. And in Pennsylvania, former Rep. Lou Barletta, who is running for governor after losing a Senate race two years earlier, said he “had to consider” whether a Republican could ever win a race again in his state given the current administration of elections there. Trump may have started the election-truther movement. But what was once the province of an aggrieved former president has spread far beyond him, infecting elections at every level with vague, unspecified claims that future races are already rigged. It’s a fiction that’s poised to factor heavily in the midterm elections and in 2024 — providing Republican candidates with a rallying cry for the rank-and-file, and priming the electorate for future challenges to races the GOP may lose.

Full Article: ‘It’s spreading’: Phony election fraud conspiracies infect midterms – POLITICO

National: Democrats push to shield election workers from violent threats | John Kruzel/The Hill

Democrats on Capitol Hill are renewing calls for legislation that would stiffen criminal penalties against those who threaten election administrators after unprecedented harassment aimed at workers during last year’s presidential contest. More than a dozen Democratic lawmakers, including from the key battleground states of Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, are pushing the proposals, with some lawmakers warning that violence could erupt during upcoming elections without enhanced protections. “I hope that it does not come to that,” said Rep. Nikema Williams (D-Ga.) of the prospect of violence against election workers. “But unless we do something about it, that’s the trendline. We saw what happened at the United States Capitol when no one took the proper steps to prevent that.” Nearly 1 in 6 local 2020 election workers received threats of violence, and almost 1 in 3 said they felt unsafe because of their job, according to an April survey by the Brennan Center for Justice. Some had their homes broken into, others fled with their families into hiding and some faced armed crowds outside their workplaces and homes. And now, more than 10 months after Election Day, threats persist.

Full Article: Democrats push to shield election workers from violent threats | TheHill

National: ‘Incredibly dangerous’: Trump is trying to get Big Lie promoters chosen to run the 2024 election | Daniel Dale/CNN

Swing state by swing state, former President Donald Trump is trying to get people who tried to overturn the 2020 election chosen to be in charge of the 2024 election. Trump’s Monday endorsement of state Rep. Mark Finchem for Arizona secretary of state is the latest in a series of announcements that has alarmed independent elections experts. Trump has now backed Republicans who supported his lies about the 2020 election for the job of top elections official in three crucial battlegrounds — Arizona, Michigan and Georgia — where the current elections chiefs opposed his efforts to reverse his 2020 defeat. If people who have sought to undermine the 2020 election are running things in 2024, when Trump might be a candidate again, experts and many Democrats fear that attempts to subvert the will of the voters stand a much greater chance of success. “It is incredibly dangerous to support people for office who do not accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election. It suggests that they might be willing to bend or break the rules when it comes to running elections and counting votes in the future,” said Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science and co-director of the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center at the University of California, Irvine. “Someone who claims falsely that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump lacks credibility and cannot be trusted to run a fair election.” Finchem, who has also promoted QAnon conspiracy theories, has been an especially aggressive promoter of the lies that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and rife with “rampant” fraud. Finchem attended the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington and was photographed outside the US Capitol that day (he denies any involvement in the riot there). And nearly eight months after President Joe Biden’s inauguration, he continues to urge Arizona legislators to somehow overturn Biden’s victory in the state.

Full Article: ‘Incredibly dangerous’: Trump is trying to get Big Lie promoters chosen to run the 2024 election – CNNPolitics

National: Judge: Former EAC executive director Brian Newby violated law in voter form case | Roxana Hegeman/Associated Press

A former high-ranking election official violated federal law in 2016 when he granted requests by Kansas, Georgia and Alabama to modify the national voter registration form to require documentary proof of citizenship in those states, a federal judge ruled. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon threw out the contested decisions made by Brian Newby, then-executive director of the Election Assistance Commission, an independent federal agency, after finding on Thursday that Newby failed to determine whether the proposed requirements were necessary to register to vote. The long-delayed ruling by Leon has little practical effect since a federal appeals court had earlier granted a preliminary injunction in the case, blocking the enforcement of the requirement. In a separate case, the Kansas law requiring documentary proof of citizenship was found unconstitutional by a federal appeals court, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene. Leon remanded the requests for the changes sought by Georgia and Alabama to the Election Assistance Commission to reconsider in a manner consistent with his ruling, should those state continue to seek the state-specific instructions to the form. A requirement that prospective voters provide documents — such as a birth certificate or U.S. passport — in order to register to vote has long been championed by former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who led former President Donald Trump’s now-defunct voter fraud commission. Kobach was a leading source for Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that millions of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally may have voted in the 2016 election.

Full Article: Judge: US election official violated law in voter form case

National: This is how embarrassing Trump’s ‘fraud’ claims have gotten | Philip Bump/The Washington Post

It’s been, let’s see, 318 days since the 2020 presidential election. During that time, there has been an unprecedented effort to elevate and prove claims that there were enough illegal votes cast in enough counties in enough states that it cost Donald Trump a victory. That effort has resulted in precisely nothing substantive, no proof of people stuffing ballot boxes or illegally voting thousands of times or of electronic voting machines being manipulated. In multiple states, there were audits and recounts that validated the outcome: Trump lost. But that is not the validation Trump seeks. Instead, he wants the world to believe that he didn’t lose — that, despite the lack of evidence, he was the true victor in November. Or, not that, really — he wants people to think that the debunked and irrelevant evidence actually does prove that case, in the manner of a guy who makes his career selling Bigfoot footage. This, however, is not going to actually change the results of the election, should anything be able to do so, because there is a big difference between convincing random people in “Trump 2024″ shirts that fraud occurred and convincing actual election officials that they missed something big. So there’s been a two-track approach, with Trump and his allies charging that states also messed up their actual election processes, either by inadvertently committing technical violations of voting rules or by changing the rules in the first place.

Full Article: This is how embarrassing Trump’s ‘fraud’ claims have gotten – The Washington Post

National: Some Republicans Fear Tighter Election Rules Could Boomerang on the Party | Dante Chinni/Wall Street Journal

Since the 2020 election, Republicans in state legislatures have been tightening rules around voting and ballot security, passing more than 100 pieces of legislation in 24 states. Now some Republicans in Michigan, where they are weighing tightening voter rules, are pausing their efforts—in part because they believe some election-law changes could hurt their own party at the ballot box. This summer state Rep. Ann Bollin, the Republican who chairs the Michigan House Elections and Ethics Committee, said there was “not support” to make the absentee voting process more difficult. Ms. Bollin, herself a former township clerk, cited concerns from county clerks, including Republicans from largely conservative areas, who said the bills could have negative impacts on voter participation among voters of all stripes, Republicans as well as Democrats. The move has set off a fight within the state GOP over whether the new rules are necessary and whether they could actually hurt Republicans in the state. Other proposals have also been shelved for now. Michigan Republicans aren’t alone in their concerns. Party officials in a handful of other states voiced disapproval over the new proposals and laws.

Full Article: Some Republicans Fear Tighter Election Rules Could Boomerang on the Party – WSJ

National: Senate Democrats Forge Agreement On New Voting Legislation | Claudia Grisales and Juana Summers/NPR

Senate Democrats have reached a deal on revised voting rights legislation, but a major roadblock remains in the evenly divided chamber with Republicans ready to halt the bill’s progress. The package is the latest attempt by Democrats to counteract Republican-led measures at the state level to restrict voting access and alter election administration. The new legislation, unveiled Tuesday morning by Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar and several co-sponsors, builds off a framework proposed by Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who had opposed an earlier, sweeping measure from his party. Along with Manchin, the new bill’s co-sponsors are Democratic Sens. Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Jon Tester of Montana, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Alex Padilla of California, along with Maine independent Sen. Angus King. Republicans have been united in opposition to what they call a federal takeover of state election policy. With an evenly divided Senate, a GOP filibuster stands in Democrats’ way, and their effort would fall short of the 60 votes needed to move the measure forward.

Source: Senate Democrats Forge Agreement On New Voting Legislation : NPR

National: Senate Democrats near agreement on new voting rights legislation | Leigh Ann Caldwell and Teaganne Finn/NBC

Senate Democrats are close to an agreement on updated voting rights legislation that can get the support of all 50 Democratic-voting senators, three Democratic aides familiar with negotiations said. The For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act were introduced in Congress in 2019 and 2021, respectively. Since their introductions, both have been voted on along party lines. The member-level discussions are complete, a source said, but staff members are going through the text to fix technical issues. No further details have been shared. The legislation would require the votes of 60 senators, including 10 Republicans, and it’s unlikely that Democrats will get enough Republican supporters. The bill is part of congressional Democrats’ broader campaign to strengthen voting laws at the federal level to fight restrictive voting laws passed in Republican-led states, such as Texas and Georgia.

Full Article: Senate Democrats near agreement on new voting rights legislation

National: Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election could put future fair elections in jeopardy | Rob Kuznia, Bob Ortega and Casey Tolan/CNN

When the election office led by Lisa Deeley first came under attack from then-President Donald Trump last year, it was more than a month before Election Day. Deeley, the chair of Philadelphia’s three-member election commission and a Democrat, watched from home as Trump falsely claimed during the first 2020 presidential debate that poll watchers had already been turned away at early voting centers in Philadelphia. “Bad things happen in Philadelphia,” Trump said. Deeley’s cell phone immediately lit up with calls and text messages. “A lot of my family, my friends, got a little chuckle out of it, but I knew it wasn’t at all something to laugh about,” she told CNN. “It was just the beginning.” Trump’s efforts to subvert the election began well before Election Day, and have only gained momentum since, with Republicans passing laws to restrict voting or make it easier for partisans to interfere in more than a dozen states, including key battlegrounds. Most recently, in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott signed an election bill into law last week over the fierce objection of the state’s Democrats, who, in hopes of derailing similar restrictions proposed earlier this summer, had fled the state two times en masse.

Full Article: Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election could put future fair elections in jeopardy – CNNPolitics

National: A dangerous trend among GOP candidates shows the Trump threat is here to stay | Greg Sargent/The Washington Post

So is this really how it’s going to be? Are more and more Republican candidates across our great land going to treat it as a requirement that they cast any and all election losses as dubious or illegitimate by definition? We’re now seeing numerous examples of GOP candidates running for office who are doing something very close to this. Which suggests the legacy of Donald Trump could prove worse for the health of democracy than it first appeared. It isn’t just that Republicans will be expected to pledge fealty to the lost cause of the stolen 2020 election. It’s also that untold numbers of GOP candidates will see it as essential to the practice of Trumpist politics that they vow to actively subvert legitimate election losses by any means necessary. One high-profile GOP candidate now playing this ugly Trumpist game is Larry Elder, who is running in a recall election against California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom. This week, Elder told reporters that “there might very well be shenanigans” in the vote counting, just like “in the 2020 election,” and vowed that his “voter integrity board” of lawyers will “file lawsuits.” “The 2020 election, in my opinion, was full of shenanigans,” Elder also told Fox News. “My fear is they’re going to try that in this election right here and recall.” It’s common for campaigns to prepare for post-election litigation. But Elder is going much further. He’s hinting at a concerted effort to steal the recall and linking that to the “big lie” that there were widespread problems in 2020. The goal is plainly to tap into the deep well of paranoia and conspiracy-mongering that Trump fed for years — and to undermine in advance faith in any outcome but a win.

Full Article: Opinion | A dangerous trend among GOP candidates shows the Trump threat is here to stay – The Washington Post

National: Lawmakers seek to protect election workers | Linda So and Jason Szep/Reuters