An assault on American voters is underway

[China]

Gov. Lee signs bill opposed by city council, prevents Knoxville voters from participating in every city council election

 

Governor Bill Lee signed a bill into law on Friday that changes how people in Knoxville elect city council members. It was amended and takes effect on Jan. 1, 2024.

 

Currently, when voters head to the polls in Knoxville during city primary elections, they are allowed to vote for candidates only in their district. During the city general elections, however, Knoxville voters are able to vote for candidates in every city council election, including districts outside the one they live in.

 

Knoxville conducts its citywide, local elections differently from most of Tennessee. State law generally requires cities to hold district-limited elections for city council seats, with the exception of the citywide at-large seats. However, decades ago state lawmakers passed an exception for Knoxville and cities of a similar size to allow voters to elect all of its city council members across all districts on a citywide basis. 

 

The law removes that exception. HB 0817 was introduced by Representative Elaine Davis (R - Knoxville) and in effect, it only impacts Knoxville and Morristown because these are the only two cities that utilize the exemption. Sen. Richard Briggs (R-Knoxville) sponsored the Senate counterpart bill.

 

Davis does not live in Knoxville but said she felt district nominees could be overruled by voters who live outside the district if the law didn't pass. A statement she released previously is below.

 

“Our communities deserve to be able to choose which elected officials they want to represent them. Unfortunately, there are places that allow a district’s nominee to be overruled by voters who live outside of the district. This is simply unacceptable and the reason why I was proud to sponsor House Bill 817 to stop this disenfranchisement from continuing. I remain committed to ensuring that Tennessee has the most fair and secure elections in the nation.”

 

Many Knoxville leaders said they were opposed to the law, and said it felt like an "egregious overstep" by the state legislature. On March 22, the city council unanimously passed a resolution opposing the bill. The resolution also affirmed rights guaranteed through the "home rule" section of the state constitution.

 

The resolution says that the "home rule" section transferred the state's power to enact legislation affecting Knoxville to the city government. The University of Tennessee Institute for Public Service also says that the "home rule" can be adopted by a city and would prevent the state legislature from passing private acts that apply to that city.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

On 5/5/2023 at 7:18 PM, China said:

Arizona Supreme Court fines Kari Lake's lawyers over false election claims

 

Arizona's Supreme Court Thursday ordered former gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake's lawyers to pay a $2,000 fine to the court clerk for repeated false statements related to last year's election.

 

Chief Justice Robert Brutinel signed Thursday's order, requiring Lake's legal team to pay the fine for claiming 35,563 ballots were wrongly added to the vote count in Maricopa County and calling the claim an "undisputed fact."

 

Brutinel declined to award legal fees to attorneys for Gov. Katie Hobbs, D-Ariz., and Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes. Both officials called for sanctions against Lake because of her lawsuit filed last year challenging the results of the election.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

 

Kari Lake election challenge shouldn’t proceed, Arizona officials say

 

The last remaining election misconduct claim by Kari Lake is playing out in court as state officials and the Democratic governor asked a judge to throw out the case Friday.

 

Lake was among the most vocal of last year’s Republican candidates promoting former President Donald Trump’s election lies, which she made the centerpiece of her campaign. While most other election deniers around the country conceded after losing their races in November, Lake did not.

 

Courts have dismissed most of the former TV anchor’s lawsuit. On Friday, a judge heard arguments on whether or not Lake’s final claim should move ahead to a trial next week.

 

Attorneys representing Arizona election officials and Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs say Lake’s allegation that the election was rigged is based on unsubstantiated speculation.

 

Lake’s lawyers say there was a flood of mail-in ballots in Maricopa County, home to more than 60% of the state’s voters, at a time when there were too few workers to verify ballot signatures. Her attorneys say the county ultimately accepted thousands of ballots that had been rejected earlier by workers for having mismatched signatures.

 

The Arizona Supreme Court revived her claim challenging the application of signature-verification procedures, reversing a lower court decision that found she waited too long to raise that claim.

 

The state Supreme Court sent the claim back to the lower court to decide if there is another reason to dismiss it, or if Lake can show that enough votes were affected to change the outcome of the election, which she lost by over 17,000 votes.

 

Lake alleged at least 164,000 illegal votes were counted, according to filings by her attorneys. Three signature verification workers have said they experienced rejection rates due to mismatched signatures on 15% to 40% of the ballots they encountered.

 

“The math doesn’t add up,” said Kurt Olsen, one of Lake’s attorneys.

 

Opposing attorneys said the workers’ speculation doesn’t amount to a violation of the law or misconduct by election workers, and raised questions about whether the three workers truly knew the ultimate outcome of the ballots they had flagged.

 

Abha Khanna, one of the attorneys representing Hobbs, said Lake’s allegations are “wholly untethered to reality.”

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

A few hours in and Kari Lake's trial is already over (or it should be)

 

Kari Lake on Wednesday opened her (second) trial challenging the 2022 election ... with a complete and total fizzle.

 

Her attorney, Kurt Olsen, told the judge he’d be presenting evidence that Maricopa County didn’t verify the voter signatures on “hundreds of thousands” of early ballots, instead hiring signature reviewers who just went through the motions while the county looked on.

 

“This isn’t a question of not doing it well enough,” he told judge. “They’re simply not doing signature verification.”

 

Then Olson called his first witness: A “whistleblower” who proceeded to annihilate Lake’s case.

 

Jacqueline Onigkeit, who worked as a level one reviewer during last year’s election, spent more than an hour explaining the lengths to which county went to verify signatures — the weeklong training of workers, the two shifts of level one reviewers, three levels of signature review, the admonition to get it right.

 

“They (supervisors) told us, ‘You need to be very cautious. You need to pay attention to what you’re doing and remember that whatever you reject or approve, you can be called in to testify,’ ” Onigkeit testified.

 

As a witness for the defense, Onigkeit was dynamite.

 

The problem is, she was supposed to be the star witness for Lake.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

 

[China]

Ohio election officials scramble ahead of August vote on state constitution changes

 

Aubrey Fox has worked the last eight elections as a poll worker in Lakewood, a suburb west of Cleveland.

 

"It's something I do on a couple of vacation days a year," Fox said. "I just love being part of democracy."

 

But Fox says she plans to boycott working a recently announced special election planned for August, a decision that was a turnaround for Republican state lawmakers.

 

"I just feel it's wrong, and I don't want to participate," Fox said.

 

The August election has also drawn opposition from local election officials. A GOP-backed state law that took effect in April made a number of changes to voting, including banning most August special elections. But on May 10, Republican lawmakers approved a statewide vote this upcoming August to decide on a resolution to make it harder to amend the Ohio Constitution.

 

Republicans want voters to raise the threshold for approving future amendments to the Ohio Constitution from a simple majority to 60%, before a possible November ballot measure to codify abortion rights in the constitution. A group of doctors and citizens is currently gathering signatures to put an abortion rights amendment on the November ballot.

 

The resolution that would be decided in August would also make it significantly harder for groups to get onto the ballot in the future by requiring signatures from every county in the state, not half the counties as is law now.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

 

[China]

YouTube changes policy to allow false claims about past US presidential elections

 

YouTube will stop removing content that falsely claims the 2020 election or other past U.S. presidential elections were marred by “widespread fraud, errors or glitches,” the platform announced Friday.

 

The change is a reversal for the Google-owned video service, which said a month after the 2020 election that it would start removing new posts that falsely claimed widespread voter fraud or errors changed the outcome.

 

YouTube said in a blog post that the updated policy was an attempt to protect the ability to “openly debate political ideas, even those that are controversial or based on disproven assumptions.”

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Bang]

****ing stupid. You can't debate lies, period. 
This country is doomed.

 

~Bang

[LD0506]

5 minutes ago, Bang said:

****ing stupid. You can't debate lies, period. 
This country is doomed.

 

~Bang

 

Naww

The country isn't doomed 

This iteration might be scrood

A generation of kids that have zero ****s to give will build something different 

And all that red state grey meat will fertilize the Arizona desert once we run em through woodchippers

Just gotta ride this out

 

[Bang]

We keep saying that, but every step forward is accompanied by 1,384 steps back.
 

~Bang

[LD0506]

5 hours ago, Bang said:

We keep saying that, but every step forward is accompanied by 1,384 steps back.
 

~Bang

 

Things have to get bad enough that people are willing to act, and we aren't there yet. Most are still counting on someone else doing the work or the dying, kinda like ole You EssA in '37. Everyone saw war coming and set to finding ways to make a buck off of it. They sure didn't expect their kids to be floating in the surf off Iwo. 

 

The worst crime John Brown committed was bad timing.

[LadySkinsFan]

7 hours ago, Bang said:

****ing stupid. You can't debate lies, period. 
This country is doomed.

 

~Bang

 

So we don't debate their fascist points. We label their **** Fascist and then we talk about Democracy and We the People and what's been done to get rid of the Fascist policies in the last few years since Biden was elected in November 2020 and again in 2022. We call out their negatives and then hit with our positives.

 

But we don't debate them ever.

 

 

Edited June 3, 2023 by LadySkinsFan

[China]

Um, yeah...

 

 

[China]

How the far right tore apart one of the best tools to fight voter fraud

 

On a night in January 2022, Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin stepped on stage in a former airbase in Houma, La.

 

With American flags draped from the stage, the topic of the night was democracy.

 

The state's chief voting official joked that he was competing with a former LSU Tiger great playing in the NFL playoffs the same night.

 

"I want to thank you all for coming out, competing with Joe Burrow is pretty tough!" Ardoin laughed.

 

But these were election die-hards.

 

The group hosting the event — We The People, Bayou Chapter — is one of hundreds of so-called election integrity groups that have popped up across the country since 2020, motivated by former President Donald Trump's lies about voting.

 

During the Q&A portion of the event, people asked about how to stop dead people from voting "to support the Democrats" and voiced a number of other popular election conspiracy theories.

 

"I think one of the reasons we had so much distrust from this past election was because all of a sudden either over the course of the night, or in the wee hours of the morning, votes were discovered," said one man, repeating a common false claim about how votes were tallied in 2020.

 

But Ardoin wasn't just dropping by to talk about electronic voting machines or mail ballot fraud.

 

He was making an announcement: Louisiana would become the first state ever to pull out of an obscure bipartisan voting partnership known as the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC.

 

ERIC is currently the only system that can catch if someone votes in more than one state, which is illegal. And election officials widely agree it helps to identify dead people on voting lists.

 

But Louisiana was done with it.

 

"This week I sent a letter to [ERIC], suspending Louisiana's participation in that program," Ardoin said.

 

At the time, in early 2022, most Americans had never heard of ERIC.

 

But in Houma, it seems in large part due to a far-right misinformation machine, Ardoin's announcement garnered 15 seconds of applause.

 

It was the first of many times to come in which Republican officials would turn their back on this tool they once praised, in an effort to score political points with their base.

 

This NPR investigation, which found video of the Houma event posted to Facebook, is the first to report that Ardoin announced his ERIC decision to conservative activists.

 

And a deeper look at the red-state exodus that followed — eight states and counting have now pulled out of ERIC — shows a policy blueprint for an election denial movement, spearheaded by a key Trump ally, eager to change virtually every aspect of how Americans vote.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

True The Vote Leadership Accused of Using Donations for Personal Gain

 

Conservative activists Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips used the nonprofit True the Vote to enrich themselves, according to a complaint filed to the IRS.

 

On Monday, the nonprofit watchdog group Campaign for Accountability called for an investigation into True the Vote, which has made repeated false claims about voter fraud in elections. The complaint said True the Vote may have violated state and federal law when the charity used donations to issue loans to Engelbrecht, its founder, and lucrative contracts to Gregg Phillips, a longtime director. The organization also failed to disclose the payments to insiders in its tax returns, including excessive legal bills paid to its general counsel at the time, who filed election-related lawsuits in four states, the complaint said.

 

“Such disclosure lapses heighten suspicion regarding whether True the Vote and or its current or former officers and directors intended to conceal the payments from the public or IRS,” the complaint said. The self-dealing contracts and loans were first reported by Reveal.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

'Let's Talk About Who's Cheating': Freshman Democrat Gives GOP A Ruthless Fact-Check

 

Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) didn’t let an interruption from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) faze her as she tore apart Republicans’ voter fraud claims on Wednesday.

 

Crockett went after GOP lawmakers as she talked “about who’s cheating” during a congressional hearing that looked at election integrity in the District of Columbia.

 

“We haven’t had half as many hearings about guns as we’ve had on voting rights, and every time we seemingly have a hearing on voting rights, we’re talking about the fact that people are cheating, so let’s talk about who’s cheating” Crockett said.

 

Crockett, in remarks to Wendy Weiser, vice president of democracy at The Brennan Center for Justice policy institute, questioned Fox News’ $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems in a defamation case involving 2020 election lies before switching to a Georgia law that reportedly held 87,000 people back from voting in 2018.

 

“I’m running out of time, so I’ma keep going,” she said.

 

“There also was this article because I don’t want us to base anything on Georgia at all. Please, Jesus, not Georgia. Because Georgia purged 87,000 votes.”

 

The mention of Greene’s home state led the Republican to interrupt Crockett before the Texan declined to yield and shared receipts from several media outlets.

 

“I’m reclaiming my time. All right, so there were 87,000 people that were purged that were legitimate voters, so no we don’t want to copy off of Georgia,” she said.

 

“Also, another GOP voter admits he committed fraud. Another one in Pennsylvania, man who admits he voted for Trump with his dead mom’s name because he listened to too much propaganda.”

 

Click on the link for the full article and video

[China]

On 12/1/2022 at 8:30 PM, China said:

CYBER NINJAS CEO’S TEXT MESSAGES ABOUT ARIZONA ‘AUDIT’ REVEAL FREQUENT CONTACTS WITH ELECTION DENIERS

 

As local officials in Cochise County, Ariz., face lawsuits for refusing to certify the results of the 2022 midterms, American Oversight has obtained additional records from last year’s discredited “audit” of Maricopa County’s 2020 vote, including text messages with conspiracy theorists pushing the same lies fueling today’s ongoing election denial.

 

The partisan “audit,” initiated following the 2020 presidential election by the Arizona Senate and conducted by lead contractor Cyber Ninjas, was heavily influenced by lies about a stolen election and helped inspire other absurd election “investigation” efforts. 

 

The latest documents — released the day before Thanksgiving in response to American Oversight’s lawsuit for records related to the “audit” — were formerly held by Cyber Ninjas and include text messages sent and received by former CEO Doug Logan. The messages show Logan communicating with a wide cast of Trump-allied election deniers and provide more insight into how “audit” leaders’ helped sow distrust in U.S. democracy. 

 

Evidence uncovered through our investigation into the Maricopa County “audit” demonstrated that it was launched with the predetermined goal of finding fraud that would discredit the results of the 2020 election. The newly released messages also show how the election deniers in charge of the “audit” anticipated similar efforts to follow in other states across the country.

 

Click on the link for the full article 

 

Trump-backed Arizona 'audit' was even more of a debacle than previously known: newly unearthed texts

 

he Trump-backed "audit" of the 2020 election in Arizona ended disastrously for the former president as it not only confirmed President Joe Biden won the state, but it actually gave him a bigger final margin than the official state tally.

 

And now the Arizona Republic is reporting that newly unearthed text messages sent by the CEO of the company that conducted the audit show that it was an even bigger debacle than had been previously reported.

 

The newspaper has reviewed text messages sent by Cyber Ninjas boss Doug Logan showing that the man leading the audit of the Arizona vote was often confused and bewildered by what his own data was showing.

 

"I looped back to look through all of the aggregation data again," he wrote in one text dated July 5th, 2021. "It (is) pretty broken. A lot of it doesn't make any sense."

 

 

A couple of months later, on September 13th, Logan said that it "looks like basically our numbers are screwy."

 

Click on the for the full article

[Larry]

A very simplistic overview of the implications of gerrymandering, the Voting Rights Act, and the USSC decision concerning Alabama's congressional maps. 
 

(I'm not saying "simplistic" as a way of disagreeing with it. Just saying I suspect most of the folks in this thread already know it, or almost all of it.)

 

 

[China]

On 6/12/2023 at 8:59 PM, China said:

 

Trump-backed Arizona 'audit' was even more of a debacle than previously known: newly unearthed texts

 

he Trump-backed "audit" of the 2020 election in Arizona ended disastrously for the former president as it not only confirmed President Joe Biden won the state, but it actually gave him a bigger final margin than the official state tally.

 

And now the Arizona Republic is reporting that newly unearthed text messages sent by the CEO of the company that conducted the audit show that it was an even bigger debacle than had been previously reported.

 

The newspaper has reviewed text messages sent by Cyber Ninjas boss Doug Logan showing that the man leading the audit of the Arizona vote was often confused and bewildered by what his own data was showing.

 

"I looped back to look through all of the aggregation data again," he wrote in one text dated July 5th, 2021. "It (is) pretty broken. A lot of it doesn't make any sense."

 

 

A couple of months later, on September 13th, Logan said that it "looks like basically our numbers are screwy."

 

Click on the for the full article

 

Cyber Ninjas CEO traded nearly 2,000 texts with current Trump lawyer on 'audits,' money

 

Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan was deep into his so-called “audit” of Maricopa County election results when he considered telling workers the ballot review was taking longer than planned and he was running out of money.

 

He sought help from a confidant of former President Donald Trump. She told Logan not to share that with the dozens of people counting ballots on spinning tables for fear of shutting down the audit.

 

“This is very nice and sincere. It will definitely leak to the press. I recommend you don’t send it. It could actually invite lawsuits since it’s an admission of breach of contract," Christina Bobb said in a July 3, 2021, text.

 

"I know it's painful and slow and difficult, but I recommend hanging in there. The audit is not over. If you have to hang around, so do they … for money, I mean. I recommend not making any statements in writing until this is done."

 

Logan wanted to be honest with the people working for him. “But that's not right,” Logan replied a minute later. “People deserve to know what is going on.”

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Signature collectors face felonies from scandal that upended GOP governor’s race

 

At least three people are facing 27 charges each for their alleged involvement in a 2022 signature forgery scandal that halved the Republican gubernatorial field, according to online court records filed Tuesday.

 

Willie Reed, Shawn Wilmoth and Jamie WIlmoth each face charges including election forgery, computer fraud, conducting a criminal enterprise and false pretenses – all felonies – according to online filings in the 37th district court in Warren. The Detroit Free Press was first to report the charges and linked them to the signature scandal.

 

Click on the link for the full article 

[China]

A Delaware city is set to give corporations the right to vote in elections

 

The state of Delaware is famously business-friendly. With more than 1.8 million entities registered in the First State, companies outnumber its human residents by nearly two-to-one. 
 

One city is now moving to raise businesses' influence in the state even further, with a proposal to grant them the right to vote.

 

Seaford, a town of about 8,000 on the Nanticoke River, amended its charter in April to allow businesses — including LLCs, corporations, trusts or partnerships — the right to vote in local elections. The law would go into effect once both houses of Delaware's state legislature approve it.

 

The proposal has rekindled a debate over how much power corporations should have in local government, with fierce opposition from civic interest groups who say businesses already wield too much influence over politics.

 

"It was very shocking to see this attempt to have artificial entities have voting rights," said Claire Snyder-Hall, executive director of Common Cause Delaware, a watchdog group. 

 

"We're seeing voter suppression all over the county, and this is the flipside," she added. "It's not saying the residents of Seaford can't vote, but it's diluting their votes by allowing nonresidents to vote."

 

A handful of other Delaware towns, including Fenwick Island, Henlopen Acres and Dagsboro, already allow corporations to vote, according to Common Cause. Human residents don't always take kindly to that permissiveness.

 

In 2019, it was revealed that a single property manager who controlled multiple LLCs voted 31 times in a Newark, Delaware, town referendum, an incident that led Newark to amend its rules.

 

Click on the link for the full article 

[EmirOfShmo]

 

[China]

On 6/22/2023 at 10:27 PM, China said:

A Delaware city is set to give corporations the right to vote in elections

 

The state of Delaware is famously business-friendly. With more than 1.8 million entities registered in the First State, companies outnumber its human residents by nearly two-to-one. 
 

One city is now moving to raise businesses' influence in the state even further, with a proposal to grant them the right to vote.

 

Seaford, a town of about 8,000 on the Nanticoke River, amended its charter in April to allow businesses — including LLCs, corporations, trusts or partnerships — the right to vote in local elections. The law would go into effect once both houses of Delaware's state legislature approve it.

 

The proposal has rekindled a debate over how much power corporations should have in local government, with fierce opposition from civic interest groups who say businesses already wield too much influence over politics.

 

"It was very shocking to see this attempt to have artificial entities have voting rights," said Claire Snyder-Hall, executive director of Common Cause Delaware, a watchdog group. 

 

"We're seeing voter suppression all over the county, and this is the flipside," she added. "It's not saying the residents of Seaford can't vote, but it's diluting their votes by allowing nonresidents to vote."

 

A handful of other Delaware towns, including Fenwick Island, Henlopen Acres and Dagsboro, already allow corporations to vote, according to Common Cause. Human residents don't always take kindly to that permissiveness.

 

In 2019, it was revealed that a single property manager who controlled multiple LLCs voted 31 times in a Newark, Delaware, town referendum, an incident that led Newark to amend its rules.

 

Click on the link for the full article 

 

Delaware House Approves Bill Allowing Business Entities to Vote in Town's Municipal Elections

 

Lawmakers in the Delaware House of Representatives have approved legislation authorizing a small town in the southern part of the state to allow business entities, including corporations and limited liability companies, to vote in municipal elections.

 

Lawmakers voted 35-6 on Friday for the measure, which was sent to the Senate on the final day of this year’s legislative session. The Senate declined to take up the measure, although it could be revisited when the General Assembly reconvenes in January.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Federal judge halts new Florida law he calls ‘latest assault’ on voting

 

A federal judge on Monday blocked a new Florida election law pushed by Republicans that puts restrictions on voter registration groups, calling it “Florida’s latest assault on the right to vote.”

 

U.S. Chief District Judge Mark Walker granted a preliminary injunction against the law just days after it went into effect. Walker is an appointee of former President Barack Obama who has repeatedly ruled against the state in past legal challenges to election measures put in place by the GOP-controlled Legislature.

 

“When state government power threatens to spread beyond constitutional bounds and reduce individual rights to ashes, the federal judiciary stands as a firewall,” Walker wrote in his 58-page order that included a subtle jab at Gov. Ron DeSantis by invoking a catch phrase he often uses. “The free state of Florida is simply not free to exceed the bounds of the United States Constitution.”

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Cooked Crack]