An assault on American voters is underway

[Larry]

I admire the chutzpah of arguing that I want the court to make discrimination legal, so that I can do the thing that's illegal, if discrimination is illegal."  

[Simmsy]

Biden isn't going to take on the court, we'll need a new Democratic president for that.

[China]

GOP states quit the program that fights voter fraud. Now they’re scrambling.

 

Over the past year and a half, eight Republican-led states quit a nonpartisan program designed to keep voter rolls accurate and up to date.

 

Top Republican election officials in those states publicly argued the program was mismanaged. The conspiracy theorists who cheered them on falsely insisted it was a front for liberals to take control of elections.

 

But experts say the program, known as the Electronic Registration Information Center, was among the best nationwide tool states had to catch people trying to vote twice in the same election. Now, those Republican-led states who left — and other states who lost access to their data — are scrambling to police so-called “double voters” ahead of the presidential election in 2024.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Cooked Crack]

 

[China]

'Hypocritical' — Sec. of State LaRose apparently changes law to help Issue 1 supporters

 

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has seemingly changed the rules around Ohio law to benefit Issue 1 supporters after they made a mistake when sending out election information.

Groups around the state are having difficulties with Ohio’s new election law.

 

"I am very much for simplifying these procedures and making sure everybody gets counted," anti-abortion advocate Austin Beigel said.

 

Although Beigel believes that everyone is responsible for making sure they are following the law when it comes to voting, he understands that sometimes aspects can be overcomplicated.

 

"We want this issue to be clear and people to have ease of access to their polls and to get their votes counted — so nobody doesn't get their vote not counted on some ridiculous technicality," he said. "But you've got to be correct."

 

He supports Issue 1, the proposal to make it harder to amend the Ohio Constitution, which will be on the ballot this Aug. 8 special election.

 

But the change in how absentee ballots are requested has caused confusion for the Vote Yes on Issue 1 team.

 

Changes

Up until the beginning of 2023, there was no one specific form for requesting absentee ballots.

 

A new law signed in January that went into effect this April made a requirement of one specific form.

 

Mike West with the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections explained that the Cleveland Jewish News published an outdated form in June.

 

Sending in the wrong form caused dozens of readers to have their requests for mail-in ballots rejected by the Board.

 

"That's what the law says, that you have to use one specific form," West said.

 

Some more changes

A week later, supporters of Issue 1 made the same mistake, but they got a different result.

 

Within hours of the Vote Yes team admitting the error, LaRose sent a message to boards of elections that outdated ballot requests can be accepted now.

 

"If a voter submits an absentee ballot application on the Secretary of State’s previously prescribed form, the application may be accepted so long as the voter includes a valid form of ID required by H.B. 458," the note from the state elections office said.

 

Jewish voting rights advocate Jodi Jackson explained people in her community should have the same opportunities.

 

"Coming from an area, part of the state in the county that skews more towards the 'Vote No' — 'you can't use it,'" Jackson said. "Then when it happened with the 'Vote Yes' — it just — it came across as being very hypocritical. Secretary LaRose is a leading proponent of 'Vote Yes.'"

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

House GOP Wants To Make It Harder To Vote, Easier To Give Dark Money

 

House Republicans plan to advance legislation on Thursday that would increase burdens on voting, ease restrictions on money in politics, and completely rewrite election law for the District of Columbia.

 

The American Confidence in Elections Act aims to nationalize some of the voter suppression policies that Republican-run states passed after President Donald Trump lied about voter fraud in 2020 as part of a scheme to steal the election.

 

With Democrats in control of the Senate and the White House, the bill has no chance of becoming law. In the previous Congress, Democrats made legislation to expand the right to vote and disclose dark money their top legislative priority. That bill, the Freedom to Vote Act, was blocked by a GOP filibuster after then-Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) refused to support changing the Senate’s filibuster rules.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Close to 100,000 Voter Registrations Were Challenged in Georgia — Almost All by Just Six Right-Wing Activists

 

On March 15, 2022, an email appeared in the inbox of the election director of Forsyth County, Georgia, with the subject line “Challenge of Elector’s Eligibility.” A spreadsheet attached to the email identified 13 people allegedly registered to vote at P.O. boxes in Forsyth County, a wealthy Republican suburb north of Atlanta. Georgians are supposed to register at residential addresses, except in special circumstances. “Please consider this my request that a hearing be held to determine these voters’ eligibility to vote,” wrote the challenger, Frank Schneider.

 

Schneider is a former chief financial officer at multiple companies, including Jockey International, the underwear maker. His Instagram page includes pictures of him golfing at exclusive resorts and a dog peeing on a mailbox with the caption “Woody suspects mail-in voter fraud” and the hashtag “#maga.” On Truth Social, the social media platform backed by former president Donald Trump, Schneider’s posts have questioned the 2020 election results in Forsyth County and spread content related to QAnon, the conspiracy theory that holds that the Democratic elite are cannibalistic pedophiles. In January 2023, he posted an open letter to his U.S. representative-elect encouraging “hearings to hold perpetrators accountable where evidence exists that election fraud took place in the 2020 and 2022 elections.”

 

The March 2022 voter challenges were the first of many from Schneider: As the year progressed, he submitted seven more batches of challenges, each one larger than the one previous, growing from 507 voters in April to nearly 15,800 in October, for a total of over 31,500 challenges.

 

Vetting Georgia’s voter rolls was once largely the domain of nonpartisan elections officials. But after the 2020 election, a change in the law enabled Schneider and other activists to take on a greater role. Senate Bill 202, which the state’s Republican-controlled legislature passed in 2021, transformed election laws in response to “many electors concerned about allegations of rampant voter fraud,” as the bill stated. Many states allow challenges, but officials in Georgia and experts say that in the past challengers have typically had relevant personal knowledge, such as someone submitting a challenge to remove a dead relative from the rolls. Georgia, however, is unusual in explicitly allowing citizens unlimited challenges against anyone in their county.

 

At first, voting rights groups were vocal about other aspects of SB 202, such as restrictions on absentee ballots, paying less attention to the 98-page bill’s handful of sentence-length tweaks that addressed voter challenges. The change to the challenges rule was “the sleeper element of SB 202,” said Rahul Garabadu, a senior voting rights attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Election officials sue conservative voting group over refusal to produce ballot-harvesting evidence

 

The Georgia State Election Board is asking a judge to order a conservative voting organization to produce information to help investigate its claims of ballot trafficking in the state.

 

The Texas-based True the Vote group filed complaints with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in November 2021, including one saying it had received “a detailed account of coordinated efforts to collect and deposit ballots in drop boxes across metro Atlanta” during the 2020 general election and in a runoff election in January 2021.

 

True the Vote’s assertions were relied upon heavily for the film “2000 Mules,” a widely debunked film by conservative pundit and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza. The film featured surveillance video from drop boxes in Atlanta’s suburbs showing people depositing multiple ballots. A State Election Board investigation found that those people were submitting ballots for themselves and family members who lived with them, which is allowed under Georgia law.

 

In the court filing Tuesday, the state attorney general’s office asked a Fulton County Superior Court judge to order True the Vote to comply with its subpoena.

 

“After multiple good faith efforts by the SEB (State Election Board) and its counsel to obtain the requested information and documents, True the Vote continues to indifferently vacillate between statements of assured compliance and blanket refusals,” leaving the election board with no choice but to turn to the courts, the filing says.

 

Click on the link for the full article

 

So put up or shut up.

[China]

House Republicans pass massive overhaul of federal elections system out of committee

 

On a party-line vote, the U.S. Committee on House Administration on Thursday night passed a bill that would enact strict new voting laws for states, such as requiring copies of IDs for voting by mail, and set penalties for states that allow voting by noncitizens in local elections.

 

The 224-page bill, H.R. 4563, was approved 8-4, and contains provisions similar to those passed in many Republican-led states since the 2020 election.

 

The chair, Republican Rep. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, said the measure establishes a “common sense election integrity” standard that is similar to those in states with recently passed voter overhaul bills, such as Georgia. Many Democrats and voting rights advocates have criticized the Georgia voting law for its strict voting requirements, arguing that it would disproportionately harm voters of color.

 

“Two years ago, Georgia implemented their election integrity reform,” Steil said. “The data shows voter participation increased under the new law. Georgia experienced record midterm turnout in 2022. The left is still falsely claiming election integrity leads to voter suppression.”

 

The top Democrat on the committee, Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, slammed the House bill for “catering to the demands of election deniers,” and said it will not increase voter access to the ballot.

 

“Americans can take solace in the fact that this bill will never become law,” Morelle said.

 

While the overhaul has a chance of passage in the Republican-controlled House, it’s likely to die in the Senate, where Democrats hold a slim majority.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Long n Left]

On 7/7/2023 at 8:27 PM, Larry said:

I admire the chutzpah of arguing that I want the court to make discrimination legal, so that I can do the thing that's illegal, if discrimination is illegal."  

Right??!! Wasn’t article 2 enacted to keep these yokels from drawing maps that give them mainly white, gop districts, but are now arguing that doing it objectively is race based?

 

But, this iteration of the SC will probably put it on its docket. 🤦‍♂️

[Larry]

After all. Pointing out that the GOP is intentionally drawing districts to disenfranchise blacks means you are noticing race. 

[EmirOfShmo]

 

 

 

[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

 

On 5/13/2023 at 2:45 PM, China said:

 

 

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

 

On 5/18/2023 at 1:09 AM, China said:

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

 

Kari Lake’s team ordered to pay more than $122K in sanctions over Maricopa lawsuit

 

Kari Lake’s legal team, including lawyer Alan Dershowitz, must pay $122,200 in sanctions after a federal court in Arizona found that the former Republican gubernatorial candidate’s lawsuit contesting voting methods was “frivolous.”

 

Lake, a former television news anchor, brought a suit against the state of Arizona in April 2022 demanding the election officials use alternative methods to collect and count ballots, claiming that electronic voting machines are not reliable.

 

The lawsuit was thrown out and Lake ultimately lost the gubernatorial election to Gov. Katie Hobbs. She then filed another suit after the election alleging widespread fraud. That case was also dismissed, though she continues make baseless claims that the race was stolen from her.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[LD0506]

No court ruling can uncrazy someone

[China]

Alabama Republicans, despite Supreme Court ruling, reject call for second majority Black House district

 

Alabama Republicans, under orders of the U.S. Supreme Court to redraw congressional districts to give minority voters a greater voice in elections, rejected calls Monday to craft a second majority-Black district and proposed a map testing the judges’ directive.

 

Lawmakers must adopt a new map by Friday after the high court in June affirmed a three-judge panel’s ruling that Alabama’s existing congressional map — with a single Black district out of seven statewide — likely violated the Voting Rights Act.

 

In a state where more than one in four residents is Black, the lower court panel had ruled in 2022 that Alabama should have another majority-Black congressional district or something “close to it” so Black voters have the opportunity to “elect a representative of their choice.”

 

Republicans, long resistant to creating a second Democratic-leaning district, proposed a map that would increase the percentage of Black voters in the 2nd Congressional District from about 30% to nearly 42.5%, wagering that would satisfy the court — or that the state will prevail in a second round of appeals.

 

House Speaker Pro Tempore Chris Pringle, who serves as co-chairman of the state redistricting committee, said the numbers are sufficient to provide an opportunity for an African American candidate to get elected. He said the plan satisfies the court’s instruction to give Black voters a greater opportunity to elect their preferred candidates.

 

“We took in consideration what the court asked us to do which was to provide an opportunity district that complied with Section 2 (of the Voting Rights Act,)” Pringle said.

 

The Permanent Legislative Committee on Reapportionment approved the proposal in a 14-6 vote that fell along party lines. The proposal will be introduced as legislation Monday afternoon as lawmakers convene a special session to adopt a new map by a Friday deadline set by the three-judge panel.

 

The National Redistricting Foundation, one of the groups that backed challenges to the Alabama map, called the proposal “shameful” and said it would be challenged.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Cooked Crack]

 

 

[EmirOfShmo]

 

[Jumbo]

****ing ignorant, vile, malevolent, goper ****heads. What a blight on civilization.

 

Right up there with violent criminals and sexual offenders, going by any value to society in terms of general decency, fairness, and truth. Etc. Etc. 

[Cooked Crack]

 

[China]

Democrats scramble to reach voters after Florida cancels mail-in ballot requests

 

Florida Democrats say they’re spending and organizing to chase down people who vote by mail after election officials across the state canceled all standing mail ballot requests this year.

 

The mass cancellations were to comply with a 2021 election law that added new restrictions to mail-in voting. The legislation — which was celebrated by Gov. Ron DeSantis and slammed by voting rights advocates as discriminatory — cut the duration of mail-in ballot requests in half from four years to two. It also required that existing requests for mail ballots be canceled at the end of 2022, forcing election workers to cancel millions of requests and start their lists of vote-by-mail voters from scratch.

 

In practice, that means that voters who requested mail-in ballots in 2021 or 2022 will have to make such requests again to vote in local races and the 2024 primary and general elections. In previous years, voters would not have had to request a ballot again for four years.

 

Democrats in the state say the change disproportionately affects their voters, who have embraced mail-in voting more than Republicans since 2020, when then-President Donald Trump falsely claimed mail-in voting was rife with fraud. The new law is forcing campaigns to adapt; Democrats say they're organizing aggressively to educate voters about renewing their mail ballot requests, sapping resources from voter registration and other outreach efforts. 

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

‘I have been indicted,’ says suspect in Michigan vote machine tampering probe

 

A key suspect in an alleged plot to illegally access Michigan voting machines following the 2020 presidential election says she has been indicted in the long-running probe and expects to be arraigned next week. 

 

“My attorney has been informed that I have been indicted by DJ Hilson, the special prosecutor in Michigan, working at the request of (Attorney General) Dana Nessel,” Stefanie Lambert said Wednesday on a conservative podcast, where she bashed the pending criminal action. 

 

“I'm not losing any sleep over this,” continued Lambert, a metro Detroit attorney who has worked for 2020 election deniers across the country. “I know that I've done absolutely nothing illegal. My clients have not done anything illegal.”

 

Bridge Michigan could not independently verify her assertions late Wednesday.

 

Lambert is one of nine suspects Nessel referred to a special prosecutor last fall, citing an alleged tabulator tampering plot that aimed to prove former President Donald Trump’s unfounded claims the 2020 contest was rigged against him.

 

Court records show Hilson convened a secret grand jury to review evidence. It is the grand jury that would decide any indictments.

 

In a Thursday morning email, Hilson said he could "neither confirm nor deny the existence of a grand jury or any indictments" because of state law prohibiting disclosure in such cases until defendants are in custody. 

 

"Regardless of what any person may say, I am still bound by law and intend to follow it," Hilson told Bridge. 

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

66,000 Franklin County voters’ polling places moved for August election

 

More than 66,000 Franklin County voters will have a different place to cast their ballots this August than their usual polling locations.

 

Twenty-seven polling locations serving 66,320 voters are unavailable Aug. 8, the Franklin County Board of Elections announced Thursday. Notices to affected voters will arrive in the mail in the coming days.

 

“Due to the timing of this special election, many of our standard voting locations were unavailable because of pre-planned events and other activities,” Franklin County Board of Elections Director Antone White said in a press release.

 

The closures – which only affect the August special election – impact about 7% of the county’s registered voters, an elections board spokesperson confirmed Thursday. 

 

The only item on voters’ ballots is Issue 1, which would raise the threshold to vote on and enact citizen-initiated constitutional amendments. NBC4’s Issue 1 debate with elected officials and policy experts can be watched here.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Department of Justice jumps into FL voting case

 

The Biden administration is weighing into yet another legal fight against the state of Florida underway in federal court.

 

If it pleases the court — The Department of Justice this week filed a “statement of interest” regarding a lawsuit challenging a voter registration provision that requires some people to physically sign their name with a pen, aka the “wet signature” requirement.

 

The lineup — The lawsuit was filed in March against Secretary of State Cord Byrd and the state’s election supervisors by the voting advocacy group Vote.org, as well as the Florida state branch of the NAACP and two other organizations. The groups are being represented by lawyers from the Elias Law Group, a firm aligned with Democrats. The case is being presided over U.S. District Judge Allen Winsor, an appointee of former President Donald Trump.

 

Vs. the RNC and others — The DOJ brief entered into the court record took aim at a motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed by the supervisors as well as the Republican National Committee, which has intervened in the case to defend the state law. The RNC has called the signature requirement a way to deter and detect fraud while also noting that most people get around the requirement because they register when they get a drivers’ license.

 

Back and forth — Lawyers for the Justice Department tried to undercut several arguments made by the RNC and local election supervisors, including whether private groups have the standing to question if a state law violates federal civil rights and voting laws. Another point of contention: Whether those suing the state must show a pattern of intentional racial discrimination.

 

A trend? — This marks the second time in the past few weeks that the Biden administration has chimed in on lawsuits challenging Florida laws. Late last month the DOJ contended that a new law that restricts some Chinese citizens from owning property in Florida violates federal law and the U.S. Constitution. 

 

Click on the link for the full article

[skinsmarydu]

• •  

Posted Thursday at 03:56 PM

“I'm not losing any sleep over this,

 

You have absolutely no idea how much sleep I've lost. 

[Cooked Crack]

Quote

A lawsuit aimed at rewriting Wisconsin's legislative maps to favor Republicans less is expected to be filed Wednesday at the state Supreme Court, a day after the state's highest court flipped to liberal control for the first time in years. 

 

Law Forward, a Madison-based liberal-leaning law firm focused on voting issues, is bringing the legal challenge straight to the Supreme Court, according to a press release from the firm. By bypassing lower courts, the challenge would be expedited and could lead to an outcome before the 2024 elections