Tag: ballot
Democrats To 'Pull The Guts Out' Of GOP Effort To Deny Harris Ballot Access

Democrats To 'Pull The Guts Out' Of GOP Effort To Deny Harris Ballot Access

Republicans – with the assistance of the far-right Heritage Foundation (architects of Project 2025) — are planning a last-ditch effort to stop Vice President Kamala Harris from getting ballot access. But Democratic-aligned attorneys are already waiting to shut it down.

Heritage has been planning for the possibility of President Joe Biden exiting the race since late June. Mike Howell, who is the director of Heritage's Oversight Project, laid out how Republicans could exploit laws in several swing states to challenge a non-Biden nominee's efforts to qualify for the ballot. But in a Tuesday report for Rolling Stone, reporters Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng wrote that the GOP's goal of preventing Harris from getting on the ballot is likely to fail.

"I am going to bet that if [Republicans] try to do this, it’ll be something that we can pull the guts out of in the time it takes to have lunch," an unnamed Democratic lawyer said.

The attorney, who called the effort "some of the dumbest bulls— I’ve ever had to read," went on to compare the effort to deny ballot access to Harris to one by former President Donald Trump's disgraced ex-attorney, John Eastman. He argued in 2020 that Harris didn't meet the presidency's natural-born citizen requirements despite being born on U.S. soil, due to her parents being immigrants. Eastman simultaneously believed Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was an eligible candidate in 2016 despite being born in Canada.

Perez and Suebsaeng previously reported that an unnamed "senior source" within the Trump campaign, as well as an individual involved with Project 2025 confided that they knew the effort to keep Harris off of ballots would fall apart. However, those sources said the goal was more to distract Democrats from the campaign trial with complex litigation in the final months of the election cycle.

“Such litigation is extremely unlikely to be successful,” Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project At UCLA’s Law School, told the outlet. “I fully expect the Democrats’ nominee to be on the ballot in every state and Washington, D.C."

Before he dropped out of the race, Biden and his campaign reportedly had calls with attorneys and legal experts who pored over how to respond if Heritage tried to argue in court that Harris wasn't able to replace Biden on the ballot. Democratic lawyers tended to agree that their arguments to the court would be "as condescending as possible" in the event Heritage followed through on their legal threats. According to Rolling Stone, one idea kicked around on the call was "scolding these Republicans for supposedly not understanding how basic terms like 'presumptive nominee' work."

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) hinted that Democrats would run into "legal impediments" if they tried to replace Biden on the top ballot line. But Democratic election attorney Marc Elias dismissed that as "frivolous threats of frivolous litigation by an election denier." He also stated that no Democratic nominee would be official anyway until after delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next month officially select their party's general election candidate.

“There is currently no nominee of the Democratic Party, and so the notion that the Democratic Party is somehow precluded from choosing its nominee, pursuant to its bylaws and its rules, is preposterous,” Elias said.

“I am here to say that with 100 percent certainty that when the Democratic National Committee nominates its candidate and transmits that to the states, that person will be on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia," he added.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Delaware MAGA Group Aiding RFK Jr. On Ballot Access

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is scrambling to get on the 2024 ballot in enough states before a critical deadline. And in at least one state, he's counting on former President Donald Trump's loudest supporters to reach his goal.

The Daily Beast reported recently that in President Joe Biden's longtime home of Delaware, the Kennedy campaign has been in close contact with the Independent Party of Delaware (IPD), which has the ability to put its own candidate on the First State's presidential ballot this fall. At least one member of the IPD's leadership was in Washington during the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection.

"So I was there Jan 6th," tweeted Phil Dyer, who is vice chairman of the Independent Party of Delaware, in 2022. "I left after hearing Trump because everything was peaceful. Never thought he made any threats. Never thought the Capitol would be stormed." And earlier this year, Dyer tweeted excitedly about "Jan 6 part 2."

In addition to Dyer, others in party leadership are also hard-right Trump supporters. Chairman Donald Ayotte has insisted publicly that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by Democrats despite ample evidence disproving that claim. IPD treasurer Kathy DeMatteis has tweeted similar sentiments.

As the Beast reported, RFK Jr.'s entreaties to MAGA don't start and end with his IPD outreach. In May, the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy and Democratic political scion spoke in New York at an event hosted by a group with deep MAGA ties. The Constitutional Coalition of New York State, which hosted the event, has also dabbled heavily in propagating the Big Lie (that Trump is supposedly the rightful president).

RFK Jr.'s MAGA alliances are likely an thorn in the side of the former president, who has publicly attacked the independent candidate after polls suggested he had appeal to Republicans. In a post to his Truth Social account, Trump told his millions of followers that a vote for RFK Jr. would be a "wasted protest vote."

"His Views on Vaccines are FAKE, as is everything else about his Candidacy," Trump wrote in April. "Let the Democrats have RFK Jr. They deserve him!"

The RFK Jr. campaign is trying to get ballot access in enough states in order to meet CNN's qualifications to appear onstage at the network's June 27 presidential debate alongside President Joe Biden and Trump. The network is requiring that Kennedy get on enough ballots in enough states whose Electoral College votes add up to at least 270, and has a deadline of June 20 to qualify. Kennedy also has to register 15% support among voters in at least four national polls, which he has also not done.

The Associated Press reported last week that while Kennedy claims that he's on enough ballots to meet the threshold, his petition signatures have not yet been certified in several states. The campaign said that it had qualified for 19 state ballots constituting 278 total electoral votes, though CNN said it won't consider states that haven't certified his petition signatures.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

At Least 20 QAnon Republicans On Ballot For Congress And Top State Offices

At Least 20 QAnon Republicans On Ballot For Congress And Top State Offices

When Democratic now-President Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election — defeating Republican then-President Donald Trump by more than seven million in the popular vote and picking up 306 electoral votes — critics of QAnon hoped that the far-right conspiracy movement would go away. But that didn’t happen. Just as Trump himself has maintained a level of influence that is unusual for ex-presidents, QAnon is still going strong almost 19 months into Biden’s presidency. Moreover, the extremist movement, according to New Republic reporter Melissa Gira Grant, is making a concerted effort to increase its influence via the 2022 midterms.

“A movement we were told would collapse without (Trump) has gone mainstream in Republican politics, and now boasts the support of more than 20 candidates running for federal or statewide office who will appear on the ballot this November,” Grant reports in an article published by The New Republic on August 18. “As many as 18 QAnon-supporting candidates for Congress will compete in November’s general election, with two QAnon-supporting gubernatorial candidates and two QAnon-supporting candidates for secretary of state, based on analyses from Grid and Media Matters. Including people who lost their primaries, QAnon candidates made the ballot in 26 states in the 2022 elections, and they have raised more than $20 million.”

To understand why Grant finds QAnon’s ongoing influence on the Republican Party so troubling, one needs to be familiar with some of the conspiracy theories that the cult has promoted. QAnon believes that the United States’ federal government has been hijacked by a sinister international cabal of child sex traffickers, pedophiles, satanists and cannibals and that Trump was elected president in 2016 in order to fight the cabal. Some conservative Republicans have had enough integrity to call out QAnon’s views as total nonsense, including Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah and Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. But many other Republicans have avoided criticizing QAnon, as they fear that doing so might offend Trump.


“Some of the names of QAnon-adjacent congressional candidates will be familiar, such as Republican incumbents Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, both considered long shots in 2020 whose first week in office included the January 6 assault on the Capitol by some of their own supporters, and who January 6 rally organizers allege met with them as part of their efforts to keep Trump in office — an allegation Boebert has denied,” Grant explains. “They are joined by newcomers like Republican Rep. Mayra Flores of Texas, who spread conspiracy theories that January 6 was ‘surely caused by infiltrators,’ and is currently serving in Congress after winning a special election this past spring.”

Grant continues, “There’s also Ohio Republican congressional candidate J.R. Majewski who was present at the Capitol on January 6 and boasted of helping get Trump supporters there, that has a chance at prevailing in a toss-up race. Like Greene and Boebert, Flores and Majewski are on record affirming support for QAnon — ‘I believe in everything that’s been put out from Q,’ Majewski said in 2021 — and both have tried to mislead reporters when questioned about their support for QAnon, denying or disavowing their past statements even as they still advance some core QAnon missions, such as casting doubt on the results of the 2020 election.”

QAnon have been major promotors of the Big Lie, the debunked conspiracy theory that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump through widespread voter fraud. And QAnon supporters were among the extremists who attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 in the hope of preventing Congress from certifying Biden’s Electoral College victory. QAnon supporter Jacob Chansley, dubbed the QAnon Shaman, is now serving a 41-month sentence in federal prison for his role in the attack on the Capitol Building.

“The dangers in this core belief in a stolen election becomes even more evident at the state-level, where QAnon-supporting candidates may be elected into positions with critical roles in the 2024 election, as part of a strategy led by QAnon influencers beginning in 2021,” Grant observes. “They have scored two supportive Republican candidates for governor, Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and Dan Cox in Maryland, and two for secretary of state, Republicans Jim Marchant in Nevada and Mark Finchem in Arizona. Mastriano and Cox both attended a QAnon conference in April 2022, ‘Patriots Arise,’ at which the opening speaker claimed that ‘child satanic trafficking’ existed and that he would ‘not stop until these people’ — the alleged traffickers — ‘are dead and in boxes in the ground.’ After Mastriano pitched himself to the crowd as the one who God would help win — and that what he would do to the state of Pennsylvania would make Florida look like ‘amateur hour’ — organizers presented him with a sword to ‘bless him.’”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Disenfranchised By Bad Design

Disenfranchised By Bad Design

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

This Nov. 8, even if you manage to be registered in time and have the right identification, there is something else that could stop you from exercising your right to vote.

The ballot. Specifically, the ballot’s design.

Bad ballot design gained national attention almost 16 years ago when Americans became unwilling experts in butterflies and chads. The now-infamous Palm Beach County butterfly ballot, which interlaced candidate names along a central column of punch holes, was so confusing that many voters accidentally voted for Patrick Buchanan instead of Al Gore.

We’ve made some progress since then, but we still likely lose hundreds of thousands of votes every election year due to poor ballot design and instructions. In 2008 and 2010 alone, almost half a million people did not have their votes counted due to mistakes filling out the ballot. Bad ballot design also contributes to long lines on election day. And the effects are not the same for all people: the disenfranchised are disproportionately poor, minority, elderly and disabled.

In the predominantly African American city of East St. Louis, the race for United States senator in 2008 was missing a header that specified the type or level of government (Federal, Congressional, Legislative, etc). Almost 10 percent of East St. Louis voters did not have their vote counted for U.S. Senate, compared to the state average of 4.4 percent.Merely adding a header could have solved the problem. Below you can see the original ballot and the Brennan Center redesign.

“When we design things in a way that doesn’t work for all voters, we degrade the quality of democracy,” said Whitney Quesenbery, a ballot expert and co-director of the Center for Civic Design, an organization that uses design to ensure voters vote the way they want to on Election Day.

Many mistakes can be avoided with tiny tweaks.

Designer Marcia Lausen, who directs the School of Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, wrote a whole book about how democracy can be improved with design. She even tackles the infamous butterfly ballot. The 2000 Chicago Cook County judicial retention ballot crammed 73 candidates into 10 pages of a butterfly layout punch card ballot, with punch holes packed much more tightly together than in previous elections. As in Palm Beach, Yes/No votes for the candidates on the left page were confusingly interlaced with Yes/No votes for the right page.

Lausen’s proposed redesign eliminates the interlaced Yes/No votes, introduces a more legible typeface, uses shading and outlines to connect names and Yes/No’s with the appropriate punch holes, and removes redundant language.

BEFORE

AFTER

In the 2002 midterm election in Illinois’ Hamilton County, each column of candidate names was next to a series of incomplete arrows. Voters were supposed to indicate their choice of candidate by completing the arrow on the left of the candidate name. But because we read left to right and the candidate names in two races lined up perfectly, many voters marked the arrow to the right. As presented in a Brennan Center analysis, setting the columns a bit further apart and adding borders would have cleared up this confusion:

                       BEFORE                                                                        AFTER

In Minnesota in 2008, Al Franken beat Norm Coleman for the U.S. Senate seat by a sliver, less than 300 votes. In that race, almost 4,000 absentee ballots were not counted because the envelope was not signed. The Minnesota Secretary of State’s office decided to redesign the mailing envelope. After a series of usability tests, they added a big X to mark where people should sign. In the following election in 2010, the rate of missing signatures dropped to 837. Below is the before and after from a Brennan Center report:

Minnesota’s mailing envelope is a good example of how designers can solve design problems well before any election actually happens — by testing those ballots beforehand.

“Test and test and test,” recommends Don Norman, a designer and cognitive scientist who wrote the the book on designing objects for everyday life. The most important aspect of ballot design, he says, is considering the needs of the voters. He suggests doing extensive testing of ballots on a sample of people, which should include those who are “blind, deaf, or people with physical disabilities as well as people with language difficulties.”

Bad instructions are a design problem, too.

Beyond layout and ordering, the unanimous winner for worst part of ballot design? Instructions.

“The instructions are uniformly horrible!” said usability expert Dana Chisnell, who co-directs the Center for Civic Design with Quesenbery. Confusing jargon, run-on sentences, old-fashioned language left over from 100 years ago: all of these plague ballots across the country. Here are a few example instructions (the first from Kansas, the second from Ohio) along with the Brennan Center’s redesign:

BEFORE

AFTER

(Brennan Center, Better Ballots)

BEFORE

AFTER

Even if the instructions are clear, placement of instructions has a huge effect on whether people understand them. In usability tests conducted in Florida’s Sarasota and Duval counties in 2008, the majority of participants got to the end of the ballot and stopped. Which was a problem, because the ballot continued on the other side. Despite instructions specifically telling people to vote both sides of the ballot, they didn’t.

So designers added three words to the end of the right column: Turn Ballot Over. The result? An estimated 28,000 fewer lost votes in the two counties that adopted the redesign. Here’s the before and after:

Designers have already put together guidelines for making better ballots.

Luckily, there are resources for how to help avoid these predictable problems. In addition to Lausen’s book, the Design for Democracy initiative has worked for years at applying design principles to improve elections. A few years ago the design association AIGAcombined forces with Whitney Quesenbery and Dana Chisnell to condense their best practices into a set of handy field guides.

The ballot-specific guide, Designing Usable Ballots, has this advice:

  1. Use lowercase letters.
  2. Avoid centered type.
  3. Use big enough type.
  4. Pick one sans-serif font.
  5. Support process and navigation.
  6. Use clear, simple language.
  7. Use accurate instructional illustrations.
  8. Use informational icons (only).
  9. Use contrast and color to support meaning.
  10. Show what’s most important.

For the designers, these recommendations may seem obvious. But election officials — the ones responsible for laying out a ballot — are not designers.

Sometimes, reality thwarts good design.

Even if officials wanted to follow every design best practice, they probably wouldn’t be able to.

That’s because ballots are as complicated as the elections they represent. Elections in the U.S. are determined at the local level, and so each ballot must be uniquely crafted to its own jurisdiction. Ballots must combine federal, state, and local contests, display measures and propositions, and sometime require voters to express their choices in various formats — for example ranking their choices versus selecting one candidate for the job.

“There will always be special circumstances that present new problems for ballot design,” said David Kimball, a political science professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who has written extensively on voting behavior and ballot design.

Take what happened this summer in California’s Senate race primary. A record number of 34 candidates were running to replace incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer, and the ballot needed to fit them all. In many counties, elections officials simply couldn’t follow the good design recommendation of “Put all candidate names in one column.”

To make matters worse, bad design is written right into the law.

Election officials are often constricted in what they can and can’t do by specific language in their local election code. More often than not, the law is to blame for bad design.

For example, numerous jurisdictions require that candidate names and titles be written in capital letters. This goes against huge amounts of evidence that lowercase letters are easier to read. Other requirements like setting a specific font size, making sections bold or center-aligning headers make it next to impossible to follow all the design best practices. Illinois Election Code used to require candidate names to be printed in capital letters. (Statutes of the State of Illinois)

Some election code requirements just seem to invite clutter. In Kansas, a candidate’s hometown must be listed under their name. In California, the candidate’s occupation. Designers argue that this additional text complicates the ballot with needless information, but they can’t get rid of it without breaking the law.

“It’s amazing how many design prescriptions are written into law by non-designers,” said designer Drew Davies, who has worked with numerous jurisdictions to improve their ballots and voting materials and is design director of AIGA’s Design for Democracy.

Some of those prescriptions border on the comical. In New York, election law requiresthat each candidate name must be preceded by “the image of a closed fist with index finger extended pointing to the party or independent row.” Here’s how that actually looks on real New York ballots:

In design, everything matters — even the order of the candidate names.

Some design problems are not as obvious as a pointing finger. Take something as simple as the order of the candidates’ names. There is a well known advantage for being listed first on the ballot. The “primacy effect” can significantly sway elections, especially in smaller races not widely covered in the media where there is no incumbent. One study of the 1998 Democratic primary in New York found that in seven races the advantage from being listed first was bigger than the margin of victory. In other words, if the runner-up candidates in those races had been listed first on the ballot, they likely would have won.

As one report puts it, “a non-negligible portion of local governmental policies are likely being set by individuals elected only because of their ballot position.” To combat this unconscious bias, some states have already mandated that names are randomly ordered on the ballot. Still, many states and jurisdictions do not have a standard system for organizing these names.

The future will bring new design challenges… but also new ways to make voting more accessible.

As more and more states adopt absentee and vote-by-mail systems, they make voting more accessible and convenient — but they also introduce new ways of making mistakes. And those errors are only caught after the ballot has been mailed in, too late to change. A polling place acts as a fail-safe, giving you the opportunity to ask a poll worker for help or letting you fill out a new ballot if yours gets rejected by the voting machine. But on an absentee ballot, if you made a mistake and your vote isn’t counted, you’ll never know.

There are several current efforts to overhaul the ballot entirely. Los Angeles County, for example, has teamed up with the design company IDEO to create an easier and more accessible way to vote. Their customizable device would let people fill out a sample ballot on their own time from a computer or mobile device, and then scan a code at the polling place to automatically transfer their choices to a real ballot.

The Anywhere Ballot is another open-source project that’s designed to create a better voting experience for everyone — including voters with low literacy or mild cognitive issues. Their digital ballot template, which came out of extensive user testing and follows all the current ballot design best practices, lets anyone use their own electronic device to mark a ballot.

But of course, the design problems that plague ballots affect all aspects of the voting process.

Voter registration materials, mailed voter guides and education booklets, election department websites and online instructions, poll worker materials — all of these have problems that can be improved with better design.

“Ballots are where all the drama happens,” said designer Lausen, “but there is much more to election design.”

Cover Photo: (AP Photo/Gary I. Rothstein)

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