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Tag: voting access
Top GOP Lawyer Spearheads Secret Plot To Curtail College Student Voting (VIDEO)

Top GOP Lawyer Spearheads Secret Plot To Curtail College Student Voting (VIDEO)

A prominent Republican lawyer involved in efforts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election is spearheading a sinister, clandestine campaign to limit voter access across key states, curtailing turnout among demographic groups that skew Democrats, including young voters.

The lawyer, 72-year-old Cleta Mitchell, a notorious election denier and ardent Trump supporter, urged GOP donors to “combat” measures that facilitate voting on college campuses, same-day voter registration, and automatic mailing of ballots to registered voters, according to the Washington Post.

Mitchell made the petition at a Republican National Committee donor retreat in Nashville on Saturday, giving a 50-slide PowerPoint slide presentation — titled “A Level Playing Field for 2024” — audio portions of which the Post obtained from journalist Lauren Windsor.

“What are these college campus locations? What is this young people effort that they do?’ Mitchell demanded, according to audio of the presentation reviewed by the Post. “They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm, so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed.”

Mitchell’s “special legal presentation” proposed limiting early voting and repudiated campus voting in five states with large public universities and in-state student populations: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

“Forty-five days!” Mitchell fumed about Virginia’s early-voting period. “Do you know how hard it is to have observers be able to watch for that long a period?”

Mitchell told the conservative audience at the event that to eliminate any chance “for any candidate other than a leftist to have a chance to WIN in 2024,” the nation’s electoral system must be “saved,” per the Post.

“The Left has manipulated the electoral systems to favor one side … theirs,” Mitchell falsely stated in her presentation, driving a GOP-wide election disinformation campaign that fueled the January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of conservative voters.

“Our constitutional republic’s survival is at stake,” she added.

Unlike a large swathe of the new breed of fringe conservative agitators, Mitchell’s strong election denialism goes back a decade, pre-dating former President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign effort.

In a 2010 letter soliciting contributions for Tea Party-backed Nevada Republican Sharon Angle in the high-profile race against then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Mitchell alleged without evidence that Reid would steal the election.

“Reid intends to steal this election if he can’t win it outright… Understand, EVERYTHING we have worked for in the last year could be destroyed by dirty tricks and criminal acts,” Mitchell wrote.

Shortly after major news outlets projected Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election, Mitchell, then a Trump legal adviser, appeared on Fox News to spread election fraud conspiracy theories, Media Matters reported at the time.

“We’re already double-checking and finding dead people having voted. We’re going to be finding people have voted across state lines, voted in two states, illegal voting, noncitizens and that sort of thing. So we are building that case,” Mitchell said.

Several Fox anchors, including Trace Gallagher, Maria Bartiromo, and Jon Scott, gave Mitchell a platform to air the sort of election lies that, in April 2023, cost Fox News to pay Dominion Voting Systems the largest known defamation settlement in U.S. history.

Mitchell also participated in the now-infamous hour-long phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, during which Trump pressured Raffensberger to “find 11,780 votes,” enough to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory in the state.

“All we have to do, Cleta, is find 11,000-plus votes,” Trump said on the call, which Fulton County’s district attorney, Fani T. Willis, is investigating as part of a probe into Trump’s efforts to subvert the state’s 2020 election results.

Facing criticism for her presence on the call, Mitchell tweeted, “Happy to be considered a nut job because I believe in the rule of law,” per the Post.

In the weeks before the call, Mitchell tweeted conspiracy theories targeting Raffensperger, alleging that the Georgia recount was a “total sham” and political “cover” for the secretary of state.

Safeguarding The Vote — From Every Threat — Is Critical To Democracy

Safeguarding The Vote — From Every Threat — Is Critical To Democracy

How vulnerable to tampering or malfunction will our electoral system be Nov. 8 when millions show up to cast their ballots? It’s a topic of considerable interest.

“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have got to be honest,” Donald Trump told Ohio voters in August, according to CBS News.

He was not being honest. He was hedging the possibility that he will be the loser.

However, there are serious problems that need attention. For example, America’s voting machines are aging. Many are approaching the end of their intended lifespan. Voting machines are designed to last about 10 to 15 years, and a significant number in the U.S. are beginning to face the end of their cycles.

They aren’t exactly held up with bailing wire and twine, but there is cause for concern. A full 42 states have voting machines that are at least a decade old, and 14 states have ome polling places where there is no paper trail to backtrack and recheck the tallies. That’s according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, which has been trying valiantly to draw attention to the status of the nation’s voting machines for more than a decade.

The issue is finally getting some attention thanks to recent headlines about the security breach of the Democratic National Committee’s email servers, suspected to be the work of Russian hackers. Hackers also attempted unsuccessfully to breach voter databases in Arizona and Illinois.

The danger of cyber-attacks — or any tinkering with the American voting system — is a lot like terrorism. The mere threat of it, the fear of it, does the most damage. All that is really necessary is to undermine the public’s belief that their vote will be accurately counted. No hacking, no disruption of the vote, actually has to occur.

In this, Donald Trump has played the perfect stooge. He is undermining the public’s faith by promoting the idea that our systems are less secure than they actually are. Trump isn’t talking about real threats. He’s claiming that his voters are being targeted, that his votes are being suppressed.

Lawrence D. Norden, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center, who testified on Sept. 28 before a House committee, stressed the need to separate fact from fiction.

“To address and combat potential threats to the integrity of our elections, we must honestly assess the risks and distinguish between what is probable, possible and conceivable but highly unlikely,” Norden said to the Subcommittee on Information Technology.

Here is what deserves underlining.

The American voting process is incredibly decentralized. There are more than 10,000 voting jurisdictions in the nation. And few votes are cast over the Internet or through machines connected to the Internet (mostly by military and overseas voters). That means there isn’t one place for hackers to remotely target.

The Brennan Center estimates that at least 80 percent of registered voters in November will vote on a paper ballot, or through an electronic machine that produces a paper trail.

That said, continued vigilance is of the utmost importance. Cyber security experts, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security are hyper-focused on detecting any problems, whether caused by foreign groups or domestic attempts at identity theft. Meanwhile, the Brennan Center has encouraged election officials across the country to keep backups, including paper copies of registration lists, to conduct automated scans that check for fraudulent activity, to audit after the election. And the need to replace older equipment, for which it’s sometimes difficult to get replacement parts, is finally receiving attention.

But there is good news to report on another threat to the right to vote, one perpetrated in recent years by state legislatures under the guise of preventing voter fraud. Restrictive voter identification laws have been challenged in the courts and are being beaten back for unconstitutional overreach.

It’s important to understand that voting is a right — not a privilege — for U.S. citizens, whether the voter is native born or naturalized. Laws surrounding the vote must not impede that right. And, increasingly, the courts are ruling that many new provisions limit the access of eligible voters, even though legislatures profess their purpose is to fix a problem that doesn’t exist in the first place.

To protect our democracy we must protect the sanctity of the vote. In this election more than any in recent memory, being an informed voter has taken on new meaning and new significance.

(Mary Sanchez is an opinion-page columnist for The Kansas City Star. Readers may write to her at: Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413, or via e-mail atmsanchez@kcstar.com.)

(c) 2016, THE KANSAS CITY STAR. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC

Photo: REUTERS/Chris Keane

Polling Places Become Battleground In U.S. Voting Rights Fight

Polling Places Become Battleground In U.S. Voting Rights Fight

LINCOLN PARK, Ga. (Reuters) – Louis Brooks, 87, has walked to cast a vote at his neighborhood polling place in Georgia’s predominantly black Lincoln Park neighborhood for five decades. But not this year.

Brooks says he will not vote in the presidential election for the first time he can remember after local officials moved the polling station more than 2 miles (3 km) away as part of a plan to cut the number of voting sites in Upson County.

“I can’t get there. I can’t drive, and it’s too far to walk,” said Brooks, a black retired mill worker and long-time Democratic Party supporter. He said he does not know how to vote by mail and doesn’t know anyone who can give him a ride.

A Reuters survey found local governments in nearly a dozen, mostly Republican-dominated counties in Georgia have adopted plans to reduce the number of voting stations, citing cost savings and efficiency.

In seven of those counties, African-Americans, who traditionally back Democrats, comprised at least a quarter of the population, and in several counties the changes will disproportionately affect black voters. At least three other counties in Georgia dropped consolidation plans under public pressure.

While polling place cutbacks are on the rise across the country, including in some Democratic-run areas, the South’s history of racial discrimination has made the region a focus of concern for voting rights advocates.

Activists see the voting place reductions as another front in the fight over Republican-sponsored statewide voting laws such as stricter ID requirements that disproportionately affect minority and poorer voters who tend to vote for the Democratic Party.

Several of these have recently been struck down by courts that ruled they were designed to hinder minority voting.

“There is a history in those states of using different strategies to cut voting in minority communities,” said Leah Aden, senior counsel at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Education Fund.

“Hogwash,” said Robert Haney, chairman of the Upson County Board of Elections, denying that race was a factor in his board’s decision.

“Nobody is trying to keep anybody from voting,” said Haney, adding that officials would send a ballot to the home of anyone who needed it. He said the cut in polling sites from nine to four was designed to increase efficiency by closing low-turnout sites, saving about $20,000.

The Nov. 8 election will be the first presidential contest since the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that Georgia and all or parts of 14 other states with a history of racial discrimination no longer need federal approval for election law changes like polling place consolidations.

Since the court ruling, the Reuters survey found, more than two dozen local governments in eight of those states have implemented new cuts in polling places. Two thirds of those were met with public opposition.

Four of the states – Arizona, Georgia, Florida and North Carolina – could be election battlegrounds in the fight for the White House and control of the U.S. Senate.

“IMPACT CAN BE DISASTROUS”

“This is part of the story of voting in the South,” said Willie Williams, a black small business owner from Daphne, Alabama, where polling stations were cut to two from five during last month’s municipal elections over the objections of black voters.

Williams, who still keeps his father’s receipt for his poll tax – the tax some blacks in the South had to pay to qualify to vote before civil rights laws in the 1960s eliminated it – says the reduction was “just another tool in the tool kit for shaving off minority votes.”

Daphne city officials denied any racial motivation, saying the changes were meant to improve safety and create better access and parking for voters.

Still, Isela Gutierrez, a research director at the liberal group Democracy North Carolina, says the effects of such cutbacks can be wide ranging. “The elections boards aren’t lying when they say some of these locations have low turnout and it makes better administrative sense to close them – but the impact can be disastrous.”

Numerous academic studies have found people are less likely to vote the farther they must travel and the longer they must wait in line, which becomes more likely with fewer voting sites.

“Some of these changes individually may affect only a small number of voters, but in the aggregate across the country it will be a very large number of voters,” said Danielle Lang, voting rights counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, a Washington-based voting rights and campaign finance group.

The issue gained prominence in a March primary in Arizona’s Maricopa County, where more than 30 percent of residents are Hispanic. A decision to slash polling places left voters in lines for up to five hours. Republican county officials said they misjudged turnout.

CONSOLIDATIONS

Georgia has been an epicenter for efforts to reduce polling places since the Supreme Court decision. And in that state, which has not backed a Democrat in a presidential election since 1992, polls show Republican Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in a close battle for the presidency that could be decided by turnout of minority voters.

“If you want to restrict voter turnout in minority and disadvantaged communities, a good way is to move a polling place somewhere they can’t get to,” said Stacey Abrams, Democratic leader in the Georgia state legislature.

Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said race was being unfairly inserted into the debate on polling place changes.

“It’s election officials making adjustments based on the changing ways people are voting,” he said.

A Reuters analysis, using voter registration lists for 2012 and 2016, found at least two Georgia counties where the changes disproportionately affect blacks.

A consolidation plan in Macon-Bibb County closed six polling places in black-majority neighborhoods, and only two in white majority areas. McDuffie County’s decision to eliminate three polling places means two-thirds of the county’s black voters, and one-third of its white voters, will now vote in one location.

Other changes have had little impact on minority voters. In Georgia’s Lumpkin County, for example, where blacks are just 2 percent of the population, officials consolidated seven polling locations into one to make the county compliant with federal disability laws.

Voting rights groups in several states have tried to form patchwork networks to track the changes, which are not well publicized, and then fight back where necessary with threats of lawsuits, petition drives or complaints to federal officials.

In Upson County, Haney said, the elections board dropped a proposal to close a polling site in heavily black Salem, a sparsely populated rural area, after residents pointed out the hardship of traveling an extra 10 miles (16 km) or more.

But the Lincoln Park site, which had just 230 voters cast a ballot in person on Election Day 2012, was more easily combined with a polling place in the center of the nearby town of Thomaston, he said.

Kay King, the only African-American member of the elections board in Upson County and the only one to vote against the voting site closures, said she knew it meant some Lincoln Park residents would not be able to vote.

“They walk to the store, they walk to church – when you don’t have transportation to get to something like this, it makes you not want to do it, you just throw your hands up,” she said.

(Additional reporting by Andy Sullivan in Washington; Editing by Jason Szep and Ross Colvin)

Photo: Louis Brooks (L), talks with Henry Wilder with the Thomaston-Upson County Branch of the NAACP in the Lincoln Park neighborhood in Thomaston, Georgia, U.S. August 16, 2016.  REUTERS/Tami Chappell

Occasional Ohio Voters Kicked Off Voting Roles

Occasional Ohio Voters Kicked Off Voting Roles

By Andy Sullivan and Grant Smith

When Larry Harmon tried to vote on a marijuana initiative in November in his hometown of Kent, Ohio, the 59-year-old software engineer found his name had been struck from the voter rolls.

Two hours south in Zanesville, restaurant worker Chris Conrad, 37, was also told he was no longer registered.

Both men later found out why: they had not voted often enough.

As the Nov. 8 elections loom, officials in Ohio have removed tens of thousands of voters from registration lists because they have not cast a ballot since 2008.

All U.S. states periodically cleanse their voter rolls, but only a handful remove voters simply because they don’t vote on a regular basis. And nowhere could the practice have a greater potential impact in the state-by-state battle for the White House than Ohio, a swing state that has backed the winner in every presidential election since 1960.

Voters of all stripes in Ohio are affected, but the policy appears to be helping Republicans in the state’s largest metropolitan areas, according to a Reuters survey of voter lists. In the state’s three largest counties that include Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus, voters have been struck from the rolls in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods at roughly twice the rate as in Republican neighborhoods.

That’s because residents of relatively affluent Republican-leaning neighborhoods are more likely to vote in both congressional elections and presidential contests, historical turnouts show. Democrats are less likely to vote in mid-term elections and thus are more at risk of falling off the rolls.

In the three biggest counties, at least 144,000 voters have been removed, the Reuters analysis found. The statewide total is unclear. Each of the state’s 88 counties manages its own voter rolls, which generally are not made public.

Unlike other voting-rights disputes that have sparked protests and lawsuits, the practice doesn’t appear to be driven by one specific party. Both Republican and Democratic officials in Ohio have purged inactive voters over the past 20 years.

But neighborhoods that have a high proportion of poor, African-American residents are hit hardest, the Reuters analysis found.

“It’s absolutely unfair,” said Donna Porter-Jones, an organizer at Amos Project, an interfaith group that aims to register 30,000 voters from some of Cincinnati’s poorest neighborhoods ahead of November.

 

CLEANING UP THE ROLLS

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, says canceling registrations for voters who missed three straight federal elections helps keep voting rolls current. Since 2011, the state has cleared out more than 2 million records of people who have moved or died, he said.

Those who don’t vote over a six-year stretch or respond to a postcard mailed to their address have only themselves to blame, he said. “If this is really important thing to you in your life, voting, you probably would have done so within a six-year period,” he said in an interview.

People who don’t respond to the postcard can be removed from voting lists if they sit out the next two federal elections. Many other states only remove voters from the rolls if they have died or moved to a new address.

“You shouldn’t be struck of your right to vote because you skipped an election,” said Kathleen Clyde, a Democratic state representative who has been fighting the practice.

Four civil liberties groups sued to end the practice last month, arguing that it violates federal law and unfairly targets low-income and minority voters.

Voting-rights advocates say they are concerned that many infrequent voters who helped drive turnout to a record in the 2008 presidential election won’t be able to vote in this year’s likely matchup between Democrat Hillary Clinton, vying to become the first female president, and Republican Donald Trump, the celebrity billionaire.

 

PARTISAN BATTLES

The Ohio lawsuit is one of a number being fought across the country. Photo ID requirements and other efforts to tighten voting laws have spurred fierce partisan battles and protests in recent months. They follow a Supreme Court decision in 2013 that struck down parts of the Voting Rights Act, a signature achievement of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

The Ohio dispute, by contrast, centers on a practice that has been in place for decades but is receiving new attention from civil liberties groups and Democrats ahead of November.

“We are pleased the courts are reviewing the state’s actions,” said Pratt Wiley, national director of voter expansion at the Democratic Party in Washington.

Republican party officials at the local and national level, as well as the Trump campaign, did not respond to requests for comment.

But Tom Fitton, the head of Judicial Watch, a conservative group that has pushed Ohio and other states to keep their voting lists up to date, described the lawsuit as a “power play” by civil liberties groups “to ensure that candidates they like are able to steal elections if necessary.”

Federal law prohibits states from removing voters solely because they haven’t voted, but it also requires them to keep voter lists up to date. Ohio residents who are removed from voting lists must re-register at least 30 days before an election.

Harmon, the software engineer, backed President Barack Obama in 2008 but has sat out presidential and congressional elections since then. He says he initially thought he had done something wrong to get kicked off the voting rolls.

“I felt embarrassed and stupid at the time,” said Harmon, who is involved in the Ohio lawsuit. “The more I think about it, the madder I am,” he said.

 

“KICKED OFF”

In Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County, 5 percent of voters in neighborhoods that backed Obama by more than 60 percent in 2012 were purged last year due to inactivity, according to the Reuters analysis of the voter lists. In neighborhoods where Obama got less than 40 percent of the vote, 2.5 percent of registered voters were removed for that reason.

In Franklin County, home to the state capital Columbus, 11 percent of voters in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods have been purged since 2012 due to inactivity. Only 6 percent of voters in Republican-leaning neighborhoods have been purged.

The disparity is especially stark in Hamilton County, where affluent Republican suburbs ring Cincinnati, which has one of the highest child-poverty rates in the country.

In the heavily African-American neighborhoods near downtown, more than 10 percent of registered voters have been removed due to inactivity since 2012. In suburban Indian Hill, only 4 percent have been purged due to inactivity.

Overall, 30,000 voters have been removed due to inactivity since 2012, a larger figure than Obama’s margin of victory that year.

On a recent rainy afternoon, Amos Project canvasser Marcia Mackey tried to get some of those voters back in the system. Wielding a clipboard and a smile, Mackey asked pedestrians in the Over the Rhine neighborhood north of downtown Cincinnati when they last cast a ballot. If they couldn’t remember, she encouraged them to register again.

“People don’t know they’ve been purged until they go to the election site and get turned away,” Mackey said. “We need to make sure that people have voices.”

 

(Grant Smith reported from New York. Editing by Jason Szep and Ross Colvin)

Photo: AMOS canvassing members work on voter registration at a community center in Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S., May 12, 2016. REUTERS/William Philpott