Tag: brennan center for justice
Trump’s Amateur Sleuths Poised To Decry Another 'Stolen Election'

Trump’s Amateur Sleuths Poised To Decry Another 'Stolen Election'

As Republican candidates, parties and groups are poised to legally challenge election results where they have lost or lag behind in the preliminary results, a parallel effort is underway in pro-Trump circles that likely will fabricate propaganda about illegitimate elections.

Candidates have long been able to challenge voters and ballots after Election Day during the vote count reconciliation process – called the canvass – which is before results are certified and recounts occur. But the efforts in Trump circles stand apart from these legal processes.

Trump Republicans and their allies are poised to gather “evidence” that frequently is not legally admissible in determining election outcomes, but can be exploited by propagandists to create distrust about voting, election officials, and the accuracy of voting systems.

“In some states, election deniers motivated by false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election are engaging in their own deeply flawed investigations to substantiate myths of widespread voter fraud,” reported the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School in a research paper released on Friday. “They have organized to engage in practices like amateur data matching with voter rolls, door-to-door canvassing to compare residents’ statements with voter records, and surveillance of mail ballot drop boxes. These error-ridden practices can disenfranchise eligible voters and strain election official resources.”

Among the most high-profile recent efforts has been surveillance of drop boxes in Arizona, a state where 80 percent or more of the voters cast mailed-out ballots. This effort includes taking photos and videos of individuals dropping off ballots and their car’s license plates. That tactic is among several to make the claim that legions of unregistered voters are casting ballots.

This tactic, apart from possibly intimidating voters, is an example of what the Brennan Center called an “error-ridden” practice. The address tied to a license plate may not be the same as a voter’s most recent registration information, especially if that voter recently moved.

Nonetheless, since the 2020 election, ex-Trump campaign workers and self-appointed data analysts have parsed voter rolls in swing counties in swing states to falsely claim that the rolls were rife with inaccuracies that could be exploited by Democrats to fabricate votes.

Initially, Trump activists started knocking on doors to verify if a voter’s address on their registration record was accurate, to ask if they voted in 2020 and gather personal information. That activity lead to accusations of voter intimidation by civil rights groups. Earlier this year, the focus shifted to filing mass challenges of voters’ credentials, such as in metro Atlanta in Georgia, where more than 60,000 challenges were almost entirely rejected by county election officials this past summer, who, nonetheless, had spent months investigating the complaints.

“Activists are being encouraged by those who claim the 2020 election was ‘stolen’ to perform their own amateur data matching. They are using National Change of Address lists, tax assessor data, a portal operated by government contractor Schneider Geospatial, public map services, and public voter data from multiple states to make inferences about current voter eligibility and past election legitimacy,” the Brennan Center report said. “In doing so, they are cobbling together incomplete datasets that can later become ‘evidence’ for candidates to baselessly challenge the legitimacy of the election if they lose.”

Those behind these efforts have waged recruitment drives to gather evidence for post-Election Day challenges or to generate fodder that almost certainly will be used for propaganda – filling media channels as some battleground states take more time to count their votes than others. (Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, for example, cannot start counting absentee ballots until Election Day. Florida, Arizona, and Nevada can start several weeks before.)

Whether led by ex-Trump White House officials or campaign lawyers based at Conservative Partnership Institute in Washington, or a looser collective of election deniers and self-appointed experts convened and funded by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, the ringleaders have instructed activists to use apps like Basecamp to coordinate their activities, and apps like VotifyNow to report incidents that they deem suspicious.

“In the upper left-hand corner is the menu tab that will bring up your voter integrity tools,” a VotifyNow tutorial said. “When you click on these buttons, such as mail-in ballot issues, you’ll see the app allows you to type in a brief description of any suspicious activity you notice, as well as upload a photo or video... That incident is then sent to our database to be analyzed and compared with other issues in your area.”

Needless to say, just because a citizen observer thinks that they are seeing something wrong does not mean that factually is the case, said Tammy Patrick, a senior advisor at the Democracy Fund, at a November 2 press briefing where threats to election officials were discussed.

“I’ve had some election officials tell me that these observers act like they’re going to find the body; that they are coming onto a criminal site or crime scene,” she said. “When you approach the information that way, when you don’t know what you are looking at, you’re going to find what [conspiratorial evidence] you are looking for.”

Nor are specious observations likely to be accepted as evidence in any post-Election Day administrative review or legal process. But what fails to meet a legal standard of evidence can succeed as disinformation.

“It is important to remember that all reliable evidence shows that our elections — including the 2020 election — are safe, secure, accurate, fair, and free of widespread voter fraud,” the Brennan Center said. “We cannot let these dangerous and defective schemes compromise our democracy.”

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

With 1000 Complaints Of Election Threats, Garland Has Gotten One Conviction

With 1000 Complaints Of Election Threats, Garland Has Gotten One Conviction

A Department of Justice task force to combat violent threats against election workers has received more than 1,000 referrals since it was launched in July 2021but has only secured one conviction, a House committee was told on Wednesday.

“It’s received well over 1,000 reports of threats, but it’s only secured one conviction,” said Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), House Homeland Security Committee vice chair. “Which raises the question, ‘Why only one conviction?”

At the committee hearing on the election security landscape, the lack of accountability was also tied to local police. These departments were reluctant topress charges after being contacted by the election officials, the committee was told, because police officers often did not know where the legal line was between illegal threatening conduct and permissible political speech.

“Law enforcement, in many cases, is unaware that issues on Election Day or leading up to the election can be a real threat or a real issue,” said Neal Kelly, who now chairs the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, which seeks to educate police on this issue, and was formerly the registrar of voters in Orange County,California, and was a police officer before that.

“Beat officers, officers on the ground, just are not familiar with criminal code for election violations or that threats to election officials are occurring in large numbers,” he said. “When I was in Orange County, I had police officers respond to some scenes and they just thought it was a civil matter. They were not aware that there were actually criminal violations that occurred at a vote center.”

The House hearing comes as 2022’s general election is heating up and there is disagreement over what are the biggest ongoing threats facing voters, election officials and American democracy. Polls conducted since the House January 6Committee has been holding hearings detailing ex-President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election have shown many voters, especiallyindependents, want the provocateurs and insurrectionists held accountable.

“The threats to election security vary widely in the United States,” said Torres.“There’s the threat of a cyberattack on election infrastructure. There’s the threat of influence operations that radicalized people with misinformation and disinformation… And there’s a threat of violence and harassment and intimidation against election officials themselves.”

Torres asked which threat was mostly likely to “endanger” the 2022 midterms.

Elizabeth Howard, a senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice and NewYork University law school and a former Virginia state election official, replied that widespread threats to election officials were her top concern “because of the cascading effects that result.”

“What we’re seeing across the country are election officials who are deciding to leave the profession,” she said. “So, for example, five of Arizona’s 15 counties now have new election directors this cycle. Six of Georgia’s most populous counties have new election directors this cycle. This crates the potential for more mis- and disinformation because the people taking the retiring election officials’ place are not going to have the same level of experience [running elections].”

Kelly said that the 2020 election “amplified” the harassment, but “I’ve heard them before. If you go back to 2018 in Orange County, there was a number of similarthreats and issues arose when we had congressional districts flip from red to blue... It’s not just at the national level. It can certainly happen at the local level.We see that, and I will say this, it’s not just the battleground states.”

“In every single election we see rumors, we see myths and disinformation,” saidNew Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat, who had toleave her home and have police protection after the 2020 election and after herstate’s recent 2022 primary. “Those rumors rend to peter out.”“Unfortunately, we are still on a daily basis, in my state and across the country ,living with the reverberating effects of the big lie from 2020,” she continued. “The recent activities that happened in my state where we almost failed to certify an entire county’s worth of votes in a primary election [Otero County] are a direct result of that rhetoric.”

At Wednesday’s hearing, Democratic members were united in squarely blaming Trump’s false stolen election claims, and, to a lesser degree, social media platforms, that paired conspiracy-minded people with conspiracy theorists, for the uptick in threatened violence. Republican members, in contrast, said increased federal oversight of state-run elections was their top worry, and often went on to repeat Trumpian conspiracy theories about 2020.

“Isn’t it true, by implication, that the ballots cast in Wisconsin – by absentee dropbox deposited ballots were illegal in the 2020 election?,” asked Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC), referring to a July 2022 ruling by the Wisconsin Supreme Court that banned their use one month before the state’s upcoming primary.

“I cannot speak to the ins and outs of the specific legality, the constitutional questions that came forth in Wisconsin,” Oliver replied. “What I can tell you is that in states like mine, where we have secure 24-hour monitored systems that are permissible under state law, [that] we do not see the level of concern. And frankly, the alleged fraud, the alleged fraud that has been leveled against such ballot collection systems.”

These kinds of exchanges evaded the central question of what the most pressing security threat was facing upcoming midterm elections. And just as important, what could or should be done to counter election-centered threats and violence?

“When something like 40 percent of Americans believe that the 2020 election was stolen, about 60 to 70 percent of Republicans… clearly, that is the root cause of the threats of violence that many nonpartisan election officials are facing,” said Rep. Tom. Malinowski (D-NJ) addressing Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, where polls have found 62 percent of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was stolen. “What should responsible leaders in our country be doing to address that false belief out there?”

“I guess I find the silver lining to every cloud – that folks are interested in this topic right now at a level that they would not normally be,” replied LaRose. “I view this as an opportunity to educate people about the safeguards that exist, and make sure that information is available in every part of our state.”

Only Torres, the committee vice chair, asked about the Justice Department’s election threats task force and why it only had one conviction.“Is the issue one of law and the law is insufficiently protective of election workers or is it one of enforcement?” he asked. “What’s going on?”

“The DOJ task force has taken important steps but clearly what they’ve done is not enough,” Howard replied, summarizing more detailed written testimony. “We think that they need to expand the task force to include state and local law enforcement. As our Brennan Center survey showed, almost nine out of 10 election officials who had been threatened reported those threats not to federal officials, but to their local law enforcement.”

The DOJ did not send any officials to testify. But later in the hearing, Kelly amplified Howard’s comments by noting that most local police officers are unfamiliar with election-related crimes and are reluctant to present cases to local prosecutors.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Washington, Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke to reporters and pushed back on the accusation that the DOJ wasn’t doing enoughto hold perpetrators of 2020-related election violence accountable.

Garland replied:

“There is a lot of speculation about what the Justice Department is doing, what it’s not doing, what our theories are, what are theories aren’t, and there will continue to be that speculation. That’s because a central tenet of the way in which the Justice Department investigates — a central tenet of the rule of law — is that we do not do our investigations in public. This is the most wide-ranging investigation and the most important investigation that the Justice Department has ever entered into. And we have done so because this represents, this effort to upend a legitimate election, transferring power from one administration to another, cuts at the fundamental of American democracy. We have to get this right. And for people who are concerned, as I think every American should be about protecting democracy, we have to do two things. We have to hold accountable every person who is criminally responsible for trying to overturn a legitimate election. And we must do it in a way filled with integrity and professionalism – the way the Justice Department conducts investigations. Both of these are necessary in order to achieve justice and to protect our democracy.”

Garland was referring primarily to crimes surrounding the planning and execution of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In contrast, testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee concerned the ongoing and current threats to local and state election officials by believers in the big lie, where local and federal police, for differing reasons, have barely held those threatening violence to account.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.

Court's Right-Wing Radicals Now Pose Lethal Threat To Democratic Elections

Court's Right-Wing Radicals Now Pose Lethal Threat To Democratic Elections

The House Select Committee hearings are swaying political independents and centrists to reject the power-grabbing tactics used by Donald Trump and his Republican enablers to overturn the 2020 presidential election, according to several polls and surveys of battleground state voters released on Thursday, June 30.

“Vast majorities of the American people are paying attention, and they are deeply concerned,” said Leslie Dach, co-chair of Defend Democracy Project, an advocacy group dedicated to the principle that voters determine the outcome of elections. “They believe that a crime has been committed. They want accountability in the courts and at the ballot box. And they hold not just President Trump responsible, but they hold his allies and Republicans responsible for what happened.”

More than 80 percent of all voters have heard or seen “a lot” or “some” about the investigation, pollster Celinda Lake said at the Defend Democracy briefing. Among independents, the bloc that votes for Democrats and Republicans, support for the investigation has grown from 55 percent in May to 73 percent in June, which she called “startling.”

“There’s even greater support for the congressional investigation than there was for the second [Trump] impeachment,” Lake said. Among Republicans, 14 percent supported Trump’s impeachment immediately following the insurrection, while 30 percent are now supporting the wider January 6 investigation.

A different survey probing moderate voters’ reactions to 2020’s election denial for Voting Rights Lab, a D.C. nonprofit tracking state trends, found about half of all voters were still susceptible to the ‘Big Lie,’ with 30 percent saying the 2020 election had been stolen, 7 percent saying that there had been “significant fraud, but it had no impact on the results,” and 11 percent who were “not sure.”

Voters in both major parties were very concerned about American democracy, but moderates were most disturbed by the behaviors showcased in the hearings, where politicians manipulated elections for power, including negating the vote.

“Whether they voted for Trump or Biden, the biggest threats to democracy across all voters was, one, self-serving politicians,”said Tresa Undem, a Washington, D.C. based researcher. “And then [came] this ‘us-versus-them’ mentality… And, at the center of that, there’s no common good. There’s no common goal.”

Enter The Supreme Court

But on the same day that new research showed that swing voters are increasingly rejecting the Trump-led tactics to thwart the popular vote, the Supreme Court announced that it will hear a case this fall where radical Republicans will contend that only a state legislature – not a state’s constitution, nor its supreme court, governor, or election officials – can set voting rules and certify victors.

In other words, in much the same way that Trump and his loyalists tried to overturn 2020’s popular votes, a case that could enshrine a similar hyper-partisan power grab has been welcomed by the Supreme Court. If validated by the court, the ruling could lead some Republican-run legislatures to override a Democratic presidential candidate’s victory in 2024, because a state’s legislature, not its voters, would appoint its presidential electors.

“This case sets up what will be one of the most consequential cases of the next term, and, indeed, what may be one of the most significant, if [not] one of the most destructive cases in American democracy that we will have seen, depending on how things turn out,” said Thomas Wolf, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law ‘s democracy program, at a June 30 briefing that reviewed the case’s complexity and stakes.

“The super-majority of justices on this new Supreme Court have made clear that they are willing to entertain ideas that have not previously been upheld by the highest court in the land,” Wolf said. “This certainly would be one of them.”

The case, from North Carolina, involves redistricting, and which state authority has the final say over redrawing its electoral boundaries. Its legislature segregated voters to preserve its power, which is one way to manipulate voting. The maps created by the GOP-led legislature were rejected by the state’s high court.

The legal theory pushed by radical Republicans is called the “independent state legislature theory (ISL).” It asserts that no other state branch can interfere in how its elections are run. It cites terse sentences in the U.S. Constitution that say state legislatures set the “times, places and manners” of holding federal elections, and, in another section, that legislators appoint presidential electors.

While the North Carolina case involves gerrymandering, the power grab at its core could affect every stage of voting. During Trump’s post-2020 litigation, where his campaign lost more than 60 suits challenging electoral protocols and results, his legal team repeatedly raised this theory. But it has gained momentum, including statements by four of the nine Supreme Court justices in other rulings that said they would welcome reviewing the ISL theory – or a version of it.

Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas supported it, and Brett Kavanaugh said it should be scrutinized before 2024, Princeton University’s Kim Lane Scheppele, who specializes on threats to constitutional governmental, wrote in March. Via email, she said that Chief Justice John Roberts also “has never seen a Republican-leaning voting rights case that he didn’t want to get behind.”

“The Court may well find – as did the Court in Bush v. Gore [in 2000] – that there is no individual right in the Constitution to vote for president or even for electors of the president,” Scheppele said. “As you know, before the Civil War, a number of states used a system in which their state legislatures select the electors. Given the emphasis of the Court on (selective) historical practices [such as its decision banning abortion], they may well find that any system a state legislature creates for selecting electors is fine with them, including cancelling the popular vote altogether – or cancelling it after the fact if the result isn’t ‘clear.’ And in the pure version of the independent state legislature theory, neither governor nor state court can override, limit, or interpret the rules that the legislature passes.”

A 'Nutty' Partisan Fantasy

At the Brennan Center’s briefing, constitutional scholars said that the court would have to construct a convoluted path to validate the theory and gut the historical checks and balances over how elections are run. But after recent rulings banning the right to an abortion, expanding gun rights, empowering prayer in school, and limiting executive branch power to fight climate change, several scholars said the best strategy may be to warn the public about the stakes in the case, its potential for wreaking chaos, and also to ridicule the ISL theory as a partisan fantasy.

“It’s nutty. It’s a deliberate comical misreading of what the text, structure, history, purpose, meaning, and goals of the constitutional provision are,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center.

Meanwhile, several voter surveys conducted since the January 6 hearings began have found that the most powerful voting bloc in battleground states – centrists who vote for Republicans or Democrats – increasing are disgusted by Trump’s attempted coup. One of Trump’s tactics was a first cousin, if you will, of the ISL doctrine, where state GOP leaders rejected their state’s popular vote results. Instead, they sent forged Electoral College documents to Washington.

“What is emerging very, very strongly from the hearings is not just that Trump was responsible, but there was a faction of the Republicans, Trump Republicans, who were responsible as well,” Lake said. “This was about overturning the will of the people, overturning elections, and people take that very, very seriously.”...

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.

Graham Whines That Voting Rights Push Depicts Republicans As 'Racists'

Graham Whines That Voting Rights Push Depicts Republicans As 'Racists'

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) complained on Tuesday that Democratic efforts to protect the right to vote are really just about making Republicans look racist. And though GOP-run states passed dozens of bills to make it harder to vote in just the past year, he said the issue is completely "manufactured."

Mere days after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his office tried to gaslight the nation into believing Republican state legislators were not trying to suppress voting rights, Graham made similar comments in a Senate floor speech.

"As to voting rights itself, I think this is the most hyped, manufactured issue in a long time," the South Carolina Republican argued. "It's not a problem in search of a solution, it's a manufactured problem."

Graham then defended efforts in some states to change voting laws to require photo identification in order to vote by mail, before accusing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of trying "to basically say that Republicans, at our heart, are a bunch of racists when it comes to voting."