“Racist slurs and death threats: The dangerous life of a Georgia elections official

chicanery, election administration

Stateline:

When Milton Kidd leaves work at the end of the day, he slips out the back door of the domed Douglas County Courthouse, avoiding the public entrance where people might berate him or demand his home address.

He never takes the same route home two days in a row, and he makes random turns to avoid being followed.

Kidd, a Black man, has a very dangerous job: He is the elections and voter registration director for Douglas County.

“Milton Kidd is a nasty n***** living on tax money like the scum he is,” one voter wrote in an email Kidd shared with Stateline. “Living on tax money, like a piece of low IQ n***** shit.”

Another resident from Kidd’s county of 149,000 west of Atlanta left him a voicemail.

“I don’t know if you’re aware, Milton, but the American people have set a precedent for what they do to f***ing tyrants and oppressors who occupy government office,” the caller said. “Yep, back in the 1700s, they were called the British and the f***ing American people got so fed up with the f***ing British being dicks, kind of like you, and then they just f***ing killed all the f***ing British.”

Kidd smiled incredulously as he shared his security routine and the hate-filled messages that inspired it. He is dumbfounded that he’s the target of such vitriol for administering elections in 2024 — but he knows where it originated.

The lies told by former President Donald Trump, who faces state felony charges for trying to pressure Georgia officials to change the 2020 results, have resonated with many Douglas County voters, Kidd said. Now this nonpartisan official, like many others across the country, is forced to face their ire.

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With the First Presidential Debate Thursday Night, I Don’t Expect Trump Immunity Decision Until Friday at the Earliest

Supreme Court

The Supreme Court has over a dozen cases left to decide. The next date for announcing opinions is Wednesday. The Court has not yet announced whether there will be opinions on Thursday or Friday of this week (I suspect on both days). It is also quite possible, given that almost all the remaining opinions are major ones, for some opinions to be released early next week, taking us into July (that happens occasionally at the Court).

The Court really slow walked the Trump immunity, case, all but making the completion of a trial before the election in D.C. on 2020 election subversion charges impossible. Given the delay, I don’t think any of the Justices think that it will make a difference if the opinion (if ready) comes out this Wednesday compared to next Monday in terms of timing for a trial.

But it would be huge to the debate if the day before or the day of the debate the Supreme Court announced some principles of Trump immunity. Whatever the Court does (and I expect they will recognize at least some immunity from some official acts in some circumstances), it could be spun as a Trump win or loss.

Chief Justice Roberts likely would not want the Court injected so much into the Presidential debate. That suggests nothing before Friday at the earliest.

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“Wisconsin judge to weigh letting people with disabilities vote electronically from home in November”

election administration, voting technology

AP:

A Wisconsin judge on Monday is expected to consider whether to allow people with disabilities to vote electronically from home in the swing state this fall.

Disability Rights Wisconsin, the League of Women Voters and four disabled people filed a lawsuit in April demanding disabled people be allowed to cast absentee ballots electronically from home.

They asked Dane County Circuit Judge Everett Mitchell to issue a temporary injunction before the lawsuit is resolved granting the accommodation in the state’s Aug. 13 primary and November presidential election. Mitchell scheduled a Monday hearing on the injunction.

Questions over who can cast absentee ballots and where they can do it have become a political flashpoint in Wisconsin, where four of the past six presidential elections have been decided by less than a percentage point….

They also point out that military and overseas voters are permitted to cast absentee ballots electronically in Wisconsin elections. People with disabilities must be afforded the same opportunity under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the federal Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits all organizations that receive financial assistance from discriminating on the basis of disability, they argue.

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“Clippers Cut a Wide Swath Making Political Campaign Videos Go Viral”

cheap speech

NYT:

When Andrew Lawrence begins his night shift, he powers on his monitor to sift through Fox News’ evening programming.

He and his small team at Media Matters for America, the liberal nonprofit media watchdog group, spend hours each day glued to their screens, scanning cable shows, livestreams and congressional hearings for political moments they can clip, post on social media and call out as absurd.

“We watch Fox News so you don’t have to,” Mr. Lawrence said.

The slog seems to be paying off. His video posts are often viewed millions of times.

Clipping political gaffes was once more of a pastime for amateur political obsessives. Now, professionals have stepped in and supercharged the political discourse, flooding platforms like X and TikTok with cuttingly captioned video snippets, often publishing edited clips within minutes or even seconds.

Despite concerns that the most-watched clips often omit crucial context, sometimes by design, clippers have amassed tens of millions of views, forcing candidates to pay attention — and to watch their words.

More so than ever before, clipping has been embraced by both official Democratic and Republican campaign committees that have exploited the reach of real-time clips and even outdone their independent predecessors.

Gone is the heyday of the tracker, a political operative who would tail candidates at stump events big and small, camcorder in hand, hoping to catch gaffes on tape. Today, the ubiquity of livestreaming and video recording has transformed any rallygoer with a smartphone into a wellspring of videos clippers can turn into potential viral sensations. With so much of a campaign being captured on video and then quickly spotlighted in microscopic, mocking detail, the smallest personality foible, momentary lapse or passing awkwardness can spell a public-relations nightmare for a candidate.

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