“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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“Disappointment and ‘depression’: Biden’s biggest fundraisers watch their advantage vanish”

campaign finance, campaigns

Politico:

Joe Biden’s campaign planned to bury Donald Trump in an avalanche of cash.

Instead, his allies are bracing for a slugfest without the benefit of a fatter wallet, as financial reports showed Trump outraising Biden in back-to-back months, hauling in huge sums after his 34 felony convictions and erasing Biden’s longstanding financial edge.

Democrats in recent days largely downplayed Trump’s new financial lead in the same way Trump’s allies had when Biden was running ahead in the money race — saying the president would have enough money to compete.

But privately, several Democratic strategists and donors were reeling.

“There was the strategy of raising all this money on the front end so we could have this huge edge,” said one Biden bundler, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “The whole point of it was to come out with a sizable cash advantage and, you know, we’re now even and it’s June. … I have no other word for it other than ‘depression’ among Biden supporters.”

Another major Biden bundler, also granted anonymity, called the development “disappointing, but not surprising.”

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How Much Does the Hunt for Small Donors Contribute to the Extremism of Our Political Culture?

Uncategorized

This Washington Post story is full of examples of how extreme rhetoric turns on the spigot of small donations. This isn’t surprising; as I’ve noted, in the days of direct mail, consultants also understood that extreme rhetoric was a key to unlocking donations (Richard Vigurie, the architect of direct mail fundraising, told Jimmy Carter it would never work for him because he was too moderate).

The incendiary emails are part of a concerted strategy that has allowed the campaign to erase a financial lead that President Biden’s campaign had opened up in recent months, according to people close to the former president who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak for the campaign. But experts in small-dollar fundraising say the solicitations are aggressive even by the standards of Trump’s frequently hyperbolic and inflammatory language.

“I think those are clearly an escalation over and above some incredibly heated rhetoric and some irresponsible rhetoric we’ve seen over time,” said Matthew Hindman, a professor at George Washington University who studies digital emails. “The fact that those messages continue to be sent out tell us about something. The rhetoric has been driven by user response and user donations. If this extreme rhetoric continues to generate funds, it’s going to be rewarded with an even more extreme response next time.”…

Aides are planning an aggressive push around the sentencing, advisers said, betting his supporters will be especially motivated by a potential prison sentence….

One person with knowledge of the pitches said donations increase any time Trump seems to be under attack or argues that he is being treated unfairly. That’s particularly true when he is generating wall-to-wall news coverage during an event like the hush money trial in New York.

Some recent pitches have raised eyebrows even among longtime Trump observers and advisers. Emails falsely claimed that the FBI wanted to shoot Trump during a court-authorized search of his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida for classified documents he allegedly unlawfully retained after leaving office. “Put Biden on Trial,” one read…

“Rhetorical gimmicks like this poison the well for every other Republican trying to raise money online,” one GOP consultant said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “It burns out small-dollar donors. The Trump campaign is printing money on this, but when you’re already talking about the death penalty in June, what are you going to say in October?”

Hindman said the campaign is unlikely to dial back its rhetoric as long as the money was flowing.

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