Among the nuggets in here: commission to meet first in July in DC delay in naming commissioners supposedly because of background checks Obama won’t be called to testify because he has “no information or expertise on voter fraud” Lawyers’ Committee … Continue reading
Category Archives: chicanery
Key Bauer post: What can be done about this? At a minimum, the election administration community should perform an “after action” audit of the 2016 episode and examine how the federal and state government performed in emergency conditions and how … Continue reading
Lisa Rosenbloom for the ACLU. … Continue reading
News & Observer: A proposal to redraw North Carolina’s court districts has emerged in the final days of the General Assembly’s session. A state House judiciary committee considered proposed maps for Superior Court and District Court judges and district attorneys … Continue reading
The 24-page order and opinion of the magistrate judge could be appealed. The underlying document—Kobach’s advice to Trump as to how to make it harder for people to register to vote by changing the federal National Voter Registration Act (NVRA)—remains … Continue reading
Zack Roth: President Trump’s commission on voter fraud appears to be struggling to attract A-list talent, at least among Democrats. The White House announced three new members of the panel late Wednesday: Mark Rhodes, the clerk for Wood County, West … Continue reading
This, from the SOS of a state whose voting security is most worrisome: Brian Kemp, the Republican secretary of state of Georgia, used the call to denounce Johnson’s proposal as an assault on state rights. “I think it was a … Continue reading
What a WaPo story: In political terms, Russia’s interference was the crime of the century, an unprecedented and largely successful destabilizing attack on American democracy. It was a case that took almost no time to solve, traced to the Kremlin … Continue reading
“I don’t know why this has fallen on my shoulders,…I’m just a very small old country boy from Arkansas in this bigger commission with Vice President Pence, and I’m just going to do the best I can, to be honest.” … Continue reading
Boston Globe: Two members of a presidential commission charged with investigating alleged voter fraud want the panel to focus on what could be the biggest fraudulent scheme of all: attempted Russian hacking of numerous state election systems. The call, by … Continue reading
NPR: Democrats on the Senate panel, however, are frustrated by DHS Secretary John Kelly’s unwillingness to disclose more detail about the states that were targeted or compromised last year. DHS acknowledges that Russia’s intelligence officers went after elections systems in … Continue reading
Texas Tribune: Just days after his victory, Trump caused a stir by claiming — without evidence — that he would have won the popular vote in addition to the Electoral College “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” … Continue reading
Bob Bauer at Just Security. … Continue reading
Pam Fessler for NPR. … Continue reading
CNN: An outside group that supports President Donald Trump is running a radio ad in Atlanta ahead of Georgia’s special election Tuesday that takes the voice of former President Barack Obama out of context to make the argument that Democrats … Continue reading
The latest on Bloomingburg from The Forward: Not least among the oddness is the saga of Rabiner, an early Hasidic pioneer in Bloomingburg. A Hasidic man who moved to Bloomingburg in 2014, Rabiner won reelection to the village board in … Continue reading
Politico: Democrats are uniting behind a simple message about Russian hacking during the 2016 election: Donald Trump doesn’t care. Even as the president lashes out at the series of Russia-related probes besieging his administration, Democrats say Trump has yet to … Continue reading
Advisory: Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, today announced that the Committee will hold an open hearing on June 21st … Continue reading
Despicable: Authorities were called to the neighborhood where [GA06 congressional candidate] Karen Handel lives in Roswell after suspicious envelopes were found in mailboxes Thursday afternoon. Police say Roxburg Drive off Old Alabama Road was shut down for several hours while crews … Continue reading
Great investigation by Craig Silverman and Tarini Parti: Those three groups — Great America PAC, Great America Alliance and Stop Hillary PAC— have been cited or promoted in some way in more than 110 articles on AAN dating back to … Continue reading
Bloomberg: Russia’s cyberattack on the U.S. electoral system before Donald Trump’s election was far more widespread than has been publicly revealed, including incursions into voter databases and software systems in almost twice as many states as previously reported. In Illinois, investigators … Continue reading
AP: Twelve employees of a Democrat-linked group focused on mobilizing black voters in Indiana are accused of submitting fake or fraudulent voter registration applications ahead of last year’s general election in order to meet quotas, according to charging documents filed … Continue reading
Inquiring minds want to know. Updated: Chris Geidner reports Kobach will continue to serve. … Continue reading
Watch live. … Continue reading
Key read and reality check from David Becker. … Continue reading
Key Bauer followup: Evidence Supporting a Finding of “Substantial Assistance” It follows that the evidence in support of the “substantial assistance” would be different in quantity and nature from what is needed for a “coordination” claim. The evidence on the … Continue reading
The latest from the Forward on the Bloomingburg saga: Shalom Lamm, the developer behind the controversial effort to build hundreds of homes for Hasidic families in the upstate New York village of Bloomingburg, pled guilty Tuesday to federal charges in … Continue reading
USA Today: The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee told USA TODAY on Tuesday that Russian attacks on election systems were broader and targeted more states than those detailed in an explosive intelligence report leaked to the website The … Continue reading
Charlie Savage for the NYT: An intelligence contractor was charged with sending a classified report about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election to the news media, the Justice Department announced Monday, the first criminal leak case under President Trump. The … Continue reading
The Intercept: Russian Military Intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report … Continue reading
The Dallas Morning News reports. … Continue reading
Bob Bauer: Commentary on Russian intervention in the 2016 elections has included one confidently expressed and perhaps growing view: that there may be a scandal there, but no conceivable crime. It is claimed that the Trump campaign could wink and … Continue reading
NYT: Shifting from his previous blanket denials, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said on Thursday that “patriotically minded” private Russian hackers could have been involved in cyberattacks last year to help the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump. While … Continue reading
PunditFact: Jarrett said that “you can collude all you want with a foreign government in an election,” because there’s no law that says collusion is a crime. Three prominent election law scholars said there are at least four laws that … Continue reading
WSJ on the latest in the Bloomingburg saga: Prosecutors said Mr. Nakdimen and his associates falsely registered voters to overcome local opposition to their 396-unit townhouse project in the tiny Catskills village of Bloomingburg. The developers anticipated making hundreds of … Continue reading
Bryan Lowry: The American Civil Liberties Union has asked a federal court to enable documents from Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s November meeting with President Donald Trump to be made public. Kobach earlier this month handed over the documents, … Continue reading
Jim Condos, Vt. Secretary of State writes: I am deeply troubled by the announcement that the President signed an executive order establishing a commission to review alleged voter fraud in our elections. Since the 2016 election, President Trump has made … Continue reading
Ken Vogel for Politico: Weintraub’s interest was piqued by an article published last week by TIME magazine that revealed intelligence officials had evidence that Russian agents bought Facebook ads to disseminate election-themed stories. It also indicated that congressional investigators were … Continue reading
Houston Chronicle: Two people who worked as election clerks during the May 2016 primary runoff have pleaded guilty to unlawfully casting a ballot for another person, Harris County Clerk Stan Stanart announced Monday. Jeanene Johnson, 63, and Latunia Thomas, 46, … Continue reading
Phillip Howard and Robert Gorwa WaPo oped (that I missed last week): This month, one of the most important intelligence documents about Russian interference in the U.S. election emerged. But it didn’t come from the National Security Agency or the … Continue reading
NYT: The speeches are a part of the group’s mission of grooming future conservative leaders — Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller, a White House adviser, are among its alumni — and its long list of donors has included … Continue reading
Politico: When Kris Kobach, Kansas’ aggressive secretary of state, convinced the state legislature to give him prosecutorial power to pursue voter fraud, he said it was necessary to root out tens of thousands of undocumented aliens who were voting as … Continue reading
Anniston Star: Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill says he will have some say in who gets selected to serve on a federal election fraud panel led by Vice President Mike Pence…. Merrill said he knew about the plan to … Continue reading
Josh Douglas in USA Today: Improving the voting process is a goal worthy of a presidential commission on voting. Trying to bolster the credibility of already-debunked theories of voter fraud is not. … Continue reading
Mark Joseph Stern for Slate: On Monday, the Supreme Court dealt a death blow to North Carolina’s notorious voter suppression law, refusing to review a lower court’s decision to block the measure for “target[ing] African Americans with almost surgical precision.” … Continue reading
Tierney Sneed for TPM. … Continue reading
NYT editorial: To state the obvious, this isn’t a commission. It’s a self-driving vehicle preprogrammed to arrive at only one destination: that strange, fact-free land in which, according to Mr. Trump and many conservatives, hordes of foreigners and people without … Continue reading
NYT: Kris W. Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, oversees an office whose clerical and regulatory work costs the state’s taxpayers barely $5.5 million a year. But he has parlayed that modest post into a national platform for tough restrictions … Continue reading
Statement. … Continue reading
Take Care blog: Evidence suggests that the Commission’s conclusions are also already preordained. Kris Kobach, co-chair of the new Commission, met with President-Elect Donald Trump in November 2016, in an apparent interview to become Secretary of the Department of Homeland … Continue reading