This one really hits home. I have friends and family who have lost their homes or otherwise been displaced by the awful recent wildfires. The tradition has been to give disaster aid where it is needed —whether that is Florida, North Carolina, or California—without extortion. What crass political opportunism.
A recent Orange County Grand Jury report that found no evidence of voter fraud did little to dissuade a false claim of election tampering from exploding on social media soon after.
On Jan. 16, Joe Hoff, a far-right television and radio host, posted a video clip on his website of an Orange County Registrar of Voters worker scanning a batch of ballots three times after the November 2024 elections.
“We don’t know if there is a legitimate reason for the worker’s actions,” Hoff wrote.
Building on suspicion, the video was reposted by “End Wokeness,” an X account that commented Democrats “outperformed” on the ballot in O.C., as a poll worker was “caught” triple-scanning ballots.
The post has since amassed more than 2 million views.
In response, the Orange County Registrar of Voters issued a statement the following day and contended that the security camera footage only shows the worker properly doing her job.
“The employee scanned the batch of ballots twice and then cleaned the scanner before scanning the batch of ballots a third time because during the first two scans some of the ballots were rejected by the scanner,” the statement read. “Given the large number of vote-by-mail ballots we scan during an election, Registrar of Voters employees must regularly clean the scanners.”…
A federal judge has held Rudy Giuliani in contempt for continuing to falsely accuse two Georgia women of election fraud in 2020, breaching a court order against further attacking them after the pair won a $148 million defamation suit against him.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell lit into a visibly frustrated Giuliani — seated in her Washington courtroom — saying she had hoped the voluminous evidence that his attacks on Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss were false would have caused him to “stop saying such fabricated lies.”
Moss and Freeman urged Howell to hold Giuliani in contempt after discovering comments he made about them — echoing similar claims at the heart of their original defamation lawsuit — on his podcast in November.
On Friday, Howell agreed, and she ruled that Giuliani must within 10 days sign a declaration swearing that he has reviewed all the evidence and sworn testimony refuting his claims about Moss and Freeman, acknowledging that no sworn testimony or government review has contradicted that evidence and affirming that he had a full opportunity to cross examine all witnesses in their lawsuit. Howell said that if Giuliani doesn’t file this declaration within 10 days, she will begin fining him $200 a day.
Howell opted against putting Giuliani in jail, calling that the most serious option in her quiver, but emphasized that if he continues to violate her orders and fails to pay his fines that would likely be the next punishment.
“I am very concerned based on the statements made during this hearing that Mr. Giuliani may not be persuaded to stop making statements that violate the consent judgment in this case without even more severe sanctions in this case,” Howell said….
Republicans made claims about illegal voting by noncitizens a centerpiece of their 2024 campaign messaging and plan to push legislation in the new Congress requiring voters to provide proof of U.S. citizenship. Yet there’s one place with a GOP supermajority where linking voting to citizenship appears to be a nonstarter: Kansas.
That’s because the state has been there, done that, and all but a few Republicans would prefer not to go there again. Kansas imposed a proof-of-citizenship requirement over a decade ago that grew into one of the biggest political fiascos in the state in recent memory.
The law, passed by the state Legislature in 2011 and implemented two years later, ended up blocking the voter registrations of more than 31,000 U.S. citizens who were otherwise eligible to vote. That was 12% of everyone seeking to register in Kansas for the first time. Federal courts ultimately declared the law an unconstitutional burden on voting rights, and it hasn’t been enforced since 2018.
Kansas provides a cautionary tale about how pursuing an election concern that in fact is extremely rare risks disenfranchising a far greater number of people who are legally entitled to vote. The state’s top elections official, Secretary of State Scott Schwab, championed the idea as a legislator and now says states and the federal government shouldn’t touch it.
“Kansas did that 10 years ago,” said Schwab, a Republican. “It didn’t work out so well.”…
To be clear, voters already must attest to being U.S. citizens when they register to vote and noncitizens can face fines, prison and deportation if they lie and are caught.
fter Kansas residents challenged their state’s law, both a federal judge and federal appeals court concluded that it violated a law limiting states to collecting only the minimum information needed to determine whether someone is eligible to vote. That’s an issue Congress could resolve.
The courts ruled that with “scant” evidence of an actual problem, Kansas couldn’t justify a law that kept hundreds of eligible citizens from registering for every noncitizen who was improperly registered. A federal judge concluded that the state’s evidence showed that only 39 noncitizens had registered to vote from 1999 through 2012 — an average of just three a year.
In 2013, then-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican who had built a national reputation advocating tough immigration laws, described the possibility of voting by immigrants living in the U.S. illegally as a serious threat. He was elected attorney general in 2022 and still strongly backs the idea, arguing that federal court rulings in the Kansas case “almost certainly got it wrong.”
Kobach also said a key issue in the legal challenge — people being unable to fix problems with their registrations within a 90-day window — has probably been solved.
“The technological challenge of how quickly can you verify someone’s citizenship is getting easier,” Kobach said. “As time goes on, it will get even easier.”…
The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the Kansas case in 2020. But in August, it split 5-4 in allowing Arizona to continue enforcing its law for voting in state and local elections while a legal challenge goes forward.
Seeing the possibility of a different Supreme Court decision in the future, U.S. Rep.-elect Derek Schmidt says states and Congress should pursue proof-of-citizenship requirements. Schmidt was the Kansas attorney general when his state’s law was challenged.
“If the same matter arose now and was litigated, the facts would be different,” he said in an interview.
But voting rights advocates dismiss the idea that a legal challenge would turn out differently. Mark Johnson, one of the attorneys who fought the Kansas law, said opponents now have a template for a successful court fight.
“We know the people we can call,” Johnson said. “We know that we’ve got the expert witnesses. We know how to try things like this.” He predicted “a flurry — a landslide — of litigation against this.”…
Republicans plan to move quickly in their effort to overhaul the nation’s voting procedures, seeing an opportunity with control of the White House and both chambers of Congress to push through long-sought changes that include voter ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements.
They say the measures are needed to restore public confidence in elections, an erosion of trust that Democrats note has been fueled by false claims from President-elect Donald Trump and his allies of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. In the new year, Republicans will be under pressure to address Trump’s desires to change how elections are run in the U.S., something he continues to promote despite his win in November.
The main legislation that Republicans expect to push will be versions of the American Confidence in Elections Act and the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, said GOP Rep. Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, chair of the Committee on House Administration, which handles election-related legislation. The proposals are known as the ACE and SAVE acts, respectively.
“As we look to the new year with unified Republican government, we have a real opportunity to move these pieces of legislation not only out of committee, but across the House floor and into law,” Steil said in an interview. “We need to improve Americans’ confidence in elections.”
Republicans are likely to face opposition from Democrats and have little wiggle room with their narrow majorities in both the House and Senate. Steil said he expects there will be “some reforms and tweaks” to the original proposals and hopes Democrats will work with Republicans to refine and ultimately support them….
Months before voters went to the polls in November, a group of election skeptics based in North Carolina gathered on a call and discussed what actions to take if they doubted any of the results.
One of the ideas they floated: try to get the courts or state election board to throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots cast by voters whose registrations are missing a driver’s license number and the last four digits of a Social Security number.
But that idea was resisted by two activists on the call, including the leader of the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network. The data was missing not because voters had done something wrong but largely as a result of an administrative error by the state. The leader said the idea was “voter suppression” and “100%” certain to fail in the courts, according to a recording of the July call obtained by ProPublica.
This novel theory is now at the center of a legal challenge by North Carolina appeals court Judge Jefferson Griffin, a Republican who lost a race for a state Supreme Court seat to the Democratic incumbent, Allison Riggs, by just 734 votes and is seeking to have the result overturned.
The latest case is getting attention statewide and across the country. But it has not yet been reported that members of the group that had helped publicize the idea had cast doubt on its legality….
he theory Griffin is citing originated with a right-wing activist, Carol Snow, who described herself to ProPublica in an email as “a Bona Fide Grade-A Election Denier.” Snow promoted it with the help of the state chapter of the Election Integrity Network, a national group whose leader worked with President Donald Trump in his failed effort to overturn the 2020 election. The network also was behind extensive efforts to prepare to contest a Trump loss this year in other states, as ProPublica has reported, as well as in North Carolina, according to previously unreported recordings and transcripts of meetings of the state chapter.
State election officials have found that missing information on a voter’s registration is not disqualifying because there are numerous valid reasons for the state’s database to lack that those details.
Those reasons include voters registering before state paperwork was updated about a year ago to require that information or using alternate approved documents, such as a utility bill, to verify their identities. What’s more, voters must still prove their identity when casting a ballot — most often with a driver’s license. “There is virtually no chance of voter fraud resulting from a voter not providing her driver’s license or social security number on her voter registration,” attorneys for the state election board wrote in response to the RNC lawsuit….
Donald Trump helped create the US government’s cybersecurity agency during his first term as president. Six years later, employees of that agency are afraid of what he’ll do with it once he retakes office.
Trump’s alliances with libertarian-minded billionaires like Elon Musk and his promises to cut government spending and corporate oversight have alarmed staffers at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the component of the Department of Homeland Security that defends US government computer systems from hackers and helps state and local governments, private companies, and nonprofit groups protect themselves.
CISA, which the Trump administration and Congress created in 2018 by reorganizing an existing DHS wing, became a target of right-wing vitriol after its Trump-appointed director rebuffed the president’s election conspiracy theories in 2020 (prompting Trump to fire him) and after it worked with tech companies to combat online misinformation during the 2022 election….
CISA is also bracing for changes to its election security mission. The agency has already dramatically scaled back conversations with social media companies about online misinformation following a right-wing backlash, but Trump’s team could force CISA to abandon even more of its election security work. CISA staffers worry that Trump will block the agency from participating in state and local election officials’ “Trusted Info” initiative, which encourages Americans to listen to their local election supervisors instead of provocative online claims.
“I think that work is probably dead,” says a third CISA employee.
South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security, embraced election conspiracies after Biden’s win in 2020. “Kristi Noem is a Trump loyalist who has backed him in election denial claims, and now she’s going to be in charge of the agency that oversees [CISA],” says the cyber official. “I have a lot of questions about what happens there.”
The third CISA employee expects to see the “persecution of those who have done election security work” once Trump takes office….
On the morning of Nov. 4, 2020, former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi drove northeast from Washington to Philadelphia on an urgent mission:to monitor the tally of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots as President Donald Trump’s reelection hung in the balance.
Bondi and another Trump loyalist, Corey Lewandowski, quickly discovered that pandemic protocols were preventing Republican observers from closely scrutinizing ballotsTrump had claimed were susceptible to fraud. So they called one of the president’s most high-profile hired guns — former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.
“I said, ‘Gee Pam … I don’t have the time,’” Giuliani recalled to a D.C. Bar committee that later ruled that his election challenge in Pennsylvania was grounds for disbarment. “I really didn’t want to go because I had so many things to organize, and it seemed to me that just one jurisdiction wasn’t worth sacrificing getting started in the others.”
Giuliani was swayed to join Bondi, Lewandowski andTrump’s younger son, Eric Trump, later that day at a news conference outside the Philadelphia airport, where Bondi declared: “We won Pennsylvania, and we want every vote to be counted in a fair way.”
That appearance marked the beginning of Bondi’ssupport forTrump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election — a role often overlooked among the better-known players in the post-election drama but one documented in media reports, court filings, evidence obtained by the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, and testimony by Lewandowski and Giulianiduring his D.C. disbarment proceeding.
Giuliani faced intense media scrutiny and professional sanctions for making claims in court about the Pennsylvania vote that a D.C. Bar committee deemed “utterly false.” But in public appearances in the week after the election, Bondi also made unfounded allegations about“evidence of cheating” and “fake ballots,”and in private huddles with other campaign advisers she discussed legal strategies to challenge the results in a stateJoe Biden ultimately won by 80,000 votes….
Before the November presidential election, Ohio’s secretary of state and attorney general announced investigations into potential voter fraud that included people suspected of casting ballots even though they were not U.S. citizens.
“The right to vote is sacred,” Attorney General Dave Yost, a Republican, said in a statement at the time. “If you’re not a U.S. citizen, it’s illegal to vote -– whether you thought you were allowed to or not. You will be held accountable.”
In the end, their efforts led to just a handful of cases. Of the 621 criminal referrals for voter fraud that Secretary of State Frank LaRose sent to the attorney general, prosecutors have secured indictments against nine people for voting as noncitizens over the span of 10 years — and one was later found to have died. That total is a tiny fraction of Ohio’s 8 million registered voters and the tens of millions of ballots cast during that period.
The outcome and the stories of some of those now facing charges illustrate the gap — both in Ohio and across the United States — between the rhetoric about noncitizen voting and the reality: It’s rare, is caught and prosecuted when it does happen and does not occur as part of a coordinated scheme to throw elections….
In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s 2024 election victory, the right’s “election fraud” claims magically disappeared—but only temporarily. The fraud narrative is already reemerging to justify a wave of restrictive new voting laws in 2025, according to audio obtained by Documented from a December meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or “ALEC.”
ALEC is an influential organization that brings together state legislators, private-sector corporations, and right-wing advocacy organizations. Former Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell led a December 4, 2024 panel at the ALEC meeting, where she pitched state lawmakers on a menu of restrictive new voting laws.
“We’re going to begin a real effort next year to educate state legislatures and legislators, as well as members of Congress, to identify the problems” in elections, Mitchell said, according to a recording of the session.. “We’re going to be talking to legislators and staff about the things that need to be done to restore voter confidence.”
Mitchell offered state lawmakers a lengthy policy wish list, with calls for limiting early and mail-in voting, creating stringent new proof of citizenship and identification requirements, and making it easier to purge voters from the rolls.
It also calls for eliminating “ballot curing,” which allows eligible voters to fix technical mistakes on their ballot. The document was titled the “Voters’ Election Integrity Bill of Rights,” and which has since been updated online as the “U.S. Citizens Elections Bill of Rights.” The metadata for the online version shows it was created by an employee of the Conservative Partnership Institute, which employs Mitchell….
New book from Wes Hendricksen from the University Press of Kansas, with potential relevance to election law. It includes a brief discussion of the post-2020 period.
Here’s the statement – which is undated but appears to be new – throwing True the Vote under the bus and also maintaining confidence in the “underlying premise” of the film … but in a nonspecific way far less susceptible to, say, defamation law.
No word on whether a similar sort-of-kind-of apology is in the offing for prospective FBI nominee Kash Patel’s 2000 Mules children’s book. Am I making those nine words up? No, gentle reader, I am not.
President-elect Donald Trump plans to fire the entire team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith to pursue two federal prosecutions against the former president, including career attorneys typically protected from political retribution, according to two individuals close to Trump’s transition.
Trump is also planning to assemble investigative teams within the Justice Department to hunt for evidence in battleground states that fraud tainted the 2020 election, one of the people said.
The proposals offer new evidence that Trump’s intention to dramatically shake up the status quo in Washington is likely to focus heavily on the Justice Department, the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, and that at least some of his agenda is fueled not by ideology or policy goals but personal grievance….
Smith’s office is composed of dozens of attorneys, FBI agents and support staff from across the Justice Department, many with specialties in national security and public corruption cases. Some are former Justice Department employees plucked from private practice. Most, however, are mid- and upper-level career staffers on detail to the special counsel’s team from divisions within the main Justice Department building in downtown Washington or from U.S. attorneys’ offices across the country.
In past special counsel investigations, such staff attorneys typically have returned to their regular jobs after their temporary assignments concluded. Some members of Smith’s teams have already done that. In other cases,departments that loaned employees have not yet been informed when or if they will return, according to an person familiar with the situation, who like others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters….
Plans for federal election-fraud investigations in swing states are less well-defined, but several officials who defended the 2020 voting in key battlegrounds said they have been bracing for the possibility.
“Since there’s no malfeasance, we will certainly work with anyone who wants to investigate our work,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D). “But we will expect them to act with integrity and go where the facts — not their agendas — will lead.”
Neither the president-elect nor his allies have ever provided evidence to prove their claims of voter fraud, and they did not make similar claims during this month’s election after Trump emerged as the victor. But Trump has continued to trumpet his unproved allegations about 2020, using ominous language to suggest that he would try to criminally prosecute state officials.
In September, heclaimed without evidence in a social media post that there was “rampant cheating” in 2020 and promised that those responsible would “be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, which will include long-term prison sentences.”
“Please beware,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
Among the accusations Trump and his allies have lobbed at Benson and others: They allowed the counting of ballots from noncitizens, dead people or out-of-state residents; they illegally altered election rules during the coronavirus pandemic that allowed cheating to occur; and they barred GOP poll watchers from observing voting or counting….
