“All five of the nominees to appellate and district courts wrote in response to the question submitted by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois, that Congress had certified Biden as the winner and that he served as the 46th president. But they didn’t directly answer if he had won the election that Trump lost and continues to dispute.”
“FBI Director Kash Patel feeds 2020 election conspiracy theories with documents about unverified tip”
Ryan Reilly for NBC News:
FBI Director Kash Patel said this week the bureau had shared “alarming” — but unsubstantiated — allegations about manipulation of the 2020 election with a Republican member of Congress.
“The FBI has located documents which detail alarming allegations related to the 2020 U.S. election, including allegations of interference by the CCP,” Patel wrote, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. “I have immediately declassified the material and turned the documents over to the Chairman Grassley for further review.”
Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The unsubstantiated claim promoted by Patel, which an unidentified confidential human source gave to the FBI in 2020, during President Donald Trump’s first term, asserts that the Chinese mass-produced driver’s licenses to be used in a mail-in ballot scheme. Patel linked to an article written by John Solomon, whom Trump appointed alongside Patel in 2022 to represent him before the National Archives and Records Administration on matters related to his presidential records….
The article Patel promoted mentioned that U.S. Customs and Border Protection has seized fake licenses that were arriving mostly from China and Hong Kong around the time the FBI received the tip about the election plot. According to a 2020 news release from CBP, most of the seized licenses “were for college-age students,” a population that has historically sought licenses with fake birthdays so underage students can get into bars and purchase alcohol.
No evidence of widespread or systemic voter fraud affecting the 2020 election has been found, despite allegations promoted by Trump and his allies since he lost that year’s presidential race….
said the bureau produces hundreds of reports every day based on such tips, which do not always pan out.
Sometimes they are recalled or edited for a number of reasons, the former FBI official said. Those reasons could be that agents found the information to be false or that the sources of the information had been discredited.
A second former senior FBI official, who also asked not to be named, said they were not familiar with the report but said both the Chinese and the Russian governments have spread false claims about fake ballots to aggravate divisions between Americans.
The second former FBI official suggested that Patel share “the information with both Republicans and Democrats so there can be a balanced look and heal the country instead of causing more distrust and discontent playing into the hands of our foreign enemies.”
Rick Hasen, an election law expert, said that Patel’s post “might feed the MAGA base” but that what he was promoting was an uncorroborated story of unknown origin “with no evidence that anything actually happened, and certainly no evidence that any ballots were cast or illegal voters were even registered to vote using state identifications.”
Hasen said there has long been a “cottage industry of people” making false or vastly exaggerated claims of election fraud or portraying administrative errors as acts of malice. While there are occasionally instances of voting fraud, Hasen added, they tend to be isolated and small….
“Eric Adams vows to sue election board over independent run”
In yet another cynical move, Eric Adams, who is running as an independent in NYC’s November mayoral race (rather than as a Democrat), is now seeking to run on two additional ballot lines: EndAntiSemitism and Safe&Affordable. He vows to sue the Election Board if his petitions are denied on the grounds that candidates running as independents can only appear on one ballot line.
Unsolicited advice from me to Adams. The solution, of course, is simple: If you are genuinely an entrepreneurial minor party man, you should run on the lines of your two new parties and forego running as an independent.
“Musk’s X Sues New York Over Law Requiring Hate-Speech Data”
X challenges the constitutionality of New York law requiring social media companies to disclose how they deal with hate speech, extremism, and disinformation. Similar to the California law struck down by the Ninth Circuit, “[t]he law, which goes into effect this week, requires X and other major social media companies to file reports detailing how they define and moderate hate speech, racism, extremism, radicalization, disinformation and misinformation, harassment and foreign political interference. It’s part of a broader effort by states to mitigate what they see as the harmful effects of online platforms.”
New Montana Initiative Seeks to Use Corporate Law to Restrain Corporate Political Spending
Veteran election leaders today unveiled “The Montana Plan,” a ballot initiative that seeks to eliminate corporate and dark money from Montana politics without running afoul of Citizens United. The initiative would amend Montana’s constitution to prohibit the state from granting corporations it creates the power to spend in politics. Today, Montana, like most states, grants its corporations every power held by an individual to do all things necessary or convenient to carry out its business and affairs. The initiative if passed would change that to eliminate the power to spend in politics.
Proponents argue, “This is authority every state possesses but no state has used in more than a century.”
But what about out-of-state corporations? Well, Montana law already limits corporations chartered in other states to the same set of powers that Montana-chartered corporations hold. Thus, were Montana to limit its own corporations’ political spending, the restriction would automatically apply to out-of-state corporations.
Intriguing. The Montana Plan is being sponsored by the Transparent Election Initiative, a Montana-based nonprofit organization.
ELB Book Corner: Ciara Torres-Spelliscy: “The Naked 2020 Elections”
I am pleased to welcome Ciara Torres-Spelliscy to the ELB Book Corner, writing about her new book Corporatocracy. This is the third of four posts:
Because of the “Big Lie,” most Republicans to this day think the 2020 election was stolen. But we should not let this distortion sully what the 2020 election was: a herculean and successful effort to run a national election during a pandemic.
The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 did not stick round long enough to impact the 1920 election. A century later, America was not so lucky. The 2020 presidential election took place smack dab in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, before there was a vaccine.
Voters clamored for safe ways to vote in 2020, and many states responded by expanding ways to vote. With millions of American voters voting by mail for the first time, voter confusion surfaced.
One 2020 PSA featured topless female Pennsylvania legislators reminding Pennsylvanians who were voting by mail to avoid the “naked ballot” problem. (Viewers could not see their breasts, but they could see that the women were indeed topless. Sample ballots covered the upper half of their torsos.) Inspired by these lawmakers, celebrities copying the trope also got naked for democracy. In a celebrity PSA, Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman, Mark Ruffalo, and Amy Schumer, showed up in their birthday suits to remind Pennsylvania voters that they had to use a secrecy envelope when they returned their mail-in ballots— otherwise those ballots could be deemed “naked” and rejected by officials. The celebrity ad was launched by the pro-democracy nonprofit RepresentUS.
Pennsylvania expanded the availability of mail-in ballots to all registered voters under Act 77 in 2019. Partially because of this new law and partially because of the pandemic, the use of mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania jumped over tenfold from 2016 to 2020: from 266,208 to 2,704,147.
The naked-ballot problem was the result of a ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that naked ballots could be rejected. This was a reversal, as naked ballots counted during the 2020 primary. Lisa Deeley, the top election official in Philadelphia, told Politico, “This [naked ballot problem] has the potential of disenfranchising tens of thousands of voters…[and] one voter who is disenfranchised is one too many.”
In the end, far fewer naked ballots were reported in the general election than experts predicted, so perhaps all of the PSAs (clothed and naked) informed Pennsylvanians how to comply with the law.
Get out the vote (GOTV) ads were particularly inventive in the swing state of Georgia. Folks who lived in Atlanta may have seen some unique PSAs featuring strippers urging voters to participate in the upcoming election. If amateur strippers showed up in the Pennsylvania ads, professional strippers appeared in the Georgia ads. As described by NPR, “[A] woman in knee high, lace up boots walks away from the camera, toward a stage decorated with patriotic bunting. . . . The beat drops, the woman and other dancers begin to perform, and the repeated message is a simple one: ‘Get Your Booty To The Poll.’ . . .”
As a producer of the ads, Paul Fox explained the genesis of the ad: “This video really started with the death of George Floyd in May [2020] and us feeling like there was a better way to voice a need for change . . . We wanted to . . . get people, especially men, to vote.” Thus, the Get Your Booty to the Poll PSAs mentioned police brutality, cash bail, and public schools.
Georgia in 2020 was a microcosm of a changing American electorate, and whoever cracked the code of GOTV in Georgia would attain enormous political power. If you’d like to learn more, then please read Corporatocracy or listen to my new radio show Democracy & Destiny.
“Obama, Back in Public Eye, Offers a Careful Warning of a Democratic Slide”
N.Y. Times
In an appearance with writer Heather Cox Richardson in Connecticut, Obama “pointed to an erosion of traditional values like the rule of law, an independent judiciary, the freedom of the press and the right to protest.” He then went… Continue reading
New Report on Election Security from Brennan Center
The Brennan Center has published Election Certification: How to Strengthen State Frameworks by Lauren Miller Karalunas. The report explains the shift since 2020 in the ways some officials have turned a mandatory formality at the end of vote-counting into… Continue reading
“‘Insensitive, to say the least’: Mike Lee deletes Minnesota posts amid GOP criticism”
Politico
“Utah Sen. Mike Lee, amid widespread outrage, has deleted a pair of social media posts associating the deadly Minnesota shootings last weekend with ‘Marxists’ and the state’s Democratic governor.”
“Republicans Add New Barriers to Oklahoma’s Dizzyingly Fast Process for Citizen Initiatives”
Daniel Nichanian (Bolts Magazine)
Yet another profile of Republican efforts to make direct democracy more difficult in states where it has been used for initiatives–such as raising the minimum wage–that reflect public opinion more closely than the party’s… Continue reading
“GOP budget bill faces nearly 2-to-1 opposition with many unaware: Poll”
Democracy is about more than elections. It is also about policy responsiveness and addressing the wants and needs of regular people.
Washington Post/Washington Post-Ipso Poll:
The partisan breakdown:
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LOTS MORE OF INTEREST . . .
“Bernie Sanders, seven other senators urge Democrats to break with billionaire donors”
Washington Post
Leveraging public concerns about Elon Musk’s role in the 2024 election and in shaping Trump administration policies, Sanders and seven other Democratic Senators are calling on the Democratic Party to break with their own billionaire donors and eschew… Continue reading
“Minnesota senator confronts colleague for ‘terrible’ post on shooting”
Washington Post: Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota seeks out Senator Mike Lee to reproach him for his reckless comments.
“Smith walked briskly across the chamber and out into the hall and asked where Lee had gone. She said she… Continue reading
Former NJ Senator Menendez Starts 11 year Sentence for Corruption
The N.Y. Times has a long profile of Robert Menendez, the former Senator from New Jersey, who is scheduled to start his federal prison sentence for corruption today.