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….
But in its decision, the court did something unexpected. In addition to crediting the government’s national-security arguments, it highlighted an important tension within pro-free-expression arguments: the right to access and speak on the platform of one’s choosing versus the right to have platforms free from foreign manipulation and control. The court explained:
In this case, a foreign government threatens to distort free speech on an important medium of communication. Using its hybrid commercial strategy, the [People’s Republic of China] has positioned itself to manipulate public discourse on TikTok in order to serve its own ends. The PRC’s ability to do so is at odds with free speech fundamentals. Here the Congress, as the Executive proposed, acted to end the PRC’s ability to control TikTok. Understood in that way, the Act actually vindicates the values that undergird the First Amendment.
This anti-distortion rationale for government speech regulation used to be central to the First Amendment, especially in campaign-finance cases, until the Supreme Court rejected it when striking down corporate campaign-contribution limits inCitizens United v. FEC.Recently, in last term’sMoody v. NetChoice, the Court criticized state laws limiting social-media content moderation by invoking an (in)famous 1970s precedent that the government cannot “restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others.”
But the anti-distortion rationale lives on in national-security cases. For example, only a year after Citizens United, the Supreme Court affirmed a decision by then–D.C. Circuit Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh that foreigners have no First Amendment right to contribute to U.S. elections.
The anti-distortion argument also figured in the concurring opinion by Sri Srinivasan, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, which focused on the long history of legislation restricting foreign ownership of key sectors of the U.S. economy, including radio, broadcast TV, and cellular networks. These restrictions were motivated by the same legitimate concerns as the TikTok law: the possibility for covert manipulation of the American information environment. The emphasis here is on covert because, as Srinivasan pointed out, “counterspeech”—responding to objectionable speech with more speech—“is elusive in response to covert (and thus presumably undetected) manipulation of a social media platform.”
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York is on a mission in President Biden’s final days in office. She wants to convince him that he can rescue his legacy by adding the century-old Equal Rights Amendment, which would explicitly guarantee sex equality, to the Constitution as a way to protect abortion rights in post-Roe America.
He could do it all, she contends, with one phone call.
Both houses of Congress approved the amendment in 1972, but it was not ratified by the states in time to be added to the Constitution. Ms. Gillibrand has been pushing a legal theory that the deadline for ratification is irrelevant and unconstitutional. All that remains, she argues, is for Mr. Biden to direct the national archivist, who is responsible for the certification and publication of constitutional amendments, to publish the E.R.A. as the 28th Amendment.
The move would almost certainly invite a legal challenge that would land in the Supreme Court. But Ms. Gillibrand wants Mr. Biden to use his presidential power while he still has it to force the issue, effectively daring Republicans to wage a legal battle to take away equal rights for women….
Thousands of blank ballots were cast in the Spafford and East Syracuse justice races, so the winners ended up being two men who each got fewer than 20 write-in votes.
There were no official candidates on the ballots for justice in the village of East Syracuse and the town of Spafford. Justices are local judges who decide traffic tickets and violations, criminal misdemeanors and some civil cases in local courts.
Last week, the Onondaga County Board of Elections hand counted more than 1,000ballots in the two races. Most of the ballots were blank. The election was held in November but because winning candidates received fewer than 20 ballots each, the law requires the board had to recount the ballots by hand.
A total of 30 ballots had write-in choices in Spafford and 26 in East Syracuse.
In Spafford, Jeffrey Prego was declared the winner on Monday night with 17 votes, 57% of the 30 votes cast, according to the board of elections website. The Spafford race had 1,064 blank ballots….
More than two dozen F.B.I. informants were in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, but contrary to widespread conspiracy theories, bureau officials did not order anyone to break the law as a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol that day, according to a report by a Justice Department watchdog released on Thursday.
After a nearly four-year investigation, the department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, also determined that the F.B.I. had not stationed any undercover agents in the crowd that gathered at the Capitol to disrupt the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory over Donald J. Trump in the 2020 election.
In his nearly 90-page report, Mr. Horowitz said the bureau “undertook significant efforts to identify domestic terrorism subjects” who planned to travel to the Washington area on Jan. 6. But he criticized its leaders for failing to recognize the potential dangers posed by the rioters before they descended on the city.
Moreover, he specifically chided the F.B.I.’s top ranks for failing to follow through on their promise to canvass their field offices for intelligence on potential threats after the 2020 election.
Referring to the informants, Mr. Horowitz wrote that both the F.B.I.’s central headquarters and its Washington field office “could have taken an additional step to leverage an intelligence resource that is unique to the F.B.I.” that might have mitigated the violence, but did not.
AJC:
Tucked in a jagged corner on the Georgia House map, Donna Harris and her neighbors voted last month for the candidates they thought could be their next representative.
It now appears they cast ballots in the wrong state House … Continue reading
WSJ:Amazon.com is planning a $1 million donation to President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural fund, as founder Jeff Bezos and other tech leaders shore up ties with the incoming administration.
The donation is being prepared as Bezos, Amazon’s … Continue reading
FairVote:
A new nationwide poll from FairVote and Lake Research Partners surveyed Americans who voted for third-party and independent candidates for president. Key findings include:
87% of third-party voters say they are aware of ranked choice voting (RCV). 86%… Continue reading
I am very pleased to welcome to ELB Book Corner several contributors to The Oxford Handbook of American Election Law (Eugene D. Mazo ed. 2024). The 30% discount code for ELB readers is ALAUTHC4. The eighth and final contribution is… Continue reading
Politico:
Donald Trump’s pick to lead the civil rights division at the Department of Justice built a national profile as the ultimate San Francisco contrarian — representing conservative college students at UC Berkeley, a Google engineer fired for opposing diversity… Continue reading
