“Top US Election Security Watchdog Forced to Stop Election Security Work”

chicanery, voting technology

Eric Geller for Wired:

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has frozen all of its election security work and is reviewing everything it has done to help state and local officials secure their elections for the past eight years, WIRED has learned. The move represents the first major example of the country’s cyberdefense agency accommodating President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud and online censorship.

In a memo sent Friday to all CISA employees and obtained by WIRED, CISA’s acting director, Bridget Bean, said she was ordering “a review and assessment” of every position at the agency related to election security and countering mis- and disinformation, “as well as every election security and [mis-, dis-, and malinformation] product, activity, service, and program that has been carried out” since the federal government designated election systems as critical infrastructure in 2017.

“CISA will pause all elections security activities until the completion of this review,” Bean added. The agency is also cutting off funding for these activities at the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center, a group funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that has served as a coordinating body for the elections community.

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“Government Workers Cannot Be Fired for Their Political Views”

Supreme Court

John Langford and Erica Newland in The Atlantic:

Political-patronage systems promote corruption at the expense of effective governance, and Americans grew dissatisfied with the cronyism and moblike rule that flowed from the spoils system. Following decades of effort to enact civil-service reform, momentum surged when a disgruntled office-seeker assassinated President James Garfield in 1881. In response, Congress passed the Pendleton Act in 1883 to “regulate and improve the civil service of the United States,” establishing a merit-based system for federal hiring.

Under the current federal civil-service regime, fewer than 4,000 federal employees—including constitutional officers, such as the attorney general and secretary of state, and top agency officials—serve at the president’s pleasure, fireable for political disagreements or pretty much any other reason. The overwhelming majority of the more than 2 million workers who daily serve the American people in the federal civil service are wisely protected from political firings.

That protection flows from something even deeper than the Pendleton Act and other federal statutes. In 1947, the Supreme Court was faced with a First Amendment challenge to the Hatch Act, which limits the extent to which most federal officials can engage in overt political activity while in office. The Court upheld the act but made clear that the First Amendment would prohibit Congress from directly restricting the ability to hold federal offices to members of one party, such as by enacting “a regulation providing that no Republican … shall be appointed to federal office.” Notwithstanding the Court’s guidance, the worst practices of political patronage continued to crop up in state and local governments, forcing the Supreme Court to elaborate the point and put a stop to spoils practices in a series of cases.

The most relevant case to our present-day situation began in 1980, when Republican Illinois Governor Jim Thompson issued an executive order freezing all hiring across state agencies absent express permission from his office. Requests for exceptions became routine, and an agency was set up inside the governor’s office to vet them. Five job-seekers sued, claiming that in practice, the order and exceptions were being used to create a political-patronage system favoring Republicans.

When the case reached the Supreme Court, the Court held that systems of political patronage like the one established by Thompson violate the First Amendment. Quoting one of its first patronage decisions, the Court reaffirmed that “conditioning public employment on the provision of support for the favored political party ‘unquestionably inhibits protected belief and association.’” Doing so “pressures employees to pledge political allegiance to a party with which they prefer not to associate, to work for the election of political candidates they do not support, and to contribute money to be used to further policies with which they do not agree.” It is “tantamount to coerced belief,” something the First Amendment plainly forbids. Nor did it matter that Thompson had not issued a direct order specifying that only Republicans would be hired, because “what the First Amendment precludes the government from commanding directly, it also precludes the government from accomplishing indirectly.”

There is an exception to the First Amendment bar on political hirings and firings. Those officials in legitimate policy making positions can be dismissed for political reasons without offending the Constitution. That’s because in America’s representative democracy, it is important that lawful policy reflects the political will of the voters, as voiced by the executive. But the executive cannot simply label large numbers of officials “policy makers” and render them all fireable at will. Instead, courts must look through labels to the substance of an official’s role and determine whether political alignment is necessary in that role. In any given dispute, the government has the burden of demonstrating that a particular position is in fact a policy-making one before the job-holder may be fired based on raw political allegiance.

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The AfD is the Most Popular Party in Germany Among Those under the Age of 50

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This recent polling data will come as a surprise to many.

Like many of the “new right” parties in Europe, the AfD began as an anti-immigration party. Its support began to rise in direct response to Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to admit over 1 million Syrian refugees. But like many of these other new right parties, it has become a vehicle for the expression of generalized disaffection with government and with the previously dominant two major parties. As this polling data shows, it is now the most popular party among those under 50 in Germany (and one of the two most popular parties for those under 60).

Germany’s mixed-member, proportional representation election system has generated increasingly dysfunctional governments. Its most recent elections led to a government cobbled together out of three parties, which formed a governing coalition that is incoherent from a policy perspective. The internal tensions have led to constant fighting between the parties and an inability to make major policy decisions to address Germany’s major economic and political issues. The government recently collapsed and Germany has been forced to hold new elections.

This illustrates a dynamic I’ve written about over the last decade. Many democratic governments across the West appear incapable to large segments of their societies to deliver effective government on the issues people care most about. That alienation and disaffection leads voters to abandon the mainstream, traditional parties and turn to more extreme options. The proportional representation systems make this dynamic worse; they are more likely to generate multi-party governing coalitions that then find it difficult to address the concerns of citizens. But that’s not to say all is well in the first-past-the-post democracies, like the US and the UK, either. For the data, hat tip to @OwenWntr.

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“Musk-linked group offered $5m for proof of voter fraud – and came up with nothing”

fraudulent fraud squad

Brendan Fischer and Emma Steiner in The Guardian:

In May 2024, a flashy ad went viral on social media warning that “across the country, there are real cases of fraud and abuses of the [election] system that have eroded our trust”. The ad pledged that “whistleblowers” who shared evidence of election fraud “will be rewarded with payment from our $5m fund”.

This reward was courtesy of a just-announced group, the Fair Election Fund, which has deep connections to Elon Musk’s political network, according to materials obtained by Documented.

The Fair Election Fund pledged that “the bulk of the group’s budget will be devoted to paying whistleblowers” for sharing their stories, and that it would launch “aggressive paid and earned media campaigns” that would “highlight these cases”.

It was followed by another ad that ran in swing states during the Olympics and told viewers “you could be eligible for compensation” for sharing evidence of election fraud.

Despite the group’s high-profile, deep-pocketed backers and lucrative bounty offers, it never revealed any evidence of voter or election fraud. Instead, the group took a series of unrelated detours into tangential areas like third-party ballot access, and its effort to uncover fraud reaffirmed what numerous studies, court rulings and bipartisan investigations have concluded: voter fraud is extremely rare.

The lack of evidence has not stopped Republicans in Congress and state legislatures from continuing to push restrictive voting laws aimed at addressing this phantom threat. Meanwhile, Musk is claiming that “fraud” justifies his efforts to slash government operations, but similarly has not revealed much evidence.

The Fair Election Fund has now gone radio silent. Sitemap data shows that the website has not been updated since October, and the X/Twitter account for the group has not posted since November. The group’s spokesperson, former representative Doug Collins, became Trump’s veterans affairs secretary, and is now also leading the office of government ethics….

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“A Supreme Court Race May Shuffle the Rules of Wisconsin’s Democracy, Again”

judicial elections

Bolts:

But voting rights advocates are closely watching the election as well. A host of issues related to voter access—the use of drop boxes, accommodations for disabled voters, and voter ID rules, to name a few—may also ride on this court’s composition. 

“The latest makeup of the court has been a major pro for access to democracy,” said Sam Liebert, a former Wisconsin election clerk who now directs the state chapter of the pro-voter access group All Voting is Local. “It’s so important that we have a supreme court that recognizes that the right to vote is a right.”

Conservatives have also drummed up attention to the April contest’s importance for elections policy. “Very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!” Elon Musk posted on X in January, echoing the right’s unfounded claims that Wisconsin elections are fraught with fraud. 

“Elon Musk highlighted a critical issue in this race: election integrity,” Schimel told a conservative radio host. 

Schimel built a record of controversial actions in the name of “election integrity” when he served as attorney general. In 2016, he dispatched state Department of Justice employees to monitor polling sites, mostly in heavily Democratic areas—a move Democrats and voting rights advocates criticized as an intimidation tactic against communities likely to oppose Trump. 

Crawford, meanwhile, says she supports making it easy to vote. “The bottom line is that we need to make sure that eligible voters are able to exercise their right to vote without having to jump through a lot of unnecessary hoops,” she told Bolts.

She added that she is generally wary of policies that purport to make elections more secure but that mainly just hamper voters: “I think it is really important, obviously, that we have fair elections in Wisconsin, and that includes elections that are safe and secure, but also elections where everyone who is eligible to vote can exercise that right and get their ballots cast,” she said. “There needs to be a balance there and the law needs to be used to protect both aspects of elections.”

There’s currently no case pending in front of Wisconsin’s supreme court concerning the voter ID requirement, though Schimel’s campaign has played it up as a live issue. Some prominent supporters have also tied the race to false claims that drop boxes for mail ballots are a vehicle for voter fraud, arguing that Wisconsin’s ability to limit voting by drop box depends on a Schimel victory.

That may be true: In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued a 4-3 decision that let Wisconsinites deposit their mail ballots at drop boxes. That ruling reversed a 2022 ruling that had banned drop boxes in that year’s midterms. Protasiewicz’s victory and the court’s flip in 2023 made the difference between those two cases, and observers think a conservative majority could revisit the issue ahead of 2026 if the court flips again this year.

The highest-profile voting issue this court handles may be redistricting, which dominated the 2023 race Protasiewicz won, and which led the GOP to threaten to impeach her. The court struck down the previous legislative maps as being non-contiguous, and kicked the matter to lawmakers who, fearing potential court-ordered maps friendly to Democrats, ended up adopting fairer statehouse maps in 2024 that paved the way for Democratic gains amid much more competitive Wisconsin elections last fall. Democrats now see an actual chance at winning legislative control in 2026. …

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