In the first television interviews of his post-presidency, Donald Trump repeated his false claims that the election was stolen from him 10 times — each instance unprompted and unchallenged.
Trump emerged this week for interviews with Fox News Channel, Newsmax and One America News Network tied to the death of Rush Limbaugh.
Each network actively appeals to Trump’s base conservative audience. And the way the interviews were conducted illustrates how difficult it may be to change the minds of supporters who believe the former president’s unfounded narrative.
Nearly a month after he left office, Trump drove his point home on each network:
A great choice for the FPPC. Congrats Abby!
We asked our experts to assess 16 prominent reform proposals that aim to improve the quality of American democracy. Many of the proposals are drawn from the Our Common Purpose project that was coordinated by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Each expert participant was asked to rate eight randomly drawn proposals. The full set of statements describing each reform is in the Appendix. The figure below shows expert support and opposition for each proposal.
Experts overwhelmingly support the proposed reforms. Of the 16 we tested, majorities of our expert respondents strongly supported 9 and strongly or moderately supported 15. The only proposal that did not garner majority support was compulsory voting.
The proposals fall into distinct categories. The largest group aims to increase voter participation, particularly among traditionally marginalized groups. Increasing flexibility on when and how ballots can be cast (95% support), guaranteeing suffrage rights to ex-felons (91%), same-day registration (91%), moving Election Day to a national holiday (87%), and pre-registering young voters (85%) all attracted support from more than four in five experts. By contrast, compulsory voting was supported by only 29% of experts, perhaps reflecting discomfort with the manner by which it tries to increase participation as well as recent research on the range of unintended consequences it can generate, including disillusionment with democracy itself.
Another group of proposals seeks to reduce the influence of large individual and corporate campaign donors in American elections. These include increased transparency on the source of donations, providing public campaign funding, and amending the Constitution to impose greater restrictions on private spending. All these garner strong support among the experts (98%, 87%, and 88%, respectively).
A third set of proposals focuses on the rules for converting voter support into representation. At the top of this list is requiring states to establish non-partisan redistricting commissions to reduce partisan gerrymandering (95% support). Next, at 84%, is support for switching to a system in which the president is elected by direct popular vote instead of by the Electoral College.6 Also in this category are two electoral reforms, ranked-choice voting (78% support) and eliminating the requirement for Members of Congress to be elected from single-member districts (73%), both of which aim to open paths to electoral success for candidates other than those who can prevail in either Democratic or Republican primary contests.
In turn, enlarging the House of Representatives (64%) would increase the ratio of representatives to citizens, allowing for a more fine-grained mapping of representatives’ characteristics onto constituent preferences.
The last two proposals focus on the conduct of governance rather than elections. The first would limit the period for which federal judges could serve on the Supreme Court to 18 years (77% support), guaranteeing a vacancy on the Court every two years. This proposal seeks to reduce the stakes for high court appointments and thereby cool the attendant politics both during elections and in the day-to-day operation of the Senate. The next would eliminate the 60-vote requirement to suspend debate in the Senate, eliminating the filibuster and effectively returning the chamber to majority rule (74%). …
Threats to democracy
To further unpack the significance of these events, we asked experts to rate the severity of the threat they posed to democracy. Unsurprisingly, more than 90% of experts viewed the items that scored highest across the (ab)normality-and-importance dimensions as either a moderate, serious, or grave threat.
One item that our experts rated as abnormal was also one that few viewed as posing much of a threat to democracy: the House impeaching President Donald Trump for a second time. In total, 93% of our academic experts rated the two impeachments themselves as presenting little or no threat to U.S. democracy (7% sensed a moderate threat; none said it was a serious or grave threat). In the wake of Trump’s second acquittal, some prominent Republicans have voiced a different perspective, predicting that the impeachments would create a spiral of partisan retribution. For instance, Senator Lindsey Graham suggested that Vice-President Kamala Harris could be impeached if Republicans retake the House of Representatives for having expressed support for Black Lives Matter protesters in summer 2020.
Republican state legislators and secretaries of state on Wednesday announced the creation of a commission that will look at election laws amid a push to curb expanded access to voting.
The announcement from the Republican State Leadership Committee comes as GOP state lawmakers in key battlegrounds are now racing to roll back provisions that expanded access to voting, citing constituent concerns about voting integrity after the election was marred by baseless allegations of voter fraud pushed by former President Donald Trump and other GOP officials. Those claims culminated in the deadly January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.
The commission said in a statement that the goal is “to restore the American people’s confidence in the integrity of their free and fair elections” by “making it easier to vote and harder to cheat.”
Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill and Michigan state Sen. Ruth Johnson are leading the commission, which will work alongside state legislators as they push to make changes to election laws.
The narrow window in which legal disputes may be resolved following a presidential election weighs heavily in favor of applying the “capable of repetition” doctrine to resolve issues capable of reoccurring. Otherwise, non-legislative state actors may be emboldened in future presidential elections to make even more last-minute changes to state election laws contrary to the Electors Clause than occurred in this year’s election.
Second, Petitioner clearly satisfies the element that there is a reasonable expectation he may in the future be subject to the same action. There is no legal impediment to him running for re-election.4 National media and political pundits have highlighted Petitioner as a potential presidential candidate in 2024 and report that he would be the GOP frontrunner should he run again. This reporting is objectively based upon polling data and Petitioner’s access to the financial resources needed to run. 5 Therefore, Petitioner easily satisfies the second element of the capable of repetition standard.
Significantly, his petition raises important issues capable of repetition which could be critical in a subsequent presidential election….
Footnote 5 reads:
See, e.g., “Inauguration Day isn’t the end of the Trump era. It’s just the beginning.” USA Today, January 17, 2021 (“President Donald Trump would enjoy an almost certain early favorite status in an open 2024 Republican primary”), available at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/01/17/paleologos-polltrump-era-just-getting-started/4196345001/; “It’s still Trump’s party,” Axios, January 14, 2020 (“57% of Republicans said Trump should be the 2024 GOP candidate . . .[t]hat’s a formidable base for Trump, who also controls the $150 million+ he has raised for his super PAC since the election”) available at: https://www.axios.com/trump-republicans-mpeachment-support-10c11b10-2149-406fab6a-4a94db8d1226.html.
Allegheny County’s administration of the November 2020 election suffered from inconsistent poll worker training and public communication, among other errors, a new report showed. The county has not outlined plans to address the problems.
“By putting an emphasis on systems, we wanted to make the county implicitly and explicitly more accountable,” said Juliet Zavon, the report’s primary author. “What is the level of competency required of poll workers in this county?”
The report was produced by the Elections Task Force, which Zavon described as an independent group of local residents with expertise in cybersecurity and election administration. The document describes an antiquated poll worker management system, a lack of training for many poll workers and insufficient means for the public to ask questions and learn about voting.
In the second half of 2020, Donald Trump’s reelection campaign shelled out seven figures to an influencer marketing business linked to his White House’s former chief digital officer.
Why it matters: The payments bought promotion from prominent conservative brands and social media personalities, showing how campaigns are exploring new, often more opaque digital advertising channels as large social media companies crack down on political ads.
What’s new: Filings with the Federal Election Commission show the Trump campaign paid nearly $1.8 million during the second half of 2020 to Legendary Campaigns LLC for “online advertising.”
You can watch the video here.
A group of Democratic senators sent President Biden a letter Wednesday urging him to use his executive powers to expand voting-rights protections and step up enforcement of campaign-finance violations as part of an effort to turn the page on what they say was former president Donald Trump’s disregard for these priorities.
At least 20 senators, led by Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), asked Biden to take nearly a dozen steps to improve ballot access and address bad actors, including greater efforts to help eligible Americans to register to vote and beefed-up policing of election-related crimes by the Department of Justice, the Federal Election Commission and the Internal Revenue Service.
“In some ways, the 2020 election showed the resiliency of our democracy,” the senators wrote in a letter to be sent to Biden on Wednesday, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. “Still, we saw widespread voter suppression strategies, especially targeting communities of color, and record levels of dark money spent to unduly influence voters.”…
The senators’ specific proposals include: expanding protections under the Voting Rights Act to curtail voter suppression by state and local governments; pushing the Justice Department and FEC to give higher priority to prosecuting voting-rights and campaign-finance violations; expanding ballot access for incarcerated voters and those with disabilities; requiring states to do more to assist with voter registration, particularly among Native Americans, naturalized citizens, veterans and the elderly; strengthening sanctions against foreign actors that interfere in U.S. elections; and reinstating disclosure requirements to the IRS for donors to nonprofits that do issue advocacy and are known as 501(c)(4)s
The siege of Iowa and New Hampshire has begun.
The two states with privileged places on the presidential primary calendar are finding their roles more threatened than ever before — most recently in the form of a bill introduced in Nevada this week to move that state’s nominating contest to the front of the line in 2024.
On its own, the Nevada encroachment would mean little. For years, Iowa and New Hampshire have successfully defended their one-two position from states eager to jump ahead. But the combination of Iowa’s botched 2020 caucus and increasing diversity in the Democratic Party’s ranks has made the whiteness of Iowa and New Hampshire all the more conspicuous, putting the two states on their heels and throwing the 2024 calendar into turmoil.“There’s no reason in the world that those states should go forward so early, because they’re not representative of what 90 percent of the country’s all about,” said former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat who remains influential in party politics. “America looks different than it did 50 years ago, when these traditions were put in place, and the Democratic electorate looks really different.”
He added, “It’s no longer palatable, as far as I’m concerned, for those states to take precedence over states like South Carolina and Nevada.”
Nearly a quarter of former president Donald Trump’s 6,081 Facebook posts last year contained extremist rhetoric or misinformation about the coronavirus, the election or his critics, according to a new analysis by the left-leaning group Media Matters for America.
The analysis found that Facebook did effectively nothing to limit or block the vast majority of his problematic posts, which together were shared and liked more than 927 million times, according to the group, which based its analysis on data from Facebook-owned analytics tool CrowdTangle.
The research demonstrates in stark numbers just how many times Trump came up to the line of Facebook’s rules — if not crossed them — but was given a pass by the company.
Facebook appended labels to 506 of Trump’s 1,443 problematic posts, mostly with a generic label, such as “See Election Results,” which provided links to authoritative information but did not provide users with any indication of whether the post was false or misleading. Of the 506, just one was labeled false and another was labeled partly false, while the rest received more generic labels, Media Matters said.
In all of 2020, The Washington Post counted the removal by Facebook of just seven posts by Trump and his campaign, four of which were for copyright-related issues. Trump and his campaign shared an account.
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone pointed out that not all forms of misinformation related to the election or covid-19 were banned by the company, and that Facebook removed Trump’s posts in the handful of instances where executives found that they violated the social network’s policies. In instances when Trump and others claimed election fraud, for example, the company chose to affix a label directing people to information about the election and voting methods instead of removing the content.
New from Gregory Huber, Marc Meredith, Michael Morse, and Katie Steele, in Science Advances. Abstract:
Administrative records are increasingly used to identify registered voters who may have moved, with potential movers then sent postcards asking them to confirm their address of registration. It is important to understand how often these registrants did not move, and how often such an error is not corrected by the postcard confirmation process, because uncorrected errors make it more difficult for a registrant to subsequently vote. While federal privacy protections generally prevent researchers from observing the data necessary to estimate these quantities, we are able to study this process in Wisconsin because special poll books, available via public records requests, listed those registrants who were identified as potential movers and did not respond to a subsequent postcard. At least 4% of these registrants cast a ballot at their address of registration, with minority registrants twice as likely as white registrants to do so.
New from the Covid States Project:
Two-thirds of respondents believe that the election was conducted fairly, while one-third believed that it was not. However, this aggregate pattern obscures enormous partisan gaps. Fully 96% of Democrats reported that the election had been conducted fairly, compared with only 30% of Republicans (see Figure 1).
Overall, 59% disagree and 29% agree with the statement, “If votes were fairly counted, Donald Trump would have won the 2020 election.” Among partisans, however, 89% of Democrats disagree, versus only 18% of Republicans and 65% of Republicans agree (see Figure 2).,,,
Interestingly, while most respondents overall felt the elections were conducted fairly, many nonetheless voiced a variety of concerns about specific election integrity issues. Such concerns arose among all partisan groups, but Democrats and Republicans emphasized quite different issues (see Figure 3). Majorities of Democrats and Republicans were worried about measures that would reduce voting (voter suppression and intimidation), with Democrats somewhat more concerned (by 7-8 points). Democrats and Republicans were about equally concerned regarding foreign country interference (62% vs 61%). The big differences between Democrats and Republicans emerged with regard to the integrity of the votes that were cast. Republicans were much more worried than Democrats about mail-in voter fraud (80% vs. 32%), illegal votes from non-citizens (79% vs. 33%), and inaccurate or biased vote counts (79% vs 36%).
538:
It was the nightmare scenario for the 2020 election: With so many more people than usual casting absentee ballots, observers feared that a significant share of ballots would be rejected for not following proper procedure. One study, for instance, showed that first-time mail voters, who are less familiar with the rules of absentee voting, were up to three times more likely to have their votes rejected, and at least 550,000 absentee ballots went uncounted during last spring and summer’s heavily vote-by-mail primary elections.
But those fears did not come to pass. According to data collected by FiveThirtyEight from state election offices, not only did absentee-ballot rejection rates not rise, but rejected ballots were actually less of a problem than they were in 2016.
From the 27 states, plus Washington, D.C., where we were able to obtain data, only 297,347 out of 47,999,299 absentee ballots cast in the 2020 general election were rejected — a rejection rate of 0.6 percent. And in 20 of the 23 jurisdictions that provided data for the last two presidential elections, the 2020 rejection rate was lower than 2016’s. (Data is not yet available in the remaining states but will eventually be released as part of the 2020 Election Administration and Voting Survey.)…
One reason for this is obvious: Voters heeded election officials’ exhortations to send back their absentee ballots as early as possible. Ubiquitous reminders in the media and saturation coverage of problems at the U.S. Postal Service likely helped, too. But states by and large also proactively changed their election policies to prevent ballots from getting tossed due to lateness. Several states extended their deadlines so that ballots could arrive after Election Day (as long as they were properly postmarked), including Massachusetts. Michelle Tassinari, the director of the commonwealth’s Elections Division, told FiveThirtyEight that this was a big reason for the Bay State’s improvement.
Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser with the Democracy Fund, also applauded states for giving voters ways to return their ballots other than mailing them back (which, of course, can take several days). “Those return options made the difference in many ballots not coming back late.” Indeed, according to preliminary findings from the Survey of the Performance of American Elections, 45 percent of mail ballots were dropped off in person in 2020, up from 29 percent in 2016. In large part, this was because of increased access to ballot drop boxes. At least 38 states plus Washington, D.C., offered drop boxes in the 2020 general election, up from about 13 that did so before 2020. According to Tassinari, this was another secret to Massachusetts’s success. “We encouraged every city and town to get drop boxes, and some municipalities even had multiple drop boxes,” she said. “For instance, the City of Worcester had them in all the fire stations.”
Some states also implemented reforms to speed up the USPS’s ability to process ballots. “More states used intelligent mail bar codes [on their ballot envelopes] that allowed the postal service to know where ballots were and make sure they were processed in a timely manner,” explained Patrick. Massachusetts was one of those states: Election officials applied for 351 separate postal permits for special envelopes with bar codes pre-addressed to the 351 city and town clerks across the commonwealth — “a difficult, exhausting process,” Tassinari told us, but one that was worth it in the end. Instead of having to be hand-stamped, Tassinari explained, the envelopes could be processed automatically, leading to faster delivery.
Ballot lateness wasn’t the only problem that got better in 2020. Some states also cut into the second-most common reason absentee ballots tend to get rejected: voter error, such as a missing or invalid signature on the ballot envelope. For example, 15 states plus Washington, D.C., began offering voters the ability to “cure,” or fix mistakes on, their absentee ballots, according to Amber McReynolds and Grace Beyer of the National Vote at Home Institute. (That’s on top of the 17 states that already allowed ballot-curing before 2020.) State data suggests that this prevented thousands of ballots from being rejected. In Kentucky, which temporarily changed its election laws last year to allow ballot curing, 2,933 ballots were cured, leaving only 1,197 that were rejected. In Georgia, a state that had a cure process previously, 2,777 ballots were cured, cutting the number of ballots that were eventually rejected to 7,604.
Tom Edsall in the NYT:
A decade ago, the consensus was that the digital revolution would give effective voice to millions of previously unheard citizens. Now, in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, the consensus has shifted to anxiety that online behemoths like Twitter, Google, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook have created a crisis of knowledge — confounding what is true and what is untrue — eroding the foundations of democracy.
These worries have intensified in response to the violence of Jan. 6, and the widespread acceptance among Republican voters of the conspicuously false claim that Democrats stole the election.
Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford, summarized the dilemma in his 2019 report, “The internet’s Challenge to Democracy: Framing the Problem and Assessing Reforms,” pointing out that in a matter of just a few years
the widely shared utopian vision of the internet’s impact on governance has turned decidedly pessimistic. The original promise of digital technologies was unapologetically democratic: empowering the voiceless, breaking down borders to build cross-national communities, and eliminating elite referees who restricted political discourse.
Since then, Persily continued:
That promise has been replaced by concern that the most democratic features of the internet are, in fact, endangering democracy itself. Democracies pay a price for internet freedom, under this view, in the form of disinformation, hate speech, incitement, and foreign interference in elections.
Writing separately in an email, Persily argued that
Twitter and Facebook allowed Trump both to get around legacy intermediaries and to manipulate them by setting their agenda. They also provided environments (such as Facebook groups) that have proven conducive to radicalization and mobilization.
Smart Steve Mazie in The Economist:
The First Amendment grants plenty of room for robust debate; plaintiffs seeking damages for defamatory statements face an appropriately steep climb. On the rare occasions when libel or slander claims stick, the defamed entity is typically the only compensated party. These voting-technology suits may offer a wider public benefit: curbing the spread of disinformation that destabilises democracy itself.
New report from R Street:
The United States has endured the most contentious post-election period in modern history, as former President Donald Trump challenged the results of an election that President Joe Biden won by 7 million votes nationwide—albeit by slim majorities in several swing states (Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin) that propelled him to a 306-to-232 Electoral College victory.
The former president and his supporters filed no fewer than 61 lawsuits challenging various aspects of the vote, attempted to sway legislatures to discard certified electoral votes and even attempted to convince Congress (and the vice president) to refuse to certify some states’ electors. The Trump team succeeded only in one lawsuit involving a negligible number of Pennsylvania votes. Nevertheless, this sustained campaign to overturn the election results has had a notable and deleterious effect on public trust in the nation’s election system.
The latest polls found that more than three-quarters of Republican voters did not trust the final vote outcome. Trump’s allegations were wide-ranging and often farfetched. Despite the lack of evidence, some election skeptics seem to place more faith in unfounded social-media assertions than in the decisions made by state election officials, the courts and even the federal Department of Justice, which found no serious instances of election fraud. Now, numerous Republicans at the national and state levels are proposing a variety of post-election voting reforms, seemingly in response to former President Trump’s unsubstantiated postelection claims of rampant voter fraud. While some proposed reforms merit serious deliberation, efforts to repeal no-excuse absentee voting and ban ballot drop boxes will do little—if anything—to improve election integrity and deserve more scrutiny.
After Republicans seeking to recall California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said they had reached the number of signatures necessary to trigger a special election, one conservative influencer falsely claimed that the organizers have faced hurdles that voters in November’s election did not.
“So California is requiring signature verification for Gavin Newsom’s recall, but didn’t require it for the mail in ballots. How strange,” said actor Kevin Sorbo, who starred as “Hercules” in a TV series about the mythological hero, in a tweet sent to hundreds of thousands of followers.
A screenshot of Kevin Sorbo’s tweet making false claims about California’s election laws.
In fact, California did require signature verification for mail-in ballots for the 2020 election, as PolitiFact reported in the months leading up to Election Day. Several election officials, experts, journalists and fact-checkers debunked Sorbo’s Feb. 15 tweet soon after it was posted.
But the tweet still circulated widely, picking up thousands of retweets and likes. It was further amplified on the platform by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Rudy Giuliani.
This Ash Center event looks great:
Date:
Thursday, February 18, 2021, 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Location:
Virtual event, registration required
The 2020 elections hinged, in dramatic ways, on widely varying state laws and state election procedures. Major changes were made in light of the pandemic, to expand options for mail-in and early voting and to Election Day itself. These changes engendered strong support and strong opposition, and were one reason for the record turnout of 160 million voters. Now, state legislatures are in session all around the country. Will the changes adopted in 2020 be made permanent? Will voting options be expanded further? Or will states seek to roll back voting opportunities as a result? Join us for a discussion with leading state election experts and state legislators to see where things stand, and where they might go.
Panelists include:
- Dale Ho, Director of the Voting Rights Project, ACLU
- Nan Grogan Orrock, State Senator, Georgia
- Wendy Underhill, Director of Elections and Redistricting, National Conference of State Legislatures
- Miles Rapoport (Moderator), Senior Practice Fellow of American Democracy, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation
The Senate impeachment trial has provided further proof of what can no longer be denied: Former president Donald Trump poses an existential threat to American democracy. The harrowing evidence shows that Trump incited and supported the violent insurrection at the Capitol that aimed to prevent the peaceful transition of power and resulted, tragically, in multiple deaths. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) confirmed these facts in his statement following the Senate vote.
Such anti-democratic conduct should disqualify Trump from ever holding future public office. While conviction by the Senate would have been the best and quickest route to disqualification, because that failed, Congress can — and must — pursue an alternative path to protecting our republic from a future Trump presidency: Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
Partisan disinformation to undermine 2020’s presidential election shadowed every step of the voting process last year but took an unprecedented turn when the earliest false claims morphed into intricate conspiracies as Election Day passed and President Trump worked to subvert the results, according to two of the nation’s top experts tracking the election propaganda.
At the general election’s outset, as states wrapped up their primaries and urged voters to use mailed-out ballots in response to the pandemic, false claims began surfacing online—in tweets, social media posts, text messages, reports on websites, videos and memes—targeting the stage in the electoral process that was before voters. These attacks on the nuts and bolts of voting, from registration to the steps to obtain and cast a ballot, began as “claims of hacking and voter fraud… [that] honed [in] on specific events,” said Matt Masterson, who helped lead the Department of Homeland Security’s election security team.
“This is a lot of what we talked about with you at CISA [the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] in the lead-up [to Election Day], anticipating that were there were problems experienced, and then in the contested elections, those would be used to blow out of proportion or lie about what was actually taking place,” Masterson said, speaking to the nation’s state election directors in early February at a winter 2021 conference.
But as November 3’s Election Day approached and the vote-counting continued afterward in presidential battleground states, Masterson and a handful of teams working inside and outside of government to trace and track disinformation, and to urge online platforms and sources to curb their false content, saw an unexpected development. The narrowly focused threads that attacked earlier steps in the process of running elections swapped out purported villains and protagonists and became a full-blown conspiratorial tapestry attacking the results.
“They all got combined into one big narrative… one large lie to try to undermine confidence in the election,” said Masterson, whose presentation at the National Association of State Election Directors‘ (NASED) meeting traced this evolution.
“Misinformation is the frontier in election security and election integrity,” said Aaron Wilson, senior director for election security at the Center for Internet Security, which tracked 209 cases of misleading or deliberately false attacks on voting, at the same NASED forum….
Masterson’s and Wilson’s presentations were some of the most detailed analyses yet tracing the evolution of propagandistic attacks on 2020’s voting process and election administration. The Stanford Internet Observatory, where Masterson is a fellow, will release a full report—including naming the biggest purveyors of 2020 election disinformation, both the platforms and their highest-volume users—later this winter.
The Department has now concluded that, although it does not disagree with the conclusion in that brief that neither Arizona measure violates Section 2’s results test, the Department does not adhere to the framework for application of Section 2 in vote-denial cases set forth in the brief. In light of the approaching oral argument, however, the United States does not seek to make a further substantive submission in these cases. Instead, we have concluded that the most appropriate course under the circumstances is to notify the Court that the previously filed brief does not represent the current views of the United States.
Oral argument is March 2.
I have written an analysis of the case that will appear soon SCOTUSBlog.
Republican lawmakers in battleground states are rushing to enact stricter voting laws that Democrats worry could dampen Black and Hispanic turnout, but the moves could end up backfiring because of the changing face of the GOP coalition.
The flurry of legislation includes attempts to impose voter ID requirements and roll back pandemic-related expansion to mail-in access, steps that may inadvertently limit the participation of many of the older, rural and blue-collar voters that Republicans now depend on.
State legislatures across the country are considering more than a hundred bills that would increase voter ID requirements, tighten no-excuse vote-by-mail, and ban ballot drop boxes, among other changes.
That’s more than three times the number of bills to restrict voting that had been filed by this time last year, according to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice.
This flood of legislation comes despite research showing that voter ID laws passed over the last decade not only don’t hamper minority turnout, but may even boost it by motivating angry Democrats and spurring stronger get-out-the-vote efforts.
Nick Stephanopoulos, a Harvard professor who studies voting laws, said that the suburban, college-educated voters moving toward the Democratic Party are the least likely to be affected by new restrictions, since they have the resources to overcome them and tend to be regular voters already.
G.O.P. legislators, dozens of whom supported overturning the state’s election results to aid former President Donald J. Trump, are moving to change the entire way that judges are selected in Pennsylvania, in a gambit that could tip the scales of the judiciary to favor their party, or at least elect judges more inclined to embrace Republican election challenges.
The proposal would replace the current system of statewide elections for judges with judicial districts drawn by the Republican-controlled legislature. Those districts could empower rural, predominantly conservative areas and particularly rewire the State Supreme Court, which has a 5-to-2 Democratic lean.
Democrats are now mobilizing to fight the effort, calling it a thinly veiled attempt at creating a new level of gerrymandering — an escalation of the decades-old practice of drawing congressional and state legislative districts to ensure that political power remains in one party’s hands. Democrats are marshaling grass-roots opposition, holding regular town hall events conducted over Zoom, and planning social media campaigns and call-in days to legislators, as well as an enormous voter education campaign. One group, Why Courts Matter Pennsylvania, has cut a two-minute infomercial.
Republicans in Pennsylvania have historically used gerrymandering to maintain their majority in the legislature, despite Democratic victories in statewide elections. Republicans have controlled the State House of Representatives since 2011 and the State Senate since 1993.
Current schedules for the legislature make it unlikely the Republicans could marshal their majorities in the House and Senate to pass the bill by Wednesday and put the proposal before voters on the ballot in May. Passing the bill after that date would set up a new and lengthy political war for November in this fiercely contested state.
Republicans have some history on their side: Pennsylvania voters tend to approve ballot measures.
“You should be very suspicious when you see a legislature who has been thwarted by a Supreme Court in its unconstitutional attempts to rig the democratic process then trying to rig the composition of that Supreme Court,” said Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
NYT:
The N.A.A.C.P. on Tuesday morning filed a federal lawsuit against former President Donald J. Trump and his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, claiming that they violated a 19th century statute when they tried to prevent the certification of the election on Jan. 6.
The civil rights organization brought the suit on behalf of Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi. Other Democrats in Congress — including Representatives Hank Johnson of Georgia and Bonnie Watson Coleman of New Jersey — are expected to join as plaintiffs in the coming weeks, according to the N.A.A.C.P.
The lawsuit contends that Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani violated the Ku Klux Klan Act, an 1871 statute that includes protections against violent conspiracies that interfered with Congress’s constitutional duties; the suit also names the Proud Boys, the far-right nationalist group, and the Oath Keepers militia group. The legal action accuses Mr. Trump, Mr. Giuliani and the two groups of conspiring to incite a violent riot at the Capitol, with the goal of preventing Congress from certifying the election.
The suit is the latest legal problem for Mr. Trump: New York prosecutors are investigating his financial dealings; New York’s attorney general is pursuing a civil investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s company misstated assets to get bank loans and tax benefits; and a Georgia district attorney is examining his election interference effort there.
Nicholas Riccardi for AP:
In the name of fairness, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his Democratic allies once welcomed the creation of a nonpartisan redistricting commission that would redraw congressional maps free of political influence and avoid contorted gerrymandering.
But now that the commission is stepping up its work, New York Democrats seem to be having second thoughts. The state may lose House seats and, under the old rules, Democrats would have had the power to redraw lines in their favor.
Some Democrats want to make it easier to overrule the commission.
As the once-a-decade redistricting conflicts heat up across the country, both Republicans and Democrats are wrestling with how far to press their advantage in a fight as consequential as any election. For Republicans that means building on the success of 10 years ago — even as some population and political trends work against them. For Democrats, it’s a test of their commitment to the changes they’ve long argued are needed to create a level playing field.
Looking forward to doing this Zoom event with Ron Collins on Wednesday, Feb. 17, at 5 pm ET/2 pm PT. RSVP required
WaPo offers another True the Vote/Jim Bopp/Eshelman lawsuit dive.
Stephanie Gomez oped in the Houston Chronicle:
Gov. Greg Abbott revealed his priorities for the 2021 Texas Legislative session, designating “election integrity” as an emergency item that lawmakers can vote on within the first 60 days of session, potentially bypassing the due deliberation and public input this issue deserves. House Speaker Dade Phelan named Rep. Briscoe Cain as the chair of the House Elections Committee, despite his notoriety for traveling to Pennsylvania to help overthrow the results of the 2020 election.
These actions signal an escalating attack on voting rights in a state that is infamous for being among the hardest in the nation to cast a ballot. It feeds and amplifies dangerously false rhetoric designed to undermine trust in our democratic system and prioritize partisan interests over the will of the people — exactly what fueled the failed white supremacist insurrection at the U.S. Capitol just weeks ago.
Opponents of democracy rely on unconscionable double-speak to assert there must be “trust and confidence in the outcome of our elections,” without ever acknowledging the complicity of the state’s leadership — Sen. Ted Cruz, Attorney General Ken Paxton and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — in undermining the trust and confidence the people hold in our democratic processes.
Abbott, Cain and their co-conspirators are willfully perpetuating distrust in democracy to hold on to power in Texas. Partisan actors have been chasing the specter of voter fraud for years, scaring Texans and funneling misinformation about the integrity of our elections to sow seeds of doubt and mistrust. It’s not new or surprising — their true mission is to continue Texas’s 150-year-old pattern of voter suppression.
The following is a guest post from Ned Foley:
What are the consequences of the Senate acquitting Trump from an election law perspective—the perspective, in other words, of protecting the electoral process in the future?
It depends, most basically, on whether or not Trump wishes to run again in 2024.
If he doesn’t, you can make the argument that the system will be safe from his unique danger to it, his uniquely narcissistic belief that an election can’t be fair if the vote count shows him losing.
On this view, any Trumpian protégé as the GOP nominee next time—be it Josh Hawley, or Ron DeSantis, or whomever—won’t present the same existential threat to “we the people” and our collective constitutional right to self-government that Trump does. Any of them would presumably accept the verdict of the voters, and not attempt a repetition of the “Big Lie” myth of a stolen election, and thus not be inherently toxic to democracy like Trump.
But you can argue this point the other way. It is often feared that Trump 2.0 will be a shrewder demagogue that Trump himself. Hawley, in other words, would be more successful in sabotaging the electoral victory of his own opponent than just making a symbolic challenge to President Biden’s win on behalf of the Trumpian base.
Rather than debating this unanswerable question, let’s agree on at least this: the Electoral Count Act of 1887, the statute at the heart of the congressional procedure for the January 6 session that was the object of the insurrection, must be amended to make unambiguously clear that no coup-like challenge to a candidate’s Electoral College victory is ever permissible, regardless of what party perpetrates the challenge and for whatever purpose.
Once an Electoral College win is set in the states, as Biden’s was, it was final for all congressional purposes, as Mitch McConnell and Liz Cheney properly understood. That understanding must be recodified in twenty-first century statutory text, replacing the impenetrably dense nineteenth-century verbiage of the 1887, and set in stone, so that nothing like January 6, 2021 is attempted again—not four years from now, not ever.
More must be done than fixing just one statute. We are already seeing a multitude of efforts undertaken by Republicans around the country to make it more difficult for Democrats to win, a motive that some GOP officials openly acknowledge. It has long been commonplace to observe that Republicans, as a party, have become ideologically opposed to free and fair elections. If this is true, the danger to the future of American democracy is far greater than Donald Trump.
But we should be cautious with this diagnosis and whatever cure might follow from it. A healthy two-party system of electoral competition can’t exist if only one of the two parties is committed to the enterprise. So, if Democrats believe that Republicans have given up on their shared project of self-rule, what then?
There’s a philosophy ascendant among progressives that, if only the Senate would abandon the filibuster, Democrats can put in place an entirely new electoral system that will guarantee free and fair elections for the foreseeable future. If there were actually the votes to jettison the filibuster, it would be an interesting experiment to see if this theory worked.
I’m dubious. How is it that one political party in two-party system can impose its own vision for running elections over the objections of the other party and expect the result to be successful? “You must play the game of electoral competition by our rules,” Democrats would be telling Republicans. “You don’t get a say in how the game is played, because we don’t trust you to play fair.” That doesn’t sound like a recipe for Republicans agreeing to playing the same game at all.
We must remember that the Voting Rights Act of 1965, our nation’s most important election law, was the bipartisan product of overcoming a filibuster, not one party’s unilateral decision to eliminate filibusters. It will be hard work and will require compromise, but the most pressing need for protecting American democracy—made more urgent because of the Senate’s handling of Trump’s second impeachment—is for Democrats to work with Mitch McConnell and Liz Cheney, who at least have a conception of a free and free election, to hammer out a set of bipartisan reforms that will resuscitate traditional two-party competition with both teams accepting the system’s premises and being willing to play by its rules. As I’ve already indicated, I would put eliminating gerrymandering at the top of that list.
Okay, so now what if Trump does want to run in 2024? There’s the chance that his own legal and financial problems will prevent him from even being a viable candidate. But if he makes a serious bid for the Republican nomination, let’s hope the GOP still has enough soul to repudiate the man who left his own Vice President, Mike Pence, at the mercy of the mob.
Otherwise, there will need to be schism along the lines of 1912, when Teddy Roosevelt mounted a third-party candidacy. The responsible center-right of American politics must offer its own alternative to the Party of Trump, if and when it comes to that.
Eugene Volokh in Tablet Mag:
In 2016, a Florida man named Douglass Mackey (using the online alias “Ricky Vaughn”) allegedly conspired to distribute a meme aimed at deceiving pro-Hillary voters.
Four years later, Mackey is now being prosecuted (as to this and as to other memes) for violating 18 U.S.C. § 241, a federal law that punishes conspiracies “to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person … in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution”—namely, the right to vote. Lying to voters in a way that keeps them from voting, the theory goes, is a crime.
Is this sort of prosecution constitutional? After all, people often lie in political campaigns. Candidates do it, activists do it, political operatives do it. Can election lies simply be outlawed?
Surprisingly, the Supreme Court has never resolved the question. It hasn’t resolved the big-picture question: When can the government punish lies? It hasn’t resolved the medium-size question: Can the government punish lies in election campaigns? And it hasn’t resolved the particular question: Can the government punish lies about the mechanisms of voting, and in particular about how to vote?
A statewide election audit has affirmed Michigan’s vote-counting machines are accurate and President Joe Biden won the state’s election, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said Friday.
Hundreds of municipal and county clerks from more than 1,300 jurisdictions took part in Michigan’s auditing exercise, hand-counting more than 18,000 ballots that were randomly selected, according to a press release from Benson’s office.
In the hand count, Biden received more votes than former President Donald Trump, and the percentage of votes for each candidate was within “fractions of a percentage point of machine-tabulated totals,” according to a press release.
The delivery date for the 2020 census data used in redistricting, delayed first by the coronavirus pandemic and then by the Trump administration’s interference, now is so late that it threatens to scramble the 2022 elections, including races for Congress.
The Census Bureau has concluded that it cannot release the population figures needed for drawing new districts for state legislatures and the House of Representatives until late September, bureau officials and others said in recent interviews. That is several months beyond the usual April 1 deadline, and almost two months beyond the July 30 deadline that the agency announced last month. The bureau did not respond to a request for comment but is expected to announce the delay on Friday.
The holdup, which is already cause for consternation in some states, could influence the future of key districts. And with Democrats holding a slim 10-seat House majority, it even has the potential to change the balance of power in the House and some state legislatures, according to Michael Li, the senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. States need the figures this year to redraw district lines for the 435 seats in the House of Representatives and for thousands of seats in state legislatures.
The delay means there will be less time for the public hearings and outside comment required in many states, and less time once maps are drawn to contest new district lines in court, as often happens after redistricting.
New letter I spearheaded from Julia Azari, Associate Professor of Political Science, Marquette University; David Kaye, Clinical Professor of Law, UC Irvine; Jack Lerner, Clinical Professor of Law, UC Irvine; Janai Nelson, Associate Director-Counsel, NAACP-LDF; Cailin O’Connor, Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science, UC Irvine; Norm Ornstein, Emeritus Scholar, American Enterprise Institute; Bertrall Ross, Chancellor’s Professor of Law, UC Berkeley; Alex Stamos, Director, Stanford Internet Observatory; James Owen Weatherall, Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science, UC Irvine, and me, as scooped by Politico.
Text of the letter:
Dear Oversight Board:
We write in our individual capacities to offer comments on the indefinite deplatforming of former U.S. President Donald J. Trump from Facebook and Instagram following his remarks during the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. This letter also addresses related questions raised in the Board’s call for public comments.
As scholars and leaders who have long studied election laws, democratic theory, the United States Constitution’s First Amendment, American politics, and the rule of law, we believe that removing Donald Trump from Facebook platforms for an indefinite period of time was the correct decision. Removal of a political leader from the platforms should be strongly disfavored, and it should be a last resort given the great benefits of robust political debate and protection for political and election-related speech. But Trump’s actions justified the step of indefinitely deplatforming him. Over many months, Trump consistently undermined public confidence in the fairness of the 2020 U.S. election results based upon false and discredited theories of voter fraud, and he encouraged violent insurrection on January 6, 2021, as Congress engaged in the formal process of counting the electoral college votes and declaring Joe Biden the winner over Trump of the presidential election. Had the platforms granted Trump continued, broad unmediated access, he could have provoked additional violence and potentially further undermined the peaceful transition of power which is essential to a working democracy.
As a private actor governed by U.S. law in the United States, Facebook has the right to include or exclude content as it sees fit, consistent with U.S. law. As a responsible corporate citizen, Facebook should ensure that its fora allow for robust, political debate. It should have general policies of non-discrimination across candidates and political views. The platforms should not be in the business of favoring one candidate or party over another, and instead allow readers and viewers access to a variety of political viewpoints and expressions of political speech. The platforms should be especially wary of removing the speech of political leaders, whose comments are both newsworthy and likely helpful to voters as they decide which candidates and parties to support or oppose.
Thus, platform rules should begin with the strong presumption to include political speech, especially from political leaders, that can inform debate, share information, and allow voters to make decisions consistent with their interests and values. Allowing a platform for political speech generally promotes democratic governance and merits inclusion on the platforms.
The strong presumption in favor of inclusive political speech should be overcome only upon a clear showing that the speech threatens to undermine, rather than support democratic governance. Just as the right to free speech does not justify falsely yelling “Fire!” in a crowded movie theater, political speech which raises a serious and imminent danger of undermining democratic governance should be removed from the platforms and serial offenders, even political leaders, should be deplatformed, at least on a temporary basis. Facebook should have clear rules embodying these principles.
The easiest case justifying removal of posts and potential deplatforming is political speech which calls for political violence against a democratically elected government or against people. Such speech has no place in a democratic discourse, and Facebook has a moral obligation not to spread such speech. Such speech need not rise to the level of calling for imminent lawless action (under the First Amendment Brandenberg standard applicable to government suppression of speech) to merit removal from a private platform like Facebook; instead, speech that consistently justifies or supports violence deserves no amplification over social media. Such posts should be removed whether or not they lead to eventual deplatforming. A repeated pattern of conduct justifies more severe repercussions.
In addition, speech that consistently spreads misinformation about the democratic process—speech about when, where, and how people vote, and speech that makes demonstrably false claims about elections being “stolen,” “rigged,” or “fraudulent”—is similarly dangerous to democratic governance and justifies sanctions from the platforms. Again, repetition of such statements is more blameworthy.
Under these standards, President Trump’s statements and course of conduct culminating on January 6, 2021 justified his deplatforming from social media. Before January 6 the President had made over 400 comments falsely calling the election into question. He encouraged his supporters to come to the Capitol on January 6 for “wild” protests. He gave a speech shared on social media that encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol and interfere with the vote counting, and in the post that led to his deplatforming, he praised those engaged in insurrection with “love” and repeated false claims of a “fraudulent” and “stolen” election as the violence in the Capitol was ongoing.
Anyone who doubts the risks of such speech need only look at the events of January 6, 2021 in the U.S. Capitol. Not only did such speech lead to the deaths of five people and injuries to countless others, including police officers guarding the Vice President of the United States and Members of Congress; those political leaders came within moments of being kidnapped or killed but for the bravery of law enforcement. Without social media spreading Trump’s statements, it seems extremely unlikely these events would have occurred. The eventual deplatforming of Trump’s accounts helped defuse a dangerous and antidemocratic situation.
There no doubt will be close calls under a policy that allows the deplatforming of political leaders in extreme circumstances. This was not one of them.
Thank you for your consideration.
Extensive Vann Newkirk piece in The Atlantic’s March issue.
The next round of redistricting in 2021 and 2022 is likely to be the most challenging in recent history and particularly detrimental to communities of color, according to a report by Michael C. Li, one of the nation’s leading experts on redistricting and gerrymandering and senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law.
The Redistricting Landscape, 2021-22 provides an overview of the battles ahead over the political maps being drawn this year and next that will apply to Congress and state legislatures for the next ten years. The report categorizes the 50 states according to their projected risk for partisan gerrymandering and/or racially discriminatory maps.
“Expect a tale of two countries,” Li writes. “In parts of the country, newly enacted reforms and divided government will make it harder to force through partisan gerrymanders or racially discriminatory maps. In other states, however, there may be even greater room for unfair processes and results than in 2011, when the country saw some of the most gerrymandered maps in its history.”
The risk for abuse in map drawing will be especially high in the South, where fast population growth and demographic change in Texas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina will combine with single-party control of the process and weaker legal protections for communities of color.
BAN:
On February 10, the Second Circuit refused to enjoin the new New York definition of a qualified political party. SAM Party of New York v Kosinski, 20-3047. Here is the twenty-page opinion, which was written by Judge Michael H. Park, a Trump appointee. It is also signed by Judge Robert D. Sack, a Clinton appointee, and Steven J. Menashi, a Trump appointee.
The new definition requires a party to poll 2% of the presidential vote to retain its qualified status. The decision says there are two state interests in the new, more difficult requirement: (1) to improve the chances that the winner will get a majority of the popular vote; (2) to save money, because the state now has public funding for candidates for state office, although it doesn’t start until 2024.
Both justifications are utterly without merit. Point one could be solved if the state used ranked choice voting. Point two is easily rebutted by pointing out that the Second Circuit already ruled in a Connecticut case that states need not provide public funding to minor parties or independent candidates.
You can find the unanimous opinion at this link.
Seems like a pretty good deal for a two-party duopoly.
Former Rep. Anthony Brindisi said today that he conceded a disputed election to Claudia Tenney to spare the 22nd Congressional District from a months-long battle that could further divide the community.
But Brindisi also called for authorities to investigate irregularities and other systemic voting problems exposed in a three-month legal fight over ballots cast in eight counties across Upstate New York.
“I hope some higher authority comes in and investigates what I think is a massive disenfranchisement of voters in the district,” Brindisi told syracuse.com in his first interview since conceding the election.
See also Oneida County exec asks Cuomo to fire elections commissioners after NY22 debacle.
The top lawyer at the embattled New York City Board of Elections has retired amid a Department of Investigation probe of his conduct, The Post has learned.
Chief counsel Steven Richman submitted his retirement papers last month and left the agency effective Jan. 30, an agency official said.
Richman, employed by the BOE since 1999, took a leave of absence in September amid the DOI probe — a key period when the elections agency prepared for new early voting and expanded mail-ballot systems for the November presidential election as well as special elections amid the coronavirus pandemic, and a new ranked choice voting system being implemented this year.
He never returned.
Richman, a Brooklyn resident who sat next to executive director Michael Ryan at board meetings, oversaw all election-related legal issues and court cases..
A DOI spokesperson said, “The investigation is ongoing and DOI declines further comment.”
NYT:
Prosecutors in Fulton County have initiated a criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn Georgia’s election results, including a phone call he made to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Mr. Trump pressured him to “find” enough votes to help him reverse his loss.
On Wednesday, Fani Willis, the recently elected Democratic prosecutor in Fulton County, sent a letter to numerous officials in state government, including Mr. Raffensperger, requesting that they preserve documents related to Mr. Trump’s call, according to a state official with knowledge of the letter. The letter explicitly stated that the request was part of a criminal investigation, said the official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal matters.
The inquiry makes Georgia the second state after New York where Mr. Trump faces a criminal investigation. And it comes in a jurisdiction where potential jurors are unlikely to be hospitable to the former president; Fulton County encompasses most of Atlanta and overwhelmingly supported President Biden in the November election.
The Fulton County investigation comes on the heels of a decision Monday by Mr. Raffensperger’s office to open an administrative inquiry.
WaPo:
Michigan’s Republican Senate majority leader told members of his party that the storming of the U.S. Capitol was “all staged” and not perpetrated by Trump supporters in a moment captured on video that drew calls for his resignation Tuesday from Democrats.
State Sen. Mike Shirkey’s false claims about the Capitol attack — contradicted by reporting, video and statements from the rioters themselves — circulated as Republicans remain divided over basic realities of the 2020 election and former president Donald Trump’s role in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection, underscoring the continued promotion of debunked theories by prominent members of the GOP. Newly elected Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Tuesday also suggested that Trump supporters were not to blame, testing her party’s willingness to condemn falsehoods and echoing her past claims that mass shootings were “false flag” events orchestrated by supporters of gun-control laws…
Shirkey apologized Tuesday in a statement for “insensitive comments” and said he regretted his choice of words after the Detroit Metro Times and other news outlets reported on the lawmaker’s claims during a Feb. 3 meeting with a handful of fellow Republicans.“I said some things in a videoed conversation that are not fitting for the role I am privileged to serve,” Shirkey’s statement said. “I own that. I have many flaws. Being passionate coupled with an occasional lapse in restraint of tongue are at least two of them.”
There are at least 165 proposals under consideration in 33 states so far this year to restrict future voting access by limiting mail-in ballots, implementing new voter ID requirements and slashing registration options.
Driving the news: As former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial begins over his role in the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection that sought to overturn President Biden’s victory — fueled by baseless allegations of voter fraud — lawmakers in states with GOP majorities are pushing new ballot obstacles based on similar baseless allegations.
Last-minute changes to proposed federal standards for new voting machines could expose the equipment to cyberattacks, according to some members of Congress and security professionals.
The Election Assistance Commission, slated to authorize new voting system guidelines on Feb. 10, amended key sections of a 328-page document less than two weeks before the decision. The amended language of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines 2.0 would allow next generation voting machines to include components capable of wireless communications, as long as they’re disabled. The changes were made even though the EAC’s technical advisory committee recommended an outright wireless ban.
Cybersecurity experts, some of the EAC’s own advisers and members of Congress are calling for the agency’s four commissioners to vote on a version of the document finalized in July 2020 which included the prohibition on wireless capability. In a letter reviewed by Bloomberg, a bipartisan coalition of more than 20 members of Congress led by Representative Bill Foster told the EAC’s Chairman Ben Hovland that the current version would “diminish confidence in both the federal voting system certification program and the security of our election systems.”
“We cannot sanction the use of online networking capabilities when they carry the very real and increased risk of cyber-attacks, at scale, on our voting machines,” reads the letter….
Meanwhile, others are asking the EAC to explain why changes to a document 15 years in the making were made less than two weeks before the scheduled vote.
“The issue here is the EAC made changes to some of the most commented-on sections of the standard without clearly explaining who made the change, why the change was made and that’s inviting a lot of questions,” said Matt Masterson a former EAC commissioner, referring to some of the 50,000 public comments submitted to the EAC in 2020.
Masterson said there’s no reason to believe the late amendments were born out of malfeasance. “There is an opportunity here for further transparency by the commission which I hope they provide,” said Masterson, former election security lead at the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security.