“Far-Right Sheriff Pushes the Big Lie in Arizona; Mark Lamb and a network of sheriffs around the country are partnering with leading purveyors of election fraud conspiracies, part of an escalating campaign to police the vote.”

election subversion risk

Bolts:

Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb walked out to standing applause at Donald Trump’s July 22 rally in Prescott, Arizona, wearing his usual cowboy hat-and-blue jeans getup and flashing a blindingly white smile. He waved and pumped a fist as he stepped to the podium, asking that everyone doff their hats and remain standing for a brief moment of silence in honor of a sheriff’s deputy shot and killed the previous month around Prescott, before quickly pivoting to the former president. 

“I can see that you guys love the rule of law and law enforcement, and we appreciate that,” Lamb told the crowd. “Do you know who else loves the rule of law? Donald Trump,” he said without irony, urging them to support a slate of Trump-endorsed candidates for state office who echo the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The sheriff also touted his new effort to monitor elections with True the Vote, a far-right group peddling unfounded voter fraud conspiracies that have overtaken the Arizona GOP.

“We’re gonna make sure that we have election integrity this year,” Lamb declared. “Sheriffs are going to enforce the law. This is about the rule of law. It is against the law to violate elections laws—and that’s a novel idea, we’re going to hold you accountable for that. We will not let happen what happened in 2020.” 

Big Lie messengers have looked to far-right sheriffs for a veneer of credibility as both Democratic and Republican election officials, prosecutors, judges and state attorneys general across the country reject every baseless lawsuit blaming Trump’s loss on voter fraud. True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht—who, as Reveal has reported, helped turn election conspiracies into a lucrative enterprise for conservative activists and lawyers—has said she turned to sheriffs for help after federal and state law enforcement dismissed her group’s claims. 

True the Vote’s partnership with Lamb and a coalition of right-wing sheriffs he leads and helped found called Protect America Now—which includes sheriffs from states as politically diverse as California, New Mexico, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Florida—is part of a nationwide attempt to police elections by emboldening sheriffs to surveil ballot drop boxes and chase down tips from anonymous hotlines that will report alleged fraud. 

Last month, Engelbrecht also announced that her group would partner with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), a group of so-called constitutional sheriffs who believe that their office is uniquely endowed with the power to enforce only those laws they deem constitutional and who have promoted the Big Lie in rallies and training sessions. Sheriffs affiliated with the CSPOA have promised to monitor future elections and hunt down lingering claims of fraud from the 2020 presidential election.

These partnerships highlight the uniquely aggressive role of sheriffs in efforts to police the vote leading up to the 2022 and 2024 elections. Politicians with badges and guns, sheriffs have extensive powers to launch criminal investigations, seize evidence and even threaten violence or jail to force compliance, making them uniquely potent as compared to judges or prosecutors or legislators. 

As they perpetuate conspiracies about fraud that have inspired increased threats against election administrators and volunteers, the True the Vote sheriffs are also in a unique position to widen their reach, using the environment they helped create as justification for more policing. The prospect of increased involvement of armed officers recalls the days of voter intimidation in the Jim Crow South (and beyond), and could also help encourage extremist vigilante violence by perpetuating baseless rumors of fraud, often against Black and Latinx communities. 

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“The Truly Scary Part of the $1.6 Billion Conservative Donation; It’s not about the legality. It’s about the loop.”

campaign finance, Supreme Court, Voting Rights Act

I have written this piece with Dahlia Lithwick for Slate. It begins:

On Monday, the New York Times broke the news that last year conservative mastermind Leonard Leo had obtained control over $1.6 billion through something called the “Marble Freedom Trust” to further his deeply conservative political and legal agenda. While much of the follow up reporting so far has focused on the unusual but apparently legal means by which the donor of the money—an elderly electronics magnate named Barre Seid—structured the transaction to avoid paying at least $400 million in taxes, the longer-term implications for a democracy as we understand it in America are far more dire.

Over the last three decades, Leo brilliantly created an interconnected series of institutions and firms designed to fundamentally reshape the American judiciary and in turn American society. This new infusion of over one billion dollars is going to solidify this effort in a way that will be hard for anyone to counter, in part thanks to new election law rules created by the Leo-shaped judiciary….

Here’s where the bootstrapping comes in. The very same conservative judiciary that Leo helped create has been central to crafting new legal rules which help elect more Republicans to office. Cases like Citizens United and Speech Now have opened the floodgates to fund large outside political groups such as Super PACs. Cases like Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta are making it easier for that large money to be contributed anonymously or through entities that can mask the identity of those who are pulling the strings, providing an easier path to influence without giving voters valuable information about who is trying to influence them and elected officials.ADVERTISEMENT

Plus, voting rights cases such as Shelby County and Brnovich v. DNC have seriously weakened the protection for minority voters under the Voting Rights Act, providing the path for white Republicans to gain ever more influence. The upcoming Milligan v. Merrill case that the Supreme Court will hear this term threatens to further weaken minority voting power in the redistricting process. Leo’s organizations seed the judiciary with jurists who advance the very theories that undermine core democratic principles from voting rights to financial disclosure rules. As doom loops go, it’s a successful operation in making sure that minorities have fewer and fewer protections while judges arrogate to themselves power to say more and more.

This term, the Supreme Court will hear Moore v. Harper, a case that stands to empower Republican state legislators against Democratic-majority state supreme courts that have been enforcing voting rights protections contained in state constitutions. Not coincidentally, the Leo-backed (and Orwellian-named) “Honest Elections Project” has been involved in efforts to get the Court to embrace a theory in Moore of the “independent state legislature” that would rob state courts of the power to protect voters’ rights. (They’ve tried the same approach in other cases, including one supporting the Republican Party’s attempt to disqualify some 2020 ballots in Pennsylvania.)

These election law rulings are just a means to an end. The end includes rulings like Dobbs on abortion, the loosening of gun laws, the paring back of affirmative action, and reading the religion protections in the First Amendment in ways that will serve not only to put religion into public schools but also to provide a path for anti-LGBTQ discrimination. The new Supreme Court supermajority also has begun hobbling the administrative state and erecting new barriers for the federal government to protect the public through covid vaccines and measures to limit climate change. The end is, and has always has been, to ensure that wildly unpopular ideas and policies can be put into effect by a life-tenured judicial branch that represents a well-funded conservative minority.

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“To Fight Election Falsehoods, Social Media Companies Ready a Familiar Playbook”

cheap speech

NYT:

The election dashboards are back online, the fact-checking teams have reassembled, and warnings about misleading content are cluttering news feeds once again.

As the United States marches toward another election season, social media companies are steeling themselves for a deluge of political misinformation. Those companies, including TikTok and Facebook, are trumpeting a series of election tools and strategies that look similar to their approaches in previous years.

Disinformation watchdogs warn that while many of these programs are useful — especially efforts to push credible information in multiple languages — the tactics proved insufficient in previous years and may not be enough to combat the wave of falsehoods pushed this election season.

Here are the anti-misinformation plans for Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube.

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“Court filings detail dramatic near encounter between Schumer and Proud Boys member on January 6”

election subversion risk

CNN:

Court filings have shed further light on the dramatic moment when Proud Boy Joshua Pruitt nearly came face to face with the then-Senate minority leader during the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

Pruitt pleaded guilty in June to a felony charge of obstructing an official proceeding. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday, and prosecutors have asked that he receive five years in prison.A court filing this weekend from prosecutors detailed how a Capitol Police special agent identified by his initials, M.L., pulled Chuck Schumer out of his chair on the Senate floor on January 6. Schumer, M.L., and two other members of the detail went to the basement of the Capitol in an attempt to escape the building, prosecutors say.

The New York Democrat and his detail were “crouch[ing] behind the recessed walls for cover” as they waited for an elevator to take them to an evacuation vehicle, court documents say, when the leader of Schumer’s detail — a sergeant identified as K.F. — saw Pruitt advancing.

K.F. made eye contact with Pruitt and yelled “evac, evac, evac,” prosecutors said.

Security footage from that day shows Schumer and his detail quickly fleeing the area, and prosecutors said that the sergeant “recalled hearing Pruitt getting louder behind him,” and that “he felt as though they were being chased.”M.L. told investigators he believed Pruitt was four or five seconds away from reaching the Senator.

Schumer and his detail quickly ran down a ramp and shut a set of double doors behind them, prosecutors said, prompting Pruitt to turn around. The moment was also captured on video.

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“Can computer simulations help fix democracy?”

redistricting

WaPo:

After the release of the 2020 Census, legislatures across the country redrew their states’ congressional district maps, just like they do every decade. And, just like every decade, aggrieved citizens sued them for gerrymandering — the process whereby politicians craft district boundaries to ensure their own parties’ victory.

But this time around, something has changed. A technological revolution, decades in the making, has added a sharp new arrow to those citizens’ quiver of legal arguments. Known as algorithmic redistricting, the technology has persuaded judges to throw out gerrymandered maps in several states, including New York and Ohio.And it will be part of a case before the Supreme Court in October that could play a role in the 2024 election and the future of voting rights.

Here is how it works.

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