Tag: voter suppression

FBI Investigates Election Day Robocalls That Threatened 800,000 Voters

More than 800,000 people with phone numbers tied to six presidential swing states have been targeted with automated phone calls on Tuesday suggesting they remain at home on Election Day, a tactic that has alarmed voters and has drawn the attention of the FBI, documents and interviews show.

All told, more than 3 million calls were made to people across the country on Tuesday, instructing them to “stay safe and stay home,” according to data and call recordings provided by the firm TelTech, which owns the RoboKiller smartphone app. One message, only a few seconds long, delivers the message in a monotone, robotic voice.

Government officials and voters interpreted the messages as potential voter suppression, though it’s not clear what the intent was since the messages apparently began last December, before the coronavirus pandemic. It is also not known who was behind the cryptic messaging campaign or whether it targeted people with particular party registrations or political leanings. Nor was it clear whether the calls had any effect on voters’ willingness to go to the polls. In many states, significant numbers of people have already voted by mail, making the apparent veiled threats irrelevant. Continue reading.

Potential for uncounted military votes looms large in swing states

Six battleground states have tight deadlines for mail ballots

Many states have thousands of mailed military ballots. Many states have tight deadlines for counting them. And many states are swing states. But this year six states stand out for checking all three of those boxes.

In Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, state law provides little or no time after Election Day for military ballots to be counted. If the election is close enough, the outcome in one or more of those states could tilt the national contest one way or the other, and counting those ballots — or not — could determine the outcome.

Several factors could make it harder to count all ballots on time, whether mailed or cast in person. These include postal system delays as well as the sheer number of ballots of all types that are being cast — perhaps the most in U.S. history. Continue reading.

Obama delivers call to action in eulogy for Lewis, likens tactics by Trump and administration to those by racist Southern leaders who fought civil rights

Washington Post logoFormer president Barack Obama delivered a call to action in his eulogy Thursday of late congressman John Lewis, urging Congress to pass new voting rights laws and likening tactics by President Trump and his administration to those used by racist Southern leaders who fought the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

Obama, speaking for 40 minutes at the pulpit where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, tied Lewis’s early life as a Freedom Rider to the nationwide protests that followed the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. He compared today’s federal agents using tear gas against peaceful protesters, an action that Trump has cheered on, to the same attacks Lewis faced on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965.

“Bull Connor may be gone, but today we witness with our own eyes police officers kneeling on the necks of Black Americans,” the nation’s first Black president said at Lewis’s final memorial service. “George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators. We may no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar in order to cast a ballot, but even as we sit here there are those in power who are doing their darndest to discourage people from voting.” Continue reading.

Barack Obama calls out Trump and GOP’s brutal crackdowns and voter suppression in powerful John Lewis eulogy

AlterNet logoFormer President Barack Obama delivered an impassioned, rousing, and at times blistering eulogy on Thursday at a memorial service for Rep. John Lewis. Instead of showing the usual reserve and hesitancy to criticize that has characterized most of his post-presidency, Obama took inspiration from the fallen civil rights hero and aimed his fury specifically at the myriad abuses of the Trump administration and the Republican Party on American freedoms and fair elections.

“George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators,” he said, drawing cheers and applause from the attendees. “We may no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar to cast a ballot, but even as we sit here, there are those in power doing their darndest to discourage people from voting, by closing polling locations and targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws, and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision. Even undermining the postal service in the run-up to an election that’s going to be dependent on mail-in ballots so people don’t get sick!”

For those who might criticize such direct denunciations of the GOP and the president’s actions at a memorial service, Obama had a brilliant prepared response. Continue reading.

Trump babbles an incoherent response after he gets cornered by a reporter over mail-in voting

AlterNet logoWith the coronavirus pandemic threatening to disrupt ongoing elections and looming over the major vote in November, universal mail-in voting has become more of a necessity than ever.

But President Donald Trump, and Republicans more generally, are terrified of the idea — because they clearly fear that easier access to the polls will tank their chances of holding on to power.

At his Tuesday circus-like press briefing, ostensibly about the coronavirus crisis, a reporter pressed him on his opposition to voting by mail. While he declared categorically that voting by mail is bad, the reporter pointed out that he, in fact, votes by mail.

Trump had no coherent response. Continue reading.

How conservatives rigged our politics: Republicans are beating Democrats at a game they don’t even know they’re playing

AlterNet logoAccording to Gallup polling, more Americans identify as Democrats than Republicans. On average, roughly 29 percent of Americans identify as Democrats, 27 percent as Republicans, and 41 percent as independent. It’s close, but the edge is enough that one would expect our legislatures, courts, and governorships to reflect that advantage.

They don’t. Despite being the less popular party, Republicans have controlled the majority of our state legislatures and governorships for the past decade. In twenty-two states, Republicans control both branches of government, compared with only sixteen for Democrats. A majority of Supreme Court justices have also been appointed by Republican presidents. And Donald Trump won the presidency despite losing to Hillary Clinton by almost three million votes. How have Republicans pulled this off?

In The Democracy Fix, Caroline Fredrickson, president of the American Constitution Society (and a regular writer for this magazine), gives a detailed and often demoralizing account of how Republicans seized political power that vastly exceeds the public support for their ideas. Tracing the origin story back to Lewis Powell’s memo—in which the then corporate attorney who would later become a Supreme Court justice outlined a plan for conservative dominance of public policymaking—Fredrickson shows how the GOP used gerrymandering, voter suppression, dubious scholarship, and dangerous media outlets to rig the system in their favor. And although she offers a plan for Democrats to fight back, it feels like Republicans have already won a game Democrats didn’t realize they were playing. Continue reading.

A judge ordered up to 234,000 people to be tossed from the registered voter list in a swing state

Washington Post logoA Wisconsin judge ordered the state to take as many as 234,000 people off its registered-voter list Friday because they may have moved — a decision that could impede residents of this swing state from voting in next year’s presidential election.

The case centers on a letter that the state Elections Commission sent in Octoberto hundreds of thousands of voters, asking them to respond if they were still at that address or to update their registrations if they had moved.

Conservatives filed a lawsuit alleging that to avoid fraud, the commission should have thrown out the registrations of voters who did not respond to the mailing within 30 days, the Associated Press reported. The Elections Commission, composed of three Republicans and three Democrats, is challenging the suit by arguing that it has the legal power to manage the registered voter list and that removing people now would cause confusion if some of them had not actually moved.

Continue reading

The Battle Over the Files of a Gerrymandering Mastermind

New York Times logoAt the heart of a decisive court ruling on Tuesday striking down North Carolina’s state legislative maps was evidence culled from the computer backups of the man who drew them: Thomas B. Hofeller, the Republican strategist and master of gerrymandering, who died last year.

Documents from the backups, which surfaced after his death, were also central to the legal battle over adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census. An enormous stash of digital files, covering Mr. Hofeller’s work in almost every state, has yet to be examined.

But in a state court in Raleigh, N.C., another courtroom battle is underway. Its aim is to ensure that those files are never publicly scrutinized.

View the complete September 4 by Michael Wines on The New York Times website here.

A Case for Math, Not ‘Gobbledygook,’ in Judging Partisan Voting Maps

The following article by Adam Liptak was posted on the New York Times website January 15, 2018:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said that statistical evidence said to show that Wisconsin’s voting districts had been warped by political gerrymandering struck him as “sociological gobbledygook.” Credit T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — In October, when the Supreme Court heard argumentsin a case that could reshape American politics, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. registered an objection. There was math in the case, he said, and it was complicated.

“It may be simply my educational background,” the chief justice said, presumably referring to his Harvard degrees in history and law. But he said that statistical evidence said to show that Wisconsin’s voting districts had been warped by political gerrymandering struck him as “sociological gobbledygook.”

Last week, Judge James A. Wynn Jr. came to the defense of math. “It makes no sense for courts to close their eyes to new scientific or statistical methods,” he wrote in a decision striking down North Carolina’s congressional map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander.

Judge Wynn directed his criticism to Republican state lawmakers, who had urged his three-judge Federal District Court to ignore what they called “a smorgasbord of alleged ‘social science’ theories,” and not to Chief Justice Roberts. But Judge Wynn did use one of Chief Justice Roberts’s most prominent opinions to make the point that numbers can have a role to play in judicial decision making. Continue reading “A Case for Math, Not ‘Gobbledygook,’ in Judging Partisan Voting Maps”

Oops! White House admits it has zero evidence of voter fraud in 2016 election

The following article by Melanie Schmitz was posted on the ThinkProgress website January 10, 2018:

WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 19: Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach listens as Vice President Mike Pence speaks at the first meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House complex in Washington, DC on Wednesday, July 19, 2017. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

In a court filing on Tuesday, the White House announced that it had not uncovered any preliminary findings of voter fraud in the 2016 election and that it would be destroying confidential voter data initially collected for President Trump’s controversial voter fraud commission, which was disbanded on January 3.

The revelation stands in stark contrast to previous comments made by both Trump and former commission vice chair and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who claimed in an interview with right-wing outlet Breitbart one week ago that all investigation work would be “handed off” to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), implying that Democrats were becoming “uncomfortable” with how much Republicans had discovered thus far. Continue reading “Oops! White House admits it has zero evidence of voter fraud in 2016 election”