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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 20 days

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For those looking to raise doubts about American elections, it's becoming clear that a key 2024 voting boogeyman will be immigration.

The false notion that undocumented immigrants are affecting federal elections has been floating around for over 100 years, experts say, but this year, due in part to an increase in migrants at the southern U.S. border, the idea could have new potency.

The narratives are being pushed by prominent right-wing figures including Cleta Mitchell, a former adviser to Donald Trump, along with the presumptive Republican presidential nominee himself.

NPR acquired a two-page memo Mitchell has been circulating laying out "the threat of non-citizen voting in 2024."

"I absolutely believe this is intentional, and one of the reasons the Biden administration is allowing all these illegals to flood the country," Mitchell said on a conservative radio show in Illinois last month. "They're taking them into counties across the country, so that they can get those people registered, they can vote them."

Trump has made the same claims on the campaign trail. And even Elon Musk, the Tesla founder and owner of X, has used his social media platform to push the baseless idea to millions of people.

"[Democrats] are importing voters," Musk wrote in a post about undocumented immigrants on March 5 that X claims has been seen more than 23 million times.

It's illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and numerous studies over the years have found that it almost never happens, but voting experts still worry the claims could take hold at a time when huge numbers of Republicans simultaneously don't trust elections and see immigration as the top problem facing the country.

"I think that's what it's meant to do — to freak people out over an issue. It's a continuation of this myth of voter fraud," said Gilda Daniels, an election law professor at the University of Baltimore. "It not only creates hysteria, but it [furthers] this idea that only certain people should be allowed to participate in the process."

A TALE AS OLD AS VOTER REGISTRATION

The idea that people are being shuttled into the U.S. to influence elections is a familiar tale for seasoned election officials.

"I've been hearing it my whole career," said Kim Wyman, a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center and the former Republican secretary of state of Washington.

In fact, the myth started taking hold in the U.S. in the late 1800s.

A hundred years before, when the country was first founded, noncitizen voting was actually fairly common and uncontroversial, says Ron Hayduk, an expert on noncitizen voting at San Francisco State University. But after the Civil War and Reconstruction, a wave of migration from Europe of nonwhite, non-English-speakers led to xenophobic fears about what would happen to the U.S. if immigrants were allowed to exercise their power politically.

One by one, states began implementing voter registration systems specifically as a means to disenfranchise immigrants.

"Allegations of vote fraud were the main stated justification for imposing restrictive practices," Hayduk said.

And in the century since then, he said, every time the country has seen an influx of immigrants, a loosening of immigration policy or an expansion of voting access, accusations of voter fraud have followed.

Mitchell's memo about the risk of noncitizen voting touches on two of those things. Migrant encounters at the southern border hit an all-time high in December, and the document focuses mostly on the implementation of a 1993 law, the National Voter Registration Act, that made registering to vote easier.

The NVRA does not require proof of U.S. citizenship for people to register to vote, only that potential voters fill out a form and attest under penalty of perjury that they are citizens. A federal voting law passed in 2002 also required applicants to provide a unique identification number to register, like a driver's license or Social Security number, which election officials say effectively serves as a citizenship check since both of those forms of ID involve the government checking whether someone is a citizen or not.

But Mitchell's main hope, according to the document, is to spur Congress to require documentary proof of citizenship as part of registration.

Experts say that sort of change would have a drastic negative impact on many eligible voters, like naturalized citizens, without solving any real problem.

"If you make [registering] harder, there will be students, young people, elderly people, poor people and other groupings of people who would just not bother," said Daniels, of the University of Baltimore. "This whole document is [saying] we don't want the NVRA or any other piece of legislation to do what it's supposed to do, which is register people to vote."

Mitchell did not respond to an email from NPR requesting comment.

SOLUTION IN SEARCH OF A PROBLEM

The right's concerns about noncitizens voting have persisted despite there being no recent evidence that ineligible people are voting at anything other than microscopic numbers in American elections.

After the 2016 election, the Brennan Center for Justice, which advocates for expanded voting access, looked at 42 election jurisdictions including some of the jurisdictions with the largest noncitizen populations in the country, and found suspected noncitizen votes made up roughly 30 of the 23.5 million votes cast (0.0001%) in those places.

A recent study in Arizona (first reported by The Washington Post) found that less than 1% of noncitizens attempt to register to vote, and even in those cases, the vast majority are thought to be mistakes.

"There are dire ramifications for those who register when they are not eligible—in the naturalization process applicants for citizenship must affirm that they have not registered to vote," wrote Tammy Patrick, a former local election official in Arizona who is now the CEO of the nonprofit Election Center, in an email. "The stakes are high and not something that most people would willingly, knowingly gamble away for the sake of casting a single ballot."

Hayduk, of San Francisco State, agreed.

"The last thing [migrants] want to do is put themselves at risk of being detained, deported, let alone put a wrench in their application for citizenship," he said.

In Georgia, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had his office perform a citizenship audit that found fewer than 2,000 suspected noncitizens registering to vote in the state over the past 25 years. None were actually able to cast a ballot.

"Noncitizens are not voting in Georgia," said Raffensperger, in an interview with NPR.

Still, in a sign that the issue has become a priority not just for the election denial wing of the Republican Party, Raffensperger has made noncitizens a key focus of his time in office even as he has fought against other conspiratorial election narratives.

Earlier this year, the secretary was pushing for a constitutional amendment in Georgia to explicitly ban noncitizen voting, something a number of other states, including neighboring Alabama and Florida, also passed recently.

"Perception is 9/10 of reality," said Hayduk. "Putting the solution on the table suggests there was a problem. And I think that's part of the point. [These laws] create a solution to a problem that doesn't exist."

Legislation tracking by the nonprofit Voting Rights Lab shows that in the first few months of 2024, 17 bills have been introduced in 12 different states that involve proof of citizenship provisions.

Federal law already bans noncitizens from voting in federal elections, but a few liberal U.S. cities, including Washington D.C., have begun allowing them to vote in local elections, adding to conservative fears that soon noncitizens will be voting en masse.

In Georgia the proposed amendment effort stalled in the legislature but Raffensperger said he plans to push for it next session.

That is almost certainly true. Both Ohio and Florida's constitutional amendments banning noncitizen voting passed with more than 75% statewide support.

But it's one thing to say noncitizens shouldn't vote. It's another to claim, as Mitchell and Trump have, that they already are in great numbers.

Raffensperger has directly refuted many similar election fraud claims over the past four years.

But when asked by NPR what he thought of the false idea that President Biden was shipping in undocumented immigrants to boost his reelection bid, Raffensperger declined to comment on it.

"What Joe Biden's up to, I don't really know. You'd have to ask him," Raffensperger said. "I'm going to make sure that we secure our elections: Now more than ever, American citizens are demanding this."

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kp777 · 1 year

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#u.s. house of representatives #house subcommittee on elections #republicans #thomas lane #voter suppression #cleta mitchell #election deniers #the big lie #2024 elections

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tomorrowusa · 1 year

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Republicans don’t like it when students vote. In red states, the GOP makes voting as difficult as possible for students living on campus or in college towns. And they would like to make it even more difficult.

One Trump Republican was particularly blatant about saying so at a gathering of filthy rich GOP donors.

A top Republican legal strategist told a roomful of GOP donors over the weekend that conservatives must band together to limit voting on college campuses, same-day voter registration and automatic mailing of ballots to registered voters, according to a copy of her presentation reviewed by The Washington Post.

Cleta Mitchell, a longtime GOP lawyer and fundraiser who worked closely with former president Donald Trump to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, gave the presentation at a Republican National Committee donor retreat in Nashville on Saturday.

Just to clarify, that was Saturday April 15th.

The presentation — which had more than 50 slides and was labeled “A Level Playing Field for 2024” — offered a window into a strategy that seems designed to reduce voter access and turnout among certain groups, including students and those who vote by mail, both of which tend to skew Democratic.

Mitchell did not respond to a request for comment, and it is unclear whether she delivered the presentation exactly as it was prepared on her PowerPoint slides. But in addition to the presentation, The Post listened to audio of portions of the presentation obtained by liberal journalist Lauren Windsor in which Mitchell discussed limiting campus and early voting.

Brace yourself for some idiotic GOP attempt at stereotyping.

“What are these college campus locations?” she asked, according to the audio. “What is this young people effort that they do? They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed.”

Personally, I’ve always felt energized – empowered – when I’ve voted. And since polls don’t close anywhere in the US before 6 PM (at the very earliest), the thought of waking up to go to vote and going back to bed right afterwards seems like Republican asininity in the extreme.

Basically Cleta admitted that this isn’t about winning elections. It’s part of a greater blueprint to keep people the GOP doesn’t like from voting at all.

Mitchell told her RNC audience that her organization, the Election Integrity Network, “is NOT about winning campaigns,” according to the text of the presentation. But the slides gave little other rationale for why campus or mail voting should be curtailed. At another point in the presentation, she said the nation’s electoral systems must be saved “for any candidate other than a leftist to have a chance to WIN in 2024.”

Pumpkin Face himself weighed in.

In Trump’s private comments to donors at the event, he said that he eventually wants to end all mail and early voting, according to audio obtained by The Post. But until that happens, he said, Republicans had to get better at it.

Remember Trump’s infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger? Apparently ol’ Cleta had something to do with that.

Mitchell advised Trump and was on the call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021 when Trump asked Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn the result.

“All we have to do, Cleta, is find 11,000-plus votes,” Trump said on the call, which is now under investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis as part of a broader inquiry into efforts to overturn the 2020 result in Georgia.

No matter how inconvenient it may be, we need to vote in every single election and for every office. There’s no such thing as an unimportant election. Voting consistently is the only way to preserve democracy.

People on the far right have been successful because they’ve taken the long view. It took them 49 years but by never missing an election they paved the way for the repeal of Roe v. Wade. And they’re still not finished trying to drag us back to the pre-Enlightenment dark ages.

Do whatever it takes to register and vote – in EVERY single election and for every office.

Be A Voter - Vote Save America

A friendly reminder that voter registration is done by address. If you’ve moved since the last election, even just down the street, you must register at your new address.

An archived copy of the linked article.

#republicans #the gop #cleta mitchell #donald trump #voter suppression #gop strategy of disenfranchisement #preventing college students from voting #campus voting #voter registration #register and vote #election 2023 #election 2024

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intelligentchristianlady · 1 year

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Republican logic: If they're likely to vote against us, we mustn't let them vote.

#voters #voting #students voting #Cleta Mitchell #Republicans #GOP #voter repression #please register #please vote

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joe-england · 1 year

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Taylor Swift clip TRASHING Republicans SURGES into spotlight

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gwydionmisha · 2 years

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#Election Deniers #Cleta Mitchell #War on Democracy #News

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bighermie · 8 months

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Fulton County Grand Jury Was Unhinged, Reveals Election Lawyer

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cultml · 8 months

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emptymanuscript · 9 months

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We Found The Real Leader of the Conservative Movement

I feel like leader is a definite exaggeration but Cleta Mitchell is a strong voice in the system that gives the Republicans outsized strength. The real thing to watch in this video is the attitude and the description of the system.

One of the things that isn’t mentioned in this video and explains the networked appearance of this endeavors is that she is far from the only connection between all these institutions. Not just in terms of people but in terms of systematization. There are standardized communications between groups that go out daily, and monthly by email.

I know someone who used to be on the talking points email list. Every single day, the list sends out the talking points that are supposed to be used about the news, policy, and state of the state. The end of the daily email would say for all other issues see the monthly email. So when you see every single conservative news caster saying the same thing, every single politician using the same words, every interest group like this attacking the same fight, that isn’t a coincidence. That is a well managed system at work.

If you ever wonder what all the think tanks and all the money going to think tanks are buying, that’s it. This system. The miraculously concerted effort of the singular hydra of which she is one head. The point of the system is power. Not ideology. The ideology is a tool not a goal. The system uses Republicans instead of Democrats (note that she started as a Democratic legislator and switched to Republican) because the Republican ideology is easier to systematize. That’s another way in which the parties are not the same. The way Democrats self organize is right about 10% as effective at systems management as the way Republicans self organize. That’s a good chunk of why Republicans are able to work with the same efficiency as Democrats in spite of the fact that if you file the letter off of the legislation and policies, about 70% of US voters strongly prefer the Democrat’s answer to the Republican’s. Republicans are simply better organized and systematized to make things work as if it is balanced at 50/50.

I also really want to point out the very brief bit about polling on college campuses and how it relates to my favorite political video that I love to post over and over again.

youtube

Paul Weyrich was one of the founders of the modern system. He was another head of the hydra like Cleta Mitchell back in the day. They’re responding with the same ideology because this ideology is necessary to the system and its goals. They understand completely that the fundamental argument at hand is easy access voting vs. disenfranchisement. The more you let anybody vote any way that they want, the less powerful a system of organization is. The more barriers you can put up to voting, the more powerful a system of organizing voters to work in lockstep as a bloc becomes.

#youtube #politics #republicans #vote

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 1 year

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Steps from the Capitol, Trump allies buy up properties to build MAGA campus | The Washington Post

At first glance, the flurry of real estate sales two blocks east of the U.S. Capitol appeared unremarkable in a city where such sales are common. In the span of a year, a seemingly unrelated gaggle of recently formed companies bought nine properties, all within steps of one another.

But the sales were not coincidental. Unbeknown to most of the sellers, the limited liability companies making the purchases — a shopping spree that added up to $41 million — are connected to a conservative nonprofit led by Mark Meadows, who was Chief of Staff to President Donald Trump. The organization has promoted MAGA stars like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.).

The Conservative Partnership Institute, as the nonprofit is known, now controls four commercial properties along a single Pennsylvania Avenue block, three adjoining rowhouses around the corner, and a garage and carriage house in the rear alley. CPI’s aim, as expressed in its annual report, is to transform the swath of prime real estate into a campus it calls “Patriots’ Row.”

The acquisitions strike some Capitol Hill regulars as puzzling, considering that Republicans have long made a sport of denigrating Washington as a dysfunctional “swamp,” the latest evidence being a successful GOP-led effort to block local D.C. legislation to revise the city’s criminal code.

“So you don’t respect how we administer our city and then you secretly buy up chunks of it?” said Tim Krepp, a Capitol Hill resident who works as a tour guide and has written about the neighborhood’s history. “If it’s such a hellhole, go to Virginia.”

Reached on his cellphone, Edward Corrigan, CPI’s president, whose name appears on public documents related to the sales, had no immediate comment on the purchases, which were first reported by Grid News and confirmed by The Washington Post. “I’ll get back to you,” Corrigan said. He did not respond to follow-up messages.

Former senator Jim DeMint, CPI’s founder, and Meadows, a senior partner at the organization, did not respond to emails seeking comment. Cameron Seward, CPI’s general counsel and director of operations, whose name appears on incorporation documents related to the companies making the purchases, did not respond to a text or an email.

As Congress’s neighbors, denizens of the Capitol Hill neighborhood are accustomed to existing in close quarters with all varieties of official Washington. Walk the neighborhood and you might catch a glimpse of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) or former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon, among those who own homes near the Capitol. The Republican and Democratic national committees both have offices in the neighborhood.

But it’s rare, if not unprecedented, for a nonprofit to purchase as many properties in such proximity and in so short a period of time as CPI has assembled through its related companies, a roster with names like Clear Plains Holdings, Brunswick Partners, Houston Group, Newpoint and Pennsylvania Avenue Holdings. The companies list Seward as an officer on corporate filings, as well as CPI’s Independence Avenue headquarters as their principal address.

Now, in what may be an only-in-Washington vista, a single Pennsylvania Avenue block is occupied by Public Citizen, the left-leaning consumer advocacy group, the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank, and CPI, which bought four properties through its affiliates.

In addition to the nine D.C. parcels CPI’s network has bought since January 2022, another affiliated company, Federal Investors, paid $7.2 million for a sprawling 11-bedroom retreat on the Eastern Shore. In 2020, CPI, under its own name, also spent $1.5 million for a rowhouse next to its headquarters, which it leases, a few blocks from the Capitol.

DeMint, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina, started CPI in 2017, shortly after he was ousted as Heritage’s leader amid criticism that the think tank had become too political under his direction. Meadows joined in 2021, after working as Trump’s Chief of Staff. He was by Trump’s side during the administration’s final calamitous days, before and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and as the President’s allies were seeking to overturn election results.

On its 2021 tax returns, CPI reported $45 million in revenue, most of it generated through contributions and grants, and paid DeMint and Meadows compensation packages of $542,000 and $559,000, respectively. Its current offices, a three-story townhouse at the corner of Third Street and Independence Avenue SE, is a hub of GOP activity. During the chaotic lead-up to Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s election as House Speaker, dissident Republican lawmakers were observed congregating at CPI.

CPI also provides grants to a cluster of nonprofits headed by Trump allies. Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, for example, leads America First Legal, which received $1.3 million from CPI in 2021 and bills itself as a check on “lawless executive actions and the Radical Left.”

Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who was on the call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger seeking to reverse votes in the 2020 election, runs what the organization bills as its “Election Integrity Network,” which has cast doubt on the validity of President Biden’s 2020 victory.

“The election was rigged,” EIN tweeted last July. “Trump won.”

CLOSE TO THE CAPITOL

At an introductory meeting in December, recalled Gerald Sroufe, an advisory neighborhood commissioner on Capitol Hill, a CPI representative said the group planned to move its headquarters to a three-story building it had bought on Pennsylvania Avenue, next to Heritage’s office. Until the pandemic forced it to close, the Capitol Lounge had occupied the 130-year-old building. The bar had served a nightly bipartisan swarm of congressional staffers and lobbyists for more than two decades.

The CPI official, Sroufe said, indicated that the group planned to use the new Pennsylvania Avenue properties to “expand” its offices and “provide new retail.” But the official made no mention of Patriots’ Row, Sroufe said, or the three rowhouses the group’s affiliates had bought around the corner on Third Street SE. All of the properties are in the neighborhood’s historic district, which protects them from being altered without city review.

“This is much grander than what we were talking about,” Sroufe said after learning from a reporter about the other purchases. “On the Hill, people are always talking about how wonderful it is to be close to the Capitol and Congress. It’s kind of like a curse.”

As in many commercial corridors hit hard by the pandemic, businesses along Pennsylvania Avenue have struggled over the past couple of years. Tony Tomelden, executive director of the Capitol Hill Association of Merchants and Professionals, said CPI could energize a strip pocked with vacant storefronts.

“I welcome any business because the only thing opening right now are marijuana shops,” said Tomelden, an H Street NE bar owner who helped open the Capitol Lounge in 1996 and, as it happens, instituted a rule that patrons could not talk politics while imbibing. “If they’re going to pay a lot of money and raise property values, I’m all for it. I don’t care about anybody’s politics as long as they pay their tab.”

In an overwhelmingly Democratic city, finding those who are less sanguine about CPI’s growing footprint is not exactly difficult.

Yet politics is only part of the issue, as far as Krepp is concerned. CPI’s purchases, he said, threaten the area’s neighborhood vibe, as would be the case if any group, no matter its ideological leaning, bought as many properties. “I don’t want to create another downtown on Capitol Hill,” he said. “There’s a glut of available office space downtown. You don’t have to buy up neighborhoods.”

Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), a regular commuter to the Capitol from his home in Montgomery County, sees CPI’s acquisitions in terms more political than geographic.

“It just seems like a massive real estate coming-out party for the extreme right wing of the Republican Party,” Raskin said. “This is a very explicit and well-financed statement of intent. They set out to take over the Republican Party and they’re very close to clenching the power.”

Instead of Patriots’ Row, Raskin suggested an alternative name: Seditionist Square.

“Maybe Marjorie Taylor Greene can be their advisory neighborhood commissioner,” he said.

A ‘PERMANENT BULWARK’ IN D.C.

On its 2021 tax return, CPI said its mission is to be a “platform” for the “conservative movement,” and to provide “public policy” training for “government and nonprofit staffers” and meeting space for gatherings and policy debates.

Although not required to identify donors, CPI reported seven contributions in excess of $1 million, including one of more than $25 million. Trump’s Save America political action committee gave $1 million in 2021, according to campaign finance records. Billionaire Richard Uihlein, a major Republican donor, gave $1.25 million a couple of years ago through his foundation, records show.

A CPI-related entity, the Conservative Partnership Center, rented space to two political action committees as of early January, the House Freedom Fund and Senate Conservative Fund, according to campaign finance records. CPI also received $4,000 from Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who has recorded his “Firebrand” podcast at the group’s studio, as has the host of the “Gosar Minute,” Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), according to the group’s annual report. Greene paid CPI $437.73 for “catering for political meetings” in 2021, the records show.

“No one stood up to the Left as courageously as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene,” CPI declared in its 2021 annual report, hailing her as a “hero” who “endured sexist fury that always lurks just beneath the progressive surface.” The report described Boebert as a “gun rights advocate” who “wants to protect our environment more than anyone else.”

It was in CPI’s 2022 annual report that the group briefly referred to its expansion plans, writing that it has strengthened “its ability to serve the movement by beginning renovations to Patriots’ Row on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“In 2022, the Left tried to drag America further into a dark future of totalitarianism, chaotic elections and cultural decay,” the report asserts in an introduction from DeMint and Meadows. “The Washington establishment, per usual, did nothing to stop them. But neither the Left nor the establishment could stop the culture and community we’re building here at the Conservative Partnership Institute.”

“With our expanded presence in D.C.,” they add, “we’re launching CPI academy — a formal program of training for congressional staff and current and future members of the movement.”

“Even if we can’t change Washington, we can create a permanent bulwark against its worst tendencies.”

A SPATE OF SALES

CPI began its expansion in 2020, purchasing the rowhouse next door to its headquarters and christening it “The Rydin House” for Mike Rydin, a construction magnate and prominent conservative donor. When Federal Investors bought the Eastern Shore property, the group named it “Camp Rydin.”

On Capitol Hill, several property owners who sold their buildings to CPI-linked companies were surprised to learn that the buyers were connected to a group led by Meadows and DeMint.

“I did not know,” said Jacqueline Lewis, who sold a townhouse on Third Street SE to 116 Holdings for $5.1 million in July. The company’s officer, according to its corporate filing, is Seward, and the principal address it lists is the same as CPI’s headquarters. A trust document related to the transaction is signed by Corrigan, CPI’s president.

Brunswick Partners, which lists CPI and Seward as contacts on its corporate filing, bought the neighboring rowhouse for $1.8 million in January, according to property records. Brian Wise, the seller, said he did not know of the company’s CPI connection. An attorney who approached him and his wife, he said, “asked if we were willing to sell and we agreed on a price. It was a business sale.”

Keith and Amanda Catanzano also were unaware of CPI when they sold a garage in the alley behind Third Street SE to Newpoint for $1 million in June. Newpoint lists Seward as an officer and the same mailing address as CPI. “We had no idea,” said a woman who answered the phone at a number listed for the Catanzanos before hanging up.

Eric Kassoff, who sold the former site of the Capitol Lounge to Clear Plains, said he knew of the company’s CPI ties before the $11.3 million deal was finalized in January. He also sold the group a carriage house behind the building for $400,000.

Kassoff said he did not want to lease the space to a fast-food restaurant or a convenience store. He said CPI’s political leanings were not a factor in his decision to sell to the organization.

“Why would I have any issue selling my property to proud Americans?” asked Kassoff, who described himself as an independent. “We need to get past the labeling and demonizing and talk to each other, and that’s true in politics as well as commerce. If we were all to take that position we wouldn’t have much of a country left, would we?”

Although the Capitol Lounge closed more than two years ago, vestiges of its past remain on the building’s exterior, including a rendering of Benjamin Franklin beneath a quote concocted by the bar’s founder, Joe Englert: “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

James Silk, the bar’s former owner, said he left behind memorabilia when he vacated the building that could be suitable for the new owner: Richard M. Nixon campaign posters still hanging on the walls of what the owners cheekily dubbed the Nixon Room (located across from the Kennedy Room).

“Nixon is finally with his people,” Silk said. He laughed and added: “Nixon was a Republican, right?”

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kp777 · 11 months

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By Miles Parks

NPR

June 7, 2023

Why are Republicans abandoning one of the best tools the government has to catch voter fraud? That simple question is the focus of a new NPR investigation, published Sunday.

The tool is the Electronic Registration Information Center, better known as ERIC. It was created almost a decade ago as a way for states to share government data, in an effort to keep their voter rolls up to date. It allows election officials better insight into when their voters move and die and the rare times when they vote twice in different states, which is illegal.

"The little secret is that maybe more than 10 years ago, if somebody voted in Ohio, in Florida, in Arizona and Texas, you would have never known," Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, said in an interview with NPR in February. "With ERIC, we can compare our voter rolls to those states."

Eight Republican states have now pulled out of ERIC, including many with voting officials who are on the record as praising the partnership as recently as a few months ago. Ohio pulled out a month after LaRose spoke to NPR.

J. Christian Adams, a conservative elections attorney, has long been a critic of how ERIC operates. But he told NPR: "It's this crazy zeal to get out of ERIC ... that is going to cause voter fraud to flourish."

So what happened? Here are five takeaways from NPR's investigation:

1. A far-right website kicked things off

The story starts in January 2022, when a far-right website called the Gateway Pundit, which has pushed conspiracy theories in the past, began writing about ERIC. Up until then, the partnership was considered a quiet bipartisan success story, with member states that spanned the political spectrum.

NPR's investigations team analyzed hundreds of thousands of social media posts on a handful of social media sites frequented by election deniers. We found the Gateway Pundit's coverage started the far right's fixation on the program:

See Chart.

Roughly a week after the first Gateway Pundit article, Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin, a Republican, announced his state would become the first to pull out of ERIC, citing "concerns raised by citizens, government watchdog organizations and media reports."

2. Local "election integrity" groups are a political force

NPR found that while Ardoin did not make a big public show out of pulling out of ERIC, he did bring the announcement to maybe the only constituents at that time who would even care: a local group of conservative activists gathered in Houma, La.

The crowd, assembled for an "election integrity town hall," applauded for 15 seconds when Ardoin announced he was pulling the state out of ERIC. The event was publicized less than 24 hours before Ardoin's office released its statement on ERIC.

NPR's investigation also found these sorts of community election integrity groups to be critical in the effort to discredit ERIC across the country.

A group called Protect Your Vote Florida published a page on its website called "How to Influence Florida Legislators to Suspend Contract with ERIC!"

"The STRATEGY is to run a campaign directed at key Florida legislators," the group wrote in the post, which included a list of the state's lawmakers and contact information. "Hand delivered letters, emails, phone calls, and social media activity will all be utilized to maximize impact."

Emails acquired by NPR through public records requests showed election officials began to field questions from voters and state lawmakers shortly after these calls went out.

3. A Trump ally has coordinated an election denial machine

Cleta Mitchell is known by many for working with former President Donald Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election. The attorney was on the infamous call where Trump asked Georgia election officials to "find votes."

In the time since, she's been building an election denial infrastructure.

Her podcast, "Who's Counting," has become a central hub for stolen election narratives, and she's also started a coalition of grassroots groups across the country called the Election Integrity Network.

NPR's investigation found Mitchell to be a ringleader of sorts for the effort to dismantle ERIC.

She even hosted a secret ERIC summit with red state lawmakers last summer, according to documents shared with NPR by a nonprofit watchdog group called Documented.

Secretaries of state from the first five states to withdraw from ERIC attended the event, according to one attendee.

See chart.

4. Republican primaries are a driving force behind the ERIC exodus

In Louisiana, when Ardoin made the decision to leave ERIC, he was gearing up to run for reelection in a state Trump won by almost 20 percentage points. He was facing numerous challenges on his right. And ERIC was becoming a priority for Republican voters.

"We started hearing it on the campaign trail," added Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen in an interview with NPR.

Allen ran for his office last year, and shortly after the Gateway Pundit published its first article, he made a campaign promise to pull out of ERIC if he won. This January, he followed through, and Alabama became the second state to withdraw.

Secretaries of state in Missouri, West Virginia and Ohio — all states that have pulled out — have announced campaigns for higher office next year, or are expected to run.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis is a candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. DeSantis appointed Cord Byrd as his secretary of state last year, and the state's stance on ERIC shifted almost immediately.

NPR's investigation found that before he was secretary, Byrd regularly joined election integrity calls hosted by Mitchell.

5. ERIC withdrawals will make for "dirtier voter rolls" and an emboldened far right

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, put it simply in an interview with NPR: The states that have left ERIC "indirectly said, 'We're going to have dirtier voter rolls.' "

Brianna Lennon, a Democrat who oversees voting in Boone County, Mo., told NPR that will surely be the case in her county.

Before Missouri joined ERIC, the elections office relied on returned mail to find out if a voter moved to another state.

"That's what we'll have to go back to using," she said.

Election experts say less accurate voter rolls have a direct impact on voters, from longer lines at precincts to mail ballots and information getting sent to the wrong places.

Lennon told NPR she's worried about what the ERIC saga means for the 2024 election cycle. She had gotten a sense recently that community election integrity groups were gaining more traction in her state, but she says the secretary of state's decision was the first major policy decision she's seen that lined up so directly with their goals.

"I'm sure there are going to be ripples that come from this particular move and I'm not exactly sure what the end will be," she said. "I don't think this is an isolated thing."

Read or listen to the full investigation here.

#republicans #2024 elections #red states #rigged elections #election tampering #attempting coup

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plethoraworldatlas · 8 months

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Georgia Conservatives building AI tool that will overwhelm the system with false voter fraud claims

In Georgia, conservative operatives have contracted a private company to allow private citizens to challenge en-masse the voter registrations of their neighbors and community members, through voter fraud vigilantism. Fueled by Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell, this tool would allow people to file potentially thousands of challenges, overwhelming election workers and making legitimate voters jump through hoops to verify their registration. And we all know that some communities will be targeted far more than others

“EagleAI presentations that I have seen are confused and seem to steer counties towards improper list maintenance activities,” Blake Evans, Georgia’s elections director, said in a statement to NBC News. “EagleAI draws inaccurate conclusions and then presents them as if they are evidence of wrongdoing.”

Richards, who said Evans’ view was “not true,” also told Georgia officials that he’d found error-riddled voter rolls, with more registrations than eligible voters. Evans said the company is misunderstanding — and misconstruing — how list maintenance works, and painting typos and formatting differences, like typing a voter registration in all caps, as problems. “Eagle AI data offers zero additional value to Georgia’s existing list maintenance procedures,” Evans added.

#voting rights #voting #ai #voter suppression #anti ai

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xlntwtch2 · 5 months

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from Rolling Stone ... 12/08/23 ...

"For more than a decade, election officials have relied on a system to reduce fraud and boost voter registration. Trump's cronies are sabotaging it, state by state — and trying to replace it with something more MAGA"...

"(There is) ..a sustained pressure campaign against ERIC*, which has risen to the highest levels of the Republican Party, that involves angry demands from the former president, conspiracy theories in far-right media, and GOP secretaries of state too willing to give into them; nine Republican-led states have left ERIC in the past two years....

"Once a member of the old-school Republican mainstream, (Cleta) Mitchell has become the most ardent of election deniers...

"CONFUSION HAS FOLLOWED in the states Mitchell has persuaded to pull out from ERIC. ....

"Mitchell has a number of ties to EagleAI, as the investigative watchdog Documented first detailed, including helping the group with strategic planning, legal advice, and hosting demonstrations of the software for her Election Integrity Network nonprofit...

"EagleAI claims that “hundreds of individuals and county election offices in 23 states have shown “interest” in using it. ....

"Schmidt, Pennsylvania’s top election official, is critical of software like EagleAI. “The data sets that they’re looking to use, such as property-tax records, should not be used to generate a list of voters who are ineligible” to vote, according to Schmidt, because plenty of eligible voters don’t always appear on them. “There’s any number of spouses who do not show up on property–tax records. No one who rents an apartment will show up on property-tax records.”...

"EagleAI also markets its platform for use not just by state and county election officials, but by ordinary citizens to spot “potential problem registrations for review and/or election challenges.” Conservative groups have already sponsored training sessions for activists to use the software, according to Documented....

"IF TRUMP AND HIS LIEUTENANTS get their way, it’s possible that the failed efforts of 2020 and 2021 (culminating with the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol) could be remembered as a mere dress rehearsal for whatever happens next — particularly if the presidential election is close..."

*"ERIC was created in 2012 by the nonpartisan Pew Charitable Trusts. It started with seven original member states with a goal of helping modernize their outdated, often paper-record-based voter-registration data — and offers trustworthy information to clean up voter rolls of deceased or ineligible voters. States are then able to securely share specific information about voters, like the last four digits of a Social Security number or a driver’s license number, to eliminate any confusion about who a voter is and whether they’re eligible to register." <-from Rolling Stone news

#MAGA lawyers and others at work...

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mariacallous · 1 year

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“The 2022 midterm elections offered many snapshots of the contemporary school wars,” Jessica Winter writes, about races across the country targeted by right-wing activists who have “turned public schools into the national stage of a manufactured culture war over critical race theory, L.G.B.T.Q. classroom materials, the sexual ‘grooming’ of children, and other vehicles of ‘woke leftist’ indoctrination.” In South Carolina, which is experiencing a major teacher shortage, two candidates for state superintendent—one with twenty-two years of teaching experience and a platform focussed on raising teacher pay, and another with no teaching experience, who leads a conservative think tank that advocates for “education freedom”—faced off on Tuesday. “Education freedom,” as it turns out, involves funnelling public funding into private schools and charter schools. “In short, the two people vying to run South Carolina’s public schools were an advocate for public schools, and . . . an opponent of public schools,” Winter writes. Maybe you can guess who won—handily. Winter examines several other races, and points out why rival factions in the school battles, increasingly polarized and infused with vitriol, should actually be working toward similar goals.

—Jessie Li, newsletter editor

The 2022 midterm elections offered many snapshots of the contemporary school wars, but one might start with the race for Superintendent of Education in South Carolina, a state that languishes near the bottom of national education rankings and that’s suffering from a major teacher shortage. Lisa Ellis, the Democratic candidate, has twenty-two years of teaching experience and is the founder of a nonprofit organization that focusses on raising teacher pay, lowering classroom sizes, and increasing mental-health resources in schools. Her Republican opponent, Ellen Weaver, who has no teaching experience, is the leader of a conservative think tank that advocates for “education freedom” in the form of more public funding for charter schools, private-school vouchers, homeschooling, and micro-schools. “Choice is truly, as Condi Rice says, the great civil-rights issue of our time,” Weaver stated in a debate with Ellis last week. In the same debate, Ellis argued that South Carolina does not have a teacher shortage, per se; rather, it has an understandable lack of qualified teachers who are willing to work for low pay in overcrowded classrooms, in an increasingly divisive political environment—a dilemma that is depressingly familiar across the country. Ellis also stressed that South Carolina has fallen short of its own public-school-funding formula since 2008, leaving schools billions of dollars in the hole. Weaver countered that the state could easily persuade non-teachers to teach, so long as they had some relevant “subject-matter expertise,” and warned against “throwing money at problems.” The salary floor for a public-school teacher in South Carolina is forty thousand dollars.

In short, the two people vying to run South Carolina’s public schools were an advocate for public schools, and—in her policy positions, if not in her overt messaging—an opponent of public schools. The latter won, and it wasn’t even close: as of this writing, Weaver has fifty-five per cent of the vote to Ellis’s forty-three. Weaver didn’t win on her own, of course—her supporters included Cleta Mitchell, the conservative activist and attorney who aided Donald Trump in his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results; the founding chairman of Palmetto Promise, Jim DeMint, a former South Carolina senator who once opined that gay people and single mothers should not be permitted to teach in public schools; and Jeff Yass, a powerful donator to education PACs—at least one of which has funnelled money to Weaver’s campaign—and the richest man in Pennsylvania. (Yass, as ProPublica has reported, is also “a longtime financial patron” of a Pennsylvania state senator, Anthony Williams, who helped create “a pair of tax credits that allow companies to slash their state tax bills if they give money to private and charter schools.”)

Weaver borrowed the sloganeering and buzzwords of right-wing activist groups, such as the 1776 Project and Moms for Liberty—which, as my colleague Paige Williams recently reported, have turned public schools into the national stage of a manufactured culture war over critical race theory (C.R.T.), L.G.B.T.Q. classroom materials, the sexual “grooming” of children, and other vehicles of “woke leftist” indoctrination, as well as lingering resentment over COVID-19 lockdowns. During the debate, Weaver railed against C.R.T. and the “pornography” supposedly proliferating in schools, and associated Ellis with a “far-left, union-driven agenda.” (Incidentally, South Carolina’s public employees are prohibited from engaging in collective bargaining.) “They believe in pronoun politics. They believe parents are domestic terrorists, much like Merrick Garland,” Weaver said. (Weaver may have been referring to an incident in May, 2021, when Ellis’s nonprofit cancelled a protest after it “received harassing and threatening messages from groups with extreme views about masking,” including death threats.) “These are people,” Weaver went on, “who are out of touch with the mainstream of South Carolina values, and these are the people who my opponent calls friends.” Ellis maintained that those who profess to be hunting down proponents of C.R.T. in schools are “chasing ghosts.”

The ghost chasers bagged plenty of votes on Tuesday. A clown-car school-board race in Charleston, South Carolina, ended with five out of nine seats going to Moms for Liberty-backed candidates. Governor Ron DeSantis—the maestro of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” legislation and a home-state hero to Moms for Liberty—endorsed six school-board candidates, all of whom won their races; Moms for Liberty endorsed a total of twelve in Florida, winning nine. In Texas, ten out of fifteen spots on the state school board appeared to be going to Republicans, including three seats in which G.O.P. incumbents either lost or dropped out of their primary when facing opponents who took a harder line against C.R.T.

Another C.R.T.-haunted race, for education superintendent in Arizona, was as striking in its bizarre contrasts as the one in South Carolina. (As of this writing, the outcome is still a tossup.) The Republican challenger, a seventy-seven-year-old named Tom Horne, was banned for life by the S.E.C. in a past career as an investor; violated campaign-finance laws when he was the state’s attorney general; and was cited half a dozen times for speeding, including in a school zone, during a previous stint as education superintendent—a busy time when he also tried to outlaw bilingual education in public schools and to eliminate the Mexican American studies program in the Tucson Unified School District. His big thing now is—wait for it—banning critical race theory in the classroom. He also wants a greater law-enforcement presence in Arizona’s schools, because, as he has said, “the police are what make civilization possible.” Horne’s opponent is the Democratic incumbent, a thirty-six-year-old speech-language therapist and onetime preschool teacher named Kathy Hoffman who wants to—wait for it!—raise school budgets and teacher salaries, and lower class sizes. (The signature achievement of her first term as superintendent was to lower the counsellor-to-student ratio in public schools by twenty per cent.) Hoffman has a baby daughter and took her oath of office in 2019 on a copy of “Too Many Moose!,” one of her students’ favorite books. It’s as if Miss Binney from “Ramona the Pest” were running against Spiro Agnew.

The precise logical relation between the conservative-libertarian axis of billionaires who wish to privatize public education—notably among them Betsy DeVos, who was Secretary of Education under Trump—and the rank-and-file right-wing moms who back “Don’t Say Gay” is as yet unclear. For the moment, at least, their desires match—as Tuesday night’s election results have demonstrated—and nowhere is their bond stronger than in their shared antipathy for teachers’ unions, even in states where much of the meaningful work that unions do has been outlawed. On the eve of Election Day, one of Moms for Liberty’s founders, Tina Descovich, tweeted, “Teachers unions do not care about kids. Period.” The vision of “educational freedom” espoused by Ellen Weaver and her ideological comrades is one in which teachers are servants of parents and public money pours into private pockets, where any space can be a school and anybody can lead a classroom, and where whatever compact remains between parents and teachers—whatever sense of a community collaborating in a public good—dissolves.

The tragedy of the post-pandemic schools crisis, crystallized in Descovich’s tweet and in many of Tuesday’s election results, lies in how it has heightened the adversarial relationship between two groups whose interests should be closely aligned. (Or, indeed, one and the same: many teachers are parents.) As beleaguered as they are, most public-school systems are not yet splintering along DeVosian lines into a privatized mix of living-room salons and strip-mall micro-schools. Until then, public-school parents will continue to hand their children off to public employees in a public building for six hours per day, or eight, or nine. A degree of trust in these educators’ qualifications, their good faith, and even their state of mind is nonnegotiable. Poor working conditions for teachers are necessarily synonymous with poor learning conditions for students; overcrowded, under-ventilated classrooms are at once a political issue, a labor-rights issue, and a children’s-rights issue. Something the members of Moms for Liberty say a lot is “We don’t co-parent with the government.” Don’t we, though? ♦

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