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Post by the Scribe on Mar 9, 2020 0:03:24 GMT
This is why the GOP may hold congress again after the mid-term elections and why Donald Trump (if he is still around) or whatever Republican will win in 2020. The system is rigged, clearly. And with this past stolen election and the obstruction of Obama's judicial appointees and Trump's unprecedented appointments to the bench any appeals to this right wing fraud will be struck down. You won't hear this on the corporate owned mainstream media (which is owned by 6 conservative companies) nor will you hear this on right wing media which controls all of talk radio and FOX. The only hope the DEMS have is to get some charismatic leaders to run for office and get people registered and to the polls despite everything the right wing cons are throwing at them. That and another severe economic crash may help. Too bad we have to go through this just to get left wingers elected. Sad. Rigged: How Voter Suppression Threw Wisconsin to Trump And possibly handed him the whole election. Ari BermanNovember/December 2017 Issue Listen: w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/346771509%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-IFRky&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true From the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to the election of our first black president in 2008, the United States saw a gradual increase in voting access. Wisconsin had a particularly proud history of high voter turnout and expansive voting laws, adopting pioneering measures like Election Day registration in the 1970s. But when Republicans took control of 26 state legislatures in the wave election of 2010, they passed a slew of laws making it harder to vote. Twenty-two states have adopted new voting restrictions since then, more than half of which first went into effect in 2016. Wisconsin followed this pattern after Scott Walker became governor in 2011 and began his crusade to remake the state in the conservative image. One of the first projects he and the GOP Legislature undertook was enacting some of the most onerous voting laws in the country.
In other states, the rollback of voting protections was aided by the Supreme Court, which in 2013 gutted the Voting Rights Act, ruling that nine primarily Southern states—and cities and counties in six others—with long histories of voting discrimination no longer had to clear new election rules with the federal government. The 2016 election was the first presidential contest in more than 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act.
A month after the Supreme Court ruling, North Carolina passed a sweeping rewrite of its election laws, requiring voter IDs, cutting early voting, and eliminating same-day registration, among other changes, before the law was struck down in a federal court for targeting black voters “with almost surgical precision.” Ohio repealed the first week of early voting, when African Americans were five times likelier than whites to cast a ballot. Florida barred ex-felons from becoming eligible to vote after serving their time, preventing 1.7 million Floridians from voting in 2016, including 1 in 5 black voting-age residents. Arizona made it a felony for anyone other than a family member or caregiver to collect a voter’s absentee ballot, disproportionately hurting Latino and Native American voters in the state’s rural areas.
“We’re moving into a pre-Voting Rights Act era, where there isn’t any real watchdogging of elections and changes to election laws,” says Albrecht. “States, including Wisconsin, are making maverick changes that have a significant impact on populations that have been historically disenfranchised. “The GOP shows no signs of letting up on its campaign to restrict voting rights. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has reversed the Obama administration’s opposition to a restrictive voter ID law in Texas and voter purging in Ohio. And the request by Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity for the voter data of every American has led thousands of voters to unregister in swing states like Colorado and sparked fears that the administration will propose new policies to undermine access to the ballot at the federal and state levels. Emboldened by these efforts, Republican-controlled statehouses have already passed more voting restrictions in 2017 than they did in 2016 and 2015 combined. Taken together, “there’s no doubt that these election changes affected the turnout among young voters, first-time voters, voters of color, and other members of the Obama coalition that overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton,” says Marc Elias, general counsel for Clinton’s campaign, who filed a half-dozen voting rights lawsuits in the months before the 2016 election.
Control of Congress in 2018, not to mention the presidential election in 2020, hinges in part on states like Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Virginia that have put new voting restrictions in place. The lesson from 2016 is terrifyingly clear: If voter suppression can work in a state like Wisconsin, with a long progressive history and a culture of high civic participation, it can work anywhere. And if those who believe in fair elections don’t start to take this threat seriously, history will repeat itself.
The voter ID law’s impact was particularly acute in Milwaukee, where nearly two-thirds of the state’s African American population lives.
After the law passed, the GOP-dominated Legislature disbanded the nonpartisan agency tasked with overseeing state elections and educating the public about the law, replacing it with a commission of partisan appointees. The law was quickly tied up in court, but after it was reinstated in 2014, the Legislature didn’t allocate any funds for voter ID advertising until June 2016.* “The state did virtually nothing to reach out and educate communities in poverty around the photo ID law,” Albrecht said. Wisconsin reported that it was running ads about the law in 52 movie theaters across the state, but not one of those was in Milwaukee. Anyway, Albrecht asks, “how often do people in poverty go to the movies?”
It wasn’t just poor African Americans who were disenfranchised. Most college IDs were not accepted under the law because they didn’t require signatures or have the state-mandated two-year expiration date—a criterion that made little sense at four-year schools. Only 3 of the 13 four-year schools in the University of Wisconsin system had IDs compliant with the new law.
That meant many schools, including UW-Madison, had to issue separate IDs for students to use only for voting, an expensive and confusing process for students and administrators. In addition to needing these new IDs to vote, students at private colleges and universities had to bring them to register to vote as well, in addition to a proof-of-enrollment form. (Public university students needed either the ID or the proof of enrollment.)* There were more than 13,000 out-of-state students at UW-Madison alone who were eligible to vote but couldn’t do so without going through this byzantine process if they lacked a Wisconsin driver’s license or state ID. (UW-Madison ultimately issued more than 7,300 voter IDs for the 2016 general election.)
The voter ID law was one of 33 election changes passed in Wisconsin after Walker took office, and it dovetailed with his signature push to dismantle unions, taking away his opponents’ most effective organizing tool. Wisconsin’s Legislature cut early voting from 30 days to 12, reduced early voting hours on nights and weekends, and restricted early voting to one location per municipality, hampering voters in large urban areas and sprawling rural ones.* It also added new residency requirements for voter registration, eliminated staffers who led statewide registration drives, and made it harder to count absentee ballots.
Republicans were explicit about the purposes of these changes as well. On the floor of the state Senate, Grothman said of extended early voting hours in heavily Democratic cities like Madison and Milwaukee, “I want to nip this in the bud before too many other cities get on board.” (Roughly 514,000 Wisconsinites voted early in 2012; they favored Obama over Mitt Romney by 58 to 41 percent, according to exit polls.) The county clerk of conservative Waukesha County said early voting gave “too much access” to voters in Milwaukee and Madison. Judge Peterson later ruled the early voting cuts had been passed “to suppress the reliably Democratic vote of Milwaukee’s African Americans.”
“The Wisconsin experience,” Peterson said, “demonstrates that a preoccupation with mostly phantom election fraud leads to real incidents of disenfranchisement, which undermine rather than enhance confidence in elections, particularly in minority communities.”
Put together, the changes were a slow-motion train wreck on Election Day for voters like Zack Moore and Andrea Anthony, a pileup many saw coming but nobody was able or willing to stop.
full article: www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/10/voter-suppression-wisconsin-election-2016/
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 9, 2020 0:03:57 GMT
Voter suppression by Republicans is the first big tool in their toolchest. Once suppression is in place the second big tool comes into place. THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE.
This is one of the better explanations of how the electoral college works for the minority party in power and is well worth reading and understanding.How the Electoral College Rigged the Election for Donald TrumpAmerica's electoral system gives smaller, more conservative states more weight – and that benefited TrumpMark Makela/Getty By David S. Cohen November 16, 2016
I don't agree with Donald Trump on much. We both like New York City. We both believe in the importance of oxygen for sustaining living beings. Beyond that, and especially in the political realm, we don't often see eye-to-eye.
However, it has become painfully clear that one of the central claims of the Trump campaign is undoubtedly true: The election was indeed rigged. But it wasn't rigged in the direction Trump claimed – rather, it was rigged in Trump's and his party's favor. This happened in a number of ways – felon disenfranchisement, voter suppression and Puerto Rico having no say whatsoever, for instance – but one huge one that was under-appreciated by many Americans before this week is the Electoral College system.
This Election Is Being Rigged – But Not by Hillary Clinton: www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/this-election-is-being-rigged-but-not-by-hillary-clinton-w448638
Those actually trying to manipulate the election outcome support the guy who keeps whining about election-rigging
The facts are indisputable: Last Tuesday, there was an election for president. One candidate received more votes than the other. And that candidate lost.
Right now, Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by over a million votes. As all the absentee ballots from California, Washington and New York are counted, experts expect that number to climb to over two million, with a margin of victory around 1.5 percent. As has been noted in The New York Times, that would be a greater margin of victory in the popular vote than the ones with which John F. Kennedy won in 1960 and Richard Nixon won in 1968.
Of course, Trump won the election because he won the most electoral votes. The U.S. Constitution allots each state a number of electoral votes based on the combined number of members of Congress each state has. Therefore, Wyoming, with one representative in the House and two senators, has three electoral votes, while California, with 53 representatives and two senators, has 55 electoral votes. In all but Nebraska and Maine, all electoral votes go to the candidate who wins the state's popular vote. Thus, a candidate who wins by one vote in a state gets the same number of that state's electoral votes – all of them – as a candidate who wins by millions of votes.
So the election was rigged in the sense that the Founding Fathers created a system that, at this point in history, tilts the playing field in favor of candidates who appeal to low-population states and a small set of contested "swing" states, rather than those who appeal to big urban centers in population-rich states that are not contested.
First, the swing states: By giving all the electors in a swing state to the candidate who wins that state, even if only by a small number of votes, the system heavily favors the candidate who appeals to those few states. All the other states, where the candidates may win by much larger margins, become less relevant.
In this election, Clinton won some of the most populous states in the nation – New York and California – by substantial margins. Texas was the largest state Trump won, but he won that by a much smaller margin. Of course, Trump won the important swing states, but also by very narrow margins. Because of the winner-take-all system, Trump's narrow advantage in those few swing states mattered much more than Clinton's massive advantage in the unconstested states.
Second, basic math illustrates the point that all low-population states, not just swing states, are favored in this system. According to the last census (in 2010), Wyoming, the nation's lowest population state, has just over 560,000 people. Those people get three electoral votes, or one per 186,000 people. California, our most populous state, has more than 37 million people.
Those Californians have 55 electoral votes, or one per 670,000 people. Comparatively, people in Wyoming have nearly four times the power in the Electoral College as people in California. Put another way, if California had the same proportion of electoral votes per person as Wyoming, it would have about 200 electoral votes.
If you look at a map generated by Slate showing this difference, the states with the greatest power in the Electoral College – those whose citizens' votes count the most – are mostly low-population, conservative states. Meanwhile, the states with the least power in the Electoral College are more of a mixed bag of conservative, swing and liberal states. Importantly, among the five least powerful (most populous) states are three that deliver overwhelming Democratic majorities every four years: California, New York and Illinois.
What this means is that America's electoral system is rigged to give these smaller, more conservative states more weight. In fact, that's one of the reasons the Constitution's framers created the system in the first place: to give those smaller states a say in the process (and to help slave states). To illustrate this, think about what a pure popular vote system would do to the election. The small states would be largely ignored, and the biggest states with the most populous cities would get the most attention.
The Framers thus chose a system that would give power to the small states over the big states, a system that now favors conservative Republicans over more liberal Democrats. It's no coincidence that the two presidential candidates in this century who have won the popular but lost the election were Democrats (the other being Al Gore, in 2000). We have to call this system what it is: rigged.
Interestingly, Trump himself recognized the unfairness of the Electoral College in a series of tweets in 2012. He called the system "a disaster for a democracy," "a total sham and a travesty," and a "laughing stock." Of course, he tweeted this commentary when he mistakenly believed that Barack Obama had lost the popular vote against Mitt Romney. Trump also said, before learning Obama had in fact won both the popular and electoral votes, that there should be a "revolution in this country," that we should "fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice" and that we "can't let this happen" and "should march on Washington."
Funny how now Trump is saying something completely different. Since he won the election but lost the popular vote, he's tweeted about the "genius" of the Electoral College, saying "it brings all states, including smaller ones, into play." He also (rightly) pointed out that he would have campaigned differently if there were a pure popular vote. There's no reason to believe that the large liberal states would have turned out for Trump if only he had campaigned there. But there is every reason to believe Clinton's popular-vote margin would have been even greater had everyone in California and New York had an incentive to vote.
The root problem here is the Constitution's guarantee that every state has two senators, regardless of size. If Senate representation were proportional, so much about this country would be different. However, it isn't, and we have not only the lopsided Electoral College, but outsized influence in Congress for small, rural states – which, of course, tend to vote Republican.
So Donald Trump was right about the system being rigged. There are and always have been attempts to reform this system – un-rig it if you will – but those are likely to go nowhere in the near (nor possibly distant) future. Instead, we have to live with the reality that, with Trump winning the election while losing the popular vote, there’s no way to argue the system is anything but rigged in his favor.
www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/how-the-electoral-college-rigs-elections-for-republicans-w450749
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 9, 2020 0:04:33 GMT
Just a reminder of this Republiconservative operative admitting that Voter ID is specifically done to help Republicans win elections. The game is about performing as many tricks as possible on as many fronts as possible whereas the combination will give their party victories up and down ballot.
Reptilian Mike Turzai: Voter ID Will Allow Romney to Win Pa.
Sen Daylin Leach debates Sen Mike Turzai on Voter ID
Watch how Mike Turzai spouts lie after lie after lie. There is nothing a Republicon won't do to steal an election.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 9, 2020 0:05:16 GMT
Legal PROOF Pennsylvania was stolen in 2016 through successful gerrymandering and election shenanigans from the GOP. Those 20 electoral votes belonged to Hillary Clinton. The same seems to be true in Michigan, Wisconsin and from what I am discovering Florida once again has had irregularities: Pennsylvania Supreme Court Issues New Congressional Map To Replace Gerrymandered OneSam Levine, HuffPost •February 19, 2018
’’’Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court on Monday issued a new congressional map to replace the state’s current one, which the court said is so partisan it violates the state’s Constitution.
&The Supreme Court drew the map after Republican lawmakers and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) failed to come up with an agreement by the Feb. 15 deadline.
Related SearchesSupreme Court JudgesPennsylvania Congressional MapPennsylvania GerrymanderingPennsylvania Congressional Districts ’In an opinion earlier in February, the state Supreme Court wrote that Pennsylvania’s congressional districts need, at minimum, to be compact and contiguous, to contain roughly the same number of people, and to not split counties and other communities unnecessarily. A map was unconstitutional, the court said, when it prioritized partisan advantage over those criteria.
&“”’“”In a Monday order, the court wrote that its new map splits just 13 counties. (The earlier plan, devised in 2011, split 28.) Nine of these counties are split among two congressional districts, while the other four counties are split among three. The court wrote that its plan “draws heavily” from proposals submitted by Republican lawmakers, Democrats, the plaintiffs and others, but said this map’s compactness is “superior or comparable.”
Republicans controlled the redistricting process in the state in 2011 and drew a map that gave their party a considerable advantage. In 2012, 2014 and 2016, they won 13 of the state’s 18 congressional seats, even though the party only won about 50 percent of the popular vote. GOP voter registration also lags behind Democrats significantly in the state. In a 5-2 decision last month, the state Supreme Court said the map “clearly, plainly and palpably” violated the state’s Constitution.
Democrats have been closely watching the redistricting battle, because it could offer a chance for the party to pick up a handful of seats in Congress. The Brennan Center for Justice estimated that the old map had accounted for an additional three to four GOP seats in Congress.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost. www.yahoo.com/news/pennsylvania-supreme-court-issues-congressional-200651169.htmlThe New GOP Plan to Steal the 2016 Presidential Election01/23/2013 01:24 pm ET Updated Mar 25, 2013
TAMPA, FL - AUGUST 29: RNC Chairman Reince Priebus adjouns during the third day of the Republican National Convention at the Tampa Bay Times Forum on August 29, 2012 in Tampa, Florida. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was nominated as the Republican presidential candidate during the RNC, which is scheduled to conclude August 30. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) In November, the Republicans used gerrymandering to win the U.S. House of Representatives. Now they want to use it to win the presidency in 2016.
By artfully redrawing district maps, the Republicans were able to win a majority of the House seats in 2012 — despite the fact that Democratic House candidates garnered 1.3 million more votes than GOP candidates nationwide.
Now the Republicans want to duplicate that political heist — except this time their target is the presidency. Last week Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus endorsed a scheme to allocate electoral votes by U.S. House districts, instead of state-wide. They want to rig the Electoral College so that a GOP candidate can win even if he or she loses the popular vote.
Right now, 48 of the 50 states allocate their electoral votes in a state-wide, winner-take-all manner. The candidate that wins the state gets all of its electoral votes. Two states, Maine and Nebraska, use what is called the Congressional District Method, where the state’s electoral votes are divided up among the state’s U.S. House districts. The candidate who wins a district gets one of the state’s electoral votes. (Two electoral votes end up going to the candidate who wins the state-wide vote.)
The Republicans want to expand the use of this district-based method to states where their party is in charge of the state government. In the last decade, the party has plowed tens of millions of dollars into state legislative contests so they can control the redistricting process and draw district lines in a way that unfairly favors their congressional candidates. The original plan was to use this gerrymandering to ensure control the U.S. House. But now they want to double down on that winning strategy and apply it to presidential contests.
There is already a potential for the Electoral College to elect the candidate who loses the popular vote. We saw that travesty with George W. Bush in 2000. This problem is made possible by the winner-take-all nature of how the votes are allocated in the states. A simple example shows how this works. In the last election, Obama won in Maryland by 1,677,844 to 971,869 — and won that state’s 10 electoral votes. Romney won in Arizona by 1,233,654 to 1,025,232 and won 11 electoral votes. So while Obama won 500,000 more votes than Romney in the two states (2,703,076 vs. 2,205,523), Romney won 11 electoral votes to Obama’s 10.
We can get this kind of perverse outcome because some states are heavily Democratic or Republican, which allows the victorious candidates to win those states with a lot more votes than they need. Those votes are in essence “wasted.” That is what happened to the Democrats in Maryland, where Obama won by over 700,000 votes.
The Republican plan would magnify this problem by switching electoral vote allocation to the district level. Instead of having one problematic winner-take-all contest in each state, you would have as many as there are House districts in each state. That means a potential of hundreds of such contests nationwide — there are 435 seats in the House of Representatives. So now there would be hundreds of opportunities for votes to be wasted in lopsided victories. This increases the chances of the “wrong” candidate winning — something that electoral systems experts have warned would be the outcome to switching to a district-based system.
And the “wrong” candidate would most likely be a Republican, because they have been very successful in redrawing congressional district lines so that large numbers of Democratic voters are crammed into districts and waste a lot of their votes. So switching to a district-based system is clearly an effort to rig the election in the GOP’s favor.
We need to publicize this effort and label it for what it is — a shameful attempt at political cheating. The Republican Party has stolen the U.S. House and now they want to steal the presidency.
In the long run, we need to get rid of the Electoral College so that there are no opportunities to rig presidential elections in this way. Or if we keep it, we need to modify it in the way proposed by the National Popular Vote Plan, which would ensure that the winner would always be the candidate who wins the popular vote.
Do you have information you want to share with HuffPost? Here’s how.
www.huffingtonpost.com/douglas-j-amy/2016-electoral-college_b_2520878.html
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 9, 2020 0:05:42 GMT
This is why the Democratic Party pisses me off so much. How many times does this have to happen before Democratic leadership will call this out? Democrat incumbents NEED to be replaced with Progressives.
Does No One Care That 7 Million Votes Were Not Counted?
Big Picture Interview: Mike Papantonio, America's Lawyer (RT America)/Ring of Fire Radio/Law and Disorder. The evidence that Kris Kobach's interstate crosscheck program helped hijack the election for Donald Trump couldn't be clearer. So why aren't Democrats talking about it?
Lynching by LAPTOP, a review:
Greg Palast: Cross Check- Motherlode of Vote Purge Scams
BREAKING: Election Experts Explain How The Election Was Stolen!
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 9, 2020 0:06:19 GMT
This could be another good effect of the Trump Russia connection however after the 2000 fiasco where Bush and the Supremes stole the election they did a similar thing that made it even EASIER for the GOP to steal elections. If it forces a policy to always have a paper trail that is a good thing.Congress Set To Approve Nearly $700 Million For Election Security, Source SaysMarch 21, 2018·9:03 AM ET Miles Parks
Swing states, and even individual precincts within those states, present a significant point of vulnerability when it comes to the threat of election interference because of their potential to impact the result in a presidential race, the current secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and one of her key predecessors both told senators Wednesday.
Both officials appeared before the Senate intelligence committee to discuss election security, as Congress appeared ready to inject approximately $687 million into helping states improve their voting systems and granting additional funding to the FBI.
Russian Threat To Elections To Persist Through 2018, Spy Bosses Warn Congress www.npr.org/2018/02/13/584672450/intelligence-leaders-testify-about-global-threats-in-senate-hearing The decentralized nature of elections in the U.S. is often talked about as a strength. Because states run their own elections, it's impossible to break into one system and affect nationwide vote tallies or voter registrations.
But that decentralization also means local jurisdictions in places that can have an outsized effect on the outcome of national races — like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan — will be forced to defend against cyber-threats posed by entire nation-state adversaries like Russia.
"The reality is: Given our Electoral College and our current politics, national elections are decided in this country in a few precincts, in a few key swing states," former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, who served under President Obama during the 2016 presidential election cycle, told members of the Senate intelligence committee. "The outcome, therefore, may dance on the head of a pin."
Senate Campaign In Tennessee Fears Hack After Impostor's Emails Request Money The current secretary of DHS, Kirstjen Nielsen, echoed those comments. Johnson and Nielsen testified together, in a show of bipartisanship, on Capitol Hill as part of the Senate intelligence committee hearing.
more: www.npr.org/2018/03/21/595305722/senators-hold-election-security-hearing-after-releasing-recommendations-for-2018?utm_source=npr_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20180321&utm_campaign=breakingnews&utm_term=nprnews
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 9, 2020 0:07:00 GMT
I think we have a bigger problem with election integrity from the GOP more than the Russians.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:38:31 GMT
Some good news for a change.Voting Rights Advocates Just Won a Big Victory in Court The ruling is a setback for conservative groups trying to purge voter rolls across the country.
Pema LevyMar. 30, 2018 6:21 PM
A conservative legal group’s crusade to purge voter lists across the country hit a setback Friday when a federal judge in Florida ruled that Broward County was already adequately maintaining its voter file. In doing so, the judge rebuffed the group’s efforts to force the heavily Democratic county to implement procedures that voting rights advocates say could have resulted in eligible voters being removed from the rolls.
The case is one of many filed by the American Civil Rights Union, which claims that numerous counties throughout the country are shirking their duty under federal law to remove ineligible voters. One of the leaders of the effort is J. Christian Adams, a former member of President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission. Adams, a conservative legal activist, claims that voter fraud exists in the United States on a large scale, particularly among non-citizens, though his research on the matter has proved dubious at best. (The overwhelming weight of the evidence suggests that voter fraud is extremely rare.) Adams is an ally of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, and both have advocated for laws that force voters to show proof of citizenship in order to register.
In her decision Friday, Judge Beth Bloom rejected key arguments put forward by ACRU. Among them was ACRU’s contention that Broward County had more registered voters than eligible citizens, which the group put forward as proof that the superintendent of elections is not fulfilling her list-maintenance responsibilities. Some experts have raised doubts about this assertion, and Bloom agreed with those critics, calling the calculations of ACRU’s expert witness “misleading” and the evidence put forward by ACRU on the topic “inaccurate.”
ACRU had also argued that the standard for what qualifies as a “reasonable effort” to maintain accurate rolls—the legal requirement—should depend on the population of a county: A large county with an ever-changing population and a high registration rate compared to the eligible population (the same statistic Bloom found unreliable) should have to undertake more list maintenance efforts than one whose population is more static. Such a standard of reasonableness could result in more purging in urban areas, which often have more voters of color and are more likely to back Democrats. Bloom found that this interpretation of reasonableness would be unworkable. “ACRU’s proposed definition of ‘reasonable efforts’ is too subjective and would lead to an arbitrary, non-uniform, unworkable, and unpredictable application,” she concluded.
As Mother Jones reported last year, Adams and ACRU have filed similar suits across the country in recent years—first in small, rural counties, including some with large minority populations. Rather than fight in court, many of these counties agreed to consent decrees that imposed additional list maintenance requirements. In 2016, the group filed suits against large, Democratic-leaning jurisdictions in swing states, including Broward County. This was the first case against a large county to reach trial.
Bloom’s Friday ruling, which directly rebuts ACRU’s population-versus-registration arguments, will likely impede future efforts by Adams and groups doing similar work around the country. Justin Levitt, an election law expert and former Justice Department official, noted that the judge’s rejection of ACRU’s “bad math” could have important implications for legal battles in other counties.
www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/voting-rights-advocates-just-won-a-big-victory-in-court/
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:39:03 GMT
All of these pre election tactics from Trumpubliconsevatives smacks of a type of election fraud to me and must be illegal at some level. Whether it be lies and propaganda from FOX, the GOP, the right wing noise machine, Russian trolls, Wikileaks and Putin's boy Assange and any other nefarious deeds Republicons are guilty of must be stopped. While the Democratic Party has its own internal issues there is a false equivalency to say both parties do this at the same level. No one comes close to the dirty tricks to steal elections like that of the GOP and their minions.
Report: Enquirer paid $30K to silence Trump Tower doorman
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:39:29 GMT
The Opposition w/ Jordan Klepper - Elections Under Attack: Cracking Down on Voter Fraud
Published on Nov 7, 2017 Motivated by a cash reward, Citizen Journalist Tim Baltz sets out to prove that voter fraud occurred in New Hampshire during the 2016 election.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:39:57 GMT
Putin Election Hack RG
That was one of the many reasons Putilov despised democracies. It was too damn easy for men like himself to overturn their elections. The stupid Americans had proven that point themselves at a Las Vegas computer convention. At one exhibition, US cyber experts changed the voter tabulations on thirty different voting machines, turning thirty mock-election losers into winners. The experts changed those election outcomes in mere minutes. Furthermore, they left no trace, no evidence of their criminal machinations.
Putilov had, of course, done the same thing during America’s last presidential election. Unfortunately, Putilov’s hackers weren’t as good as the Vegas cyber-experts, and US investigators were able to confirm that Russia had hacked into America’s voting systems. To counter that assertion, Putilov immediately launched a disinformation campaign. He ordered one of his stooges—that country’s idiotic FBI director, Jonathan Conley—to issue a statement claiming that the US voting systems was too spread-out and too diverse for hacking to succeed. That statement was of course a flat-out lie. The voting machines’ software could be compromised in a heartbeat—as the Vegas conference had proved—and, anyway, the main tabulators, which counted the votes, were connected to the Internet. In fact, the cyber-tools necessary for stealing elections—especially those needed to purge voter registration lists and and to falsify absentee ballot requests—were readily available online. Consequently, Putilov could hack into them with a vengeance. Likewise, the systems’ manufacturers and support technicians could plant vote-plundering malware any time they wanted. Nor were the manufacturers interested in stopping Putilov’s election hacking. In the documentary, Hacking Democracy, cyber-expert, Bev Harris, had proven beyond a shadow of a doubt how vulnerable they were. But the machines’ manufacturers—instead of thanking her for revealing the flaws in their systems—had threatened to sue her.
Hacking Democracy Full Documentary (2006)
You got off lucky, bitch, Putilov thought to himself. In my country, I’d have had you jailed, killed—or both!
God, Putilov hated that documentary. He was sure that after it came out the Americans would build a cyber-security firewall around their voting systems. In that documentary and on her website, www.BlackBoxVoting.org, Harris had described defect after defect after defect in America’s voting systems. For instance, she showed how Touchscreens could be programmed to register one’s votes for the opposite candidate. She laid out how incredibly simple it was to flip absentee and mail-in ballots and make them register as votes for a candidate’s rival. She pointed out how in one district votes for Al Gore in Florida had been subtracted from Gore’s final tally instead of being added to it. She demonstrated how—after voting systems had been hacked and the vote tabulations changed to elect the loser—forensic investigators lacked the technological means to detect and prove the system had been hacked and the outcome altered. She laid out for the world how hackable US elections were.
But the imbecilic Americans did . . . nothing.
Lenin must have been laughing his ass off. His primary nemesis, capitalism itself, was to blame for much of the US voting system’s failures. Voting technology in the US was run and controlled by private companies, who were, many believed, politically biased. They wanted US elections riggerd. These voting technology firms had fought federal investigators’ attempts to study their machines’ flaws and to create software, which would shield their machines from hackers. The state and local Republican politicians had also blocked efforts to prevent election hacking. They had made sure that government couldn’t monitor and investigate US elections and that there was almost no way to audit the vote tabulations afterward. Only two out America’s fifty states created systems that allowed for accurate vote recounts. Putilov and his allies could even kill many of their opponents’ votes in the cradle before their ballots could be cast. Putilov could purge any and all voters who were ex-felons, who had the same names as other voters in the registry or who had failed to vote in recent elections.
Putilov’s hackers could therefore overturn almost all US elections at the state, local and national level with impunity. There was nothing America could do about it. As Wired magazine had titled one of its articles, “America’s Electronic Voting Machines Are Scarily Easy to Target”.
And now with the help of J. T. Tower and their Saudi allies, he and an elite cadre of global oligarchs were poised to purge the earth of all its socalled democracies. The pernicious plague of “one-person, one-vote” would be flung down the planet’s “memory hole” for all time to come.
You can’t help but love capitalism, can you? Putilov thought grinning. It had made him the richest man in the world, and now with a little help from himself and his friends, the Old Free Enterprize System was about to wipe all those reprehensible representative democracies off the face of the earth.
Putilov couldn’t wait to hack the next election. He would be even better at it next time. After the coming election his band of merry cyber-thieves would leave no evidence whatsoever.
--from Robert Gleason’s The Evil That Men Do
nuclearterrorist.com/social-media-commentary/
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:40:26 GMT
I was happy to find that Wikipedia has a Voter Suppression page. Wiki is famous for being invaded by conservative trolls rewriting history or downright making stuff up. Most of this seems to be on the up and up.Voter suppression in the United Statesen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States
Voter suppression in the United States concerns allegations about various efforts, legal and illegal, used to prevent eligible voters from their right to vote. Where found, such voter suppression efforts vary by state, local government, precinct, and election.
Contents [hide] 1 Methods 1.1 Impediments to voter registration 1.2 Photo ID laws 1.3 Purging of voter rolls 1.4 Limitations on early voting 1.5 Felon disenfranchisement 1.6 Transgender disenfranchisement 1.7 Disinformation about voting procedures 1.8 Inequality in Election Day resources 1.9 Closure of DMV offices 1.10 Caging lists 1.11 Gerrymandering 1.12 Jim Crow laws 1.13 Off-year elections
2 Historical examples 2.1 1838 Gallatin County Election Day Battle 2.2 2002 New Hampshire Senate election phone jamming scandal 2.3 2004 presidential election 2.4 2006 Virginia Senate election 2.5 2008 presidential election
2.6 2010 Maryland gubernatorial election 2.7 2012 Florida 2.8 2015 early voting controversy in Maryland 2.9 2016 presidential election
2.10 2017
3 See also 4 References 5 External links
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:40:53 GMT
It’s Even Worse Than You Think: David Cay Johnston & Greg Palast
Published on Feb 3, 2018
"A narcissistic know-nothing con artist who has spent his entire life swindling others while repeatedly urging followers to commit criminal acts of violence against his critics," writes David Cay Johnston. Who could he be talking about? I asked...
Full frontal exposure of the Trump Presidency by two New York Times bestselling investigative reporters — conversing, debating. This event was broadcast live from our sold out event in Los Angeles on Wednesday, January 31.
Watch Palast question Johnston about the accusations in his book, including Johnston’s revelation of Trump’s 2005 tax return — and his explanation of why it reeks of criminality!
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:41:24 GMT
How The GOP Has Won All Elections Until At Least 2020By All That's Interesting Published October 3, 2016 Updated February 12, 2018
With census data and strategic campaign investments, the GOP may have sealed the deal on all elections until 2020. Here's how they did it.
There is no doubt that this year’s presidential election is a historic one. Two of the most polarizing and reviled candidates in history have made it to the general election, and with only a month to go, conventional wisdom and popular media pundits tell us we’re looking at a truly unprecedented voting day.
However, what if I told you that this day is the result of a six-year-old plan?
Indeed, armed with 2010 census data and the support of a little-known group, the Republican Party may very well have secured itself election wins for the foreseeable future — and it was completely legal.
How did it happen? Let’s start from the beginning.
The REDMAP
The Redistricting Majority Project, known as Project REDMAP and created by the Republican State Leadership Committee, is a small group of Republican supporters that collect money for elections. They first began to work with the GOP in 2010.
During this post-presidential election cycle, the group donated the money it had collected to important swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and North Carolina or states that had loose redistricting laws and a Democrat-majority legislature. (Take note: THESE ARE THE 4 STATES THAT GAVE TRUMP HIS WIN AND ALL UNDER QUESTIONABLE CIRCUMSTANCES)
The organization did so with one goal in mind: flip the state legislative majority from Democratic to Republican — from blue to red — in as many blue-run states as possible.
The group is not directly affiliated with the GOP, organizationally speaking, so it could be selective in how they donated their funds, which in total comprised a little over $30 million, a pretty small sum when it comes to election spending these days.
And it worked. As the organization explains on its website: “Republicans flipped at least 19 legislative bodies to Republican control and hold majorities in 10 of the 15 states that will gain or lose U.S. House seats and where the legislature plays a role in redrawing the map.”
In fact, the group was so successful that it managed to flip the Alabama House and Senate both to a Republican majority, something that hadn’t been done in 136 years (or since the post-Civil War Reconstruction). And they only spent $1.4 million in Alabama to do it.
Due to the generally small size of the elections that REDMAP targeted, most of these wins went unnoticed by the general media. However — and here’s where the true brilliance lies — these wins allowed Republicans to redraw the voting districts of their respective states in the party’s favor.
In a majority of these states, the state legislature is in charge of redistricting (redrawing the voting districts) every decennial (decade) census year. Since Republicans comprised the party majority in these states following REDMAP’s successful strategy, they could alter the map to favor a Republican party win, a practice known as gerrymandering.
The practice dates back to the 18th century, and has fallen under scrutiny as majority political parties can effectively draw out “undesirable” populations from a given district, and thus ensure that they cannot influence the results of a district-level election.
With the added bonus of the 2010 census data, the winning, REDMAP-aided legislatures could see more up-to-date figures on district residents and draw new maps around populations they decided were likely supporters.
As questions of political party affiliation did not appear on the census, legislators used race, historical voting patterns, and where these individuals lived to ascertain who comprised a likely supporter.
Thus, these states (some of them swing states) completely remapped themselves in favor of the Republican Party — cancelling out Democrat votes almost entirely — and ensuring a powerful Republican majority at state and federal levels.
As former Salon editor-in-chief David Daley wrote on the subject:
“What the Republicans did in 2010 and 2011–helped along by Citizens United, a brilliant plan, and technological advances that made map-making amazingly precise–turned gerrymandering into a blunt-force weapon for partisan control. They spent $30 million on state races and blew these Democratic incumbents out of the water, and recaptured control of all those state capitals. Then, they provided state legislators with the mapping, technological and legal help to draw impregnable lines. It worked exactly as planned, helped along by the fact that 2010 was a year of Democratic malaise and low turnout. This is the biggest political heist, and the biggest political bargain, in modern memory.”
Daley is right. The next decennial census won’t be performed until 2020, and by then it could be too late for the Democratic Party to create a similar strategy to the REDMAP.
By 2020, the Republican Party will have already held a majority of the seats in the preceding elections, and history has shown that electing brand new representatives to office — no matter how unpopular those in office may be — is a near impossible task.
As Todd Phillips explains in the Huffington Post, even though Congress has a low approval rating, incumbents (those running for reelection) are still likely to win their reelections.
The reason? “[…] the incumbent has credibility from having previously won office, and has on-the-job experience, while challengers are likely to be totally unknown. People are highly unlikely to vote for candidates who they know nothing about. This allows most incumbents to breeze through primary elections.”
While the GOP faced a setback with the 2008 election of Barack Obama, the Republican State Leadership Committee recognized that losing the 2008 presidential ticket was only a small loss, and that by doubling efforts in other areas it could ultimately “win the war.”
While census data proved to be incredibly effective for REDMAP’s initiatives and can still be drawn upon in the future, it’s likely that tomorrow’s legislative leaders will not rely as much on that data when making decisions on how to redraw. That’s not because the data isn’t useful, but that they have even better data at their disposal right now.
One of the many features of our smartphone-oriented, hyper-social lives is the simple fact that everything we post online is traceable — and permanent. Even when our social media accounts are on “super private mode,” Facebook can still sell our information to marketers and interested parties all over the world.
This data reveals everything from our buying habits and food preferences to our political beliefs. For any political party, this data offers an easy opportunity to plan ahead for the next decennial census, and refine the district lines in their favor.
Luckily, some of the more egregious cases of gerrymandering are catching national attention — and helping spur changes in state redistricting laws. Already, some state redistricting plans require independent committee or governor approval before enactment.
And while some state legislatures (like those that REDMAP targeted) still have free reign over redistricting, if more cases of gerrymandering acquire a broader audience, we could see a change in redistricting rules and regulations.
So what does all of this mean for the November election? Some political analysts say that the Republican Party may actually have shot itself in the foot with its gerrymandering project, as it helped pave the way for the election of Donald Trump, who does not have strong ties to the party’s general platform and who does not hold the best reputation among the GOP establishment.
It would seem, then, that the only way Republicans can keep a Trump presidency from happening is via massive voter turnout — too bad REDMAP largely diminished the value in that several years ago.
Next, have a look at four absurd U.S. election laws allthatsinteresting.com/us-election-laws that allow candidates to steal a victory. Then, check out the recent study that reveals why the U.S. electoral system allthatsinteresting.com/us-electoral-system is even more crooked than you thought.
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Post by the Scribe on Mar 11, 2020 8:42:16 GMT
Quote from Salon article by ronstadtfanaz: I have to chuckle at the prospect of the GOP "geniuses" doing the very things that would supposedly give them a supermajority over everybody else---and instead of another Ronald Reagan they get.... DONALD F***ING TRUMP. They got what they wanted, which was gerrymandered districts in key swing states, and they get for president a guy who may end up just destroying them. To quote the conservative pundit Jack Kirkpatrick in the "Point/Counterpoint" segment of the 1980 disaster film spoof AIRPLANE!: " “Shanna, they bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash.”
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