Tag: GOP voter suppression

Federal judge denies GOP challenge to Minnesota’s extended absentee ballot deadline

Judge turns back GOP challenge, says ballots postmarked Nov. 3 are valid if received by Nov. 10. 

Minnesota absentee ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 can be counted even if they’re received up to a week after Election Day, under a federal judge’s order turning back a Republican challenge to the extended balloting deadline.

The ruling Sunday by U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel upholds a Minnesota state court agreement spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic that allows counting of absentee ballots received up to Nov. 10. State officials are seeing a record number of mail-in ballots this year.

Attorneys for state Rep. Eric Lucero, R-Dayton, and GOP activist James Carson, who challenged the agreement, appealed the order on Monday. Brasel ruled that the two men lacked legal standing to challenge the deal. Continue reading.

Supreme Court denies GOP request, allows R.I. pandemic-related relief on mail-in ballots

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The Supreme Court on Thursday rebuffed the Republican Party and allowed a consent decree to go forward so that Rhode Island voters during the coronaviruspandemic could cast mail-in ballots without in-person witness verification.

It was the first time the justices had agreed to a pandemic-related voter relief effort. But they explained in a short, unsigned order that state officials had agreed to relax the rules and that the change already had been implemented during the June primary.

Unlike “similar cases where a state defends its own law, here the state election officials support the challenged decree, and no state official has expressed opposition,” the order said. “Under these circumstances, the applicants lack a cognizable interest in the state’s ability to enforce its duly enacted laws.” Continue reading.

Mail sorting equipment being ‘removed’ from post offices, leaving mail to ‘pile up’: union leader

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Mail sorting equipment is being removed from U.S. Postal Service (USPS) offices amid a slew of operational changes implemented by new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, according to the head of the Iowa Postal Workers Union.

Numerous reports have detailed how changes made by DeJoy, a top donor to President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, have cut overtime and changed policies, which have slowed down mail delivery across the country. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said last week that DeJoy had “confirmed that contrary to prior denials and statements minimizing these changes, the Postal Service recently instituted operational changes” shortly after he assumed office.

“We believe these changes, made during the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic, now threaten the timely delivery of mail — including medicines for seniors, paychecks for workers, and absentee ballots for voters — that is essential to millions of Americans,” they wrote in a letter to DeJoy, calling the cost-cutting measures “counterproductive and unacceptable.” Continue reading.

Pence’s hyped-up claims of ‘voter fraud’ in Indiana

Washington Post logo“Make no mistake about it. The reality of voter fraud is undeniable. We’ve seen case after case around the country where there have been prosecutions. … In my own state of Indiana in 2012, there was a Democrat super PAC that was involved in our elections, that literally, there was a group of people that were prosecuted for falsifying ballots. This happens, Martha.”

— Vice President Pence, remarks during an interview on “The Story With Martha MacCallum,” July 28

Everyone sometimes mixes up dates, and Pence did not get the year right. In 2012, the most noteworthy voter fraud case in Indiana involved a Republican — when former secretary of state Charlie White was convicted of six Class D felony charges, including voter fraud, perjury and theft. “Prosecutors said he voted and took pay as a Fishers Town Council member of a district in which he no longer lived,” the Indianapolis Star reported.

Pence actually meant to say 2016. We have noted before that there are relatively few cases of voter fraud, not “case after case.” But for the purposes of this fact check, is Pence correct when he claims that people associated with a Democratic super PAC were prosecuted for “voter fraud” and “falsifying ballots”? Continue reading.

Republicans are engineering an electoral disaster this fall

Washington Post logoAFTER A shambolic election two years ago — and several examples of poorly run primaries leading up to this week — one might have imagined that Georgia would have prepared better for its Tuesday primary vote. Instead, polling places in and around Atlanta were swamped and lines stretched for hours as poll workers struggled with new voting machines and sanitation procedures. Georgia’s experience confirmed that the coronavirus pandemic, combined with the sort of Election Day incompetence that has for years been a sad fixture of American democracy, threatens the integrity of the November presidential election. There is hardly anything more important than getting voting procedures and technology right over the next five months.

Unfortunately, many Republican politicians continue to manipulate voting rules for partisan advantage, exploiting the pandemic as an opportunity to suppress voting. The latest example is in Iowa. The state held a notably successful primary last Tuesday that smashed turnout recordsdespite the closure of many polling places, in large part because the state’s Republican secretary of state sent every voter an absentee ballot application. That allowed local officials to consolidate in-person voting locations without causing the sorts of massive backups that marred primaries in Wisconsin, the District and Georgia. Continue reading “Republicans are engineering an electoral disaster this fall”

How Partisan Gerrymandering Hurts Kids

Center for American Progress logoIntroduction and summary

Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing district lines to unfairly favor particular politicians or political parties in elections.1 It is a political dirty trick—and an extremely harmful one—that turns democracy upside down, letting politicians choose their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians. Gerrymandering allows politicians to get reelected even if they fail to address the problems that the majority of the public wants them to solve. That failure has consequences for every issue that Americans care about, including efforts to expand health care and to protect Americans from gun violence—two issues that the Center for American Progress has written about at length.2 It also has very real and harmful consequences for some of the most vulnerable Americans: children.

Redistricting is the process of redrawing district lines, which occurs every 10 years after a new census, to account for changes in district populations. In most states, redistricting is controlled by state legislators,3who use this opportunity to solidify their power by drawing opposition voters out of their districts and maximizing the number of districts that can be won by their political allies. These gerrymanders can wipe out electoral competition and result in dramatically different political outcomes than if districts were fairly drawn.

The effect is most clear in heavily gerrymandered states where one party’s candidates win a majority of the vote, but the opposing party nonetheless wins the majority of the seats—and control of the state legislature. This anti-democratic outcome is the status quo in North Carolina, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—three of the four states discussed in detail below. In Michigan, for example, Democratic candidates won the majority of the votes for both the House and the Senate, but Republican candidates won the majority of the seats in both chambers. This had a major negative impact on programs that benefit children. For example, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI)—a supporter of full-day, universal preschool—proposed an $84 million increase to Michigan’s preschool programs, but the legislature whittled that increase down to $5 million—an outcome made possible by partisan gerrymandering.4 

Continue reading.

Despite GOP Claims Of ‘Fraud,’ Most Voters Want Mail Ballots

Donald Trump and his Republican allies have spent the last several weeks fighting efforts to allow all Americans to vote by mail during the COVID-19 pandemic. But a new poll finds that the vast majority of voters actually support the idea.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released Tuesday, found that 58 percent of registered voters would support a permanent rule allowing all eligible voters to vote by mail. Another 9 percent support such a policy for this November’s election due to the pandemic, while only 29 percent are against vote-by-mail altogether.

Republicans have vocally opposed allowing all voters the option to vote by mail. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called Democratic efforts to add vote-by-mail to a coronavirus relief bill last month a “disgusting” scheme for “some political benefit.”

GOP Strategy Combines Voter Suppression With Hypocrisy

Like many of the other distortions, deceptions and outright lies in which the Republican Party has engaged, its flagrant fabrications about “voter fraud” have been exposed for what they are: a desperate attempt to hold on to power. For decades now, Republicans have undertaken a far-reaching effort to suppress the vote among constituencies that tend to vote for Democrats: voters of color, the poor, the young.

As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends widespread voting by mail to help curb the spread of the novel coronavirus, Republicans — including the president — are engaged in an all-out campaign to prevent voting by mail. The GOP knows that any initiative that makes it easier to cast a ballot will result in more ballots cast. Any genuine patriot — any American who sincerely believes in the ideals of the U.S. Constitution — should want that, right?

Nope. While some Republicans still manage to express their efforts to suppress the vote with less explicit rhetoric — using claims of “protecting the integrity of the ballot” as an excuse — President Donald J. Trump cannot manage the same discipline. In a recent call to one of his favorite propaganda outlets, Fox and Friends, Trump complained about Democratic efforts to expand alternatives to showing up physically at a polling place on a single, specific day. “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,” he said about initiatives that were removed from a stimulus bill because of GOP objections. Continue reading.

Trump Ally Purged 235,000 Voters In Ohio

Ohio is purging 235,000 voter registrations on Friday despite evidence that thousands of the registrations flagged for deletion were eligible to vote.

Ohio has historically been a key swing state in presidential elections, going back and forth between the two parties. Trump won it in 2016, while President Barack Obama won it in 2012 and 2008.

In 2018, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) won reelection there, but so did Gov. Mike DeWine (R), highlighting the fact that neither party has a lock on the state’s votes.

View the complete September 7 article by Oliver Willis on the National Memo website here.

Secret donors and Trump allies: Inside the operation to push noncitizen voting laws in Florida and other states

Washington Post logoA network of out-of-state political consultants, secret donors and activists with close ties to President Trump is behind an effort to change the Florida constitution to explicitly state that only citizens may vote in elections, a measure that would amplify the issue of immigration in the 2020 battleground state.

In recent months, organizers said they have collected nearly twice the signatures needed to qualify for the ballot next year — and more than any other ballot initiative in Florida state history, they said.

The exact legal effect the amendment would have remains unclear. While federal law explicitly bars noncitizen voting, the language in the Florida constitution — like that of many states — says that “every” citizen who is 18 may vote. The proposed amendment would change the language to say “only” a citizen may vote.

View the complete July 22 article by Amy Gardner and Alice Crites on The Washington Post website here.