State of elections since 2020
mickeyrat
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ATLANTA (AP) — The conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines that erupted during the 2020 presidential contest flared this week in a remote New Mexico county in what could be just a preview of the kind of chaos election experts fear is coming in the fall midterms and in 2024.
The governing commission in Otero County refused to certify the local results of the state’s June 7 primary because of the equipment, in what was seen as another instance of how the falsehoods spread by former President Donald Trump and his allies have infected elections and threaten the democratic process.
“We are in scary territory,” said Jennifer Morrell, a former election official in Colorado and Utah who now advises federal, state and local officials. “If this can happen here, where next? It’s like a cancer, a virus. It’s metastasizing and growing.”
There is no evidence of widespread fraud or manipulation of voting equipment in the 2020 election, which Trump lost to Joe Biden. But that hasn’t stopped the false claims, particularly those about Dominion machines.
“I have huge concerns with these voting machines,” Otero County Commissioner Vickie Marquardt said Monday as she and her two fellow commissioners — all Republicans — voted unanimously. “When I certify stuff that I don’t know is right, I feel like I’m being dishonest because in my heart I don’t know if it is right.”
The commissioners in the conservative, pro-Trump county could point to no actual problems with the Dominion equipment.
New Mexico's secretary of state asked the state Supreme Court to step in and order the county to certify the votes, and the high court did so on Wednesday. That would ensure that the nearly 7,400 ballots that were cast in Otero County are recorded as legal votes. The deadline for county certification is Friday.
In the weeks and months following the election, various Trump allies claimed that Dominion voting systems had somehow been manipulated as part of an elaborate scheme to steal the election.
On Monday, the House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol presented testimony that Trump was told repeatedly that his claims of a stolen election and rigged voting systems were false and dangerous. That included pushback from his inner circle to the claims about Dominion voting systems, which are used by jurisdictions in 27 states.
Former Attorney General William Barr, in a videotaped interview with House investigators, said he spoke with Trump about the “idiotic claims” surrounding Dominion.
Barr said he found them to be “among the most disturbing allegations” because they were “made in such a sensational way that they obviously were influencing a lot of people." He added that the claims were doing a “grave disservice to the country.”
Trump ignored that, and his allies persisted in attacking Dominion. According to the House panel, the day after Barr spoke with Trump, the president released a video in which he claimed without proof that “with the turn of a dial or the change of a chip, you can press a button for Trump and the vote goes to Biden.”
Dominion has filed defamation lawsuits against various Trump associates and conservative media organizations, including Fox News.
The company said in a statement Wednesday that the action by the Otero County commissioners was “yet another example of how lies about Dominion have damaged our company and diminished the public’s faith in elections.”
Otero County, with a population of about 67,000, went for Trump by nearly 62% in 2020. One of the commissioners is Cowboys for Trump co-founder Couy Griffin, who was convicted of entering restricted U.S. Capitol grounds — though not the building — during the Jan. 6 uprising.
New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver said the commissioners were violating the law and their oaths of office in refusing to certify the vote. She said that there is a process to deal with any problems that arise with an election but that the commissioners did not specify any.
“Unfortunately, when one county decides to act completely outside the law, it gives credence to others who may want to do the same thing," she said. "We have the potential to see this spread and have a domino effect.”
Numerous procedures are in place, including pre- and post-testing of voting equipment and post-election audits that ensure machines are working properly. In New Mexico, voters mark their paper ballots by hand. The ballots are then fed into a scanner to tally the results.
Vulnerabilities do exist, as with any technology, but election officials work to identify and fix them. A recent advisory issued by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency highlighted certain vulnerabilities discovered in Dominion voting systems and provided recommendations to election officials.
But those pushing false claims about voting systems want more than just paper ballots cast by hand -- they also want ballots to be counted entirely by hand. Experts say this is unreliable, time-consuming, labor-intensive and entirely unnecessary given the various safeguards.
Among the most prominent advocates for this is Jim Marchant, a former state lawmaker who on Tuesday was selected as the Republican nominee for secretary of state in Nevada. Marchant is among a group of “America First” candidates seeking to oversee elections while denying the outcome of the last one.
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Pro-Trump Republicans’ primary wins raise alarm about US democracy
Crucial races from Nevada to South Carolina returned candidates who back ‘big lie’ of stolen election while Democrats lost Hispanic votes in south Texas
In pivotal primary races from Nevada to South Carolina on Tuesday, Republican voters chose candidates who fervently embraced Donald Trump’s lie about a stolen election, prompting warnings from Democrats that US democracy will be at stake in the November elections.
Victories of pro-Trump candidates in Nevada set the stage for match-ups between election-deniers and embattled Democrats in a state both parties see as critical in the midterms.
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court seems poised to take on a new elections case being pressed by Republicans that could increase the power of state lawmakers over races for Congress and the presidency, as well as redistricting, and cut state courts out of the equation.
The issue has arisen repeatedly in cases from North Carolina and Pennsylvania, where Democratic majorities on the states’ highest courts have invoked voting protections in their state constitutions to frustrate the plans of Republican-dominated legislatures.
Already, four conservative Supreme Court justices have noted their interest in deciding whether state courts, finding violations of their state constitutions, can order changes to federal elections and the once-a-decade redrawing of congressional districts. The Supreme Court has never invoked what is known as the independent state legislature doctrine, although three justices advanced it in the Bush v. Gore case that settled the 2000 presidential election.
“The issue is almost certain to keep arising until the Court definitively resolves it,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in March.
It only takes four of the nine justices to agree to hear a case. A majority of five is needed for an eventual decision.
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Many election law experts are alarmed by the prospect that the justices might seek to reduce state courts' powers over elections.
“A ruling endorsing a strong or muscular reading of the independent state legislature theory would potentially give state legislatures even more power to curtail voting rights and provide a pathway for litigation to subvert the election outcomes expressing the will of the people,” law professor Richard Hasen wrote in an email.
But if the justices are going to get involved, Hasen said, “it does make sense for the Court to do it outside the context of an election with national implications.”
The court could say as early as Tuesday, or perhaps the following week, whether it will hear an appeal filed by North Carolina Republicans. The appeal challenges a state court ruling that threw out the congressional districts drawn by the General Assembly that made GOP candidates likely victors in 10 of the state's 14 congressional districts.
The North Carolina Supreme Court held that the boundaries violated state constitution provisions protecting free elections and freedoms of speech and association by handicapping voters who support Democrats.
The new map that eventually emerged and is being used this year gives Democrats a good chance to win six seats, and possibly a seventh in a new toss-up district.
Pennsylvania's top court also selected a map that Republicans say probably will lead to the election of more Democrats, as the two parties battle for control of the U.S. House in the midterm elections in November. An appeal from Pennsylvania also is waiting, if the court for some reason passes on the North Carolina case.
Nationally, the parties fought to a draw in redistricting, which leaves Republicans positioned to win control of the House even if they come up just short of winning a majority of the national vote.
If the GOP does well in November, the party also could capture seats on state supreme courts, including in North Carolina, that might allow for the drawing of more slanted maps that previous courts rejected. Two court seats held by North Carolina Democrats are on the ballot this year and Republicans need to win just one to take control of the court for the first time since 2017.
In their appeal to the nation's high court, North Carolina Republicans wrote that it is time for the Supreme Court to weigh in on the elections clause in the U.S. Constitution, which gives each state’s legislature the responsibility to determine “the times, places and manner” of holding congressional elections.
“Activist judges and allied plaintiffs have proved time and time again that they believe state courts have the ultimate say over congressional maps, no matter what the U.S. Constitution says,” North Carolina Senate leader Phil Berger said when the appeal was filed in March.
The Supreme Court generally does not disturb state court rulings that are rooted in state law.
But four Supreme Court justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Kavanaugh — have said the court should step in to decide whether state courts had improperly taken powers given by the U.S. Constitution to state lawmakers.
That was the argument that Thomas and two other conservative justices put forward in Bush v. Gore, although that case was decided on other grounds.
If the court takes up the North Carolina case and rules in the GOP’s favor, North Carolina Republicans could draw new maps for 2024 elections with less worry that the state Supreme Court would strike them down.
Defenders of state court involvement argue that state lawmakers would also gain the power to pass provisions that would suppress voting, subject only to challenge in federal courts. Delegating power to election boards and secretaries of state to manage federal elections in emergencies also could be questioned legally, some scholars said.
“Its adoption would radically change our elections,” Ethan Herenstein and Tom Wolf, both with the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program at the New York University Law School, wrote earlier this month.
___
Robertson reported from Raleigh, North Carolina.
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Nevada Republican Jim Marchant insisted there hadn't been a legitimate election in his state in more than a decade. All of Nevada's election winners since 2006, he said on a recent podcast, were “installed by the deep-state cabal.”
But when Marchant won the Republican nomination for Nevada secretary of state this week, he immediately celebrated the victory as legitimate.
“I am beyond humbled by the overwhelming support of our campaign. Nevadans made their voices heard,” Marchant declared on social media.
Such inconsistency has become a hallmark of election deniers in Republican primary contests across the U.S. in this year's midterms. Dozens of GOP candidates who sought former President Donald Trump's backing in Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and elsewhere have spent months parroting his baseless claims of 2020 election fraud but then declared victory without raising such concerns in their own elections.
Amid such seeming hypocrisy, many Republican candidates are still vowing to pursue a series of election reforms that could make it more difficult to vote — particularly for those who traditionally support Democrats — in the name of election integrity.
Democratic National Committee Chair Jamie Harrison warned that “MAGA Republicans will do anything in their desperate chase for power."
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“From undermining our democracy by spreading Trump’s Big Lie, to laying the groundwork to try to cancel votes when they don’t agree with the outcome, but falling silent if they win, this is today’s Republican Party,” Harrison told The Associated Press.
In Nevada on Tuesday, Marchant was among a slate of election deniers who secured their places on the November ballot without questioning the legitimacy of the results. The group included candidates for Senate, state treasurer and a Las Vegas-area congressional seat. That's even as the majority of counties relied upon Dominion voting machines, which continue to be the target of conspiracy theories by Trump and his allies.
The phenomenon extends well beyond Nevada.
In Pennsylvania, Republican nominee for governor Doug Mastriano spearheaded a state Senate hearing in which witnesses — including former Trump campaign attorneys Jenna Ellis and Rudy Giuliani — aired false claims about mass voter fraud. Mastriano also was outside the U.S. Capitol when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the building during the deadly 2021 insurrection. And he later tried to bring a partisan election audit to Pennsylvania before he was stripped of his committee chairmanship by his own party.
Mastriano made no mention of voter fraud as he declared victory in Pennsylvania's Republican primary for governor last month.
“God is good,” a smiling Mastriano told cheering supporters.
The Mastriano campaign declined to respond to a question about the apparent double standard.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also ignored questions about his contradictory positions on voter fraud.
Paxton won his fiercely contested primary last month after spending much of the last year championing Trump's bogus claims of election fraud. In the aftermath of Joe Biden’s presidential win, Paxton filed a legal challenge to the election results in four battleground states. He asked the U.S. Supreme Court to set them aside and allow the Republican-controlled state legislatures to determine the winner.
Seventeen other Republican state attorneys general supported the effort.
The high court rejected the challenge three days after the lawsuit was filed, finding Texas did not have standing to sue other states over how they conduct their elections. And the state bar moved to discipline Paxton just days after his primary win, claiming his leading role in petitioning the Supreme Court to block Biden’s victory was “dishonest.”
State and federal election officials across the country and Trump’s own attorney general have said there is no credible evidence the election was tainted. The former president’s allegations of fraud also were roundly rejected by courts, including by judges he appointed.
But after nearly two years of Trump's constant claims that the election was “stolen,” which have been embraced by hundreds of Republican candidates across the U.S. seeking his support, an extraordinary number of Americans have lost faith in the U.S. election system.
Only 45% of U.S. adults said they have significant confidence that votes in the 2022 midterm election will be counted accurately, and 30% have some confidence, according to a February AP-NORC poll. Democrats were much more likely than Republicans to be very confident, 66% vs. 24%.
Polling continues to show most Republicans have doubts about the 2020 presidential election. In July 2021, 68% of adults -- but only 33% of Republicans -- said Biden was legitimately elected president, according to an AP-NORC poll. Sixty-six percent of Republicans said he was not legitimately elected.
In addition to key state officials, several Trump-backed Senate candidates promoted the specter of election fraud over and over — except when delivering their primary victory speeches in recent weeks.
Georgia Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker repeatedly claimed Biden's victory was tainted by fraud over the last year and even called for seven swing states Trump lost to vote again. Ohio GOP Senate candidate J.D. Vance claimed the 2020 election was “rigged" or “stolen.” North Carolina Senate nominee Ted Budd, a Republican congressman, refused on the day of his May primary victory to say that Biden won the 2020 presidential election. And Pennsylvania Republican nominee for Senate Mehmet Oz said there was “definitely” widespread fraud in his state, even as the evidence says otherwise.
None raised similar claims about their own primary victories.
In Nevada, state GOP Chair Michael McDonald said Marchant acknowledging his primary win wasn’t hypocritical because he continued to have questions about vote-counting in the Las Vegas area.
“He was questioning the results last night, even though he was winning, which I found admirable,” McDonald said, recounting a 1:30 a.m. phone call with Marchant.
Marchant did not respond to requests for comment, but his campaign consultant Rory McShane said he continued to have questions about voting in Clark County, which leans Democratic and is where the vast majority of the state's population lives, despite the race being called for him.
There may be no more vocal proponent of Trump's baseless claims of election fraud falsehoods than Marchant, a 66-year-old former failed congressional candidate.
Marchant was present in Carson City when the party sent a dueling slate of electoral votes to Congress in December 2020. Throughout the primary, he was a fixture at rural county commission meetings during discussions about Dominion voting machines and potentially switching to hand-counting ballots. And he has toured the country with other 2020 election denialists, using phrases and terminology associated with QAnon conspiracy theorists.
Cisco Aguilar, the Democrat running against Marchant, described the Republican's statements about the 2020 election, voting machines and mail-in ballots as out of touch with reality.
In an interview, Aguilar said he feels immense responsibility after Marchant’s victory and said he's now weighing questions he hadn’t anticipated when he entered the race, such as whether agreeing to a debate would be giving a conspiracy theorist a platform.
“He’s created a massive fear among a subgroup of individuals here in Nevada,” Aguilar said. “I don’t even know if you can have a debate with someone who is unwilling to listen.”
___
Peoples reported from New York and Metz reported from Salt Lake City. Associated Press writers Hannah Fingerhut in Washington, Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Paul Weber in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.
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DENVER (AP) — It was no shock that state Rep. Ron Hanks and Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters handily lost their recent Republican primaries in Colorado for U.S. Senate and secretary of state.
Hanks was outspent 14-to-1 by his rival. Peters, who was vying to become Colorado's top elections official, had been indicted on seven felony charges alleging she helped orchestrate a breach of her voting system's hard drive.
But this past week, both candidates formally requested recounts of their primary elections from June 28, suggesting widespread irregularities seen by no one other than their own campaigns and allies.
“I have reasons to believe extensive malfeasance occurred in the June 2022 primary,” Peters wrote in her recount request, “and that the apparent outcome of this election does not reflect the will of Colorado voters not only for myself but also for many other America First statewide and local primary candidates.”
America First is a coalition of conservative candidates and officeholders who, among other things, promote the falsehood that Democrat Joe Biden did not win the 2020 presidential election.
This idea has seeped deeply into this year's Republican primaries, which have revealed a new political strategy among numerous candidates: running on a platform that denies President Donald Trump's defeat two years ago. As some of those candidates lose their own races, they are reaching new frontiers in election denial by insisting that those primaries, too, were rigged.
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“There's a clear reason they're doing it, and it's a much broader, coordinated attack on the freedom to vote across the country,” said Joanna Lydgate of States United Action. Her group supports election officials who recognize the validity of the 2020 election.
Noting that she coaches youth basketball, Lydgate added another reason: “Really, what this is is people who are sore losers, people who don't want to accept defeat."
The primary losers have an obvious role model: Trump himself.
After his first election loss during his 2016 run for the White House, in the Iowa caucuses, Trump baselessly claimed fraud and demanded an investigation. When he was elected president later that year, he claimed that fraud was the reason Democrat Hillary Clinton won more votes than he did. Trump set up a commission to try to prove that. That commission was disbanded when it failed to produce any evidence.
After his 2020 defeat, Trump and his supporters lost 63 of 64 legal challenges to the election. Trump continued to blame fraud, without evidence, even after his own attorney general and election reviews in the states failed to turn up any widespread wrongdoing that would have any impact on the outcome.
This year's post-primary election denial may be a preview for November, when Republicans face Democrats in thousands of races across the country. The GOP is expected to do well — an expectation that could set the stage for more false claims of fraud when some of those candidates lose.
Still, some Republicans aren't waiting for Democratic voters to weigh in before making unsubstantiated fraud claims.
Some recent candidates who have done that are relatively marginal ones.
In Georgia, Trump's two recruits to challenge the state's governor and secretary of state — former Sen. David Perdue and former Rep. Jodi Hice — admitted defeat after they lost the May primaries. But Kandiss Taylor, a fringe candidate who won only 3% of the primary vote for governor, refused to concede, claiming there was widespread cheating.
In South Carolina, Republican Harrison Musselwhite — who goes by Trucker Bob — lost his primary against Gov. Henry McMaster by 66 percentage points. Still, he complained of problems with the election to the state party, as did another losing GOP contender, Lauren Martel, who ran for for attorney general. The party rejected their claims.
Others who have cried fraud are more prominent.
Joey Gilbert, who came in second in the Nevada Republican primary for governor, posted a Facebook video days after the June tally showing him 26,000 votes short. “These elections, the way they’ve been run, it’s like Swiss cheese,” he said. "There’s too many holes.”
Gilbert, who attended Trump's rally near the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, before the riot at the U.S. Capitol, demanded a recount. The results appear unlikely to substantially change the final tally. He did not return messages seeking comment.
In Arizona, former newscaster Kari Lake won Trump's endorsement in her quest for the party's nomination for governor, insisting that he won the presidency in 2020. This past week, she told supporters that her top opponent in the primary “might be trying to set the stage for another steal” in next month's primary.
That earned her a rebuke from Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who has endorsed Lake's chief rival, Karin Taylor Robson.
“The 2022 elections haven’t even been held yet, and already we’re seeing speculation doubting the results – especially if certain candidates lose,” Ducey tweeted. “It’s one of the most irresponsible things I can imagine.”
Lake's campaign did not return messages seeking comment.
In Colorado, county clerk Peters immediately questioned the primary results once the tally showed her losing badly in the secretary of state's race. Claiming fraud as she trailed former county clerk Pam Anderson, a regular debunker of Trump's election lies, Peters said: “Looking at the results, it’s just so obvious it should be flipped.”
She and Senate candidate Hanks repeated Trump's election lies, a position that had won them strong support last spring at the 3,000-strong GOP state assembly, a convention attended by the party's strongest activists. Both candidates, in letters to the secretary of state’s office this past week demanding a recount, cited that support in explaining why they could not have lost their primaries.
Hanks referred a reporter to an email address for media for the two candidates, though no one responded to questions sent to that address.
The activists who attend the GOP gathering are just a small fraction of the 600,000 who voted in the June primary. According to preliminary results, Peters lost by 88,000 votes and Hanks by 56,000 votes.
Their recount letters gave reasons why the candidates believed those vote tallies were “being artificially controlled.”
The Colorado Secretary of State's office said a recount will cost $236,000 for each candidate. As of Friday night, the deadline set by the office to receive the money, neither candidate had paid, according to spokeswoman Annie Orloff.
___
Follow AP for full coverage of the midterms at https://apnews.com/hub/2022-midterm-elections
and on Twitter, https://twitter.com/ap_politics
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I know the usuals are going to say I’m just both siding it. But I don’t see how anyone can deny that’s what happened from 2016-2020. So to only criticize one party doesn’t seem fair.
Not surprised to see something like this happen in the armpit of the west.
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
I don't recall that ever happening.
I do recall democrats being freaked out that a con-artist with the solid backing of white supremacists and vlad poo tin won.
In 2020 and I'm sure in every ensuing election in our lifetime the regressives will throw tantrums and scream "it was rigged" every time one of their candidates loses. But if they win, whether by 1 vote or a million, they will claim everything was perfect and it was a beautiful well run election.
it’s concerning middle right like mace have views such as “it’s both parties.” Clinton conceded immediately, and trump said six months before the election, thru today, “either I win or it’s rigged.” Has any democrat made that claim? Voting for that ace is supporting authoritarianism in America
the fact that trump asked for help from a murderous dictator and was subsequently investigated for that does not equate to the authoritarian rhetoric from republicans
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Probably controlled by the illuminati
they are known as the satellnati
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The Golden Age is 2 months away. And guess what….. you’re gonna love it! (teskeinc 11.19.24)
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Or so I'm told
lies told to the gullible.....
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Why does it come down to just what Hilary did? Do you not recal the many protests against the inauguration? The commercials featuring celebrities asking the EC not to actually vote the way their state did and essentially ignoring the election results? The record number of politicians who boycotted the inauguration? The many many people on social media saying a trump will never be their president?
For 4 years we heard nothing but “this was won by misinformation, this election wasn’t legitimate.” Am I the only one who remembers that? It was pretty big news for 4 years.
And you bring up Trump saying he won’t concede if he loses, did you forget Hilary said this in 2020 as well? ““Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances, because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don't give an inch, and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is,” Even prior to the 2030 election she referred to Trump as an illegitimate president and that it was stolen. I fail to see how you’re a consirpacy nut for saying that in 2020, but totally acceptable if it’s about 2016.
Trying to delegitimilize the election in public opinion isn’t a one-sided strategy that started in 2020 like it’s being portrayed here.
And for the record, Biden did win in 2020. Trump lost. I’m just saying this whole protesting the results isn’t as one sided as it’s being played out to be.
Two Republicans who baselessly suggested their losses in last month's GOP primaries in Colorado may be due to fraud filed their second round of requests for recounts on Tuesday.
Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters and State Rep. Ron Hanks both echoed former President Donald Trump's lies about the 2020 election during their own races for their party's nomination for Colorado Secretary of State and U.S. Senate respectively. After they each lost by more than 40,000 votes, they requested a hand recount.
The Colorado Secretary of State's office said their regulations required any recounts to be done by machine and that it'd cost $236,000. When the two candidates didn't pay, it proceeded with certification of their losses.
On Tuesday, the Secretary of State's office released letters from Peters and Hanks insisting it wrongly rejected their hand recount requests, citing security flaws in voting machines used in Colorado. That has been a central part of the conspiracy theories the two candidates have promulgated. The Secretary of State's office had said those machines weren't used in the primary, but the two candidates disagreed.
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FREDERICKSBURG , Texas (AP) — Part of why Terry Hamilton says he abruptly left his job running elections deep in Texas wine country is by now a familiar story in America: He became fed up with the harassment that followed the 2020 election.
But this was no ordinary exit.
On the brink of November’s midterm elections, it was not just Hamilton who up and quit this month but also the only other full-time election worker in rural Gillespie County. The sudden emptying of an entire local elections department came less than 70 days before voters start casting ballots.
By the middle of last week, no one was left at the darkened and locked elections office in a metal building annex off the main road in Fredericksburg. A “Your Vote Counts” poster hung in a window by the door.
A scramble is now underway to train replacements and ground them in layers of new Texas voting laws that are among the strictest in the U.S. That includes assistance from the Texas Secretary of State, whose spokesperson could not recall a similar instance in which an elections office was racing to start over with a completely new staff. But the headaches don't stop there.
The resignations have more broadly made the county of roughly 27,000 residents — which overwhelmingly backed former President Donald Trump in 2020 — an extraordinary example of the fallout resulting from threats to election officials. Officials and voting experts worry that a new wave of harassment or worse will return in November, fueled by false claims of widespread fraud.
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Hamilton, who has clashed with poll watchers in Gillespie County in past elections, said he didn't want to go through it again.
"That’s the one thing we can’t understand. Their candidate won, heavily,” Hamilton said. “But there’s fraud here?”
He declined to discuss the nature of the threats in a phone interview, referring questions to the county attorney, who did not respond to a phone message. Gillespie County Sheriff Buddy Mills said neither his department nor police in Fredericksburg had received information about threats from elections officials.
continues......
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Mark Finchem Says Biden Didn’t Win in 2020, and He Has Big Plans for Elections in Arizona
By Katherine Miller
Mark Finchem, the Republican nominee for Arizona secretary of state, talks a lot about tracking: procedures, processes, audits, the path a ballot takes from voter to tabulator.
He’s a member of the Arizona state House of Representatives, and has a formal way of speaking, full of numerical legislation titles and terminology, but also talks about things seen and unseen. Like a number of other Republican nominees for secretary of state this year, Mr. Finchem claims the last election was fraudulent.
“Here’s why we know it didn’t happen,” he told an interviewer who had just suggested Arizona may have actually voted for Joe Biden in 2020. “It’s nonsense intuitively. Leading up to the election, this would be August, September, October. It first started off that you’d see a Trump train of maybe a dozen cars, and this is in my community. It’s one community, but I think it’s fairly representative of Arizona. You’d see a Trump train of maybe a dozen cars.” The hosts start cracking jokes about Biden trains behind gas stations these days, but in the interview, Mr. Finchem remains undeterred and unlaughing: First it was 12 cars, then 24, then 48, culminating in a three-mile Trump train. This is the kind of thing Mr. Finchem will abruptly say amid talk of election procedure.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — House Democrats are voting this week on changes to a 19th century law for certifying presidential elections, their strongest legislative response yet to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection and former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
The vote to overhaul the Electoral Count Act, expected Wednesday, comes as a bipartisan group of senators is moving forward with a similar bill. Lawmakers in both parties have said they want to change the arcane law before it is challenged again.
Trump and his allies tried to exploit the law’s vague language in the weeks after the election as they strategized how they could keep Joe Biden out of office, including by lobbying Vice President Mike Pence to simply object to the certification of Biden’s victory when Congress counted the votes on Jan. 6.
Pence refused to do so, but it was clear afterward that there was no real legal framework, or recourse, to respond under the 1887 law if the vice president had tried to block the count. The House and Senate bills would better define the vice president’s ministerial role and make clear that he or she has no say in the final outcome.
Both versions would also make it harder for lawmakers to object if they don’t like the results of an election, clarify laws that could allow a state's vote to be delayed, and ensure that there is only one slate of legal electors from each state. One strategy by Trump and his allies was to create alternate slates of electors in key states Biden won, with the ultimately unsuccessful idea that they could be voted on during the congressional certification on Jan. 6 and result in throwing the election back to Trump.
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"We've got to make this more straightforward to respect the will of the people," said Senate Rules Committee Chairman Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., whose committee will hold a vote on the legislation bill next week.
The bills are a response to the violence of that day, when a mob of Trump's supporters pushed past police, broke into the building and interrupted Biden's certification. The crowd was echoing Trump's false claims of widespread voter fraud and calling for Pence's death after it became clear that he wouldn't try to overturn the election.
Democrats in both chambers have felt even more urgency on the issue as Trump is considering another run for president and is still claiming the election was stolen. Many Republicans say they believe him, even though 50 states certified Biden’s win and courts across the country rejected Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud.
While the House vote is expected to fall mostly along party lines, the Senate bill has some Republican support and its backers are hopeful they will have the 10 votes they need to break a filibuster and pass it in the 50-50 Senate. But that could be tricky amid campaigning for the November midterm elections, and Republicans most aligned with Trump are certain to oppose it.
The Senate Rules panel is expected to pass the measure next Tuesday, with some tweaks, though a floor vote will most likely wait until November or December, Klobuchar said.
Even though they are similar, the House version is more expansive than the Senate bill and the two chambers will have some key differences that lawmakers will have to work out. The House legislation was introduced on Monday by House Administration Committee Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., and Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, both members of the House panel that has been investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Like the Senate bill, the House legislation would require that there is a single set of electors from each state submitted by the governor. The House bill would also narrow the grounds on which members of Congress could object to any state's electoral votes and raise the threshold for how many objections would be needed. Currently, the House and Senate each debate and vote on whether to accept a state's electors if there is just one objection from each chamber.
The House bill would require instead that a third of the House and a third of the Senate object to a particular state's electors in order to hold a vote. The Senate bill would require that a fifth of each chamber object.
Two such votes were held on Jan. 6, 2021, after the rioters were cleared, because GOP Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri joined dozens of House members in objecting to Biden's victories in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Both the House and Senate voted to certify the legitimate results.
Lofgren said the American people should be deciding the election, not Congress.
People who wanted to overturn the election “took advantage of ambiguous language as well as a low threshold to have Congress play a role that they really aren’t supposed to play,” she said.
The general similarities of the House bill to the Senate version could be a signal that House members are willing to compromise to get the legislation passed. Some House members had criticized the Senate bill for not going far enough. Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of both the Jan. 6 and House Administration committees, had said this summer that the Senate bill was not “remotely sufficient” to address the challenges presented by current law.
House members know they will have to give in some, though, to pass it through the 50-50 Senate. The bill, which is sponsored by centrist Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., and Susan Collins, R-Maine., already has the backing from 10 GOP senators.
Collins said Monday, “I believe we can work this out, and I hope that we do so.”
The bipartisan group of senators worked for months to find agreement on a way to revamp the process, eventually settling on a series of proposals introduced in July.
Cheney, a frequent Trump critic who lost her Republican primary in August, told reporters on Tuesday that the House bill was “entirely bipartisan” as her staff worked closely with Lofgren and other Democrats. But it remains to be seen if any other House Republicans will vote for it, as many have stayed loyal to Trump.
"We need to take steps that another Jan 6 never happens again," Cheney said.
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By Amy B Wang
September 27, 2022 at 17:44 ET
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Thank for rationally explaining everything here. There is no bothsidesing this issue. Not even remotely close, although I didn't like what she said either. But, still, it's not the same thing. To insinuate that it is is just disingenuous.