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After blaming his 2020 loss on mail balloting, Trump tries to make GOP voters believe it’s OK now
By NICHOLAS RICCARDI and MARGERY BECK
Yesterday
Marta Moehring voted the way she prefers in Nebraska's Republican primary Tuesday — in person, at her west Omaha polling place.
She didn’t even consider taking advantage of the state’s no-excuse mail-in ballot process. In fact, she would prefer to do away with mail-in voting altogether. She’s convinced fraudulent mailed ballots cost former President Donald Trump a second term in 2020.
“I don’t trust it in general,” Moehring, 62, said. “I don’t think they’re counted correctly.”
But now Republican officials — even, sometimes, Trump — are encouraging voters such as Moehring to cast their ballots by mail. The GOP has launched an effort to, in the words of one official, “correct the narrative” on mail voting and get those who were turned off to it by Trump to reconsider for this year's election.
The push is a striking change for a party that amplified dark rumors about mail ballots to explain away Trump's 2020 loss, but it is also seen as a necessary course correction for an election this year that is likely to be decided by razor-thin margins in a handful of swing states.
“We have to get right on using these mail-in ballots for the people who can't get there on Election Day,” Rep. Scott Perry, one of Trump's strongest congressional allies in his push to overturn the 2020 election, said at a conservative gathering in his home state of Pennsylvania.
That alarmed GOP strategists who saw mail voting as an advantage in campaigns because it lets them “bank” unreliable votes before Election Day and lowers the risk of turnout plummeting because of bad weather or other unpredictable factors at the polls. Trump's own campaign tried to sell Republicans on casting ballots by mail, but his voters listened to the then-president. In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Democrats were vastly more likely to cast ballots by mail than Republicans.
The trend continued in 2022, and its costs were starkly illustrated in Arizona.
Three top-of-the-ticket Republican candidates there who echoed Trump's lies about the unreliability of mail ballots encouraged their supporters to vote in person on Election Day. An election machine meltdown that day in one-third of the polling places in the state's most populous county led to huge lines and some would-be voters departing in frustration.
The three top Republicans all lost, including falling 17,000 votes short in the governor's race and 500 votes short in the one for attorney general.
This time, Republicans say they're not going to risk leaving ballots behind. Trump's handpicked chair of the Republican National Committee, his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, has vowed to embrace all sorts of legal election methods to boost turnout that Trump falsely blamed for his 2020 loss, including so-called “ballot harvesting” — letting people turn in mail ballots on the behalf of other voters.
“In this election cycle, Republicans will beat Democrats at their own game, by leveraging every legal tactic at our disposal based on the rules of each state,” Lara Trump said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Turning Point Action, a prominent, pro-Trump group, is launching a $100 million campaign to reach infrequent voters in the swing states of Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin. That will include offering mail voting as one way to make casting a ballot easier, spokesman Andrew Kolvet said.
“We'd love for elections to be run the way they were before,” Kolvet said. “We can spend our time complaining about it or we can get in gear and play by the rules that Democrats, or largely Democrats, used.”
Even Trump himself has started to recommend mail voting, though he frequently bashes it during campaign events and blames it for his 2020 loss. The RNC is also continuing to file lawsuits against various aspects of mail voting around the country.
Nonetheless, Trump recorded a short video telling his supporters that “absentee voting, early voting and Election Day voting are all good options.”
One recent push to publicize mail voting came during last month's Pennsylvania primary, when the Republican State Legislative Committee teamed up with a committee supporting the party's Senate candidate and the state GOP. The goal, said RSLC political director Max Docksey, was “to correct the narrative among Republican voters on mail voting.”
The effort was inspired by what the RSLC saw as a successful effort to increase mail voting among Republicans in the battle for control of the Virginia Legislature in 2023, a fight ultimately won by the Democrats.
The group sent mail ballot applications to 1.5 million GOP voters, sent 475,000 text messages encouraging mail voting and touted the benefits of mail voting at party gatherings.
But at the same time, Pennsylvania Republicans have sued to force the state's mail ballots to be counted at polling places rather than the county election offices, which have the equipment and space to do the job, That's among many lawsuits targeting mail voting filed by Republicans around the country since 2020.
The conflicting messages could make it challenging to swiftly reverse the drop-off in mail voting among Republicans.
In Pennsylvania, Republican operatives were pleased with their effort, which they said led to them adding nearly twice as many voters to the state's mail ballot list as Democrats did during the primary. But the overall share of Pennsylvania mail ballots sent by Republicans remained about the same as in 2020, at only one-quarter of overall ballots, according to data from the secretary of state's office.
Bill Bretz, chairman of the Westmoreland County Republican Party in the western side of the state, said he's noticed voters in his conservative area slowly but steadily warming up to mail voting.
“People understand the consequences of this election,” he said. “There's a lot of buy-in to vote by any method available, and the vote-by-mail bogeyman is beginning to fade.”
__
Riccardi reported from Denver and Beck from Omaha, Nebraska. Associated Press writers Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Martha Mendoza in Santa Cruz, California, and Leah Willingham in Charleston, West Virginia, contributed to this report.
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Voter outreach groups targeted by new laws in several GOP-led states are struggling to do their work
By AYANNA ALEXANDER
Today
WASHINGTON (AP) — During the presidential election four years ago, the Equal Ground Education Fund hired over 100 people to go door-to-door and attend festivals, college homecomings and other events to help register voters across Florida. Their efforts for this year's elections look much different.
A state law passed last year forced them to stop in-person voter registration, cut staff and led to a significant drop in funding. Organizers aren't sure how robust their operations will be in the fall.
Genesis Robinson, the group's interim executive director, said the law has had a “tremendous impact” on its ability to host events and get into communities to engage directly with potential voters.
“Prior to all of these changes, we were able to operate in a space where we were taking action and prepare our communities and make sure they were registered to vote — and help if they weren’t,” he said.
Florida is one of several states, including Kansas, Missouri and Texas, where Republicans have enacted voting restrictions since 2021 that created or enhanced criminal penalties and fines for those who assist voters. The laws have forced some voter outreach groups to cease operations, while others have greatly altered or reduced their activities.
The Florida law, signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis last May, imposed a $50,000 fine on third-party voter registration organizations if the staff or volunteers who handle or collect the forms have been convicted of a felony or are not U.S. citizens. It also raised the fines the groups could face, from $1,000 to $250,000, and reduced the amount of time they are able to return registration applications from 14 days to 10 days.
A federal judge blocked portions of the law earlier this month, including the one targeting felons and those who are not citizens. Even so, the law had a direct effect on the operations of Equal Ground and other voter advocacy organizations in the state before the ruling.
The League of Women Voters in Florida, one of the plaintiffs, shifted away from in-person voter registration to digital outreach. Cecile Scoon, the league's co-president, said the law stripped the personal connection between its workers and communities. Digital tools aren’t easy to use when registering voters and can be expensive, she said.
These organizations are needed because local election officials don't always provide adequate support and information, said Derby Johnson, a voter in Ormond Beach who attended a recent community event in Daytona Beach organized by Equal Ground. He said it appeared the Florida Legislature was just trying to make it harder for certain communities to register and cast ballots.
“There are parties actively working to suppress the vote, particularly in Black and brown communities, and these groups help educate and register voters to mitigate that," she said.
MOVE Texas, a voting rights group that focuses on voters who are 30 or younger, adjusted to that state's 2021 election overhaul with additional training for their staff and volunteers. Among the provisions drawing concern was one that increased criminal penalties for anyone who receives compensation for assisting a voter, which especially affected the ability to recruit high school and college students for voter registration drives.
“The law contributed to this culture of fear in our elections and being a person who registers voters," said Stephanie Gomez, the group’s political director.
Republicans in Kansas overrode a veto by Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly to pass a bill that made it a felony if anyone registering voters impersonated or was assumed to impersonate an election official.
That forced Loud Light Kansas, a voter outreach group that focuses on minority communities, to stop its registration efforts. Would-be voters typically perceived their staff and volunteers as election workers even when told otherwise, said Anita Alexander, the organization's vice president.
“We’re trying to engage impacted people, but we weren’t willing to risk anyone getting charged by doing voter engagement work," she said.
Loud Light and other local voter registration groups sued the Legislature. The Democratic governor said there has been no evidence in the state of widespread voter fraud or instances of individuals impersonating election officials.
In Missouri, the state chapter of the League of Women Voters and the Missouri State Conference of the NAACP sued after the state enacted wide-ranging election legislation in 2022.
Among other things, the new law bans compensation for those who register voters and requires that anyone who helps more than 10 people register must also register with the secretary of state’s office and be a voter themselves. Violators can face criminal penalties.
The completed secretary of state’s forms are public, which presents a privacy concern for many people who might otherwise want to help with voter registration efforts, said Denise Lieberman, director and general counsel of the Missouri Voter Protection Coalition.
“Historically, when those membership lists have been obtained, they’ve been used to intimidate. So, there’s a lot of trepidation, especially in groups that are targeting low-income or communities of color,” she said. “If you just want to volunteer for one hour on a Saturday morning to help out on your college campus or on an Earth Day or anything, you have to go through this whole process.”
The Missouri law is on hold while the legal challenge plays out, with a trial set for August.
Voting rights experts expect to see continued attempts to restrict voting and the activities of voter outreach groups in Republican-controlled states, said Megan Bellamy, vice president of law and policy at the Voting Rights Lab.
"The effort to target third-party voter registration groups is just, unfortunately, one of many policy areas that state legislatures are moving to address,” she said.
___
The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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Trump speaks from the lobby of Trump Tower on Friday. Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
One
of the first polls conducted since a New York Jury found Donald Trump
guilty of falsifying business records find that a significant minority
of Republicans and Independents want him to drop out and a majority of
registered voters approve of the jury's decision.Why it matters: The Morning Consult poll conducted on Friday offers some of the first clues about how voters are reacting to the unprecedented situation.
By the numbers:
54% of registered voters "strongly" or "somewhat" approve of the guilty
verdict compared to 34% who "strongly or "somewhat" disapprove.
49% of Independents and 15% of Republicans said Trump should end his campaign because of the conviction.
The polls found the race effectively tied nationally in a 1-on-1 with Biden at 45% and Trump at 44%.
Reality check: While
they may agree with the guilty verdict, the poll found that more voters
think Trump should get probation (49%) rather than go to prison (44%).
68% of registered voters said the punishment should be a fine.
The poll also revealed some deep distrust of the criminal justice system.
Three in four Republican voters said the verdict made them feel less confident in the system.
And
77% of GOP voters, as well as 43% of independents, said they believed
the conviction was driven by motivation to damage Trump's political
career.
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100 years ago, US citizenship for Native Americans came without voting rights in swing states
By MORGAN LEE
Today
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — Voter participation advocate Theresa Pasqual traverses Acoma Pueblo with a stack of sample ballots in her car and applications for absentee ballots, handing them out at every opportunity ahead of New Mexico's Tuesday primary.
Residents of the tribal community's original mesa-top “sky city” that endured after the Spanish invasion in the late 1500s know firsthand the challenges voters have faced across Indian Country, where polling places are often hours away and restrictive voter laws and ID requirements only add to the barriers.
It's been a century now since an act of Congress granted citizenship to Native Americans, but advocates say that right bestowed in 1924 still hasn’t translated into equal access to the ballot. Inequities are especially pronounced in remote regions across the U.S., and some key Southwestern states with large Native American populations.
New Mexico is trying something new — a test run of sorts for many new and contested provisions that are part of the state's Native American Voting Rights Act that was passed last year. The measure promises tribal communities a greater voice in how and where they can vote, even opening the possibility that tribal offices can be designated as a street address for remote households that have none.
This should help at Acoma, where Pasqual said some residents still do not have standard addresses.
Native Americans in New Mexico — home to 22 federally recognized tribal communities and holdings of an Oklahoma-based tribe — were among the last to gain access to voting, decades after the U.S. extended birthright citizenship to the land’s original inhabitants on June 2, 1924 through the Indian Citizenship Act.
That legislation took shape in the aftermath of World War I in which thousands of Native Americans had volunteered to serve overseas in the military.
A patchwork of statutes and treaties already offered about two-thirds of Native Americans citizenship, sometimes in exchange for land allotments that fractured reservations, gestures of assimilation, military service and even the renunciation of tribal traditions. The one-sentence Indian Citizenship Act swept away those requirements in an attempt to grant citizenship to all Native Americans.
At the same time, Congress deferred to state governments qualifications on who qualified to vote. Legal access to the ballot was denied under existing state constitutional provisions and statutes until 1948 in Arizona and New Mexico — and until 1957 on reservations in Utah.
It was by design, said Maurice Crandall, an Arizona State University history professor and citizen of the Yavapai-Apache Nation of Camp Verde. Pointing to the largest Native populations in New Mexico and Arizona, he said: " They don’t want a large group of Native people who can swing elections.”
Fast forward to 2020, he said, and “many people credit the Native vote with deciding to bring Arizona into the (Joe) Biden camp.”
Biden won Arizona by about 10,500 votes, as voter turnout surged on the Navajo and Hopi reservations.
At Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, voting has provided Native Americans with a path to power amid the political rise of pueblo member Deb Haaland. She became one of the first two Native American women in Congress in 2018 before taking the reins of the Interior Department to oversee U.S. obligations to 574 federally recognized tribes.
For the upcoming primary, Laguna is on the front lines of two Democratic contests with first-time female Native American candidates competing in districts that were redrawn in 2021 to increase Native influence. In the general election, eligible voters among 8,000 Laguna residents will cast ballots in a congressional swing district rematch between U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez and Republican Yvette Herrell, who lost in 2022 by 1,350 votes. Herrell seldom invokes her Cherokee heritage.
The state's new voting rights legislation for Native Americans provides new tools for tribal communities to request convenient on-reservation voting sites and secure ballot deposit boxes with consultation requirements for county clerks and an appeals process.
But there are still obstacles, said Laguna Pueblo administrator Ashley M. Sarracino, pointing to tensions with county election administrators over a decision to withdraw three Election Day voting sites at the pueblo this year, leaving three open.
In Arizona, the anniversary of the Indian Citizenship Act stirs up frustration among Native American leaders, including Gov. Stephen Lewis of the Gila River Indian Community. He has denounced efforts by the Republican National Committee and state lawmakers to revive and extend voter ID requirements through the 2024 general election.
Two of Lewis' community members sued in 1928 after being turned away from the polls, only to have the Arizona Supreme Court rebuff their case. The community wouldn’t realize the right to vote until 1948 — after World War II and the raising of an American flag at Iwo Jima that included Ira Hayes, who was part of the Gila River community.
Lewis during a recent online forum counted the years that passed between the time the U.S. Declaration of Independence was inked and the Indian Citizenship Act was signed. He said elected officials for years have "made laws for us, about us, but never with us.”
Native Americans have held widely divergent views about citizenship and voting, said Torey Dolan, a research fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School and citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Some view U.S. citizenship as incompatible with being Indigenous people; others see it more like dual citizenship.
With approval of the citizenship act, many Native Americans feared the expansion of U.S. citizenship might undermine the special status of trust land that allows tribes to make their own decisions about tax-exempt land and shield it from speculators.
“It was really seen in many parts of Indian Country as being aimed at breaking down tribal cultures, particularly in the Southwest,” said Geoffrey Blackwell, general counsel to the National Congress of American Indians that advocates for Native American rights and sovereignty.
For some, ensuring voting rights was worth the fight. In 1948, Isleta Pueblo member and World War II military veteran Miguel Trujillo challenged the status quo that barred Native Americans in New Mexico from voting by attempting to vote in Valencia County. He was rejected, sparking a landmark lawsuit that was supported by Washington-based federal Indian law pioneer Felix Cohen and the National Congress of American Indians.
A 1956 federal survey of Native voting in the Southwest found anemic participation, with no polling places set up at New Mexico pueblos. In Arizona, Jim Crow-style discrimination set in with widespread application of literacy tests to block Native-language speakers from voting until the practice was barred in 1970 under the federal Voting Rights Act.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 spurred a new movement within tribal communities to encourage participation, said Laura Harris, the Albuquerque-based director of Americans for Indian Opportunity and a citizen of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma.
In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that gave the Justice Department election oversight in states with a history of discrimination. Since then, several states have enacted new voting laws that some legal experts say make it unreasonably difficult for Native Americans to vote, including a flurry of restrictions from Republicans enacted in the wake of the 2020 election.
But in New Mexico, the Sandoval County clerk's office has expanded early voting services in recent years for tribal communities. Only one pueblo in the county declined the opportunity this year. Native language interpreters are posted at each of the sites, which are open to all county residents.
Evelyn Sandoval works with the county attorney's office as a liaison to Native Americans. She teaches families how to use newly available tools to register online and receive absentee ballots by mail.
“I’m trying to get them to be self-reliant,” said Sandoval, a 54-year-old former oil and gas company worker who was raised Ojo Encino, a Navajo community with fewer than 300 residents. Her mother spoke only Navajo.
___
Associated Press writer Susan Montoya Bryan contributed to this story from Zia Pueblo, New Mexico. AP writer Graham Brewer contributed from Oklahoma City.
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Conventioneers listen to speeches during the Texas GOP Convention Friday, May 24, 2024 in San Antonio.
Credit:
Eli Hartman/The Texas Tribune
Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
Republican Party
of Texas delegates voted Saturday on a platform that called for new
laws to require the Bible to be taught in public schools and a
constitutional amendment that would require statewide elected leaders to
win the popular vote in a majority of Texas counties.
Other proposed planks of the 50-page platform
included proclamations that “abortion is not healthcare it is
homicide”; that gender-transition treatment for children is “child
abuse”; calls to reverse recent name changes to military bases and
“publicly honor the southern heroes”; support for declaring gold and
silver as legal tender; and demands that the U.S. government disclose
“all pertinent information and knowledge” of UFOs.
The party hopes to finalize its platform on Wednesday, after Saturday’s votes on each proposal are tabulated.
Passed by
delegates at the party’s biennial convention, the platform has
traditionally been seen not as a definitive list of Republican stances,
but a compromise document that represents the interests of the party’s
various business, activist and social conservative factions. But in
recent years — and amid a party civil war that’s pushed it further right
— the platform has been increasingly used as a basis
for censuring Republican officeholders who the party’s far right has
attacked as insufficiently conservative, including Texas House Speaker
Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, and U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzalez, R-San Antonio.
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Vermont GOP rules bar it from promoting any candidate who is a 'convicted felon'
The party can vote to exempt a candidate, but it so far appears to be following the rule.
The
Vermont Republican Party's rules bar the state committee from
supporting or promoting any candidate who is a convicted felon.Michael M. Santiago / AP file
“The
state committee will not support or promote any candidate for elective
office who … is a convicted felon,” read the rules, which govern
everything from party meetings to how delegates must vote at national
conventions.
On social media, the party does technically
appear to be following the rule — there are no mentions of Donald Trump
on the Vermont GOP’s Twitter or Facebook
pages in the days since the former president's historic guilty verdict
in his hush money case — but the party's social media typically talks
only about local candidates and presidential candidates who visit the
state.
The rule has been on the books since at least
2013, according to an archived version of the rules, but by early 2022,
the party appears to have amended their rules.
According
to the Internet Archive, the posted rules were changed by March 2022 to
allow the state committee to exempt a candidate from the rule by
majority vote.
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Senior editor at Forbes, covering Donald Trump's business.
Dec 4, 2022,08:15am EST
Updated Dec 5, 2022, 01:14pm EST
Keeping
an eye out: Former President Donald Trump arrives to speak at an event
at Mar-A-Lago, Friday, November 18, 2022, in Palm Beach, Florida.
Rebecca Blackwell/AP
Donald Trump’s
business attracted so much scrutiny during his time in office that it
would be easy to conclude that all information about its foreign
entanglements must be out by now. It is not. Buried in a heap of
recently released financial paperwork sits a surprising revelation:
Donald Trump had a foreign creditor he failed to disclose while running
for president in 2016 and after assuming office in 2017.
The documents, compiled by the Trump Organization and obtained by the
New York attorney general, show a previously unreported liability of
$19.8 million listed as “L/P Daewoo.” The debt stems from an agreement
Trump struck to share some of his licensing fees with Daewoo, a South
Korean conglomerate that partnered with Trump on a project near the
United Nations headquarters in New York City.
Trump eliminated the debt five and a half months into his tenure as
president, according to the documents. He seems to have acted with some
urgency to wipe the liability off his balance sheet. From 2011 to 2016,
the documents show that the balance stayed static at $19.8 million.
Paperwork capturing Trump’s financial picture as of June 30, 2017, five
months into his presidency, appears to show that the balance had dropped
to $4.3 million, $15.5 million less than it had been a year earlier.
Trump got rid of the debt altogether shortly after that. “Daewoo was
bought out of its position on July 5, 2017,” the documents say, without
specifying who exactly paid off the loan.
Although the debt appeared on the Trump Organization’s internal
paperwork, it did not show up on Trump’s public financial disclosure
reports, documents he was required to submit to federal officials while
running for president and after taking office. Trump’s former chief
financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, told the New York Times
in 2016 that his boss disclosed all debt connected to companies in
which Trump held a 100% stake on the documents. That was not true.
There is a chance that Trump’s omission may have been legal,
nonetheless. Although officials have to list personal loans on their
financial disclosures, the law does not require them to include loans to
their companies, unless they are personally liable for the loans. The
Trump Organization documents do not specify whether the former
president, who owned 100% of the entities responsible for the debt,
personally guaranteed the liability, leaving it unclear whether he broke
the law or merely took advantage of a loophole.
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Nevada has a plan to expand electronic voting. That concerns election security experts
By CHRISTINA A. CASSIDY
Today
SCHURZ, Nevada (AP) — Members of the Walker River Paiute Tribe have watched the boundaries of their land recede over time along with the waters of the lake that are central to their identity, threatening the cultural symbol that gave the tribe its name — Agai Dicutta, or Trout Eaters.
Not wanting to cede their voice, tribal leaders have been making a push for expanded voting rights. That effort includes filing a lawsuit on behalf of all Nevada tribes seeking polling places on tribal lands and access to early voting.
“Tribes shouldn’t have to keep filing lawsuits just to vote on their own lands,” said Elveda Martinez, 65, a tribal member and longtime voting advocate. “It should be more accessible.”
The state has now granted the Walker River Paiutes and other tribes in Nevada a new right that advocates hope will greatly expand voting access for a community that gained U.S. citizenship only a century ago.
Voting on reservations across the country has historically been difficult, with tribal voters sometimes having to travel dozens of miles to their polling place. Slow mail service and lack of a physical address, common on tribal lands, have proved challenging.
The new process — the ability to cast ballots electronically — has the potential to significantly boost turnout among all tribes in Nevada. But what some see as a small measure of justice to equalize voting rights raises security concerns for others, with implications far beyond Nevada's 28 tribal communities as the nation braces for what is expected to be another close and contentious presidential election in November.
Under the plan, tribal members in Nevada who live on a reservation or colony can receive a ballot electronically through an online system set up by the state and then return it electronically. Experts warn that such voting — when a completed ballot is sent back either by email, through an online portal or by fax — carries risks of ballots being intercepted or manipulated and should be used sparingly, if at all.
“At this point in the United States, it’s a relatively small number of ballots that are coming through that way,” said Larry Norden, an election expert with the Brennan Center for Justice. “But we should be very concerned — both from actual security risks but also from a public confidence point of view — about expanding this.”
‘HIGH-RISK ACTIVITY’
While electronic voting may be limited at the moment, it’s available across much of the country to specific groups of voters. More than 30 states allow certain voters to return their ballots either by fax, email or an online portal, according to data collected by the National Conference of State Legislatures and Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group that studies state voting systems.
In most cases, electronic ballot return is available only to U.S. military and overseas voters. But it’s been expanded in recent years to include voters with disabilities in a dozen states. Nevada is believed to be the first to add tribes.
Cal Boone, the new tribal outreach coordinator for the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office and a member of the Walker River Paiute Tribe, has begun meeting with tribes around the state to share details about the process, which he believes could ease a legacy of barriers that has left some reluctant to vote.
“In past years, tribes didn’t have access to vote in multiple ways. You had to rely on the mail system to cast your vote or otherwise drive out to great lengths to vote,” Boone said. “What we are seeing in Nevada is really powerful, and it really sets the stage for what other states throughout the country can be doing to help support tribes."
But the solution comes with risks.
In a 2020 memo to election officials, the FBI and other federal agencies assessed the risk of sending ballots electronically to be low, but allowing those ballots to be returned electronically was high. The memo highlights recommended security practices for internet-connected systems, including isolating computers that handle electronic ballots from ones that are used for other aspects of voting.
"The information provided should be considered a starting point," the memo states. "Even with these technical security considerations, electronic ballot return remains a high-risk activity.”
Earlier this year, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is charged with helping protect the nation’s election systems, said in an online post that the memo was being redistributed to ensure state officials and policymakers are “fully informed of risks” associated with electronic ballot return.
Susannah Goodman, director of election security for Common Cause, is among those concerned that there are no federal guidelines for such systems and no independent reviews, unlike what's in place for voting machines and ballot tabulators.
An attempt to create independent standards ended in late 2022 after a group of experts determined it wasn't possible at the time given the technology and cyber risks.
‘CONFIDENT IN OUR SYSTEM’
Kim Wyman, the former top election official in Washington state, initially supported electronic voting as a military spouse, but said she grew wary after taking over as secretary of state. Her attempt to persuade lawmakers to repeal it was unsuccessful.
Wyman said she worries something could happen to the ballot in transit and what that would mean for public confidence in elections. She believes the safest bet is for voters who receive ballots electronically to print them out and return them by mail.
“Election officials are in a hard spot because they want to provide accessibility and they want to make sure that every eligible American has a right to participate in an election,” Wyman said. “But they have to do it in a way where they’re also securing those ballots and making sure that that voter’s ballot is counted the way the voter cast it.”
Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar said he knows the process carries risks, but sees everything related to elections as having some risk. He pointed to the federal government's action in 2017 to designate the nation’s voting systems as critical infrastructure, just like dams, banks and nuclear power plants.
The state’s electronic ballot return system was designed by the state with security measures intended to verify eligibility, authenticate voters and their ballots, and ensure secure communications, he said. There are steps to ensure voters are not casting multiple ballots, and the system undergoes regular security reviews and updates.
“I’m confident in our system,” Aguilar said.
He expressed frustration about what he described as a lack of national leadership on this and other election issues, saying there should be less criticism and more work and funding to address concerns.
“The federal government has access to so many experts, they have access to resources. They should be providing a leadership position to give us a path forward,” Aguilar said. “To think backward and to scare us is not the appropriate way to do this.”
STATES DIVIDED OVER SECURITY CONCERNS
So far, few Nevada voters have opted in. As of Friday, 255 voters had submitted a ballot electronically — none of them tribal members — ahead of Tuesday's primary. More than half of those were registered in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas and is the state's most populous.
“Folks that participate find it very convenient and very easy to use,” Clark County Registrar Lorena Portillo said.
Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, just over 2,500 voters returned their ballots electronically through the state system. Among them was Ramona Coker, who is blind. Coker said she no longer needs help to vote and can cast a ballot on her phone, which is equipped with screen-reading technology allowing her to follow audio prompts to make her selections.
“It feels very American. It feels like you have done your part and no one else has had an influence in that,” said Coker, who works for a Reno-area nonprofit.
She believes the challenges faced by voters with disabilities outweigh the potential risks of electronic balloting.
“We’re always going to have bad-faith actors out there, no matter what delivery form or what return form that we use,” Coker said. “And if you’re always worried about that, then you never cast a vote again.”
States led by both Democrats and Republicans have authorized electronic ballot returns, with varying rules. Alaska, California, Florida and Oklahoma limit the process to military and overseas voters and only permit electronic return by fax. In Texas, astronauts can use an online portal to cast their ballots. In West Virginia, first responders on duty outside their county also are eligible.
“Having been in the military, I’ve seen intelligence transmitted via the internet. We transmit nuclear codes via the internet,” West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner said. “If we can do that, we can certainly get a secure ballot and transmit across the internet.”
Not all states have embraced the practice. In Minnesota, officials considered it but ultimately decided against it.
“In light of recent security concerns, it’s on ice,” said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon. “Someday -- if those security considerations are addressed and if the concerns and objections of the federal agencies can be overcome -- we would definitely consider it because as a matter of convenience, it would probably make a difference.”
DIDN’T FEEL ‘OUR VOICE EVEN MATTERED’
The Walker River Paiute reservation is along a scenic stretch of highway between Las Vegas and Reno, about two hours south of the state capital in a vast stretch of desert surrounded by distant mountain peaks.
On a late spring day, sprinklers prepare alfalfa fields that dot the reservation while wild horses graze in nearby foothills. There are no grocery stores, restaurants or hotels, and the nearest town is about 30 miles away.
Although the tribe has long had its own polling location — something other tribes in the state have not — the reservation's remoteness has sometimes added to a sense of political isolation. Some tribal members have not always seen the point in voting.
“Because of the historical abuses our people have faced, we were very timid to even take part in voting or elections," tribal Chair Andrea Martinez said. "For many years, we didn’t feel like our voice even mattered.”
The prospect of casting ballots electronically is a step Martinez and other tribal leaders welcome, but they're not sure it will make a major difference, at least initially. Internet access is spotty on the reservation, as is electricity because of aging utility poles.
“Although we, through the state, can access online voting, who knows if we’ll even have electricity or internet that day?” Martinez said.
Teresa McNally, who oversees the election office in Mineral County, which includes the Walker River reservation, plans to hold a meeting with tribal members this year to explain the new system.
One thing she wants to emphasize is the focus on security, including the measures protecting the electronic ballot return system.
“What it takes to even get into our internet system here, it’s crazy,” she said.
Courtney Quintero, a tribal member and chair of the board overseeing tribal elections, said she planned to use the new system once she learned more about it, but acknowledged others may be hesitant.
“Trust is a big thing with our community," she said.
___
The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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The much-anticipated first debate of 2024 between President Joe Biden
and former President Donald Trump featured a relentless barrage of
false and misleading statements from the two candidates on immigration,
the economy, abortion, taxes and more.
Both candidates erred on Social Security, with Biden incorrectly
saying that Trump “wants to get rid” of the program, and Trump falsely
alleging that Biden will “wipe out” Social Security due to the influx of
people at the border.
Trump misleadingly claimed that he was “the one that got the insulin
down for the seniors,” not Biden. Costs were lowered for some under a
limited project by the Trump administration. Biden signed a law capping
costs for all seniors with Medicare drug coverage.
Trump warned that Biden “wants to raise your taxes by four times,”
but Biden has not proposed anything like that. Trump was also mostly
wrong when he said Biden “wants the Trump tax cuts to expire.” Biden
said he would extend them for anyone making under $400,000 a year.
Biden repeated his misleading claim that billionaires pay an average
federal tax rate of 8%. That White House calculation factors in
earnings on unsold stock as income.
Trump repeated his false claim that “everybody,” including all legal
scholars, wanted to end Roe v. Wade’s constitutional right to abortion.
Trump falsely claimed that “the only jobs” Biden “created are for
illegal immigrants and bounced back jobs that bounced back from the
COVID.” Total nonfarm employment is higher than it was before the
pandemic, as is the employment level of native-born workers.
Biden claimed that Trump oversaw the “largest deficit of any
president,” while Trump countered that “we now have the largest deficit”
under Biden. The largest budget deficit was under Trump in fiscal year
2020, but that was largely because of emergency spending due to
COVID-19.
Biden misleadingly said that “Black unemployment is the lowest level
it has been in a long, long time.” The rate reached a record low in
April 2023, and it was low under Trump, too, until the pandemic.
Biden said Trump called U.S. veterans killed in World War I “suckers
and losers,” which Trump called a “made up quote.” The Atlantic
reported that, based on anonymous sources. A former Trump chief of staff
later seemed to confirm Trump said it.
Trump claimed that Biden “caused the inflation,” but economists say
rising inflation was mostly due to disruptions to the economy caused by
the pandemic.
Trump grossly inflated the number of immigrants who have entered the
country during the Biden administration — putting the number at 18
million to 20 million — and he said, without evidence, that many of them
are from prisons and mental institutions.
Trump claimed that “we had the safest border in history” in the
“final months” of his presidency. But apprehensions of those trying to
cross illegally in the last three full months of his presidency were
about 50% higher than in the three months before he took office.
Biden criticized Trump for presiding over a loss of jobs when he was
president, but that loss occurred because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump falsely claimed that “some states” run by Democrats allow
abortions “after birth.” If it happened, it would be homicide, and
that’s illegal.
Trump made the unsupported claim that the U.S. border with Mexico is
“the most dangerous place in the world,” and suggested that it has
opened the country to a violent crime wave. The data show a reduction in
violent crime in the U.S.
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sooooo in 2022 just over 4 million ohioans cast a ballot for statewide offfices and for us senator.
yesterday, the group citizens not politicians seeking to end gerrymandering via constitutional amendment submitted 730k signatures , roughly 1/6th of the 2022 vote total.......
granted these still need certified, but having signed myself and listening to the volunteer ask the questions, as long as the signers were honest, the vast majority should be valid.
heres the link to the webpage laying out what we look to achieve.....
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The little-known charity is backed by famous conservative
donors, including the families behind Hobby Lobby and Uline. It’s
spending millions to make a big political push for this election — but
it may be violating the law.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
A network of ultrawealthy
Christian donors is spending nearly $12 million to mobilize
Republican-leaning voters and purge more than a million people from the
rolls in key swing states, aiming to tilt the 2024 election in favor of
former President Donald Trump.
These previously unreported
plans are the work of a group named Ziklag, a little-known charity
whose donors have included some of the wealthiest conservative Christian
families in the nation, including the billionaire Uihlein family, who
made a fortune in office supplies, the Greens, who run Hobby Lobby, and
the Wallers, who own the Jockey apparel corporation. Recipients of
Ziklag’s largesse include Alliance Defending Freedom, which is the
Christian legal group that led the overturning of Roe v. Wade, plus the
national pro-Trump group Turning Point USA and a constellation of
right-of-center advocacy groups.
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When Lincoln was shot he wore a coat embroidered with “One Country, One Destiny.” I’ve turned to those 4 words to help me process this moment. This assassination attempt was one of the worst events I’ve seen in our democracy. It feels like we are a country unmoored…I’ve never experienced a time more unpredictable yet with such generational consequence. So what does this particular moment mean? I remembered a passage in a book I read. “Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.”
The deep unease we carry is in part the fact that we witnessed with the shooter one person trying to use the means of violence to impose their will upon a nation of 330 million and subvert the power of people that underlies our very democracy. And now trepidation across our nation as “The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.” We fear retaliation, reprisal or escalation. But let us remind ourselves that it doesn’t have to be that way.
In the aftermath of other recent shocks to our country, we failed to unify and instead sadly grew more divided. I had hoped that these shocks would be what I called defibrillator moments that would shock our irregular heart beats into normal rhythm, but we fell far short. It’s not just that our divisions have grown so wide in our country, but our willingness to allow contempt to accompany us. It’s not just a disrespect that we see towards one another, it’s a deeper disregard and a disgust of one another.
We are losing touch with the understanding that we are all part of something bigger than all of us. As those 4 words of Lincoln - One County, One Destiny - remind us, the commonality we share runs deep and cannot be forgotten or dismissed. Violence is cowardice not strength. It is fiercely undemocratic. As we process this shock, we can choose to realize that we’ve gone too far as a society down the path of contempt. We are not each other’s enemy. We are not at war with each other. Choosing to unite instead of incite does not mean we dismiss the magnitude of our differences. But it compels us to be cautious and precise about our next steps, our words, and our actions in this unbelievably precarious moment.
One Country, One Destiny doesn’t mean we all agree, but instead reminds us that we share the same fate. We collectively mourn the death of the rally attendee, we are relieved that Trump wasn’t seriously injured. Now let’s unite around Lincoln’s vision One Country, One Destiny.
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Republicans in the state Senate refused to change the law and allow mail-in votes to be counted ahead of Election Day, despite widespread calls for change.
Pennsylvania presidential election results could again take days to count
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Tesla
boss Elon Musk and other tech executives are funding a social media ad
blitz to support the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
The
ads come as Musk uses his account on X, the social media platform he
owns, to back the Republican nominee over the de facto Democratic
nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Musk’s America PAC is
collecting data in more than a half-dozen swing states that could
determine the outcome of the 2024 election.
Elon
Musk, Chief Executive Officer of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of X speaks
during the Milken Conference 2024 Global Conference Sessions at The
Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., May 6, 2024.
The
ad shows a young man lying in bed late at night when someone else texts
him, “Hey you need to vote,” and then sends the man a video of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. The man can hear the gunshots and people screaming in the background.
As
Trump is rushed off stage with blood pouring down his face, the man
watching the video types in response, “This is out of control. How do I
start?”
The ad then displays a website for a group called America PAC.
The
website says it will help the viewer register to vote. But once a user
clicks “Register to Vote,” the experience he or she will have can be
very different, depending on where they live.
If a user lives in a
state that is not considered competitive in the presidential election,
like California or Wyoming for example, they’ll be prompted to enter
their email addresses and ZIP code and then directed quickly to a voter
registration page for their state, or back to the original sign-up
section.
But for users who enter a ZIP code that indicates they
live in a battleground state, like Pennsylvania or Georgia, the process
is very different.
Rather
than be directed to their state’s voter registration page, they instead
are directed to a highly detailed personal information form, prompted
to enter their address, cellphone number and age.
If they agree to
submit all that, the system still does not steer them to a voter
registration page. Instead, it shows them a “thank you” page.
So
that person who wanted help registering to vote? In the end, they got no
help at all registering. But they did hand over priceless personal data
to a political operation.
Specifically, a political action committee created by Tesla
CEO Elon Musk, one aimed at giving the Republican presidential nominee Trump an advantage in his campaign against Vice President Kamala Harris, the de facto Democratic nominee.
“I have created a PAC, or a super PAC ... the America PAC,” Musk said in a recent interview.
Musk also owns the social media platform X, and has a net worth of more than $235 billion, according to Forbes.
The
combination of owning a social media company that gives him an enormous
platform to push his political views, and creating a PAC with
effectively unlimited resources, has made Musk, for the first time, a
major force in an American presidential election.
Musk PAC uses ‘register to vote’ data
The
America PAC has spent more than $800,000 since early July on digital
ads that target voters in the key battleground states of Arizona,
Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin,
according to AdImpact.
The ads appeared on Facebook, Instagram and
Google through YouTube, and many encouraged people to register to vote
at America PAC’s website.
The PAC’s effort to collect information
from people using the idea of “voter registration” is a critical piece
to its plan to make personal contact with these voters.
“America
PAC is focusing on door-to-door canvassing in support of Trump,” said
Brendan Fischer, a deputy executive director at campaign finance
watchdog Documented.
“I think it is safe to assume that the voter
data gathered through these digital appeals are going to inform America
PAC’s canvassing and other political activities,” he added.
Fischer
pointed to the group’s privacy policy which says it can use the data
they’ve collected on “other activities and/or fundraising campaigns.”
Since
June, America PAC has spent more than $21 million on canvassing,
digital media, text message services and phone calls, according to
Federal Election Commission filings.
The PAC’s website offers no
indication one way or another what the group’s political leaning is. But
in its federal filings, the group discloses that all of its work is
designed to either help Trump or hurt his opponent.
Fischer said he has seen some other PACs try to use a “register to vote” message to gather people’s data.
But what is unique about America PAC’s project is who is backing it and the timing of its creation.
In
most cases, super PACs are not allowed to directly coordinate the ads
they pay for with the campaign. But this spring, regulators ruled that
door-to-door canvassing falls outside the scope of the ban because,
unlike an ad, it is a person-to-person exchange.
“What makes
America PAC more unique: it is a billionaire-backed super PAC focused on
door-to-door canvassing, which it can conduct in coordination with a
presidential campaign,” Fischer said. “Thanks to a recent FEC advisory opinion,
America PAC may legally coordinate its canvassing activities with the
Trump campaign — meaning, among other things, that the Trump campaign
may provide America PAC with the literature and scripts to make sure
their efforts are consistent.”
“Coordination is incredibly
important: it ensures that the PAC’s activities are maximally beneficial
to the campaign, and frees up the campaign’s own funds for other uses,”
he said. “I suspect that the PAC’s ability to coordinate its
data-driven canvassing activities with the Trump campaign made it very
appealing for donors.”
Longtime Republican strategists Phil Cox,
Generra Peck and Dave Rexrode are among those now guiding the PAC after a
shake-up in mid-July, according to a person with direct knowledge of
the matter. This person was granted anonymity to speak freely about a
private matter.
The change suggests there could be a shift in tactics by the PAC come November. The New York Times first reported on the moves.
Musk is not the only tech executive backing this effort.
The
America PAC raised more than $8 million between April 1 and June 30,
according to FEC records. It has received donations from veteran
investor Doug Leone, cryptocurrency investors Cameron and Tyler
Winklevoss, and a company run by longtime venture capitalist Joe
Lonsdale, according to FEC records.
Lonsdale, a co-founder of the
software company Palantir, is also a leader of the PAC, and “serves as a
political confidant to” Musk, according to the Times.
The
records do not yet list Musk as a donor. He recently said on X that he
is “making some donations to America PAC,” but did not say how much. The
PAC is not required to file a third-quarter report until Oct. 15, the
first time that Musk’s name could be listed as a donor.
A spokesman for America PAC declined to comment. Musk did not return emails seeking comment.
Musk on X mirrors Musk PAC
The
PAC’s ads that have aired on social media platforms also mirror a
larger message that Musk pushes out to his 191 million followers on X
several times a day: the notion that America is in chaos and voting for
Trump over Harris is the only way out.
″These
PACs have often functioned as the alter ego of whatever billionaire is
behind them,” said Daniel Weiner, a director of the Brennan Center’s
elections and government program.
Experts say Musk’s ownership of X
and the lack of any real guardrails around how he uses it, are a sign
the platform could be used by the Tesla boss as a political weapon to
take on Harris and Democrats at large with fewer than 100 days left
until Election Day.
“I’d say that it is somewhat concerning that
the owner of one of the most important social media platforms is openly
partisan (rooting for one of the candidates) and is using his platform
... as a vehicle for pursuing his openly partisan ends,” said Matthew
Baum, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, whose research includes
studying misinformation.
Baum said such ownership of a social
media company like X leaves open the possibility of “capture of a major
platform by a partisan actor, who would then be largely free to use the
platform as they see fit, regardless of the potential negative social or
political consequences.”
“There is a concern that Musk is weaponizing that platform to help his preferred candidate” in Trump, said Weiner.
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Comments
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Marta Moehring voted the way she prefers in Nebraska's Republican primary Tuesday — in person, at her west Omaha polling place.
She didn’t even consider taking advantage of the state’s no-excuse mail-in ballot process. In fact, she would prefer to do away with mail-in voting altogether. She’s convinced fraudulent mailed ballots cost former President Donald Trump a second term in 2020.
“I don’t trust it in general,” Moehring, 62, said. “I don’t think they’re counted correctly.”
But now Republican officials — even, sometimes, Trump — are encouraging voters such as Moehring to cast their ballots by mail. The GOP has launched an effort to, in the words of one official, “correct the narrative” on mail voting and get those who were turned off to it by Trump to reconsider for this year's election.
The push is a striking change for a party that amplified dark rumors about mail ballots to explain away Trump's 2020 loss, but it is also seen as a necessary course correction for an election this year that is likely to be decided by razor-thin margins in a handful of swing states.
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“We have to get right on using these mail-in ballots for the people who can't get there on Election Day,” Rep. Scott Perry, one of Trump's strongest congressional allies in his push to overturn the 2020 election, said at a conservative gathering in his home state of Pennsylvania.
Republicans once were at least as likely as Democrats to vote by mail, but Trump changed the dynamics in 2020. He preemptively began to argue that mail balloting was bad months before voting began in the presidential race.
That alarmed GOP strategists who saw mail voting as an advantage in campaigns because it lets them “bank” unreliable votes before Election Day and lowers the risk of turnout plummeting because of bad weather or other unpredictable factors at the polls. Trump's own campaign tried to sell Republicans on casting ballots by mail, but his voters listened to the then-president. In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Democrats were vastly more likely to cast ballots by mail than Republicans.
The trend continued in 2022, and its costs were starkly illustrated in Arizona.
Three top-of-the-ticket Republican candidates there who echoed Trump's lies about the unreliability of mail ballots encouraged their supporters to vote in person on Election Day. An election machine meltdown that day in one-third of the polling places in the state's most populous county led to huge lines and some would-be voters departing in frustration.
The three top Republicans all lost, including falling 17,000 votes short in the governor's race and 500 votes short in the one for attorney general.
This time, Republicans say they're not going to risk leaving ballots behind. Trump's handpicked chair of the Republican National Committee, his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, has vowed to embrace all sorts of legal election methods to boost turnout that Trump falsely blamed for his 2020 loss, including so-called “ballot harvesting” — letting people turn in mail ballots on the behalf of other voters.
“In this election cycle, Republicans will beat Democrats at their own game, by leveraging every legal tactic at our disposal based on the rules of each state,” Lara Trump said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Turning Point Action, a prominent, pro-Trump group, is launching a $100 million campaign to reach infrequent voters in the swing states of Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin. That will include offering mail voting as one way to make casting a ballot easier, spokesman Andrew Kolvet said.
“We'd love for elections to be run the way they were before,” Kolvet said. “We can spend our time complaining about it or we can get in gear and play by the rules that Democrats, or largely Democrats, used.”
Even Trump himself has started to recommend mail voting, though he frequently bashes it during campaign events and blames it for his 2020 loss. The RNC is also continuing to file lawsuits against various aspects of mail voting around the country.
Nonetheless, Trump recorded a short video telling his supporters that “absentee voting, early voting and Election Day voting are all good options.”
One recent push to publicize mail voting came during last month's Pennsylvania primary, when the Republican State Legislative Committee teamed up with a committee supporting the party's Senate candidate and the state GOP. The goal, said RSLC political director Max Docksey, was “to correct the narrative among Republican voters on mail voting.”
The effort was inspired by what the RSLC saw as a successful effort to increase mail voting among Republicans in the battle for control of the Virginia Legislature in 2023, a fight ultimately won by the Democrats.
The group sent mail ballot applications to 1.5 million GOP voters, sent 475,000 text messages encouraging mail voting and touted the benefits of mail voting at party gatherings.
But at the same time, Pennsylvania Republicans have sued to force the state's mail ballots to be counted at polling places rather than the county election offices, which have the equipment and space to do the job, That's among many lawsuits targeting mail voting filed by Republicans around the country since 2020.
The conflicting messages could make it challenging to swiftly reverse the drop-off in mail voting among Republicans.
In Pennsylvania, Republican operatives were pleased with their effort, which they said led to them adding nearly twice as many voters to the state's mail ballot list as Democrats did during the primary. But the overall share of Pennsylvania mail ballots sent by Republicans remained about the same as in 2020, at only one-quarter of overall ballots, according to data from the secretary of state's office.
Bill Bretz, chairman of the Westmoreland County Republican Party in the western side of the state, said he's noticed voters in his conservative area slowly but steadily warming up to mail voting.
“People understand the consequences of this election,” he said. “There's a lot of buy-in to vote by any method available, and the vote-by-mail bogeyman is beginning to fade.”
__
Riccardi reported from Denver and Beck from Omaha, Nebraska. Associated Press writers Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Martha Mendoza in Santa Cruz, California, and Leah Willingham in Charleston, West Virginia, contributed to this report.
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WASHINGTON (AP) — During the presidential election four years ago, the Equal Ground Education Fund hired over 100 people to go door-to-door and attend festivals, college homecomings and other events to help register voters across Florida. Their efforts for this year's elections look much different.
A state law passed last year forced them to stop in-person voter registration, cut staff and led to a significant drop in funding. Organizers aren't sure how robust their operations will be in the fall.
Genesis Robinson, the group's interim executive director, said the law has had a “tremendous impact” on its ability to host events and get into communities to engage directly with potential voters.
“Prior to all of these changes, we were able to operate in a space where we were taking action and prepare our communities and make sure they were registered to vote — and help if they weren’t,” he said.
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Florida is one of several states, including Kansas, Missouri and Texas, where Republicans have enacted voting restrictions since 2021 that created or enhanced criminal penalties and fines for those who assist voters. The laws have forced some voter outreach groups to cease operations, while others have greatly altered or reduced their activities.
The Florida law, signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis last May, imposed a $50,000 fine on third-party voter registration organizations if the staff or volunteers who handle or collect the forms have been convicted of a felony or are not U.S. citizens. It also raised the fines the groups could face, from $1,000 to $250,000, and reduced the amount of time they are able to return registration applications from 14 days to 10 days.
A federal judge blocked portions of the law earlier this month, including the one targeting felons and those who are not citizens. Even so, the law had a direct effect on the operations of Equal Ground and other voter advocacy organizations in the state before the ruling.
The League of Women Voters in Florida, one of the plaintiffs, shifted away from in-person voter registration to digital outreach. Cecile Scoon, the league's co-president, said the law stripped the personal connection between its workers and communities. Digital tools aren’t easy to use when registering voters and can be expensive, she said.
These organizations are needed because local election officials don't always provide adequate support and information, said Derby Johnson, a voter in Ormond Beach who attended a recent community event in Daytona Beach organized by Equal Ground. He said it appeared the Florida Legislature was just trying to make it harder for certain communities to register and cast ballots.
“There are parties actively working to suppress the vote, particularly in Black and brown communities, and these groups help educate and register voters to mitigate that," she said.
MOVE Texas, a voting rights group that focuses on voters who are 30 or younger, adjusted to that state's 2021 election overhaul with additional training for their staff and volunteers. Among the provisions drawing concern was one that increased criminal penalties for anyone who receives compensation for assisting a voter, which especially affected the ability to recruit high school and college students for voter registration drives.
“The law contributed to this culture of fear in our elections and being a person who registers voters," said Stephanie Gomez, the group’s political director.
Republicans in Kansas overrode a veto by Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly to pass a bill that made it a felony if anyone registering voters impersonated or was assumed to impersonate an election official.
That forced Loud Light Kansas, a voter outreach group that focuses on minority communities, to stop its registration efforts. Would-be voters typically perceived their staff and volunteers as election workers even when told otherwise, said Anita Alexander, the organization's vice president.
“We’re trying to engage impacted people, but we weren’t willing to risk anyone getting charged by doing voter engagement work," she said.
Loud Light and other local voter registration groups sued the Legislature. The Democratic governor said there has been no evidence in the state of widespread voter fraud or instances of individuals impersonating election officials.
In Missouri, the state chapter of the League of Women Voters and the Missouri State Conference of the NAACP sued after the state enacted wide-ranging election legislation in 2022.
Among other things, the new law bans compensation for those who register voters and requires that anyone who helps more than 10 people register must also register with the secretary of state’s office and be a voter themselves. Violators can face criminal penalties.
The completed secretary of state’s forms are public, which presents a privacy concern for many people who might otherwise want to help with voter registration efforts, said Denise Lieberman, director and general counsel of the Missouri Voter Protection Coalition.
“Historically, when those membership lists have been obtained, they’ve been used to intimidate. So, there’s a lot of trepidation, especially in groups that are targeting low-income or communities of color,” she said. “If you just want to volunteer for one hour on a Saturday morning to help out on your college campus or on an Earth Day or anything, you have to go through this whole process.”
The Missouri law is on hold while the legal challenge plays out, with a trial set for August.
Voting rights experts expect to see continued attempts to restrict voting and the activities of voter outreach groups in Republican-controlled states, said Megan Bellamy, vice president of law and policy at the Voting Rights Lab.
"The effort to target third-party voter registration groups is just, unfortunately, one of many policy areas that state legislatures are moving to address,” she said.
___
The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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Poll: 49% of Independents think Trump should drop out post-guilty verdict
Trump speaks from the lobby of Trump Tower on Friday. Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
By the numbers: 54% of registered voters "strongly" or "somewhat" approve of the guilty verdict compared to 34% who "strongly or "somewhat" disapprove.
Reality check: While they may agree with the guilty verdict, the poll found that more voters think Trump should get probation (49%) rather than go to prison (44%).
The poll also revealed some deep distrust of the criminal justice system.
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SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — Voter participation advocate Theresa Pasqual traverses Acoma Pueblo with a stack of sample ballots in her car and applications for absentee ballots, handing them out at every opportunity ahead of New Mexico's Tuesday primary.
Residents of the tribal community's original mesa-top “sky city” that endured after the Spanish invasion in the late 1500s know firsthand the challenges voters have faced across Indian Country, where polling places are often hours away and restrictive voter laws and ID requirements only add to the barriers.
It's been a century now since an act of Congress granted citizenship to Native Americans, but advocates say that right bestowed in 1924 still hasn’t translated into equal access to the ballot. Inequities are especially pronounced in remote regions across the U.S., and some key Southwestern states with large Native American populations.
New Mexico is trying something new — a test run of sorts for many new and contested provisions that are part of the state's Native American Voting Rights Act that was passed last year. The measure promises tribal communities a greater voice in how and where they can vote, even opening the possibility that tribal offices can be designated as a street address for remote households that have none.
This should help at Acoma, where Pasqual said some residents still do not have standard addresses.
Native Americans in New Mexico — home to 22 federally recognized tribal communities and holdings of an Oklahoma-based tribe — were among the last to gain access to voting, decades after the U.S. extended birthright citizenship to the land’s original inhabitants on June 2, 1924 through the Indian Citizenship Act.
That legislation took shape in the aftermath of World War I in which thousands of Native Americans had volunteered to serve overseas in the military.
A patchwork of statutes and treaties already offered about two-thirds of Native Americans citizenship, sometimes in exchange for land allotments that fractured reservations, gestures of assimilation, military service and even the renunciation of tribal traditions. The one-sentence Indian Citizenship Act swept away those requirements in an attempt to grant citizenship to all Native Americans.
At the same time, Congress deferred to state governments qualifications on who qualified to vote. Legal access to the ballot was denied under existing state constitutional provisions and statutes until 1948 in Arizona and New Mexico — and until 1957 on reservations in Utah.
It was by design, said Maurice Crandall, an Arizona State University history professor and citizen of the Yavapai-Apache Nation of Camp Verde. Pointing to the largest Native populations in New Mexico and Arizona, he said: " They don’t want a large group of Native people who can swing elections.”
Fast forward to 2020, he said, and “many people credit the Native vote with deciding to bring Arizona into the (Joe) Biden camp.”
Biden won Arizona by about 10,500 votes, as voter turnout surged on the Navajo and Hopi reservations.
At Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, voting has provided Native Americans with a path to power amid the political rise of pueblo member Deb Haaland. She became one of the first two Native American women in Congress in 2018 before taking the reins of the Interior Department to oversee U.S. obligations to 574 federally recognized tribes.
For the upcoming primary, Laguna is on the front lines of two Democratic contests with first-time female Native American candidates competing in districts that were redrawn in 2021 to increase Native influence. In the general election, eligible voters among 8,000 Laguna residents will cast ballots in a congressional swing district rematch between U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez and Republican Yvette Herrell, who lost in 2022 by 1,350 votes. Herrell seldom invokes her Cherokee heritage.
The state's new voting rights legislation for Native Americans provides new tools for tribal communities to request convenient on-reservation voting sites and secure ballot deposit boxes with consultation requirements for county clerks and an appeals process.
But there are still obstacles, said Laguna Pueblo administrator Ashley M. Sarracino, pointing to tensions with county election administrators over a decision to withdraw three Election Day voting sites at the pueblo this year, leaving three open.
In Arizona, the anniversary of the Indian Citizenship Act stirs up frustration among Native American leaders, including Gov. Stephen Lewis of the Gila River Indian Community. He has denounced efforts by the Republican National Committee and state lawmakers to revive and extend voter ID requirements through the 2024 general election.
Two of Lewis' community members sued in 1928 after being turned away from the polls, only to have the Arizona Supreme Court rebuff their case. The community wouldn’t realize the right to vote until 1948 — after World War II and the raising of an American flag at Iwo Jima that included Ira Hayes, who was part of the Gila River community.
Lewis during a recent online forum counted the years that passed between the time the U.S. Declaration of Independence was inked and the Indian Citizenship Act was signed. He said elected officials for years have "made laws for us, about us, but never with us.”
Native Americans have held widely divergent views about citizenship and voting, said Torey Dolan, a research fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School and citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Some view U.S. citizenship as incompatible with being Indigenous people; others see it more like dual citizenship.
With approval of the citizenship act, many Native Americans feared the expansion of U.S. citizenship might undermine the special status of trust land that allows tribes to make their own decisions about tax-exempt land and shield it from speculators.
“It was really seen in many parts of Indian Country as being aimed at breaking down tribal cultures, particularly in the Southwest,” said Geoffrey Blackwell, general counsel to the National Congress of American Indians that advocates for Native American rights and sovereignty.
For some, ensuring voting rights was worth the fight. In 1948, Isleta Pueblo member and World War II military veteran Miguel Trujillo challenged the status quo that barred Native Americans in New Mexico from voting by attempting to vote in Valencia County. He was rejected, sparking a landmark lawsuit that was supported by Washington-based federal Indian law pioneer Felix Cohen and the National Congress of American Indians.
A 1956 federal survey of Native voting in the Southwest found anemic participation, with no polling places set up at New Mexico pueblos. In Arizona, Jim Crow-style discrimination set in with widespread application of literacy tests to block Native-language speakers from voting until the practice was barred in 1970 under the federal Voting Rights Act.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 spurred a new movement within tribal communities to encourage participation, said Laura Harris, the Albuquerque-based director of Americans for Indian Opportunity and a citizen of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma.
In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that gave the Justice Department election oversight in states with a history of discrimination. Since then, several states have enacted new voting laws that some legal experts say make it unreasonably difficult for Native Americans to vote, including a flurry of restrictions from Republicans enacted in the wake of the 2020 election.
But in New Mexico, the Sandoval County clerk's office has expanded early voting services in recent years for tribal communities. Only one pueblo in the county declined the opportunity this year. Native language interpreters are posted at each of the sites, which are open to all county residents.
Evelyn Sandoval works with the county attorney's office as a liaison to Native Americans. She teaches families how to use newly available tools to register online and receive absentee ballots by mail.
“I’m trying to get them to be self-reliant,” said Sandoval, a 54-year-old former oil and gas company worker who was raised Ojo Encino, a Navajo community with fewer than 300 residents. Her mother spoke only Navajo.
___
Associated Press writer Susan Montoya Bryan contributed to this story from Zia Pueblo, New Mexico. AP writer Graham Brewer contributed from Oklahoma City.
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Proposed Texas GOP platform calls for the Bible in schools, electoral changes that would lock Democrats out of statewide office
The platform was voted on Saturday, with tallies expected next week. Other planks call abortion homicide and gender-transition care “child abuse.”
Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
Republican Party of Texas delegates voted Saturday on a platform that called for new laws to require the Bible to be taught in public schools and a constitutional amendment that would require statewide elected leaders to win the popular vote in a majority of Texas counties.
Other proposed planks of the 50-page platform included proclamations that “abortion is not healthcare it is homicide”; that gender-transition treatment for children is “child abuse”; calls to reverse recent name changes to military bases and “publicly honor the southern heroes”; support for declaring gold and silver as legal tender; and demands that the U.S. government disclose “all pertinent information and knowledge” of UFOs.
The party hopes to finalize its platform on Wednesday, after Saturday’s votes on each proposal are tabulated.
Passed by delegates at the party’s biennial convention, the platform has traditionally been seen not as a definitive list of Republican stances, but a compromise document that represents the interests of the party’s various business, activist and social conservative factions. But in recent years — and amid a party civil war that’s pushed it further right — the platform has been increasingly used as a basis for censuring Republican officeholders who the party’s far right has attacked as insufficiently conservative, including Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, and U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzalez, R-San Antonio.
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Vermont GOP rules bar it from promoting any candidate who is a 'convicted felon'
The Vermont Republican Party is prohibited from backing a candidate with a felony conviction, according to the party’s publicly posted rules.
That is now a bit of a problem, since the presumptive Republican presidential nominee was recently convicted on 34 felony counts.
“The state committee will not support or promote any candidate for elective office who … is a convicted felon,” read the rules, which govern everything from party meetings to how delegates must vote at national conventions.
On social media, the party does technically appear to be following the rule — there are no mentions of Donald Trump on the Vermont GOP’s Twitter or Facebook pages in the days since the former president's historic guilty verdict in his hush money case — but the party's social media typically talks only about local candidates and presidential candidates who visit the state.
The rule has been on the books since at least 2013, according to an archived version of the rules, but by early 2022, the party appears to have amended their rules.
According to the Internet Archive, the posted rules were changed by March 2022 to allow the state committee to exempt a candidate from the rule by majority vote.
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Trump Owed Hidden Debt While In Office
Keeping an eye out: Former President Donald Trump arrives to speak at an event at Mar-A-Lago, Friday, November 18, 2022, in Palm Beach, Florida.
Rebecca Blackwell/AP
Donald Trump’s business attracted so much scrutiny during his time in office that it would be easy to conclude that all information about its foreign entanglements must be out by now. It is not. Buried in a heap of recently released financial paperwork sits a surprising revelation: Donald Trump had a foreign creditor he failed to disclose while running for president in 2016 and after assuming office in 2017.
The documents, compiled by the Trump Organization and obtained by the New York attorney general, show a previously unreported liability of $19.8 million listed as “L/P Daewoo.” The debt stems from an agreement Trump struck to share some of his licensing fees with Daewoo, a South Korean conglomerate that partnered with Trump on a project near the United Nations headquarters in New York City.
Trump eliminated the debt five and a half months into his tenure as president, according to the documents. He seems to have acted with some urgency to wipe the liability off his balance sheet. From 2011 to 2016, the documents show that the balance stayed static at $19.8 million. Paperwork capturing Trump’s financial picture as of June 30, 2017, five months into his presidency, appears to show that the balance had dropped to $4.3 million, $15.5 million less than it had been a year earlier. Trump got rid of the debt altogether shortly after that. “Daewoo was bought out of its position on July 5, 2017,” the documents say, without specifying who exactly paid off the loan.
Although the debt appeared on the Trump Organization’s internal paperwork, it did not show up on Trump’s public financial disclosure reports, documents he was required to submit to federal officials while running for president and after taking office. Trump’s former chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, told the New York Times in 2016 that his boss disclosed all debt connected to companies in which Trump held a 100% stake on the documents. That was not true.
There is a chance that Trump’s omission may have been legal, nonetheless. Although officials have to list personal loans on their financial disclosures, the law does not require them to include loans to their companies, unless they are personally liable for the loans. The Trump Organization documents do not specify whether the former president, who owned 100% of the entities responsible for the debt, personally guaranteed the liability, leaving it unclear whether he broke the law or merely took advantage of a loophole.
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SCHURZ, Nevada (AP) — Members of the Walker River Paiute Tribe have watched the boundaries of their land recede over time along with the waters of the lake that are central to their identity, threatening the cultural symbol that gave the tribe its name — Agai Dicutta, or Trout Eaters.
Not wanting to cede their voice, tribal leaders have been making a push for expanded voting rights. That effort includes filing a lawsuit on behalf of all Nevada tribes seeking polling places on tribal lands and access to early voting.
“Tribes shouldn’t have to keep filing lawsuits just to vote on their own lands,” said Elveda Martinez, 65, a tribal member and longtime voting advocate. “It should be more accessible.”
The state has now granted the Walker River Paiutes and other tribes in Nevada a new right that advocates hope will greatly expand voting access for a community that gained U.S. citizenship only a century ago.
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Voting on reservations across the country has historically been difficult, with tribal voters sometimes having to travel dozens of miles to their polling place. Slow mail service and lack of a physical address, common on tribal lands, have proved challenging.
The new process — the ability to cast ballots electronically — has the potential to significantly boost turnout among all tribes in Nevada. But what some see as a small measure of justice to equalize voting rights raises security concerns for others, with implications far beyond Nevada's 28 tribal communities as the nation braces for what is expected to be another close and contentious presidential election in November.
Under the plan, tribal members in Nevada who live on a reservation or colony can receive a ballot electronically through an online system set up by the state and then return it electronically. Experts warn that such voting — when a completed ballot is sent back either by email, through an online portal or by fax — carries risks of ballots being intercepted or manipulated and should be used sparingly, if at all.
“At this point in the United States, it’s a relatively small number of ballots that are coming through that way,” said Larry Norden, an election expert with the Brennan Center for Justice. “But we should be very concerned — both from actual security risks but also from a public confidence point of view — about expanding this.”
‘HIGH-RISK ACTIVITY’
While electronic voting may be limited at the moment, it’s available across much of the country to specific groups of voters. More than 30 states allow certain voters to return their ballots either by fax, email or an online portal, according to data collected by the National Conference of State Legislatures and Verified Voting, a nonpartisan group that studies state voting systems.
In most cases, electronic ballot return is available only to U.S. military and overseas voters. But it’s been expanded in recent years to include voters with disabilities in a dozen states. Nevada is believed to be the first to add tribes.
Cal Boone, the new tribal outreach coordinator for the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office and a member of the Walker River Paiute Tribe, has begun meeting with tribes around the state to share details about the process, which he believes could ease a legacy of barriers that has left some reluctant to vote.
“In past years, tribes didn’t have access to vote in multiple ways. You had to rely on the mail system to cast your vote or otherwise drive out to great lengths to vote,” Boone said. “What we are seeing in Nevada is really powerful, and it really sets the stage for what other states throughout the country can be doing to help support tribes."
But the solution comes with risks.
In a 2020 memo to election officials, the FBI and other federal agencies assessed the risk of sending ballots electronically to be low, but allowing those ballots to be returned electronically was high. The memo highlights recommended security practices for internet-connected systems, including isolating computers that handle electronic ballots from ones that are used for other aspects of voting.
"The information provided should be considered a starting point," the memo states. "Even with these technical security considerations, electronic ballot return remains a high-risk activity.”
Earlier this year, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is charged with helping protect the nation’s election systems, said in an online post that the memo was being redistributed to ensure state officials and policymakers are “fully informed of risks” associated with electronic ballot return.
Susannah Goodman, director of election security for Common Cause, is among those concerned that there are no federal guidelines for such systems and no independent reviews, unlike what's in place for voting machines and ballot tabulators.
An attempt to create independent standards ended in late 2022 after a group of experts determined it wasn't possible at the time given the technology and cyber risks.
‘CONFIDENT IN OUR SYSTEM’
Kim Wyman, the former top election official in Washington state, initially supported electronic voting as a military spouse, but said she grew wary after taking over as secretary of state. Her attempt to persuade lawmakers to repeal it was unsuccessful.
Wyman said she worries something could happen to the ballot in transit and what that would mean for public confidence in elections. She believes the safest bet is for voters who receive ballots electronically to print them out and return them by mail.
“Election officials are in a hard spot because they want to provide accessibility and they want to make sure that every eligible American has a right to participate in an election,” Wyman said. “But they have to do it in a way where they’re also securing those ballots and making sure that that voter’s ballot is counted the way the voter cast it.”
Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar said he knows the process carries risks, but sees everything related to elections as having some risk. He pointed to the federal government's action in 2017 to designate the nation’s voting systems as critical infrastructure, just like dams, banks and nuclear power plants.
The state’s electronic ballot return system was designed by the state with security measures intended to verify eligibility, authenticate voters and their ballots, and ensure secure communications, he said. There are steps to ensure voters are not casting multiple ballots, and the system undergoes regular security reviews and updates.
“I’m confident in our system,” Aguilar said.
He expressed frustration about what he described as a lack of national leadership on this and other election issues, saying there should be less criticism and more work and funding to address concerns.
“The federal government has access to so many experts, they have access to resources. They should be providing a leadership position to give us a path forward,” Aguilar said. “To think backward and to scare us is not the appropriate way to do this.”
STATES DIVIDED OVER SECURITY CONCERNS
So far, few Nevada voters have opted in. As of Friday, 255 voters had submitted a ballot electronically — none of them tribal members — ahead of Tuesday's primary. More than half of those were registered in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas and is the state's most populous.
“Folks that participate find it very convenient and very easy to use,” Clark County Registrar Lorena Portillo said.
Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, just over 2,500 voters returned their ballots electronically through the state system. Among them was Ramona Coker, who is blind. Coker said she no longer needs help to vote and can cast a ballot on her phone, which is equipped with screen-reading technology allowing her to follow audio prompts to make her selections.
“It feels very American. It feels like you have done your part and no one else has had an influence in that,” said Coker, who works for a Reno-area nonprofit.
She believes the challenges faced by voters with disabilities outweigh the potential risks of electronic balloting.
“We’re always going to have bad-faith actors out there, no matter what delivery form or what return form that we use,” Coker said. “And if you’re always worried about that, then you never cast a vote again.”
States led by both Democrats and Republicans have authorized electronic ballot returns, with varying rules. Alaska, California, Florida and Oklahoma limit the process to military and overseas voters and only permit electronic return by fax. In Texas, astronauts can use an online portal to cast their ballots. In West Virginia, first responders on duty outside their county also are eligible.
“Having been in the military, I’ve seen intelligence transmitted via the internet. We transmit nuclear codes via the internet,” West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner said. “If we can do that, we can certainly get a secure ballot and transmit across the internet.”
Not all states have embraced the practice. In Minnesota, officials considered it but ultimately decided against it.
“In light of recent security concerns, it’s on ice,” said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon. “Someday -- if those security considerations are addressed and if the concerns and objections of the federal agencies can be overcome -- we would definitely consider it because as a matter of convenience, it would probably make a difference.”
DIDN’T FEEL ‘OUR VOICE EVEN MATTERED’
The Walker River Paiute reservation is along a scenic stretch of highway between Las Vegas and Reno, about two hours south of the state capital in a vast stretch of desert surrounded by distant mountain peaks.
On a late spring day, sprinklers prepare alfalfa fields that dot the reservation while wild horses graze in nearby foothills. There are no grocery stores, restaurants or hotels, and the nearest town is about 30 miles away.
Although the tribe has long had its own polling location — something other tribes in the state have not — the reservation's remoteness has sometimes added to a sense of political isolation. Some tribal members have not always seen the point in voting.
“Because of the historical abuses our people have faced, we were very timid to even take part in voting or elections," tribal Chair Andrea Martinez said. "For many years, we didn’t feel like our voice even mattered.”
The prospect of casting ballots electronically is a step Martinez and other tribal leaders welcome, but they're not sure it will make a major difference, at least initially. Internet access is spotty on the reservation, as is electricity because of aging utility poles.
“Although we, through the state, can access online voting, who knows if we’ll even have electricity or internet that day?” Martinez said.
Teresa McNally, who oversees the election office in Mineral County, which includes the Walker River reservation, plans to hold a meeting with tribal members this year to explain the new system.
One thing she wants to emphasize is the focus on security, including the measures protecting the electronic ballot return system.
“What it takes to even get into our internet system here, it’s crazy,” she said.
Courtney Quintero, a tribal member and chair of the board overseeing tribal elections, said she planned to use the new system once she learned more about it, but acknowledged others may be hesitant.
“Trust is a big thing with our community," she said.
___
The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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FactChecking the Biden-Trump Debate
In the first debate clash of the 2024 campaign, the two candidates unleashed a flurry of false and misleading statements.
By Robert Farley, Eugene Kiely, D'Angelo Gore, Jessica McDonald, Lori Robertson, Catalina Jaramillo, Saranac Hale Spencer and Alan Jaffe
Posted on June 28, 2024
Summary
The much-anticipated first debate of 2024 between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump featured a relentless barrage of false and misleading statements from the two candidates on immigration, the economy, abortion, taxes and more.
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Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
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Inside Ziklag, the Secret Organization of Wealthy Christians Trying to Sway the Election and Change the Country
The little-known charity is backed by famous conservative donors, including the families behind Hobby Lobby and Uline. It’s spending millions to make a big political push for this election — but it may be violating the law.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
A network of ultrawealthy Christian donors is spending nearly $12 million to mobilize Republican-leaning voters and purge more than a million people from the rolls in key swing states, aiming to tilt the 2024 election in favor of former President Donald Trump.
These previously unreported plans are the work of a group named Ziklag, a little-known charity whose donors have included some of the wealthiest conservative Christian families in the nation, including the billionaire Uihlein family, who made a fortune in office supplies, the Greens, who run Hobby Lobby, and the Wallers, who own the Jockey apparel corporation. Recipients of Ziklag’s largesse include Alliance Defending Freedom, which is the Christian legal group that led the overturning of Roe v. Wade, plus the national pro-Trump group Turning Point USA and a constellation of right-of-center advocacy groups.
continues...
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The deep unease we carry is in part the fact that we witnessed with the shooter one person trying to use the means of violence to impose their will upon a nation of 330 million and subvert the power of people that underlies our very democracy. And now trepidation across our nation as “The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.” We fear retaliation, reprisal or escalation. But let us remind ourselves that it doesn’t have to be that way.
In the aftermath of other recent shocks to our country, we failed to unify and instead sadly grew more divided. I had hoped that these shocks would be what I called defibrillator moments that would shock our irregular heart beats into normal rhythm, but we fell far short. It’s not just that our divisions have grown so wide in our country, but our willingness to allow contempt to accompany us. It’s not just a disrespect that we see towards one another, it’s a deeper disregard and a disgust of one another.
We are losing touch with the understanding that we are all part of something bigger than all of us. As those 4 words of Lincoln - One County, One Destiny - remind us, the commonality we share runs deep and cannot be forgotten or dismissed. Violence is cowardice not strength. It is fiercely undemocratic. As we process this shock, we can choose to realize that we’ve gone too far as a society down the path of contempt. We are not each other’s enemy. We are not at war with each other. Choosing to unite instead of incite does not mean we dismiss the magnitude of our differences. But it compels us to be cautious and precise about our next steps, our words, and our actions in this unbelievably precarious moment.
One Country, One Destiny doesn’t mean we all agree, but instead reminds us that we share the same fate. We collectively mourn the death of the rally attendee, we are relieved that Trump wasn’t seriously injured. Now let’s unite around Lincoln’s vision One Country, One Destiny.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/27/pennsylvania-election-results-mail-ballots/
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
LOL fucking PATHETIC!!!!!
The Golden Age is 2 months away. And guess what….. you’re gonna love it! (teskeinc 11.19.24)
1998: Noblesville; 2003: Noblesville; 2009: EV Nashville, Chicago, Chicago
2010: St Louis, Columbus, Noblesville; 2011: EV Chicago, East Troy, East Troy
2013: London ON, Wrigley; 2014: Cincy, St Louis, Moline (NO CODE)
2016: Lexington, Wrigley #1; 2018: Wrigley, Wrigley, Boston, Boston
2020: Oakland, Oakland: 2021: EV Ohana, Ohana, Ohana, Ohana
2022: Oakland, Oakland, Nashville, Louisville; 2023: Chicago, Chicago, Noblesville
2024: Noblesville, Wrigley, Wrigley, Ohana, Ohana
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
How an Elon Musk PAC is using voter data to help Trump beat Harris in 2024 election
In this article
If a voter in Michigan performs a search on Google
, a somewhat shocking ad might pop up.
The ad shows a young man lying in bed late at night when someone else texts him, “Hey you need to vote,” and then sends the man a video of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. The man can hear the gunshots and people screaming in the background.
As Trump is rushed off stage with blood pouring down his face, the man watching the video types in response, “This is out of control. How do I start?”
The ad then displays a website for a group called America PAC.
The website says it will help the viewer register to vote. But once a user clicks “Register to Vote,” the experience he or she will have can be very different, depending on where they live.
If a user lives in a state that is not considered competitive in the presidential election, like California or Wyoming for example, they’ll be prompted to enter their email addresses and ZIP code and then directed quickly to a voter registration page for their state, or back to the original sign-up section.
But for users who enter a ZIP code that indicates they live in a battleground state, like Pennsylvania or Georgia, the process is very different.
Rather than be directed to their state’s voter registration page, they instead are directed to a highly detailed personal information form, prompted to enter their address, cellphone number and age.
If they agree to submit all that, the system still does not steer them to a voter registration page. Instead, it shows them a “thank you” page.
So that person who wanted help registering to vote? In the end, they got no help at all registering. But they did hand over priceless personal data to a political operation.
Specifically, a political action committee created by Tesla
CEO Elon Musk, one aimed at giving the Republican presidential nominee Trump an advantage in his campaign against Vice President Kamala Harris, the de facto Democratic nominee.
“I have created a PAC, or a super PAC ... the America PAC,” Musk said in a recent interview.
Musk also owns the social media platform X, and has a net worth of more than $235 billion, according to Forbes.
The combination of owning a social media company that gives him an enormous platform to push his political views, and creating a PAC with effectively unlimited resources, has made Musk, for the first time, a major force in an American presidential election.
Musk PAC uses ‘register to vote’ data
The America PAC has spent more than $800,000 since early July on digital ads that target voters in the key battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to AdImpact.
The ads appeared on Facebook, Instagram and Google through YouTube, and many encouraged people to register to vote at America PAC’s website.
The PAC’s effort to collect information from people using the idea of “voter registration” is a critical piece to its plan to make personal contact with these voters.
“America PAC is focusing on door-to-door canvassing in support of Trump,” said Brendan Fischer, a deputy executive director at campaign finance watchdog Documented.
“I think it is safe to assume that the voter data gathered through these digital appeals are going to inform America PAC’s canvassing and other political activities,” he added.
Fischer pointed to the group’s privacy policy which says it can use the data they’ve collected on “other activities and/or fundraising campaigns.”
Since June, America PAC has spent more than $21 million on canvassing, digital media, text message services and phone calls, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
The PAC’s website offers no indication one way or another what the group’s political leaning is. But in its federal filings, the group discloses that all of its work is designed to either help Trump or hurt his opponent.
Fischer said he has seen some other PACs try to use a “register to vote” message to gather people’s data.
But what is unique about America PAC’s project is who is backing it and the timing of its creation.
In most cases, super PACs are not allowed to directly coordinate the ads they pay for with the campaign. But this spring, regulators ruled that door-to-door canvassing falls outside the scope of the ban because, unlike an ad, it is a person-to-person exchange.
“What makes America PAC more unique: it is a billionaire-backed super PAC focused on door-to-door canvassing, which it can conduct in coordination with a presidential campaign,” Fischer said. “Thanks to a recent FEC advisory opinion, America PAC may legally coordinate its canvassing activities with the Trump campaign — meaning, among other things, that the Trump campaign may provide America PAC with the literature and scripts to make sure their efforts are consistent.”
“Coordination is incredibly important: it ensures that the PAC’s activities are maximally beneficial to the campaign, and frees up the campaign’s own funds for other uses,” he said. “I suspect that the PAC’s ability to coordinate its data-driven canvassing activities with the Trump campaign made it very appealing for donors.”
Longtime Republican strategists Phil Cox, Generra Peck and Dave Rexrode are among those now guiding the PAC after a shake-up in mid-July, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. This person was granted anonymity to speak freely about a private matter.
The change suggests there could be a shift in tactics by the PAC come November. The New York Times first reported on the moves.
Read more CNBC politics coverage
Musk is not the only tech executive backing this effort.
The America PAC raised more than $8 million between April 1 and June 30, according to FEC records. It has received donations from veteran investor Doug Leone, cryptocurrency investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and a company run by longtime venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, according to FEC records.
Lonsdale, a co-founder of the software company Palantir, is also a leader of the PAC, and “serves as a political confidant to” Musk, according to the Times.
The records do not yet list Musk as a donor. He recently said on X that he is “making some donations to America PAC,” but did not say how much. The PAC is not required to file a third-quarter report until Oct. 15, the first time that Musk’s name could be listed as a donor.
A spokesman for America PAC declined to comment. Musk did not return emails seeking comment.
Musk on X mirrors Musk PAC
The PAC’s ads that have aired on social media platforms also mirror a larger message that Musk pushes out to his 191 million followers on X several times a day: the notion that America is in chaos and voting for Trump over Harris is the only way out.
″These PACs have often functioned as the alter ego of whatever billionaire is behind them,” said Daniel Weiner, a director of the Brennan Center’s elections and government program.
Experts say Musk’s ownership of X and the lack of any real guardrails around how he uses it, are a sign the platform could be used by the Tesla boss as a political weapon to take on Harris and Democrats at large with fewer than 100 days left until Election Day.
“I’d say that it is somewhat concerning that the owner of one of the most important social media platforms is openly partisan (rooting for one of the candidates) and is using his platform ... as a vehicle for pursuing his openly partisan ends,” said Matthew Baum, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, whose research includes studying misinformation.
Baum said such ownership of a social media company like X leaves open the possibility of “capture of a major platform by a partisan actor, who would then be largely free to use the platform as they see fit, regardless of the potential negative social or political consequences.”
“There is a concern that Musk is weaponizing that platform to help his preferred candidate” in Trump, said Weiner.
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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
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