#elections

[aktualitet-al]

Electoral reform on the table as CEC seeks clear limits on state use in elections The debate over electoral reform has returned to the use of state resources in campaigns. The CEC is calling for stronger rules, while the Socialists and Democrats highlight different approaches to balancing governance and electoral competition....

Electoral reform on the table as CEC seeks clear limits on state use in elections

[aktualitet-al]

U.S. State Department report on Albania: protests, elections under a cloud, and SPAK at the center of the test An assessment published by OSAC, a U.S. State Department structure, points to calmer elections than in the past, but keeps the focus on suspicions over the use of public resources, corruption and the limits of the rule of law in Albania....

U.S. State Department report on Albania: protests, elections under a cloud, and SPAK at the center of the test

[malawi24]

The constitutional coup of convenience: How the war on the First Vice President vandalises Malawi’s laws and leadership

The constitutional order of Malawi is under direct, unmitigated assault by lawless political manoeuvres that threaten the very bedrock of our democracy. The recent side-lining of First Vice President Jane Ansah is not a mere administrative hiccup or a minor internal friction; it is a calculated, toxic, and aggressive affront to the supreme law of the land. When President Peter Mutharika travelled…

The constitutional coup of convenience: How the war on the First Vice President vandalises Malawi’s laws and leadership

[247bulletinnews]

Mathematics of Defeat and Manipulation Exercises

The government knows it is headed for an electoral defeat. But he is struggling to convince that he is still in control of political developments In a democracy, things are supposed to be relatively simple. If you win the elections, i.e. with the current electoral law you can elect 151 deputies, you form a government. Primarily this means a self-governing government, but there have also been…

[ansy1984]

Republican and Democratic coalitions put to the test in unusual elections on Tuesday

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! Two races in politically disparate parts of the country set the stage for one of the most unusual split-screen election days of the year on Tuesday. Rep. David Scott’s death in April at age 80 created a vacancy in a heavily blue district encompassing the southern and eastern Atlanta suburbs of Stockbridge, Conyers and Snellville. With the general…

Republican and Democratic coalitions put to the test in unusual elections on Tuesday

[malawi24]

Mutharika's Ansah dilemma deepens

During the 2025 election campaign, President Peter Mutharika’s camp branded him the “Ansah” (answer) Malawi needed, but the answer now appears to be facing questions of its own after it emerged that Vice President Jane Ansah was not invited to a Cabinet meeting despite being available.While Cabinet was meeting on Monday, Ansah was at Capitol Hill where she shared a video of herself arriving for…

Mutharika's Ansah dilemma deepens

[marta-bee]

News of the Day: Election Interference

Today’s Reads

Miles Taylor: “Here are the 10 ways Trump shot himself in the foot last night.”

The Washington Post: “Trump says 278,000 noncitizens are on voting rolls. Experts say that’s wrong.” (PF)

Associated Press: “6,600 noncitizens registered to vote after error in New Jersey motor vehicle system, governor says”

What’s Happening

Two weeks ago the president gave a much-hyped primetime address where he promised to release evidence related to the security and legitimacy of past elections. (Yeah, he’s still going on about that.) This essentially fell into three categories:

Foreign countries, China particularly, had interfered with past elections.

The “Deep State” had hid the evidence of this from him for years.

Several hundreds of thousands of non-citizens were illegally registered to vote.

Conclusion: Congress must pass the SAVE Act pronto. QED.

He did release some documents, but quelle surprise: they didn’t show anything like what the president claimed. 

What Miles Taylor Wrote

Trump hoped the night would suggest he was the rightful winner in 2020. That was the emotional core of the speech, and it’s the wound he cannot stop reopening, to the dismay of Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Instead, he reminded the world that he’s a sore loser, and he re-upped evidence about who actually tried to corrupt the 2020 election. By dragging the country back to 2020, Trump resurfaced the criminal allegations he’d rather bury. The recorded phone call pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” 11,780 votes; his own Attorney General, Bill Barr, telling investigators the stolen-election claims were baseless; the dozens of courts that threw out his challenges; the fake electors scheme; January 6th. The most extensive, best-documented attempt to interfere with the 2020 election wasn’t run from Beijing or Moscow. It was run from the White House by the man who stood in the East Room last night, six years later, still litigating his loss on national television. Social media was flooded with those examples before, during, and after Trump’s speech. It was as bad of a “self own” as you could manufacture.

Trump wanted last night to be the opening argument for overturning the past and pre-litigating the future, a predicate for crying foul in November. What he delivered was a confession dressed up poorly as an exposé. He showed us that the foreign plots against him were minor and defeated, and he reminded us that the big one was run on his behalf… that the “Deep State” saved the election… and that the loudest election saboteur of 2020 was the man at the podium.

What It Means

Miles Taylor gives a pretty thorough refuting of the first two points in the first link above.  Briefly, there’s evidence that some foreign countries had purchased commercially-available details about who voted, but this kind of information is widely-available to people already and that’s not considered a data breach. Also, people from outside the US had monkeyed around online to try to shift public opinion before past elections, but this was mostly done by Russia and in Trump’s favor, not by China.

There’s no evidence a single ballot was changed after the voter cast their ballot, by foreign interference or otherwise.

On the “deep state” concern, the most that can be said is some concerns along these lines were so implausible or unsubstantiated, they were junked without being communicated to the president. Intelligence work involves a lot of data points and false leads, and the real work often centers around separating the noise from genuine items of concern. And as for non-citizens being registered to vote, this seems to come from a famously unreliable database and (in the words of Nevada’s Secretary of State), the counts “are wildly speculative at best” and unsupported by any data released by DHS. Most likely the false positives come from people who registered after becoming naturalized citizens or even just citizens with the same name as a non-citizen.

So by any objective assessment of the evidence, it’s much smoke with next to no fire. It’s also turned into something of a Rorschach test. If you’re already taking whatever the administration says with a healthy dose of NaCl, you may look at the claims and decide it was the usual lies, but if you still think the president wouldn’t just go on TV and say this kind of thing if there was nothing to it, the speech might put you into a much less helpful frame of mind on this issue. You’re now more primed to question if the elections are secure enough after all.

And here’s where we have to talk about New Jersey.

Since the speech, New Jersey’s Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced about 6,600 noncitizens were improperly registered to vote when they registered for state licenses. Several hundred of them actually voted. It’s almost certainly not enough to change an election, but people concerned about the fairness of elections are suddenly having very different kinds of questions. People opposed to these voting restrictions argue (I believe correctly) they make it harder for certain groups to vote. 

That’s one argument to make if it’s addressing a real problem, and perhaps it’s a tradeoff worth making if you can pair it with attempts to make it easier for people to prove their identity, like allowing more of the ID’s non-drivers already use in their daily lives like state benefit cards and school ID’s. But if it’s a nonexistent problem coming from politicians ginning up this fear without evidence, that’s a different discussion.  There’s still an asymmetry at work here, though, and that’s the real  problem with speeches like Trump’s. It moves the baseline, and any evidence of an actual problem has to be taken much more seriously. Obviously I’m glad New Jersey found the problem and is fixing it. I just wish the conversation was based on reality from the outset so it was easier to do more of that.

Related News

Stacy Abrams: “Trump’s Election Lies Were Never About Fraud”

Brian Tyler Cohen, The Bulwark: “The Silver Lining of Trump’s Reheated Election Denialism”

Salon: “Fox News snubs Trump’s election fantasy after learning expensive lesson “ (PF)

In Lieu of a Musical Break

More News about Election Security and Voting Suppression

The Fulcrum: “Voting Is Not a Closed-Book Test” (PF) On how mail-in ballots can help voters make more informed choices.

David French, The New York Times:  "How Trump and His Allies Can Corrupt the Midterms" (PF)

The Conversation: “Mail ballot mirages aren’t fraud, but mail ballot fraud isn’t a complete myth” (PF) Not my view, but a decent summary of the more reasonable conservative concerns with mail-in ballots.

The New York Times: “Trump’s Homeland Security Chief Threatens Election Officials With Prison Time” (PF)

Salon: ““Evidence 2020 was rigged”: Blanche says he’s investigating whether “right people” voted” (PF)

Pro Publica: “FBI Has Looked at Using Questionable AI Tech to Review Signatures on Seized Mail-In Ballots” (PF)

The Fulcrum: “The New Fight Over Election Observation” (PF)

The New York Times: “Election Denier Wins G.O.P. Nomination to Be Arizona’s Top Election Official” (PF)

New York Magazine: “How Trump’s Polling Lies Fuel His Election Denial” (PF)

Pro Publica: “Trump Pushes Out Remaining Members of Bipartisan Election Commission Ahead of Midterms” (PF)

[germanslav]

Based Kazakhstan