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Republican operatives set up ballot drop boxes with fake “official” labels on them. That’s illegal.

The Republican Party routinely insists that California is a hotbed of voter fraud. For proof, they point to the fact that voters are allowed to hand over their ballots to another person who submits them on their behalf. The California GOP decries this practice as “ballot harvesting” and attacks its legality to delegitimize election results. This year, some California Republicans went further: Some GOP operatives set up ballot drop boxes that are falsely marked “official,” encouraging voters to place their ballots in these phony boxes. These Republicans appear to have committed felony election fraud.

Over the weekend, the Orange County Register and KCAL broke the news that these official-looking drop boxes had cropped up in Fresno, Los Angeles and Orange County outside campaign headquarters, churches, and businesses. The Fresno County Republican Party had a list of “Ballot Collection Box Locations” on its website that was removed sometime Monday morning. The list included multiple gun stores and firing ranges. On Friday, Jordan Tygh—a regional field director for the California Republican Party—tweeted (then deleted) a photo of himself holding his ballot next to a box labeled “OFFICIAL BALLOT DROP OFF BOX.” Tygh said he was “proud to have cast my vote” for Michelle Steel, who is challenging Democratic congressman Harley Rouda. He added: “DM me for convenient locations to drop your ballot off at!” But the box in Tygh’s photo was not “official,” even though it was plainly designed to look like one of California’s actual ballot drop boxes. (There are more than 400 in L.A. County alone.)

California GOP spokesman Hector Barajas acknowledged on Monday that the GOP owns the boxes but refused to say how many exist. Jared Cook, a pastor who set up an unofficial drop box outside his L.A. County Baptist church, seemed to confirm the party’s involvement when he told parishioners on Wednesday that “the local GOP picks up” the ballots “two to three times a week.” (Cook’s church has previously hosted Republican candidates and protested COVID-19 restrictions.)

After Democrats triumphed in California’s congressional elections two years ago, Republicans incorrectly blamed their losses on Democratic “ballot harvesting,” condemning the practice as shady and unethical. Yet this year, even as Donald Trump and many California Republicans continue to oppose the collection of ballots, some GOP candidates have embraced the strategy. David Valadao, a Republican running for California’s 21st congressional district, said in September that because “ballot harvesting” is legal, “we’re going to have to do it ourselves. So we’ve got our own teams on the ground doing it.” Valadeo previously stated that “every Republican in the state has to be focused on ballot harvesting,” adding that it “is going to play a role” in GOP campaigns. Mike Garcia, a Republican running for reelection in California’s 25th congressional district, declared in April: “How do you combat [ballot harvesting]? You do it yourself, right? It’s legal.” California Republican Party chair Jessica Millan Patterson also said the official state party position was that no campaign should collect ballots, though she admitted that Republicans collected ballots during the March primary.

Barajas, the GOP spokesman, said on Monday that “Democrats only seem to object to ballot harvesting when someone else does it.” On Twitter, the California GOP has similarly defended the ballot box scheme as lawful “ballot harvesting.” On Twitter, the party claimed that Democrats legalized this practice and asked “why people are all of a sudden surprised.” It also trolled critics of the scheme, suggesting that fake drop boxes are more secure than door-to-door ballot collection. The National Republican Congressional Committee tweeted that Rouda “is only ok with ballot harvesting when it’s the Democrats ballot harvesting.”

These comments suggest that Republicans do not understand how Democrats “harvest” ballots. The California Democratic Party hires both volunteers and paid staff to collect completed ballots directly from voters. These individuals cannot be paid per ballot under state law. They often focus on underserved communities whose members may face hardships that make it difficult for them to personally return their own ballot. Setting up drop boxes and falsely labeling them “official,” by contrast, is not legal “ballot harvesting.” It’s likely a criminal offense. California law strictly regulates the creation and use of ballot boxes and bars private citizens from establishing them. Moreover, the statute that allows third parties to collect ballots requires voters to formally “designate” the “person” who will return their ballot to election officials. This person must sign the ballot envelope and provide both their name and relationship to the voter. Republicans do not seem to have followed these rules when collecting ballots.

In short, Republicans have shown yet again that the only ones performing illegal acts during elections... are Republicans.

#who-counts #voting #california #fraud #2 #trump #maga #tds #gop #vote #voter fraud

The 2020 election will not reflect the will of all the people but of the people who manage to overcome obstacles to the ballot box.

For most of American history, only a sliver of the population could vote, giving lie to the constitutional guarantee of self-governance. The civil rights movement of the 1960s persuaded lawmakers to outlaw disenfranchisement on the basis of race, sex, wealth, and age—and to police states’ compliance with the Voting Rights Act. This consensus stuck for about four decades; as recently as 2006, the Senate unanimously reauthorized the VRA. In recent years, however, the GOP has grown increasingly hostile to equal suffrage. George W. Bush’s Justice Department launched a five-year hunt for voter fraud to justify new voting restrictions. It failed but used the crusade as propaganda against voting rights, anyway. Republican-controlled states began implementing voter ID laws during this period, insisting that they were necessary to prevent fraud that did not exist. Republican lawmakers then worked with conservative attorneys to dismantle the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance requirement, prevailing at the Supreme Court in 2013’s catastrophic Shelby County v. Holder. That indefensible decision unleashed a wave of voter suppression in every state where Republicans ran the government. It led to mass poll closures and early voting cuts in disproportionately nonwhite communities, new restrictions on voter registration drives, draconian voter ID rules, racist redistricting, proof-of-citizenship requirements, partisan voter purges, poll taxes, and outright voter intimidation.

#who-counts #elections #voting #voting-rights #donald-trump

The best way to vote, no matter where you live.

Good voting information!

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And they all lead to the mass disqualification of mail ballots.

#who-counts #supreme-court #pennsylvania #north-carolina #2020-campaign

The Supreme Court's partisan gerrymandering decision could do even more damage to democracy.

The Supreme Court’s 5–4 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause opened the floodgates for lawmakers to draw egregious partisan gerrymanders without fear of federal lawsuits. By declaring that gerrymandering presents “a political question beyond the competence of the federal courts,” SCOTUS ensured that the 2020 redistricting process will be infected with extreme partisan bias in most states. That ruling was harmful enough on its own terms. On Wednesday, however, an influential federal judge suggested that Rucho’s rule should be expanded to prevent judges from intervening when lawmakers manipulate the outcome of elections through voting laws. If more courts adopt that theory, it will become harder than ever to challenge partisan prejudice in the administration of elections.

Wednesday’s decision in Jacobson v. Lee involves a Florida law that dictates that candidates who share a party with the current governor are listed first in every race on every ballot. Because Republicans have long held the Florida governorship, this law grants a huge benefit to GOP candidates. As U.S. District Judge Mark Walker explained when he blocked the measure in November, the first candidate listed on a ballot benefits from the “primacy effect”—voters’ tendency to favor the first choice at the top of a list. Political scientists calculate that in Florida the primacy effect gives Republican candidates a 5-percentage-point advantage over their competitors. This windfall is called the “donkey vote,” and it will give President Donald Trump a significant advantage in the must-win state come November.

Walker found Florida’s system to be “a discriminatory burden” on citizens’ constitutional right to cast an equal vote in a “free and fair election.” The law, he concluded, “systematically advantages candidates of one party,” putting an illicit “thumb on the scale in favor of the party in power.” Walker ordered the state to adopt a neutral scheme for ballot placement, like alphabetical order or a random lottery (as some other states do).

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed on Wednesday in an opinion by Judge William Pryor, a George W. Bush appointee who was one of the most [extreme right-wing] judges in the country before Trump infused the judiciary with underqualified reactionaries. Pryor’s majority decision did not address the merits, instead holding that the plaintiffs—voters and Democratic organizations—lacked standing to bring the suit. No plaintiff, Pryor wrote, had proved “injury in fact,” or a concrete harm inflicted by the law. As a result, federal courts have no authority to address their claims. Under that holding, a different plaintiff could still contest the law—including, perhaps, a candidate whom it handicaps.

In a strange move, though, Pryor went much further in a separate opinion concurring with his own majority opinion. Rucho, he asserted, was about more than gerrymandering: It stood for the broad principle that federal courts cannot resolve a “complaint of partisan advantage” in election law. When a law benefits one party but does not directly burden a citizen’s ability to cast a ballot, Pryor wrote, it does not implicate any constitutional rights. Instead, it asks courts to determine a “standard of fairness,” presenting a question that is “political, not legal.” Moreover, courts lack the ability “to answer the determinative question: How much partisan advantage from ballot order is too much?” When courts have to decide “basic questions” of fairness and figure out “how much partisanship is too much” in election administration, they’ve entered the political thicket and must butt out.

Pryor’s concurrence telegraphs to the rest of the judiciary that judges skeptical of voting rights lawsuits should use Rucho to throw them out of court… It gives [right-wing] judges a powerful weapon against such suits, allowing them to claim that voters are asking for political “fairness,” not constitutional equality, and therefore have no business in federal court.

Source: seandotpolitics

#who-counts #elections #florida #judiciary #gerrymandering

Tens of thousands of people are suddenly eligible to vote in November.

Many felon disenfranchisement rules, including North Carolina’s, are rooted in overt white supremacy. After Reconstruction, racist Democrats in the state sought to revoke Black citizens’ suffrage. They accomplished this task, in part, through vague criminal laws that stripped convicted felons of their civil rights—then enforced these laws disproportionately against Black people. North Carolina’s current statute is rooted in an 1877 law spearheaded by a representative who later presided over the lynching of three Black men. At the time, Democrats argued that felon disenfranchisement was necessary to stop “the honest vote of a white man” from being “off-set by the vote of some negro.” Its purpose, alongside other Jim Crow measures like the literacy test, was to “secure white supremacy.”

#voting-rights #north-carolina #supreme-court #racism #who-counts