Voter Suppression Alert 🚨

Politics
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made a spectacle out of the round of arrests made by his election police force earlier this month, jailing 20 people on charges of voter fraud and promising more prosecutions to come. At least one target was dragged to jail in his underwear by a SWAT team at 6 a.m. But it turns out that the individuals ensnared in DeSantis’ dragnet had no idea that they could not lawfully vote. The governor’s own appointees flubbed their legal duty to stop them from registering. And because of their sloppy errors, all 20 defendants may well be acquitted of crimes they did not intend to commit

In affidavits and media interviews, defendants share the same tragic story: They filled out a voter registration card; their county election office approved it, telling them they could vote; they cast a ballot in 2020; and now they are charged with a felony offense. Because local election officials approved each registration, DeSantis’ spokespeople have sought to blame them for failing to uncover the disqualifying convictions. This accusation conveniently overlooks a crucial fact: Florida law tasks the state government with flagging felony convictions that bar a resident from registering to vote. It wasn’t local officials who dropped the ball. It was the DeSantis administration. (Update, 5:45 p.m. : The head of the election police, a DeSantis appointee, explicitly told local election supervisors that they were not at fault, contradicting the governor’s claims.)

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Manhattan GOP Commissioner Frederic Umane, who has served on the city BOE since 1995, questioned why the agency sent a mailer to all voters this month with basic information about the upcoming general election, including where and when to vote. He raised concerns about cost, why the ten bipartisan commissioners had not approved it and noted that the city BOE was going beyond what it was required to do under state election law.

But ultimately, he warned the mailer risked driving up voter turnout in the five boroughs, which could be bad for his party, since Democrats outnumber Republicans in New York City by more than six-to-one.

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The calls featured a woman warning voters against being “finessed into giving your private information to the man” and that if they voted by mail, police and debt-collection agencies would use their personal information to arrest them for outstanding warrants or collect outstanding debts, according to court filings. The call also claimed the U.S. Centers for Disease Control could use their information to institute a mandatory vaccination program.

Both claims are false.

The calls were among more than 85,000 total that prosecutors said specifically targeted minority voters in heavily democratic areas in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, New York City and Cleveland.

Sutula last month denied a motion filed by the men’s attorneys asking Sutula to find the robocalls were protected by the First Amendment and to throw out the charges.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel also charged Wohl and Burkman with multiple felonies tied to the same conduct. The pair has appealed that case to the Michigan Supreme Court.

The Federal Communications Commission last year recommended that the pair pay a $5.1 million fine for the robocalls, which at the time was the largest forfeiture that the commission had sought in a robocall case, according to a news release.

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One more reason to keep Ms. Nessel in office.

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I was going to quote some of this, but the whole thing is so crazy there’s no short way to sum it up.

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Eugene Yu, CEO of the Michigan-based firm Konnech, was charged in mid October with illegally storing the personal information of poll workers on Chinese servers, a violation of its contract with LA County. Konnech has provided its PollChief software to cities and counties across the country, including a $2.9 million contract with Los Angeles County.

On Wednesday, the district attorney’s office said that it had moved to dismiss the case. A judge in Los Angeles Superior Court granted the motion without prejudice.

“We are concerned about both the pace of the investigation and the potential bias in the presentation and investigation of the evidence,” spokesperson Tiffiny Blacknell said in a statement. The county did indicate that it hasn’t ruled out refiling the charges after reviewing the evidence, saying it would “assemble a new team, with significant cyber security experience to determine whether any criminal activity occurred.”

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Officials in rural, Republican-controlled Cochise County in southeastern Arizona, near Tucson, voted to delay certifying the results of this month’s midterm elections and miss the state’s legal deadline of Monday, despite finding no legitimate problems with the local counts.

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The local Republican party of Morris county, New Jersey, which contains Mendham, is planning to file a lawsuit in an attempts to challenge the election result, according to the Observer-Tribune. The committee claims that several young Democrats who voted via mail-in ballots failed to meet the state’s residency requirements, affecting the outcome of a race that Baio lost by three votes.

Baio had lost by two votes before a recount.

In a statement to the outlet, he revealed that one of the voters who allegedly did not meet those residency requirements is his daughter, a New York City-based journalist. Baio said his daughter voted Democratic during the election.

“Like many parents driven by a sense of duty, we were wrong to advance the [vote-by-mail] to my daughter, Ariana,” he told the outlet. “My daughter did answer the call of duty and did vote by the mail-in ballot.

“We all need to correct this behavior,” Baio’s statement added. “As parents, and as citizens of towns as great as Mendham, I call on all Mendham residents next year to heed this example. As shameful as it is, we need to correct this behavior. I know I will.”

Bet he’d have been perfectly happy with it if he’d won.

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This, I don’t like. It’s ominous.

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AVID appears to mimic a bipartisan, cross-state partnership known as the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, which Alabama was a member of until Allen took office.

He and a number of other Republican secretaries of state abandoned the group earlier this year after the far right began targeting the organization with conspiracy theories. When he vowed to pull Alabama out, Allen himself repeated a conspiracy theory about the involvement of liberal billionaire George Soros in ERIC.

Nine states — all Republican-led — have now withdrawn from ERIC.

One of the reasons ERIC took so long to develop and roll out is because getting state DMVs on board to share that data is complicated by specific privacy laws. But voter registration lists alone don’t generally have enough unique identifiable information to confidently say a voter in one state is the same as one in another state.

“The driver’s license data helps integrate voter registration lists by supplementing them with this unique identifier that we often lack,” Morse explained.

Without that harder-to-get data, Morse and election officials who spoke to NPR said these new agreements look very similar to a now-defunct program known as Kansas Crosscheck. That program also attempted to compare state voting lists in order to clean voter rolls and find fraud but ran into trouble because of false positives and security concerns.

Voter registration data has long been fertile ground for conspiracy theories, because every year millions of Americans move or die and it’s virtually impossible for the country’s election lists to stay completely up to date. That’s not the same thing as fraud occurring, Morse noted, but for those interested in pushing the narrative that elections can’t be trusted, pointing out inaccuracies in the system serves the same purpose.

“The fear is that if you naively mash voter registration lists together, it sounds great and you just generate the appearance of fraud,” Morse said. “It’s just so easy to do [voter list maintenance] in a poor way and it’s so hard to try to do the same thing in a more reliable way.”

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(Document Link from the tweet)

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More complete info…

And… wow :eyes:

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Taking bets on how quickly the appeals come in…

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