What I Was Running Against: Mr. Trump, his family, and the cattle ranch rancher Joel Reimer, as he challenged the Biden administration
Mr. Rice was angry and put the iPad down. Listen to what he has to say. This is what I was running against!” He said he had to tell people at the country club that Mr. Trump had lost the election. “It was painful.”
In July, he lost this primary after receiving less than a quarter of the vote. He coasted to victory with 62 percent in the general election.
Mr. Meijer said he was surprised that Republicans didn’t suffer backlash from voters after the January 6 riot. He argued that the leftward-tilt of the Biden administration had pushed voters back toward Mr. Trump, citing executive orders that stretched the authority of the White House to impose vaccine mandates, an eviction moratorium and the cancellation of student debt.
He said that people were made feel like if they didn’t help the Democratic majority push on the gas, they were helping them.
Mr. Budd of North Carolina signaled support for Mr. Trump’s fraud claims in the weeks after the election by introducing the Combat Voter Fraud Act. As a Republican candidate for the Senate, he warmed up a Trump rally this spring by accusing Democrats of opposing “election integrity” because “they know they can’t win elections on a woke left agenda.” A spokesman for Mr. Budd said he had begun pushing for voter registration requirements to be tightened long before the 2020 election after seeing a major election fraud scandal in his state.
In Oklahoma, Mr. Mullin stood out from the pack of Republican Senate candidates by introducing a bill to officially expunge Mr. Trump’s second impeachment. It was faulted that the Democrats failed to note the unusual voting patterns and anomalies of the 2020 presidential election or that Republicans doubted that Donald Trump had not won re-election. The resolution was co-sponsored by more than 30 lawmakers and was intended to curry favor with the former president. In July, Mr. Trump officially endorsed Mr. Mullin.
Mr. Mullin, who owns a ranch, spent a hot Saturday that same month campaigning among his fellow cattlemen at their annual conference in Norman, Okla. One attendee, Joel Reimer, applauded him for taking a stand against the Electoral College count knowing he would be ridiculed by many for buying into conspiracy theories. Mr. Reimer, who manages a beef ranch, added, “From a small-town guy’s perspective, I personally had questions about the validity of the vote.”
The fliers said that no congressman has worked harder to save America than Mr. Mullin. The party had a new motto: “secure our elections.”
Observations of the Midterm Election with the Wisconsin Electoral Commission. Contribution by Lee Amudalat, Michael H. Keller and Rachel Shorey
Amudalat, Michael H. Keller andRachel Shorey were among the people who contributed. Produced by Sean Catangui and Hang Do Thi Duc.
The Times drew on data from various sources to analyze the 139 objectors, including from the A-Mark Foundation, Ballotpedia, CQ, The Cook Political Report, Daily Kos, L2 and LegiStorm. Andrew Beveridge, Susan Weber, and others contributed to the data analysis.
“How is the November midterm election the third or fourth thing on my radar?” the county’s director of elections and registration, Forrest K. Lehman, asked. “It should be number one.”
Perhaps the most pressing problem nationwide is a barrage of requests for election records, from photocopies of ballots to images of absentee ballot envelopes and applications.
The county clerk in Winnebago County, Wis., Sue Ertmer, said she fielded some 120 demands for records in only a couple of weeks last month. “When you get those types of requests, it gets a little hard to get a lot of other things done,” she said. “It’s a little overwhelming.”
The requests come from a variety of sources, but a number of election officials noted that Mike Lindell, the pillow salesman and purveyor of conspiracy theories about the 2020 vote, has encouraged supporters to submit them. The election deniers offered instructions at the seminar on how to file records requests.
Mr. Lindell said that the job of election workers is to give information to the public. He said his local supporters had sent him digital recreations of the ballot choices of every voter, called cast vote records, from over a thousand election jurisdictions. Mr. Lindell said that the records show that balloting has been manipulated throughout the country.
The California Department of Elections. The Defenders of Democracy: The Case of Mr. Trump in Shasta County, California, during the 2018 Midterm Elections
CNN has a series called “America’s Future Starts Now,” in which people share how they have been affected by the biggest issues facing the nation, and experts offer their proposed solutions. The views expressed in these commentaries are the authors’ own. Read more opinion at CNN.
In the lead up to the midterm elections this year, election offices everywhere need increased funding and stronger protections for workers. Those who threaten, harass and intimidate election workers should also face consequences for bad behavior. Legislators are making progress towards these goals and more can be done.
Even places that Mr. Trump won have been impacted by election denial. In Northern California’s mostly rural Shasta County, where he carried two-thirds of the vote in 2020, tensions over elections and other issues have been rising for months. Local activists have demanded a halt to early voting, pushed to count ballots by hand and sought to require voter ID at polling places — none of which are legal in the state.
The elections deniers made me a target of their anger. They accused me of violating state campaign finance laws, of being involved in corrupt activity and of lying about my experience. Some people subjected me to racist statements in a mailer. I had to get a restraining order against one person who was threatening me.
Despite these newfound risks, I remain committed to my job and to my role in protecting democracy. Since the election of 2020, my office has worked closely with local, state and federal partners to improve communications, strengthen security protocols and increase staff training opportunities.
Our elections must be free and fair if both sides of the aisle want it to be so. If you think that’s impossible, just let an election official show you how it’s done.
Natalie Adona is the clerk-recorder elect, a non-partisan office, in Nevada County, California. She is a member of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials. Adona is also an advisory board member for the Election Official Legal Defense Network, an editorial board member for the Journal of Election Administration Research and Practice, a member of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections Task Force and a participant in the Issue One campaign about the virtues of democracy.
The Philadelphian Voting Truth Roundup: An Innocent Mistake, Quickly Fixed, and Pretendent Death Threat to the Second Amendment
Donald Trump winning on election night, but the race still being too close to call, is the final scenario of the contested election results. In this example, Trump would then declare victory – despite the hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots that remained to be counted.
By week’s end, Biden would take the lead and demonstrations in and around Philadelphia would become violent. The exercise said that weeks of civil unrest, legal action and intense scrutiny were still ahead despite the initial vote count being largely complete.
I watched as the top officials in the room expressed serious concern. It was plausible even as extreme as this scenario sounded.
Wanting to set the record straight, I posted a video on Twitter to explain what had really happened – an innocent mistake, swiftly fixed, rather than some form of intentional voter fraud. Soon after, my first death threat, I unleashed a wave of hate. Phrases like “we will take you out” and “your family!” were found in the voicemail. [Expletive] your life!” When you don’t think it will happen, we will surround you.
One of the threats turned out to be credible, and I had two plain-clothes Philadelphia police officers assigned to follow me wherever I went – including the bathroom. I did not want to have to explain who my hairdresser was to him, so I refrained from getting my hair done.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/opinions/us-election-workers-voting-threats-roundup/index.html
Election Night: Lisa Deeley, a Long-term Member of the Philadelphia City Commissioners, during a Collapsar in Michigan
On Election Day, my life has always been very important to me. My mother was the person who was in charge of the neighborhood committee. I followed the polls on Election Day since she was a single mom. Back then, our polling place was a barber shop, where I would spend hours spinning on a leather barber’s chair taking it all in.
I am not the only one with a mother or barber shop like mine. We need to invest in our teachers and schools, so they can better teach civics education and impart on young people just how precious democratic ideals truly are.
Lisa Deeley, a Democrat, is the chairwoman of the Philadelphia City Commissioners, a three-member bipartisan board of elected officials in charge of elections and voter registration for the city of Philadelphia.
When the recount of the Michigan election results was halted after Russia tried to interfere in our politics and social media, it began to play a larger role in electoral politics.
It led some to doubt the election process. Doubt in this process, which began as a seed, had grown into an invasive weed choking the profession four years later.
The election reinforced my worst fears. I had just overseen the administration of the most challenging election of my career, and all eyes were on Michigan. Unfortunately, my team and I made an error in resubmitting an absentee voter file on election night – a mistake we quickly caught and corrected the morning after the election.
A leading national figure held a press conference in Michigan and misrepresented what had happened, pushing my colleagues and I into the national spotlight.
Resolving the Bounds on a First History of Elections: The Five-Step Process for Preparing Public Officials to Vote
The committee has developed a five-step process that election officials and law enforcement can follow to better prepare for elections. It says that the election officials should meet, share their situational knowledge, and agree on a vision for order and safety around election spaces, plan for possible emergencies, and practice their responses ahead of each election.
It is my hope that more election officials follow our guidelines, so that public servants can once again do their jobs without fearing for their lives.
Tina Barton is the former appointed city clerk of Rochester Hills, Michigan, and 2020 Oakland county clerk Republican candidate. She works at The Elections Group as a senior election expert.
Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of 24 books, including, “The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment.” Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
The committee has evidence of extensive contact between Trump allies, such as Roger Stone, and right-wing extremists. The Secret Service was aware of a serious threat of violence against the Capitol.
Cheney explained that the committee is “obligated to seek answers directly from the man who set this all in motion. And every American is entitled to the answers, so we can act now to protect our republic.”
The key revelation was the never-before-seen footage showing Pelosi, Schumer and other legislative leaders scrambling to procure more police and national guard forces to repel the rioters on Capitol Hill.
In public hearings during the past four months, the bipartisan panel attempted to reveal the full context of what happened that day and who was responsible.
Unlike the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon in 1974, one of the most distinctive elements of Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 election is that so much of it happened in broad daylight.
A win by Biden would be framed by the rhetoric of a rigged election, sowing doubt among his supporters about the legitimacy of his victory and creating a basis for him to go to court. Trump’s team constantly discussed and deliberated over how to achieve their goal.
Dramatic Moments of January 6, 2021: The Case of the “Stop the Steal” Congressional Campaign and the Trump’s Inner Cabal
Yet the committee managed to fill out the story in very important ways, providing shocking evidence and details as to how the events of those months were even more dangerous than we understood at the time.
The committee showed that January 6 wasn’t some random day of chaos where everything got out of control. It was planned.
The panel looked at how intentional the Trump administration was in trying to spread doubts about the results, from testing different theories about challenging the results, to leaning on state officials to change the vote to intimidate Congress.
Steve Bannon told a group of associates that the former president was going to say he was victorious, which was not true, and that he would say he was. If Biden is winning, Trump is going to do crazy shit.
When told in subsequent weeks repeatedly by top election and legal advisers, such as then-Attorney General William Barr, that the claims of fraud were “bullshit,” Trump and his inner cabal ignored those warnings and moved forward with reckless abandon.
On the day of the “Stop the Steal” rally, January 6, 2021, Trump knew that the protesters were armed and dangerous but did nothing to stop them. He was stopped by the Secret Service from going to Capitol Hill because he wanted to. The former president tried to drive the car even though he was told he could not, according to Cassidy Hutchinson.
Various state officials were looked at to see if they would do Trump’s bidding. Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a staunch conservative who backed the administration, was unsettled as Giuliani and Trump pressured him during a phone call in late November 2020 to have the state legislature reconvene and invalidate the results in his state. The road map written by the president’s lawyer for their attempt at election steal was pressured by him to reject the results.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/14/opinions/dramatic-moments-january-6-hearing-zelizer/index.html
The Campaign for Overturning the 2020 Election: The January 6 Committee Reimagines What Happens When the Trump Administration Becomes a Senator
January 6 was just one small part of a larger story. Although the panel is called the January 6 committee, it would be more accurate to call it a committee to investigate the campaign to overturn the 2020 election. This reframing is essential to understanding the months between November 2020 and January 2021.
Chairman Bennie Thompson said that the Trump administration had a plan to overturn the election. The rally, and the violence, of January 6 were just one piece of a much bigger strategy.
To convey his state of mind, committee members made clear that Trump was not “duped” or “irrational,” as Cheney said Thursday. He knew exactly what he was doing. After the Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit backed by the former president in December 2020, Trump, who the Secret Service said was “pissed,” was heard saying he didn’t “want people to know we lost.”
Trump ignored warnings of violence on January 6. He wanted the troops to go to Capitol Hill. Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland reminded viewers that he sat passively, watching television, as the attacks against Congress unfolded and as staunch allies pleaded with him to call off the troops. It wasn’t that Trump didn’t act on January 6; it was that he didn’t want to act. Can you believe it? Pelosi was heard saying to Thompson that day.
Ongoing Threat: In its pivotal hearing Thursday, the committee wanted to make one thing clear, the danger is not over in 2022. “There remains a clear and present danger to our electoral system and to democratic institutions,” Raskin said, “So, that is something that will come through in our final hearing. This is not ancient history we’re talking about; this is a continuing threat.” There is a continued threat on many levels. The election denialism of many of the Republican candidates in the upcoming elections has taken hold.
There are several key offices Republicans who subscribe to the agenda are running for, ranging from governor to Secretaries of State in some key states, all of which will be important in overseeing future elections. And, finally, the former president remains the top contender for the Republican nomination in 2024.
During her opening remarks on Thursday, Cheney made this point clear when she asked why Americans should assume that “those institutions won’t falter next time” if the wrong people were in positions of power the next time around. The story on January 6 was a bunch of officials who were Republicans who didn’t want to join the scheme. She reminded the nation that our institutions “only hold when men and women of good faith” make sure that they are strong regardless of the political consequences.
The committee is considering making a criminal referral to the Justice Department, but it is up to prosecutors to decide what will happen. The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022. which Trump was counting on to not do any damage in the future, could be rendered useless if Congress can complete work on it. We will watch as voters determine, in the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election, whether to send a clear message to Washington that messing with democracy will not be tolerated. Right now, January 6 has not been a major issue in most of the campaigns.
The committee was able to unpack the dark days after the election. They have been clearly shown in front of our eyes. We still do not know if we will close our eyes and move forward without demanding accountability, justice and reform.
Predicting Georgia Elections: The Case for Voting Fraud in a Tetrading, High-Stakes, Extremist Scenario
The editor has taken note. Jay Bookman is an author and national award-winning political columnist from Georgia who has written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other newspapers. He is writing for the Georgia Recorder. You can follow him on social media. The views expressed here are his own. CNN has more opinion.
Georgia has seen record numbers of voters turn out, with early voting totals approaching those of a presidential election year. The question is natural in a closely watched, high-stakes, bitterly fought campaign season.
In terms of predicting outcomes, it’s hard to say. The advantage that high turnout used to have for Democrats is no longer there, and we don’t know how much the early voter surge represents motivated voters or if they were just voters who would have cast their ballot anyway. There are plenty of factors at play this year, and it’s hard to say if voters are going to the polls or not.
Pollters don’t know if it is a nightmare or not. Predicting how people will vote is pretty easy. Predicting whether they’ll vote is where things get complicated – and results get misleading. In a tumultuous year like this one, with so many variables, that’s a caution to the rest of us about putting too much credence in pollsters’ work product.
Gov. Brian Kemp, who signed the bill into law, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who advocated for it, had already conceded that voter fraud played no role in recent election outcomes. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation and federal officials in the Department of Justice stated that the elections were safe, secure, and honest. What was the real reason for those changes?
It happens when you sell people a false narrative and then have a rewrite of state law to encourage them to take action. If voting isn’t being suppressed, then confidence in voting surely has been.
Democrats have built an effective voter protection apparatus that will help people overcome bureaucratic hurdles so that they can vote.
The last point is crucial. To their base, Republicans have said the changes implemented in SB 202 – making absentee balloting more difficult, significantly reducing the number of drop boxes in urban areas – were necessary to fight voter fraud. But logically, that motive makes no sense.
The next Congress will count the electoral votes in the presidential election in 2024, and its members will be the ones to consider and act on any objections to the vote’s legitimacy. The results of the 2020 election were sought to be changed on the basis of spurious allegations of voter fraud. Many of them are likely to win re-election, and they may be joined by new members who also have expressed baseless doubts about the integrity of the 2020 election. Their presence in Congress poses danger to democracy, one that should be on the minds of voters on Election Day.
Trump told supporters at rallies this fall that he did not believe there would be a fair election. I don’t think it is true.
In SB 202, for example, Georgia Republicans added a clarifying sentence to a section of state law regarding how a voter, or elector, can legally challenge the eligibility of other voters to cast ballots. It now says that “There shall not be a limit on the number of persons whose qualifications such elector may challenge.” Local election boards must hold a hearing on certain challenges within 10 business days under the new law.
Conservatives are frustrated that their challenges to the eligibility of tens of thousands of people who are legally registered in the state are failing.
“We are doing your job,” one frustrated activist told the Gwinnett elections board at its October 19 meeting. If you want your things in order, get your county in order.
What do conservatives really think about campaigning during the 2016 presidential election? Commentary on turnout, voter turnout and mail-in campaigns
Republicans tend to be more confident that widespread public frustration over inflation will propel them to victory, regardless of the problems that have dogged them, like weak fund-raising and Senate candidates their own leaders have described as low in “quality.”
Democrats in particular are puzzling over the decision Republicans made during the pandemic to demonize mail-in and early voting, after years of dominating the practice in states like Arizona and Florida. In some states, Republican Party officials have quietly sent out mailers or digital ads urging their supporters to vote early, but more prominent Republican politicians dare not amplify those appeals — lest they be on the receiving end of a rocket from Donald Trump.
It has often fallen to conservative outside groups, like Turning Point Action, to rally voters. A group run by Charlie Kirk is holding a get-out-the-vote event in Phoenix.
“When you’ve convinced your base that it’s a fraudulent method of voting, you have very little room to change their minds this late in the game,” said Tom Bonier, the chief executive of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm. A lot of things can go wrong on Election Day.
The media became enamored of get-out-the-vote operations after Barack Obama won the 2008 election because of advanced social-science techniques, innovative social media strategy, and new ways of organizing volunteers.
It had led many Democrats to assume that they had an advantage over Republicans in the art and science of campaigns, but Trump’s upset defeat in 2016 of Hillary Clinton changed that. Fieldwork, never glamorous, has not had the same cachet since.
“My assumption on everything is that Republicans are at least as good as Democrats in everything they’re doing,” said David Nickerson, a political scientist who worked on Obama’s campaign and studies turnout.
A growing number of Americans support former President Donald Trump, and so he has taken training classes from conservative groups about how to be a poll watcher in the next mid-term elections. He will now be able to see for himself.
It comes as part of a nationwide movement led by MAGA influencers who have circulated false information about election fraud, with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon the most prominent.
Bannon hosts many guests who are working to build an army of conservative poll workers, such as Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help overturn the 2020 election. “All over the country, we’re deploying people to be poll watchers to watch everything that’s happening,” Mitchell said.
Some of these people are in the country. David Clements tells crowds that that voting machines are extremely vulnerable. He used his last presentation to make an appeal that audience members do more than consume stuff. “You have to get in the ring,” he said in Michigan. “You can’t fight this on social media.”
The effect is real. Child was near a training held by Delaware County Conservatives. The organizer had expected only a couple people, but about a dozen showed up, and she had to hunt for more chairs.
Child raised a few debunked claims of election fraud. He was friendly with CNN after they showed him proof of the claims being false. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that something had gone wrong. He wanted elections to return to paper ballots and a single day of voting.
Is it possible to use paper ballots in elections? A Delaware County Council member Christine Reuther says it was frustrated by false claims about election fraud
“My head was spinning at the end of it,” he said of the presentation, explaining that he went to the seminar a second time to understand the issue better.
“I would vote, you know, every time and … hit the buttons and go home,” he said. After your vote, the seminar showed us what happens. And that’s that was an eye opener.”
“The one thing I remember vividly is the paper in the touch-writer,” he said of what he had learned about the special materials required that were not regular copy paper.
People go to the county council meetings and say they need to use paper ballots. Yes, we use paper ballots. Do you know that we use paper ballots? Delaware County Council member Christine Reuther told CNN. The votes are cast on a paper ballot, then scanned, and the results of that vote are recorded on an electronic device. A paper ballot is kept as a record of the voter’s vote, but you don’t really vote on the scanner or paper ballot.
Several citizens who used the public comment period to make false claims about election fraud were frustrated during a county council meeting. Delaware County has fought about fifteen lawsuits against 2020 election deniers. It won all of them. But the county told CNN it had cost $250,000. Reuther was concerned about how much time and money would be taken up by the movement with the election coming up.
The governorship and a US Senate seat in Pennsylvania are some of the most closely watched races in the nation. Delaware County was once a Republican stronghold, but has steadily become more Democratic over the last decade. The county council went Democratic for the first time in the last election.
When the Voting Machines were Fictitious: Carl Belis, Erice Eisen, and his wife, Bethe Ann, Pennsylvania, June 23, 2003
“Those things are fairy tales,” Carl Belis, who has been a poll worker in several elections, told CNN of public comments claiming the voting machines were vulnerable to fraud.
Belis wasn’t worried about working in this election in Delaware County. Police would be called if someone tried to disrupt the voting. “Across the nation? There will be some issues, definitely. Which is why I say to people, ‘Be prepared now. Don’t be foolish like on January 6.
Child says he just wants the rules followed. He will continue to live if Democrats win. “What, am I going to start a revolt? He said no. “Have to accept it. What else are you gonna do?”
Editor’s Note: Norman Eisen was the ethics czar for President Barack Obama and he was a political law expert who advised the White House. Taylor Redd is doing research on national elections. The people who wrote this commentary have their own opinions. Read more opinion at CNN.
Voters in Arizona and Michigan can feel peace of mind thanks to these victories. They show that – just as they did with challenges during our last election – courts will enforce the law to protect voting rights and the election system.
The people taking part in such activities sometimes are motivated by debunked conspiracies like the one depicted in the film “2000 Mules” – and their efforts appear to have intimidated some voters. The court was told by voters in Arizona that the ballot box surveilance deterred them from voting by Absentee ballot. In one instance, the people taking photographs of ballot drop boxes took pictures of a voter.
The Michigan Republican Party and the RNC sued Flint, claiming that their avowed efforts to bring more Republican poll workers in its precincts were not sufficient. State statute requires boards of election to appoint equal number of poll workers from each major political party.
The hard questions are not included in the list of questions for the GOP. Michigan has been seen as a target by the GOP. It is designed to surge more Republicans, including potential election deniers, into the voting system. There is an attack on the election system in Detroit as well as a different attack by the GOP nominee for secretary of state. Under the circumstances, it is fair to ask whether the Flint effort was part of the GOP’s election-denial strategy.
Flint won the legal action on Wednesday on the question of “standing”: Under state statute, the grievance process is only available to the county chairs of major parties. The lawsuit circumvented that requirement.
Why did the GOP bother to bring this clearly non-meritorious suit here and now? In Michigan, it is common for mostly Republican areas to have predominantly Republican poll workers while also being mostly Democratic, as was explained by Michigan elections expert Aghogho Edevibe.
With the two cases outlined here – as was the case in 2020 – the courts were a bulwark against attempts to undermine the election. These cases suggest that rule of law is still functioning to protect our democracy against drop box intimidators, election deniers and their ilk.
Election denial and voter intimidation are common throughout the United States. It is crucial to monitor legal developments leading up to the November elections to preserve the tradition of free, fair, secure and accurate elections.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump posted on his social media account that he was not certain of the legitimacy of the election in Pennsylvania. Here we go again! He wrote something. Is the election flawed?
Trump’s supposed evidence? An article on a right-wing news site that demonstrated no rigging. The article did not clearly state why it raised suspicion about the data.
There is a fear among the Republicans that the results of the US Senate elections in Pennsylvania could be a sign of things to come.
Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania Doug Mastriano said on a right wing show that it could take days for the vote count to be completed, after the acting elections chief told NBC News that it could take days.
It isn’t. It simply takes time to count votes – especially, as Chapman noted, because the Republican-controlled state legislature has refused to pass a no-strings-attached bill to allow counties to begin processing mail-in ballots earlier than the morning of Election Day.
Counties of all kinds across the country – including, as PolitiFact noted, some Republican counties in Cruz’s state of Texas – do not complete their vote counts on the night of the election. In fact, it is impossible for many counties to have final counts on election night.
Cruz claimed that the small rural counties that lean Republican have more votes to tally than the big cities that lean Democratic.
The results of the election don’t count for official vote totals on election night. Rather, media outlets make unofficial projections based on incomplete data.
The Detroit Correspondence: Dem Demographers, the Democratic Candidate, and the Trump-Biden Conjecture on 2020 Election Scenarios
The health issues of the Democratic candidate in the Senate race in Pennsylvania have also been used to question the outcome.
After Trump was defeated by Joe Biden in 2020, some right-wing personalities insisted the election must have been stolen because Biden was such a poor candidate. Tucker Carlson made an argument on Fox last week about Fetterman winning the Senate race in Pennsylvania because it would be transparently absurd for him to win.
Fetterman won in a state that Biden won by over 80,000 votes. Fetterman has led in many polls, and polls have consistently shown that voters in Pennsylvania view him more favorably than Oz does.
The city of Detroit, like other Democratic-dominated cities with large Black populations, has been the target of false 2020 conspiracy theories from Trump and others. A Republican is challenging the validity of tens of thousands of Detroit votes because he is running for Michigan elections chief.
Karamo’s lawyer vaguely softened the request during closing arguments on Friday, The Detroit News reported. And other prominent Republicans have so far kept their distance from the lawsuit.
The Republican candidates have made comments that may suggest that the Democrats might cheat on Election Day.
The Washington Post reported that Ron Johnson said to reporters, “we’ll see what happens” when it came to accepting the results of his reelection race. Do Democrats have something up their sleeves?”
The Daily Beast said that if Masters beats Kelly by 30,000 votes, he can’t prove that it’s not true. He told a similar story at an event in June.
There is no basis for the suggestion that there could be tens of thousands of fraudulent votes added to any state’s count. But Masters’ comment, like Karamo’s lawsuit, achieves the effect of many of Trump’s pre-Election Day tales in 2020: prime Republican voters to be distrustful of any outcome that doesn’t go their way.
Midterm elections in the United States are often presented as a referendum on the party in power, and that message appears to be resonating this fall. Voters need to consider the intentions of the party that hopes to regain power, and what each vote they cast will do for this country’s future.
It will also be the first time that the U.S. electoral machinery will be tested in a national election after two years of lawsuits, conspiracy theories, election “audits” and all manner of interference by believers in Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. The embracing of violence by a small but growing part of the Republican Party coincides with that test.
A court ordered armed activists to stop patrolling in Arizona. Tens of thousands of voter registrations are being challenged in Georgia. Voting rights groups train volunteers in de-escalating methods. Voters have been videotaped as they drop off their votes.
Election officials say that they are on edge, ready to handle all of the chaos and confusion of Election Day but also the subsequent misinformation and disputes.
The 2019 Maricopa Stop-the-Steal protest: A case study of a lawsuit filed against the F.B.I.
Clint Hickman is a Republican on the county board of supervisors in Arizona and he said that he felt like he was being stabbed in the back.
Like some other election offices, the Maricopa election office has beefed up its security in preparation for Tuesday. After being a target of right-wing protests in 2020, the building has been fortified with a new metal perimeter fence. The email made reference to the violence of the French Revolution and promised that election officials would find their personal addresses. It was referred to the F.B.I. by the Arizona secretary of state.
Activists and lawyers will likely challenge ballots and the process may be challenged by losing candidates, so the early voting has been relatively peaceful.
It is easy to see where things could go wrong. In Pennsylvania, thousands of ballots have been set aside because they do not include proper signatures or dates. The state Supreme Court recently ruled they should not be counted, in response to a Republican lawsuit. The court ordered election officials to keep them separate and make sure they are protected in the future.
In Wisconsin, a Republican state lawmaker is suing to stop the state from counting military ballots, claiming there are security weaknesses in the system. The Thomas More Society is a group that supports the election denial movement.
More than 100 lawsuits have been filed so far, compared with 70 at this point two years ago. On the Republican side, dozens of lawyers and firms that sought to overturn the 2020 election are again working for parties and candidates this cycle.
Democrats and outside groups have contributed to the litigation, often pushing for leniency in counting absentee ballots and challenging local Republican officials’ plans to hand-count ballots — a nod to newfound, widespread suspicion of electronic voting machines on the right.
The plan to count early ballots in Nye County, Nevada by hand was put on hold due to a lawsuit. In Cochise County, a similar attempt is being tried in court.
Absentee ballot processing in Clark County, Nevada, is monitored by election skeptics who ask questions about the hacking of voting machines.
The first Stop the Steal protest was held outside the Elections Department office in Maricopa County, where armed volunteers dressed in tactical gear were stationed outside a ballot drop box.
So far, Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, has sent 18 referrals of voter intimidation to law enforcement authorities. Voters described being photographed with long-lens cameras, and having their license plates recorded, in the complaints. Some, including one filed on Thursday from a voter in Phoenix’s Central City neighborhood, came after the judge’s order had been filed.
Republican candidates and party officials have also encouraged their voters to cast ballots in person on Election Day, reflecting two years of legal arguments and talk claiming that Democrats used expanded access to absentee voting in 2020 to illegitimately win the election. When candidates at a rally headlined by Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona, on Thursday night called on the crowd to vote in person, they were met with cheers.
“I was an absentee, mail-in voter for years,” said Janelle Black, a homemaker from Phoenix who attended the Lake rally. Ms. Black didn’t trust the secretary of state to oversee the 2020 election because she thought it had been stolen. “I want to vote ‘day of,’” she said, “so it’s counted right there. I don’t want to take any chances.”
In some states, it may be helpful for Republicans to not accept mail ballot because they may think the votes will go to Republicans on Election Day. The trend was used to make a false claim that Democrats rigged the results two years ago.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/11/07/us/election-midterm-news/biden-tries-to-shore-up-support-for-hochul-in-the-homestretch
The Challenge of Election Day in Georgia: The Bishop of a Forsyth County, Ga., Amenable to a Supermassive Turnout Boosting Bishop Jackson
The health board publicly denounced the state’s vaccine mandates and the county’s chief executive resigned in the face of public protest.
Cathy Darling Allen, the Shasta County clerk and registrar of voters, said she has familiar Election Day worries: A forecast for as much as 10 inches of snow on Sunday night could prevent some of the 180,000 voters in her mountainous county from getting to the polls.
Some community leaders in Georgia were worried because of the state’s history of intimidation and tension at the polls.
Bishop Jackson, who oversees more than 150 A.M.E. churches in Georgia, admits he is worried about Election Day because he never knows what will happen. “And I look at Arizona, people dressed in these outfits, it can be intimidating.”
More than 65,000 voters in Georgia have had their registrations challenged by fellow citizens, under procedures laid out in a new voting law. Even though most of the challenges have been thrown out, it has left some Georgia voters confused and have tossed some off the rolls. Barbara Helm, a homeless woman in Forsyth County, Ga., was forced to vote on a provisional ballot because her registration had been removed during one of the mass challenges brought by Republican voters. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported her dilemma.
A surge in turnout in the state boosted Bishop Jackson, as well as many other voting rights groups, and ensured voters were prepared for the elections.