The Mueller investigation of Pennsylvania’s midterm election: Can Trump and his allies have misrepresented the midterm elections? A warning warning from a left-right group

Murphy Hebert, a spokeswoman for the Arizona Secretary of state, told CNN that they had referred a report of voter intimidation to both the US Department of Justice and the Arizona attorney general.

A group of people followed a voter trying to drop off their ballot at an early voting box on Monday according to Hebert.

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer held a news conference last week and told reporters that people had been recording voters dropping off their ballots at the Mesa drop box. This new complaint is an increase from the initial reports.

Former President Donald Trump posted on social media on Tuesday to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the midterm election in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania. “Here we go again!” he wrote. It was a rigged election.

Is Trump’s supposed evidence true? An article on a right-wing news site that demonstrated no rigging. The article did not explain how it raised suspicion about the data.

In 2020, Trump and his allies made a prolonged effort to discredit the presidential election results in advance, spending months laying the groundwork for their false post-election claims that the election was stolen. Now, in the weeks leading up to Election Day in 2022, some Republicans have been deploying similar – and similarly dishonest – rhetoric.

Trump is not the only Republican trying to baselessly promote suspicion about the midterms in Pennsylvania, a state that could determine which party controls the US Senate.

After Pennsylvania’s acting elections chief, Leigh Chapman, told NBC News last week that it could take “days” to complete the vote count, Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, who has repeatedly promoted false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, said on a right-wing show monitored by liberal organization Media Matters for America: “That’s an attempt to have the fix in.”

It isn’t. It takes a lot of time because the Republican-controlled state legislature has not passed a bill that would allow counties to begin processing mail-in ballots earlier than Election Day.

Other prominent Republicans were there as well. Ted Cruz of Texas questioned why the Democrat blue cities only count their votes for a day when there are other places that do it quicker. The rest of the country manages to get it done on election night.”

Even aside from the fact that the big cities that tend to lean Democratic have many more votes to count than the small rural counties that tend to lean Republican, Cruz’s claim is plain false.

It’s not unusual for American elections authorities to not declare winners on election night. Rather, media outlets make unofficial projections based on incomplete data.

Do Democrats Really Have Anything Up Their Sleeves? The 2020 Detroit Denier and the Candidate GOP Chief of State John Fetterman vowed to halt the Use of Absentee Ballots

The health challenges of the Democratic candidate in Pennsylvania’s Senate race, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, have also been used to cast preemptive doubt on the possible 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. On Fox last week, as Media Matters noted, prime-time host Tucker Carlson made a similar argument about Pennsylvania’s Senate race – suggesting people should not accept a Fetterman win because it would be “transparently absurd” for a candidate who has had difficulties with public speaking and auditory processing since a stroke in May to legitimately prevail.

Fetterman won in a state Biden won by more than 80,000 votes. Fetterman has led in many (though not all) opinion polls – and polls have repeatedly found that Pennsylvania voters continue to view him far more favorably than they view his Republican opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz.

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. And now the Republican running to be Michigan’s elections chief is already challenging the validity of tens of thousands of Detroit votes in 2022.

Less than two weeks before Election Day, Kristina Karamo, a 2020 election denier and the Republican nominee for Michigan secretary of state, filed a lawsuit asking a court to “halt” the use of absentee ballots in Detroit if they weren’t obtained in person at a clerk’s office and declare that only those ballots obtained via in-person requests can be “validly voted” in this election. In state with a constitution that allows residents to request Absentee Ballots by mail, the rejection of thousands of votes cast legally by Detroit residents would be possible.

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.

Some Republican candidates have suggested that Democrats might try to manipulate the election or the counting of votes.

The Washington Post reported that Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told reporters that they would see what happened when he accepted the results of his reelection race. Do Democrats have something up their sleeves?”

After his primary victory in August, Masters scrubbed his website of language that included the false claim that the election was stolen. Under questioning from the moderator during a debate with Kelly, Masters conceded that he had not seen evidence of fraud in the 2020 vote counting or election results in a way that would have changed the outcome. Kelly argued in the debate that the “wheels” could come off of democracy if election deniers like Masters were elected.

There is no basis for the suggestion that there could be tens of thousands of fraudulent votes added to the 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.

Hundreds of thousands of votes have yet to be counted in the election that was held in Arizona, which is a swing state.

Many of the mail-in ballots that were dropped off at polling places on Election Day are included in the 80,000 additional votes reported late Friday evening in Arizona.

If they meet eligibility requirements, more than 15,000 additional ballots will eventually be counted. Monday is the last day voters can contact the elections department to have their ballots cure. Gloria believes that 9,659 people are eligible for curing. Another 5,555 in-person provisional ballots could be added as well once they are validated.

Broadly speaking Arizona and Florida have similar deadlines and processing rules for mail ballots, though some smaller regulations and procedures — like the inhouse extraction Patrick described — offer some key differences. Florida has become a better point of comparison for those on the political right against Arizona’s elections management.

According to election officials, state law requires all mail in and drop off ballots to be individually signature verified. After those ballots have been read, they will go through a bipartisan processing board that has two people check the ballot. Tabulation begins once that is complete.

Arizona’s Bill Gates: “Your grandpa isn’t going to have the right to vote,” he told reporters after the 2020 election

Arizona was the center of some of the election conspiracy theories to come out of the 2020 election that falsely claimed the election was stolen from Trump. The election deniers who echoed those claims succeeded in the GOP primary elections. Republicans at the top of the ticket spread false information about 2020.

Bill Gates, chairman of the county’s board of supervisors, said that it was offensive for Lake to say that people behind him were slow rolling this. I hope that this is the end of that, and we can be patient while the results come out.

In 2020, protesters turned out to protest at the Maricopa County vote counting center — leading officials to take extra precautions this year. Gates told reporters that threats have not stopped for the members of the elections board.

“That is now a way of life for me and my colleagues,” he explained. It is a way of life, but it should not be for all of the election workers in the country.

“I would have them just stop for a second and think about my grandpa. Gates said that his grandpa was a World War II veteran. He wasn’t fighting for their right to use a cellphone or send a text threatening their life. He was fighting for everyone to have the right to vote. My grandpa wouldn’t approve of that.

What if Republicans lose the House and Senate GOP Majority Elections next year? Comment on a recent news report by Hargrove and Lombardo

Control of the US House still hangs in the balance. Even if Republicans win a majority, it will be very close rather than being as close as GOP leaders had thought. That unexpected outcome has already produced recriminations and second-guessing of Republican leaders, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who had hoped to be emerging from these contests with a clear mandate to become the next House majority leader.

Despite the ultimate makeup of both chambers next year, the lackluster performance of the Republicans has led to calls for a delay of the upcoming leadership elections, and there is a backlash against House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy.

When races are within a percentage point or two, those outstanding ballots are enough to keep the election from being projected. Of course, the lag was anticipated – it took news organizations until the Saturday after Election Day in 2020 to declare Joe Biden the winner in the presidential race, following a massive increase in mail-in voting amid the pandemic.

While those races remain in play, CNN projected Friday that Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly will defeat Republican Blake Masters in Arizona, and Republican Joe Lombardo will knock off Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak in Nevada.

“We will be working through the weekend and get through most of those ballots – not all of those ballots – probably by no later than Monday morning,” Hargrove said.

The official account of the county responded by saying that not every woman with glasses is someone like the one pictured. “We can confirm this was a party Observer. It is important to refrain from making assumptions about workers who wear glasses.

Senator Mike McCarthy is running for the next secretary of state in Arizona – and he is running into a Democrat when he becomes the next governor

Nevada state law allows mail-in ballots to be received through Saturday, as long as they were postmarked by Election Day, meaning counties are still receiving ballots to be counted. But many ballots now arriving are being disqualified because they were postmarked after Election Day.

About two-thirds of the mail-in ballots the county received on Thursday were disqualified because they were postmarked late.

Members of the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus are withholding their support for McCarthy’s speakership bid and have begun to lay out their list of demands, CNN’s Melanie Zanona and Manu Raju report, putting the California Republican’s path to securing 218 votes in peril if the party ultimately takes the House with a slim majority.

The chair of the House Freedom Caucus had a meeting with the McCarthy on Friday. He said later that the meeting “went well” but wouldn’t say if McCarthy has his – or the caucus’ – support for speaker.

The secretary of state in Colorado said that it was too early to tell if the race would go to a recount. Under Colorado law, a recount is triggered if the race is within 0.5%. If a candidate chooses to pay for one then it will also be conducted.

Masters’ defeat in Arizona came after prominent Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, swooped into the state in the final days of the election, warning that the very fate of the nation’s democracy was on the ballot. Voters in the Grand Canyon State also spurned the bid of GOP state Rep. Mark Finchem, a strident election denier backed by Trump, to become Arizona’s top elections official. Instead, they will elect Democrat Adrian Fontes as Arizona’s next secretary of state, CNN projected Friday night.

Ms. Lake and Mr. Masters are on the social media site. Ms. Lake told Fox News on Thursday that she had “absolute 100 percent confidence that I will be the next governor of Arizona.” Mr. Hamadeh, after taking a small lead in his uncalled race, posted a photo on Twitter of himself at a rally and seemed to claim victory, writing, “I want to thank the people of Arizona for entrusting me with this great responsibility.” He is slightly behind after losing ground.

The Masters campaign sent out an email on Thursday asking for donations, saying it had seen a lot of troubling issues during the election.

On Twitter, Mr. Finchem jokingly asked his followers to “make sure” Ms. Hobbs and Mr. Fontes weren’t “in the back room with ballots in Pima or Maricopa.” Mr. Fontes fired back, writing, “Stop with this conspiracy garbage.”

Both Ms. Hobbs and Mr. Fontes have called on supporters to respect the vote-counting process. “Despite what my election-denying opponent is trying to spin, the pattern and cadence of incoming votes are exactly what we expected,” Ms. Hobbs wrote on Twitter.

The final results could take even longer to be determined, because a new Arizona law calls for an automatic recount in all electoral contests where the difference between the top two candidates was 0.5 percent or less of the total votes cast.

In the final stretch of the campaign, top Democratic candidates and their surrogates — including former President Barack Obama and Jill Biden, the first lady — cast the state’s elections as vital to preserving the nation’s democracy. They said that the candidates in Arizona were divisive and harmful, and that their election would shape how elections are run and how power is transferred.

Tammy Patrick, a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund, spent a decade working as a Maricopa County election official, mostly as a federal compliance officer. Half of the state’s voters are in Maricopa, which is home to Phoenix.

Patrick says the nuts and bolts of how elections are run in Arizona haven’t changed a lot since her time there. She says voter behavior and political realities exist.

“I don’t know if it’s because the voters heard stories about the negatives of dropping your ballot in a drop box, or if it’s because they didn’t feel comfortable doing it,” Patrick says.

Patrick says an extraction machine could speed up the process. Many Florida counties use an inhouse device that makes it easier to remove the ballot if it’s in an envelope with a laser.

She says that Arizona is under this kind of scrutiny because of the political importance of key races there as well as how close vote margins have gotten in the state. She says because the media feels less comfortable calling the race right now, the perception is that this is taking much longer.

Observational evidence against a false accusation by the Republican National Committee in the recent election: Democrat candidate Mark Kelly in Maricopa

Gates said that the allegations were offensive to the election workers.

The suggestion by the Republican National Committee that something untoward is going on is offensive to the good elections workers and it is false, he said.

When asked by CNN if he would mind if the Republican National Committee could communicate their concerns to him directly, Gates said he wouldn’t mind at all. I am a Republican. Three of my colleagues on the board are Republicans. He said to raise these issues and discuss them with us instead of making baseless claims.

Gates said that if they choose to go to court, they have every right to do that.

The count has taken an average of 10 to 12 days over the last couple of decades. That’s not because of anything Maricopa County has decided to do, that’s because of how Arizona law is set up. And that’s what we do here at Maricopa County, we follow the law to make sure that the count is accurate.”

And addressing the suggestion from Masters that the county should wipe the slate clean and start counting over again, Gates said that “is simply not allowed for under Arizona law.”

“There were two vote centers where the ballots that went into box three were actually co-mingled with the ballots that went through the tabulator. We can address this and we will. We know how many people went to the vote center in those two instances. We can then check the total number of ballots that were left there, either tabulated or in box three, and determine if they’re the same. He said that the best thing of all was that we would make a determination and then have Republican and Democrat observers watch to make sure nothing goes wrong.

As of Saturday morning, the Democrat is ahead of the Republican by more than 30,000 votes in the race for Arizona governor. And as if Friday evening, Republican Adam Laxalt is holding onto a slim lead of just more than 800 votes over Democratic incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.

With Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly’s victory on Friday night, Democrats are just one seat away from keeping control of the US Senate as all eyes turn to neighboring Nevada, where the competitive Senate race is increasingly trending in Democrats’ direction.

Political organizations, especially Democratic-leaning unions, that spent months urging people to vote in Nevada’s key Senate race are now turning their focus toward “curing” flawed mail-in ballots in the still-uncalled contest.

The RNC and the republican party of az criticized the county’s process on Friday night and demanded that it require around the clock shifts of ballot processing until all of the votes are counted. They warned that they would take legal action if necessary.

A scaled- down version of their plan to conduct a hand count audit of rural election results is being considered by Arizona officials after they suffered setbacks in court.

On Thursday, the state appeals court made it clear it would not reverse a court order barring the full hand count in time for the November elections. But a lawyer for Cochise County Recorder David Stevens – a proponent of the hand audit – said that the county isn’t giving up on its efforts to conduct a hand conduct that goes beyond the usual procedures.

The story of Nevada Democrats and the misfortunes of the GOP after the Supermajority Cut-Supremator Mitch McConnell

Trump, who saw several key endorsed candidates fizzle out in the general election, is trying to cast blame on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and gin up opposition to the Kentucky Republican ahead of Senate GOP leadership elections next week, CNN reported Friday.

The string of Democratic wins Friday night marked a stunning reversal of fortune for a party that had appeared to be in serious trouble heading into Tuesday’s elections. Candidates like Kelly and Cortez Masto had to contend with low approval ratings, a poor economic climate and high gas prices, all while facing historic trends that can lead to steep losses in the first-midterm cycle.

The Supreme Court decision to overturn abortion rights angered many voters, and this was part of a complicated cycle that has affected voter behavior. Republicans were also hamstrung by Trump’s decision to boost far-right candidates who were loyal to him, but often too extreme to appeal to the swing voters who decide elections. In the end, many independent voters and moderates appear to have rejected candidates they viewed as too extreme or too closely aligned with Trump – and Democrats turned out in droves to protect their incumbent candidates.

The one bright spot for Republicans was in Nevada, where voters elected Republican Joe Lombardo as the state’s next governor – tossing out Democrat Steve Sisolak, CNN projected. Lombardo, the popular Clark County sheriff, had reminded voters of their struggles during the Covid-19 pandemic, when unemployment in Nevada had peaked at nearly 30%. Sisolak had been argued to have hindered the state’s economic recovery because of his policies.

A spokeswoman with the Maricopa County Elections Department told CNN’s Kyung Lah the county office has “redundancies in place that help us ensure each legal ballot is only counted once.”

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/11/politics/mark-kelly-blake-masters-arizona-senate-results/index.html

The Case for a Democratic Candidate: Ambassador Tim Masters to the U.S. Senate and the 2018 Arizona Referendum on Abortion

Kelly entered the 2022 cycle well positioned to withstand the headwinds facing Democrats – even in a purple state like Arizona that Joe Biden narrowly won – because of his formidable fundraising and unique personal brand as a retired astronaut, a Navy veteran and the husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords.

Masters, a first time candidate, had the help of conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who supported him during the GOP primary. He appealed to Republicans by promising to prioritize immigration issues, and in a video released last year, he said that he believed Trump would win the election.

Masters then appeared to modulate his tone about the 2020 election results as well as the conservative stances he had sought out during the primary on abortion – in what initially seemed like an effort to appeal to broader swath of the Arizona electorate. (Though Republicans comprise a plurality in Arizona, independents make up about a third of the electorate and often sway close elections.)

Masters was portrayed by Kelly as someone who would jeopardize abortion rights and Social Security as well as being outside the mainstream. In a state where lawmakers passed a new ban on abortion at 15 weeks earlier this year – and where there are legal efforts underway to ban abortion in almost all cases – Kelly’s campaign kept a relentless focus on Masters’ anti-abortion stances.