aubiefifty 16,791 Posted August 1, 2020 Share Posted August 1, 2020 Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines Christina Greer 5-6 minutes Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty Look alive, America: What happened to Stacey Abrams is about to happen nationally. If you recall, the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race was rife with voter suppression, voter disinformation, and finally the downright theft of an election by Brian Kemp, the secretary of state and Republican candidate. Kemp used his authority as secretary of state to control the allocation of resources, ballots, and election day procedures in one of the most egregious abuses of electoral power this side of Bush v. Gore. What Kemp did to Abrams in November of 2018 laid out a winning dirty playbook that the GOP is about to roll out nationwide, with partisan officials charged with running state elections using voter suppression and disenfranchisement tactics to chip away at Democratic votes and the electoral process itself. As we’ve seen in primaries over the last few months, expect long lines, inadequate numbers of poll workers and ballots in certain (Democratic) areas, and white nationalists serving as de facto security guards at select polling sites throughout the South and Midwest. All this is happening as many voters will be casting absentee ballots for the first time because of the coronavirus, overwhelming the capabilities of often underfunded and partisan elected officials and creating a treasure trove of opportunities for lawyers and party activists to delay and legally contest results. Stacey Abrams Is the Only Vice Presidential Pick for Joe Biden. Here’s Why. The possibility of a New York debacle—where it takes weeks to determine winners, and many votes are “wasted” or “spoiled” thanks to the failures of the voting system, voter confusion and issues with the mail as each state has its own rules for when ballots must be submitted to be counted—is quite real. What Americans need and deserve are electoral systems throughout the country that are run by competent and nonpartisan individuals who respect the rule of law and the will of the people. But that’s not what we have. One of the dark and dishonest talking points the president often returns to, most recently in his tweet Thursday musing about just rain-checking the election, is the idea that Americans cheat at the polls (and specifically that they cheat against him). Although most members of his administration (and family) routinely vote by mail, the president has insisted that the use of the U.S. Postal Service is a means of increasing voter fraud. In fact, not only did the president and vice president vote by mail, so did the president’s wife and daughter Ivanka, Attorney General Bill Barr, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, and roughly a dozen other inner Trump circle officials. Essentially, Republicans voting by mail is deemed safe and acceptable, but Democrats voting by mail is cheating and a version of voter fraud, according to the president. His attacks on voting by mail along with his efforts to drastically defund the U.S. Postal Service are clearly a way of setting up a scapegoat in advance should he lose the electoral vote along with the popular vote this time—and to increase his legal and political options if he should lose narrowly in a handful of key states. In order for Biden to solidify his current lead and win by an undisputable margin, he will need to keep a close eye on the referees running our election. If he wins, restoring the systems intended to protect the integrity of our elections should be one of his first priorities. The stakes couldn’t be higher: Past the presidency, this year’s statewide election results will affect the Census, the redrawing of political lines in each state and the allocation of resources and political power for the next decade. Georgia’s example shows that Republicans are comfortable disenfranchising voters to win that fight; it remains to be seen if Democrats are willing to fight to protect democracy. It is not necessary for the Biden team to reinvent the wheel; it is crucial that they keep their hands on the wheel and their eyes focused. During the 2018 campaign, Abrams and her team built an extensive grassroots campaign strategy that extended across the 159 counties in Georgia. After the election was taken from her, Abrams and her team launched Fair Fight, an organization dedicated to litigation, legislation, and advocacy in order to support voter protection programs at state parties around the country. Whoever Biden picks for his running mate, he should lean on Abrams and other policy-makers who know and understand the real threat of voter disenfranchisement and how to combat it. Read more at The Daily Beast. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aubiefifty 16,791 Posted August 1, 2020 Author Share Posted August 1, 2020 ‘He’s Terrified of Losing’—Trump Goes Into Hyperdrive to Delegitimize the Election As much of the political world went into an uproar over Donald Trump floating the idea of delaying the November election, inside the president’s orbit, his Thursday morning tweet suggesting just that was seen as something far narrower and more strategically focused. The president isn’t really trying to delay the vote. He is trying to preemptively delegitimize the likely results. Two administration officials and another individual close to the president say that what they saw Thursday morning was the most recent tantrum—“frustration,” as one of the officials put it—of a president in search of a scapegoat in case he’s denied a second term. None of these sources said they were aware of any serious effort to trample the clear constitutional guidelines and delay a presidential election. “He is terrified of losing this one,” said the person close to Trump. “I have heard him say more times than I can count how insane it would be to live in a country where the people could possibly prefer this guy, Joe Biden, over [the president] and think that this buffoon could be a better leader than Trump.” Asked at his press conference Thursday about the tweet, Trump said “it doesn’t need much explanation” before launching into a lengthy assertion of claims that there would be widespread fraud in the election due to the use of mail-in ballots, relying heavily on reports of delays and irregularities in New York City’s primaries. “I just feel, I don’t want to delay, I want to have the election. But I also don’t wanna have to wait for three months and then find out the ballots are all missing and the election doesn't mean anything,” said the president. “That’s whats gonna happen… smart people know it. Stupid people may not know it.” “Do I want to see a change? No,” said Trump, when pressed on whether he actually meant to change the election’s date or if he meant to sow doubt in the outcome. “I don’t want to see a crooked election.” Will Trump’s Voter-Fraud Rage Backfire? Even if Trump’s tweet about delaying an election—an act for which an army of legal scholars noted Trump lacks the authority—was just a bluff, it underscored a reality that isn’t much more reassuring: The president and his allies have been busy for months sowing doubt about the credibility of an outcome in which Trump isn’t the victor. And they’ve done so through increasingly baseless, self-serving means, including by directing tens of millions of dollars in advertising, multipronged legal action, and nonstop messaging, towards attacking the practice of voting by mail. On Thursday, following the president’s morning tweets, Trump’s lieutenants made clear that that was Team Trump’s primary concern: turning voting-by-mail, a well-established and fairly common practice in American elections, into a convenient bogeyman. “The president is just raising a question about the chaos Democrats have created with their insistence on all mail-in voting,” alleged Hogan Gidley, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary. “They are using coronavirus as their means to try to institute universal mail-in voting, which means sending every registered voter a ballot whether they asked for one or not.” Across town on Capitol Hill, the president hitting the send button on the Thursday tweet sparked a time-honored reaction: Republicans ducking and claiming they didn’t see it. For those who copped to looking, nearly all pointed out that Trump lacked the authority to follow through on his presumed threat. Others suggested he was merely joking. “I don’t know how else to interpret it,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told The Daily Beast. “All you guys in the press, your heads will explode and you’ll write about it.” But on the question of whether Trump’s words served to sow discord over the trustworthiness of the election, a familiar split developed, with lawmakers close to the president validating his stated concerns about mail-in ballots, and his critics expressing fear that Trump’s tweet was posted in earnest. Asked if she was concerned that Trump’s tweet would undermine public trust in the election, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) quickly said yes. “I think that we should all be working to shore up the faith in our electoral system,” Murkowski said. And Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has formally warned against undermining trust in U.S. elections, told The Daily Beast he wished Trump hadn’t said what he did. “He can suggest whatever he wants,” Rubio added. “We're going to have an election, it's going to be legitimate, it's going to be credible.” Even a co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society expressed horror at Trump’s tweet. “Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate,” Steven Calabresi wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times. Fox News Analyst: Trump’s Election Tweet a ‘Flagrant Expression of His Current Weakness’ Many Republicans were content to sidestep questions about the impact of Trump’s words on the public’s trust in elections. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) responded by saying that Trump was raising legitimate concerns about mail-in voting. But he also expressed confidence in the electoral process. “I feel like we’ll be ready to go in November, and we’ll have a free and fair election,” said Graham. While Trump’s main objective may have been to seed doubts about the outcome of the election, the fact that he expressed it shows the erosion of bulwarks against authoritarianism, according to lawyers and scholars. They warned that those safeguards depend in large part on Republican condemnation. The fact that they weren’t, said Jason Stanley, a Yale philosophy professor, poses an urgent threat to U.S. political stability, particularly as Trump “surges” federal agents into what he describes as Democratic-controlled cities against protesters he conflates with terrorists. “Republican leaders have to denounce this. Trump is testing the waters, like he always does,” said Stanley. “The worry is that after multiple presidential elections in which the minority party won and governed in a way untethered from its electoral support, American democracy is seriously challenged.” Legal scholars agree that the law provides no authority to the president to delay an election, but instead leaves that power in the hands of Congress. In 2014, a Congressional Research Service report assessed the prospect of delaying an election due to a “sufficiently calamitous” terrorist attack. It concluded that while the Executive Branch held “significant delegated authority regarding some aspects of election law, this authority does not currently extend to setting or changing the times of elections.” But the Trump years have provided routine lessons about the fragility of American institutions as bulwarks against authoritarianism. Jameel Jaffer, executive director of Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, said that beyond the illegality of delaying the election, it was significant that Trump believed he possessed the power to delay it. “There’s a difference between saying, ‘He’s not allowed to do this’ and saying, ‘He won’t do it,’” Jaffer said. “That’s what’s most disturbing here, not the possibility they come up with a colorable argument, but that the president will act in spite of the absence of any colorable legal argument.” A Justice Department spokesperson did not reply to a query about any recent guidance its Office of Legal Counsel has offered on the issue. During Tuesday testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General William Barr said he had “never looked into” whether the president could override statutes establishing the date of the presidential election. Barr also demurred when asked if he committed the department to noninterference in a contested election outcome, saying merely, “I will follow the law.” Several prominent Trump allies—including some of his chummiest advisers and most hardened legal defenders—dismissed the notion that he could or would push the election back. In a brief phone conversation, celebrity attorney and Harvard Law figure Alan Dershowitz, a member of the defense team during Trump’s impeachment trial, said, “The answer is clear: only Congress can change the date of the election. A president doesn't have the authority… Of course, any citizen has the right to ask Congress to make a change, but I can’t imagine that they would do that.” But others close to the president kept the door propped conspicuously open. Testifying on Thursday morning, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an attorney, said about presidential authority to delay an election, “In the end, the Department of Justice, others will make that determination.” Stanley, who authored the book How Fascism Works, said the presence of federal law enforcement in American cities rendered it “a dangerous time” for Trump to “raise doubts about the election in case he loses.” He noted that in Portland, agents from the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security “went and did what Trump wanted them to do” while using the language of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency to justify suppressing protesters. Vigilante violence tied to the election is also possible in the event that Trump disputes the outcome. Armed accelerationist elements like the Boogaloo Bois, a meme-turned-militant movement, seek a civil war or a race war. In Louisville over the weekend, opposing armed militias assembled at a rally for Breonna Taylor but avoided violence. Historically, “it’s very familiar when you have a militarized force used to going after foreign enemies and then allowed to operate domestically to separate citizens from noncitizens, and now the worry is they’ll be sent against protesters and demonstrators, and all of this is worrisome ahead of the election,” Stanley said. “Unfortunately, this is on the Republican Party, and unfortunately, the Republican Party has not been acting like a party in a democracy for quite some time.” Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
homersapien 11,374 Posted August 1, 2020 Share Posted August 1, 2020 America’s domestic tranquility depends on us administering the 2020 election right Opinion by George F. Will Columnist July 31, 2020 at 3:01 p.m. EDT When Margaret Fuller, one of 19th-century America’s public intellectuals, grandly proclaimed, “I accept the universe,” Thomas Carlyle, the British historian, reportedly said, “By gad, she’d better.” In 21st-century America, people worry about whether President Trump will “accept” defeat in the election. He’d better. Dignified comportment is not his strong suit, but surely he cannot equably contemplate being frogmarched out of the White House. Perhaps hoping to postpone that indignity, he has suggested postponing the election —supposedly to prevent fraud — which only Congress could do. Trump’s proposal performs a public service: With it, he probably — one cannot be certain — has finally unfurled a flag so bedraggled that not even congressional Republicans, those gluttons for servitude, will salute it. Today’s presidential noise aimed at fomenting doubts about election integrity should summon the nation to belated seriousness about preventing the calamity of a botched election. Low expectations of government competence, although increasingly reasonable, are intolerable regarding this election, because governments often live down to expectations. We know what to expect from Trump. Writing for the Bulwark, Kim Wehle, law professor and former U.S. attorney, notes that there are approximately 250 million voting-age Americans. Of those eligible to vote in 2016, Hillary Clinton received votes from 29 percent, Trump from 28 percent — and 39 percent did not vote. A Knight Foundation study of 12,000 “chronic non-voters” found that more than a third abstain because they think their votes do not matter or that “the system is rigged.” In a normal year, a 60 percent turnout of eligible voters — the 2016 rate — would be sufficient. Normally, it is not urgent, or even prudent, to hector and prod to the polls people so uninterested in the nation’s civic life that they must be hectored and prodded. This, however, is not a normal year, because the nation’s chief executive, possibly anticipating a defeat in the electoral college as well as in the popular vote, is sowing the suspicion that the election will be rigged — stolen by floods of fraudulent votes. This suspicion will ferment in a substantial minority of American minds. Although the polls look bad for Trump’s future, they look even worse for the nation’s. The fact that 46 percent of those who voted in 2016 opted for Trump is much less dismaying than the fact that today, in the RealClearPolitics average of polls, 43 percent approve of his job performance. In 2016, he was a largely undefined figure to low-information voters, who are a large majority. Now, however, everyone has had three and a half years of exposure to him, and more than 2 in 5 Americans seem amenable to four more years of this. Three things are clear. First, Trump will again lose the popular vote. Second, if he loses it narrowly, he will claim — as he did when he won in 2016, and as he is beginning to do preemptively — that fraud produced his margin of defeat. Third, many — perhaps most — of his voters, in their inexhaustible credulity, will agree. So, this year every vote cast against him — not just in the relatively few swing states, but also in states he will carry easily and those he will lose decisively — matters. The larger his national popular vote margin of defeat, the more his predictable sore-loser whining will seem not just contemptible but risible. Hence it is imperative that the conduct of this election depend as little as possible on the U.S. Postal Service and state and local governments doing unusually difficult things. Polling places must be staffed during a pandemic. There will be unprecedented demands for mail ballots, which must be tabulated quickly. The Republic’s domestic tranquility depends on encouraging a historic level of early voting. In 2016, more than 41 percent of ballots were cast before Election Day. Ideally, 70 percent will be this year. To minimize the scope for Trump’s sociopathy, the nation needs a timely determination of the outcome — before sunrise Wednesday, Nov. 4. To facilitate this — to prevent days or even weeks of uncertainty, during which Trump can fertilize discord — states should immediately stipulate that mailed ballots must be postmarked five days before Election Day, so that counting can be completed by that evening. During World War II, the nation bought 60,000 acres of eastern Tennessee wilderness and built an instant city — streets, houses, schools, shops and the world’s most sophisticated scientific facilities in Oak Ridge, a component of the Manhattan Project. Americans can do amazing things when alarmed, as they should be about administering the 2020 election. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americas-domestic-tranquility-depends-on-us-administering-the-2020-election-right/2020/07/31/39ffb186-d351-11ea-9038-af089b63ac21_story.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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