Tag: ballot drop boxes
Arson Hits Ballot Drop Boxes In Oregon And Washington

Arson Hits Ballot Drop Boxes In Oregon And Washington

With little more than one week until Election Day, a ballot drop box in Vancouver, Washington was set on fire, destroying hundreds of ballots. And in nearby Portland, Oregon, a ballot drop box was also set on fire, but a fire suppressant minimized the loss—just three ballots were damaged. An elections analyst said Vancouver is a strong source of Democratic votes in that congressional district, where the race is seen as extremely tight.

“Vancouver is the biggest city in Washington’s Third Congressional District, the site of what is expected to be one of the closest U.S. House races in the country, between first-term Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Republican challenger Joe Kent,” The Associated Press reports. “Clark County Auditor Greg Kimsey in Vancouver told The Associated Press that the ballot drop box at the Fisher’s Landing Transit Center … had a fire suppression system inside, but for some reason it wasn’t effective. Responders pulled a burning pile of ballots from inside the box, and Kimsey said hundreds were lost.”

“It’s a direct attack on democracy,” Kimsey told the AP, calling it, “heartbreaking.”

Washington state Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, suggested the fire was an act of terror and “said the state would not tolerate threats or acts of violence meant to derail voting.”

“I strongly denounce any acts of terror that aim to disrupt lawful and fair elections in Washington state,” Secretary Hobbs said.

Washington and Oregon are vote by mail states.

Professor of law and former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance called it “utterly unacceptable & criminal behavior,” and said “the local US Attys will make this a top priority for prosecution. No 60 day rule for election violence.”

Rick Hasen, a professor of law and noted elections law expert added, “Lighting ballot boxes on fire in a federal election is a serious crime. It is going to need to be investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice in federal and state courts.”

Elections expert Trygve Olson, a senior advisor to The Lincoln Project, commented, “there is nothing less American than the idea you would do something like this to your fellow Americans. It is an insult to our founders, to those who made the ultimate sacrifice for the nation, and for those around the world who would give just about anything to have the right to vote.”

Talking Points Memo publisher Josh Marshall called for “a massive (FBI/brings in the Feds level) effort to find these culprits and severely punish them. For all the ways confidence and the reliability of our voting system has been damaged. Destruction of ballots takes things to a dramatic and unsustainable new level which tears at the fabric which still mostly ensures civic peace.”

FiveThirtyEight senior elections analyst says Vancouver, Washington “is the biggest source of Dem[ocratic] votes in WA-03 (which went about 50 percent - 46 percent for Trump overall). Vancouver has ~200k people and is the main city in Clark County, a county that provided about 70 percent of all WA-03 Dem votes in 2020.”

According to FiveThirtyEight’s poll tracking, the last two polls in that district were tied, 46 percent to 46 percent.

The FBI is investigating and working with local and state officials.

KATU photographer was able to capture video of the ballot box on fire in Vancouver, Washington.

Voters in Vancouver “who dropped off ballots at that location after 11 a.m. Saturday need to contact the Election Auditor’s Office IMMEDIATELY for a new ballot,” KATU reports. “A link to the Clark County Elections page, with contact information for the Auditor’s Office, can be found HERE. Washington voters can track the status of their ballots HERE.

Watch the video below or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Trump’s Amateur Sleuths Poised To Decry Another 'Stolen Election'

Trump’s Amateur Sleuths Poised To Decry Another 'Stolen Election'

As Republican candidates, parties and groups are poised to legally challenge election results where they have lost or lag behind in the preliminary results, a parallel effort is underway in pro-Trump circles that likely will fabricate propaganda about illegitimate elections.

Candidates have long been able to challenge voters and ballots after Election Day during the vote count reconciliation process – called the canvass – which is before results are certified and recounts occur. But the efforts in Trump circles stand apart from these legal processes.

Trump Republicans and their allies are poised to gather “evidence” that frequently is not legally admissible in determining election outcomes, but can be exploited by propagandists to create distrust about voting, election officials, and the accuracy of voting systems.

“In some states, election deniers motivated by false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election are engaging in their own deeply flawed investigations to substantiate myths of widespread voter fraud,” reported the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School in a research paper released on Friday. “They have organized to engage in practices like amateur data matching with voter rolls, door-to-door canvassing to compare residents’ statements with voter records, and surveillance of mail ballot drop boxes. These error-ridden practices can disenfranchise eligible voters and strain election official resources.”

Among the most high-profile recent efforts has been surveillance of drop boxes in Arizona, a state where 80 percent or more of the voters cast mailed-out ballots. This effort includes taking photos and videos of individuals dropping off ballots and their car’s license plates. That tactic is among several to make the claim that legions of unregistered voters are casting ballots.

This tactic, apart from possibly intimidating voters, is an example of what the Brennan Center called an “error-ridden” practice. The address tied to a license plate may not be the same as a voter’s most recent registration information, especially if that voter recently moved.

Nonetheless, since the 2020 election, ex-Trump campaign workers and self-appointed data analysts have parsed voter rolls in swing counties in swing states to falsely claim that the rolls were rife with inaccuracies that could be exploited by Democrats to fabricate votes.

Initially, Trump activists started knocking on doors to verify if a voter’s address on their registration record was accurate, to ask if they voted in 2020 and gather personal information. That activity lead to accusations of voter intimidation by civil rights groups. Earlier this year, the focus shifted to filing mass challenges of voters’ credentials, such as in metro Atlanta in Georgia, where more than 60,000 challenges were almost entirely rejected by county election officials this past summer, who, nonetheless, had spent months investigating the complaints.

“Activists are being encouraged by those who claim the 2020 election was ‘stolen’ to perform their own amateur data matching. They are using National Change of Address lists, tax assessor data, a portal operated by government contractor Schneider Geospatial, public map services, and public voter data from multiple states to make inferences about current voter eligibility and past election legitimacy,” the Brennan Center report said. “In doing so, they are cobbling together incomplete datasets that can later become ‘evidence’ for candidates to baselessly challenge the legitimacy of the election if they lose.”

Those behind these efforts have waged recruitment drives to gather evidence for post-Election Day challenges or to generate fodder that almost certainly will be used for propaganda – filling media channels as some battleground states take more time to count their votes than others. (Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, for example, cannot start counting absentee ballots until Election Day. Florida, Arizona, and Nevada can start several weeks before.)

Whether led by ex-Trump White House officials or campaign lawyers based at Conservative Partnership Institute in Washington, or a looser collective of election deniers and self-appointed experts convened and funded by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, the ringleaders have instructed activists to use apps like Basecamp to coordinate their activities, and apps like VotifyNow to report incidents that they deem suspicious.

“In the upper left-hand corner is the menu tab that will bring up your voter integrity tools,” a VotifyNow tutorial said. “When you click on these buttons, such as mail-in ballot issues, you’ll see the app allows you to type in a brief description of any suspicious activity you notice, as well as upload a photo or video... That incident is then sent to our database to be analyzed and compared with other issues in your area.”

Needless to say, just because a citizen observer thinks that they are seeing something wrong does not mean that factually is the case, said Tammy Patrick, a senior advisor at the Democracy Fund, at a November 2 press briefing where threats to election officials were discussed.

“I’ve had some election officials tell me that these observers act like they’re going to find the body; that they are coming onto a criminal site or crime scene,” she said. “When you approach the information that way, when you don’t know what you are looking at, you’re going to find what [conspiratorial evidence] you are looking for.”

Nor are specious observations likely to be accepted as evidence in any post-Election Day administrative review or legal process. But what fails to meet a legal standard of evidence can succeed as disinformation.

“It is important to remember that all reliable evidence shows that our elections — including the 2020 election — are safe, secure, accurate, fair, and free of widespread voter fraud,” the Brennan Center said. “We cannot let these dangerous and defective schemes compromise our democracy.”

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

While Advocates Seek Election Reform, Republicans Busily Restrict Voting

While Advocates Seek Election Reform, Republicans Busily Restrict Voting

The failure of major federal voting rights legislation in the Senate has left civil rights advocates saying they are determined to keep fighting—including by suing in battleground states. But the little bipartisan consensus that exists on election reform would, at best, lead to much narrower legislation that is unlikely to address state-level GOP efforts now targeting Democratic blocs.

“This is the loss of a battle, but it is not necessarily the loss of a war, and this war will go on,” Eric Holder, the former U.S. attorney general and Democrat, told MSNBC, saying that he and the Democratic Party will be suing in states where state constitutions protect voting rights. “This fight for voting rights and voter protection and for our democracy will continue.”

“The stakes are too important to give up now,” said Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which for years has operated an Election Day hotline to help people vote. “Our country cannot claim to be free while allowing states to legislate away that freedom at will.”

In recent weeks, as it became clear that the Senate was not going to change its rules to allow the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act to pass with a simple majority, there have been efforts by some lawmakers, election policy experts, and civil rights advocates to identify what election reforms could pass the Senate.

“There are several areas… where I think there could be bipartisan consensus,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, in a briefing on January 20. “These areas are all around those guardrails of democracy. They are all about ensuring that however the voters speak that their voice is heard… and cannot be subverted by anyone in the post-election process.”

Becker cited updating the 1887 Electoral Count Act, which addressed the process where state-based slates of presidential electors are accepted by Congress. (In recent weeks, new evidence has surfaced showing that Donald Trump’s supporters tried to present Congress with forged certificates as part of an effort to disrupt ratifying the results on January 6, 2021.) Updating that law could also include clarifying which state officials have final authority in elections and setting out clear timetables for challenging election results in federal court after Election Day.

Five centrist Washington-based think tanks issued a report on January 20, Prioritizing Achievable Federal Election Reform, which suggested federal legislation could codify practices now used by nearly three-quarters of the states. Those include requiring voters to present ID, offering at least a week of early voting, allowing all voters to request a mailed-out ballot, and allowing states to start processing returned absentee ballots a week before Election Day.

But the report, which heavily drew on a task force of 29 state and local election officials from 20 states convened by Washington’s Bipartisan Policy Center, was notable in what it did not include, such as restoring the major enforcement section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was removed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013. It did not mention the Electoral Count Act nor growing threats to election officials from Trump supporters.

“This won’t satisfy all supporters of the Freedom to Vote Act, but this is a plausible & serious package of reforms to make elections more accessible and secure that could attract bipartisan support,” tweeted Charles Stewart III, a political scientist and director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. “A good starting point.”

The reason the centrist recommendations won’t satisfy civil rights advocates is that many of the most troubling developments since the 2020 election would likely remain.

Targeting Battleground States

Seasoned advocates in battleground states say that Republicans have been pursuing a bottom-up strategy of targeting key decision points in the voting process that, collectively, could end up suppressing more votes than the winning margins in recent highest-stakes contests.

They point to new laws and policies in Georgia, Florida, Wisconsin, and Texas, where the GOP has foreclosed early voting options, imposed new rationales to disqualify voters or cancel their ballots, and, in Georgia, has purged longtime Democratic county election officials. They also are concerned about new legislation that may be introduced in early 2022.

Georgia, whose 2020 elections were key to Donald Trump’s defeat and the return of the U.S. Senate’s Democratic majority, offers many examples. (The state received a 100 percent grade in the Prioritizing Achievable Federal Election Reform report, meaning it already complies with the suggested remedies.)

Beyond launching a state investigation of metro Atlanta’s Fulton County, which is seen as a precursor to a GOP-led takeover of its operations, pro-Trump Republicans’ partisan actions in Georgia also include a handful of smaller counties that have seen Democratic officials purged, polling place closures, and Sunday voting suspended, and more ballots disqualified during 2021’s municipal elections than in 2020’s presidential election.

“There’s a clear a pattern going on where they [pro-Trump Republicans] are burrowing into these counties,” said Ray McClendon, Atlanta NAACP political action chairman. “These [county] election boards are going to be hardened targets that you won’t be able to make heads or tails of how much they have rigged the system pro-Republican and anti-Democrat.”

“They’re going to tell you, ‘We’re just following the rules. There’s no requirement that we have Sunday voting. There’s no requirement that we have more than one polling place,’” said McClendon. “This is not a top-down strategy.”

News reports from local, regional, and national media confirm the overall pattern.

In rural Lincoln County, Georgia, county commissioners announced they would only stand up one polling place for 2022’s elections instead of seven. “We are not trying to suppress any votes; we’re trying to make it better,” Walker Norman, Lincoln County Commission chairman, told the local NBC TV affiliate. “If I thought it was suppressing anybody’s vote, I’ll be the first one with opposition to it.”

In Spalding County, south of Atlanta, several election commissioners in mid-2020—Black women and Democrats—were ousted under new authority given to local judges and county officials under SB 202, the GOP-led legislature’s response to the 2020 election. The new election board, led by Republicans, did not offer Sunday voting during 2021’s elections.

A Reuters investigative report found that Spalding’s Board of Elections (BOE) was among six county BOEs that had seen purges of Black Democrats under SB 202, which the federal Department of Justice has sought to overturn in a voting rights lawsuit filed in June 2021.

The six counties cited by Reuters—Lincoln, Troup, Morgan, Stephens, Pickens, and Spalding—supported Trump by large margins in 2020. But, collectively, the counties had more than 33,000 Biden votes, which was about three times Biden’s statewide victory margin over Trump. In contrast, in Fulton County, Biden beat Trump by more than 240,000 votes.

Similarly restrictive moves can be seen in Texas, said Andrea Miller, who heads the Center for Common Ground, which seeks to assist minority voters in Southern states.

“We’re currently dealing with the aftermath of the [2021] legislative changes in Texas,” she said, citing new rules over applying for a mailed-out ballot that have led to abnormally high rejection rates for the upcoming March 2022 primary elections.

“About 40 percent of the ballots are being rejected (which is a lot for Texas) and it is also taking nearly 30 days to get a ballot,” Miller said via email. “Seems Texas changed the length of your driver’s license number so if you have an old one, it doesn’t have nearly enough numbers and they ‘can’t find you in the system.’ The new law also requires that if you drop the ballot off, you must do so in person and you can only drop off your own ballot.”

Texas has also run out of voter registration forms, which the Texas secretary of state’s office has blamed on supply chain issues. (In his media briefing, Becker said that rejected absentee ballot applications were a failure by the state to educate the public, and the registration form shortage represented a failure to plan for implementing a new law.)

2022 State Legislation

Meanwhile, as 2022 begins, more legislation is looming. In Georgia, GOP legislators have introduced several bills to continue to foreclose voting options. One bill, sponsored by a state senator running for lieutenant governor, would prohibit the use of drop boxes to return mailed-out absentee ballots, which were a convenience during 2020’s COVID-19 outbreaks and alleviated polling place congestion on Election Day. In another battleground state, Wisconsin, a county judge ruled in mid-January that the ballot drop boxes were not properly authorized under state law in a lawsuit filed by a right-wing foundation. The state agency that approved their use in 2020 has been attacked by GOP lawmakers and is targeted in new legislation, Becker said.

Seen from the ground up, the purpose of the post-2020 legislation and related litigation is to allow newly empowered local Republicans to chip away at Democratic turnout, and, subsequently, to try to disqualify as many mailed-in ballots as possible, the NAACP’s McClendon said.

“They have become smart enough to know that they can’t justify just blocking people of color from voting,” McClendon said. “If they can just peel off a half a point from no Sunday voting, a quarter of a point from provisional ballots getting thrown out, another quarter of a point from people not properly filling out their ballot return envelope, they will get their numbers.”

This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, The American Prospect, and many others.

California Republicans Continue To Purloin Ballots In Illegal Drop Boxes

California Republicans Continue To Purloin Ballots In Illegal Drop Boxes

Despite a cease-and-desist order from California's Secretary of State, the state's Republican party continues to deny wrongdoing after setting up multiple illegal ballot drop boxes around the state.

Law enforcement discovered the drop boxes — some of which were falsely labeled "official" — over the weekend.

On Monday, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said that the operation was a clear breach of election law.

On Wednesday, Republican officials falsely claimed that their unofficial ballot drop boxes don't violate state law, and said they would continue to put up the fake drop boxes.

"There is nothing illegal about the collection of ballots provided by voters, on a certainly volunteer basis, and entrusted to the persons who are operating that local election, or local party office, from transmitting those ballots," California Republican Party general counsel Tom Hiltachk said.

"We're going to continue with the program because it complies with the law," he added.

Padilla said many of the ballots found in the drop boxes were invalid because they were missing information, such as the identity of the person submitting the vote and their relationship to the voter.

Donald Trump has routinely accused his adversaries of exploiting official state drop boxes to tamper with ballots, which he has called "a whole big scam."

"Some states use 'drop boxes' for the collection of Universal Mail-In Ballots," Trump tweeted in August. "So who is going to 'collect' the Ballots, and what might be done to them prior to tabulation? A Rigged Election? So bad for our Country. Only Absentee Ballots acceptable!"

There is no evidence for this claim. Official ballot boxes are designed to ensure the security and integrity of individual ballots.

This is just the latest example of Trump working to undermine the legitimacy of the presidential election that former Vice President Joe Biden is favored to win.

The Trump campaign has filed a flurry of lawsuits mostly targeting blue states to make it more difficult to vote safely during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Meanwhile, Republicans across the country continue to uphold restrictive voter ID laws and other laws that make it harder for citizens to vote.

In Texas, a three-judge panel upheld Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's decision to limit each county in the state to just one official ballot drop box. The judges who ruled in the case were all appointed by Trump.

As Nov. 3 inches closer, Trump will likely continue to try to sow confusion and invalidate the election's results ahead of time.

Last month, a reporter asked Trump if Americans could expect a peaceful transition of power if Biden wins the election.

"We're going to have to see what happens, Trump replied.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

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