The 2020 Election

[Rad]

Facing Gap in Pennsylvania, Trump Camp Tries to Make Voting Harder

Trailing in the polls, President Trump and his campaign are pursuing a three-pronged strategy that would effectively suppress the mail-in vote in the critical state of Pennsylvania.

By Nick Corasaniti and Danny Hakim
NY Times
Oct. 29, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET

PHILADELPHIA - President Trump's campaign in the crucial battleground of Pennsylvania is pursuing a three-pronged strategy that would effectively suppress mail-in votes in the state, moving to stop the counting of absentee votes before Election Day, pushing to limit how late mail-in ballots can be accepted and intimidating Pennsylvanians trying to vote early.

Election officials and Democrats in Pennsylvania say that the Trump effort is now in full swing after a monthslong push by the president's campaign and Republican allies to undermine faith in the electoral process in a state seen as one of the election's most pivotal, where Mr. Trump trails Joseph R. Biden Jr. by about six percentage points, according to The Upshot's polling average.

Mail-in votes in Pennsylvania and other swing states are expected to skew heavily toward Democrats. The state is one of a handful in which, by law, mail-in votes cannot be counted until Election Day, and the Trump campaign has leaned on Republican allies who control the Legislature to prevent state election officials from bending those rules to accommodate a pandemic-driven avalanche of absentee ballots, as many other states have already done.

At the same time, the campaign has pushed litigation to curtail how late mail-in votes can be accepted, as part of a flurry of lawsuits in local, state and federal courts challenging myriad voting rules and procedures. On Wednesday evening, the Supreme Court refused to hear a fast-tracked plea from Pennsylvania Republicans to block a three-day extension of the deadline for receiving absentee ballots. But Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat who is Pennsylvania's secretary of state, advised counties to segregate ballots received after 8 p.m. on Election Day, as the issue remains before the court.

The Trump campaign has also dispatched its officials to early voting sites, videotaped voters and even pressed election administrators in the Philadelphia area to stop people from delivering more than one ballot to a drop box.

The Trump campaign's on-the-ground efforts in Philadelphia have already drawn a rebuke from the state attorney general, who warned that the campaign's foot soldiers risked being charged with voter intimidation. But the Trump campaign has defied local leaders and is running a similar operation in Delaware County, one of the suburban "collar" counties around Philadelphia that have become increasingly Democratic since the 2016 election.

The campaign's strategy is backed up by public statements from the president, who barnstormed the state on Monday and repeatedly made false claims about the security of voting in Pennsylvania along with ominous warnings.

"A lot of strange things happening in Philadelphia," he said during a stop in Allentown. "We're watching you, Philadelphia. We're watching at the highest level."

The president's comments drew an angry response on Wednesday from Lawrence S. Krasner, the city's district attorney.

"The Trump administration's efforts to suppress votes amid a global pandemic fueled by their disregard for human life will not be tolerated in the birthplace of American democracy," Mr. Krasner said. "Philadelphians from a diversity of political opinions believe strongly in the rule of law, in fair and free elections, and in a democratic system of government. We will not be cowed or ruled by a lawless, power-hungry despot. Some folks learned that the hard way in the 1700s."

Some residents have been left bewildered by the Trump campaign's attention this year. During the primary election over the summer, Adam S. Goodman, an insurance lawyer, posted a photo on Instagram in which he proudly held up two mail-in ballots outside a drop box. He soon found that the picture had been included in litigation the Trump campaign filed against the city. The campaign used the photo of Mr. Goodman along with other photos to say that some voters were dropping off more than one ballot at drop boxes.

But Mr. Goodman said his husband was simply standing out of the frame when the picture was taken.

"I find it very concerning that they are taking photos out of context from people's Instagram pages or posting surveillance photos, and there's no follow-up to determine if that's the case," Mr. Goodman said in an interview. "My husband didn't want to be in the photo. He was with me, and I took a picture of the ballots."

He called the campaign's actions "manufacturing evidence that doesn't exist, and that's what concerns me."

The intensity of the Trump campaign's efforts in Philadelphia stems in part from the man running its Election Day operations nationwide: Michael Roman, a native Philadelphian who cut his teeth in city politics before running a domestic intelligence-gathering operation for the conservative Koch brothers. Like his boss, Mr. Roman has persistently made public statements undermining confidence in the electoral process.

Mr. Roman did not comment for this article.

In a statement, Thea McDonald, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, said: "While Democrats have attempted to force rule changes and sow chaos and confusion every step of the way, Republicans have clearly and consistently advocated for stable, understandable rules so that every voter knows how to cast their ballot and can do so with confidence it will count."

After the June primary, the Republican strategy began in earnest, in a battle that pitted Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, against the Republican-controlled Legislature.

Because of the pandemic, states like Pennsylvania are being flooded with mail-in ballots. Local election administrators and the governor sought to allow early processing of the ballots, known as "pre-canvassing," but Republicans attached conditions; among them, they wanted to do away with drop boxes, impose new signature-matching requirements and allow poll watchers to cross county lines, a step that good-government groups feared would invite intimidation and delays.

The state has a history of aggressive Republican tactics. In one of the more notorious episodes, Republican poll watchers stationed at a polling place at the University of Pittsburgh in 2004 began challenging the identities of large numbers of students waiting in line to vote, who had to get friends to sign affidavits for them.

Democrats were not seeking to actually scan the ballots early, as many other states are doing. Instead, they simply wanted to allow local officials to get a head start by opening envelopes and flattening the ballots, to get them ready for processing.

"This felt like a layup," Suzanne Almeida, a lawyer for Common Cause in Pennsylvania, said, adding, "county elections officials and county commissioners were very clear about how critical this was to them."

But the Republican maneuvers mean even those efforts will have to wait until the morning of Election Day.

"Pennsylvania did nothing" to prepare, said Amber McReynolds, chief executive of the National Vote at Home Institute and the former head of Denver's election system. "The Legislature has completely failed the counties."

As a result, Ms. Almeida said, "we're certainly not at a place where we're going to have results on election night."

"There's just no physical way," she continued. "There's three million people who have requested a mail-in ballot."

The campaign also brought an array of legal maneuvers that could disqualify some mail-in ballots. It successfully sued to prevent election officials from accepting ballots that arrive without their inner envelopes, known as secrecy sleeves. A Philadelphia election official warned that the disqualification of such "naked ballots" could lead to the rejection of more than 100,000 ballots statewide. That prompted a huge voter information campaign, including a video of naked celebrities.

Republicans also challenged the installation and use of drop boxes to allow voters to avoid the Postal Service, but that challenge failed in state and federal courts.

Aggressive tactics also continue on the ground. The Trump campaign first sent poll watchers to satellite election offices in Philadelphia where voters were dropping off and filling out mail-in ballots. But those poll watchers were barred by city officials, who said monitoring of election offices fell outside sanctioned poll-watching activities.

Then the campaign began videotaping drop boxes in and around the city. This month, the Trump campaign told The New York Times that it was only aiming to find people who were delivering large numbers of ballots to the drop boxes, not people who were dropping off an extra ballot, most likely for a family member.

But that claim was false. Within days, the campaign gave images to city officials of voters dropping off two or three ballots and demanded a crackdown. The campaign has also been monitoring how drop boxes are used in nearby Delaware County.

Voting has been upended by the pandemic, and many voters are unfamiliar with the rules around drop boxes, which they may be using for the first time. But city officials have rejected the campaign's assertions that the voters in the images are necessarily doing anything wrong. Under state law, voters can deliver only their own ballots to drop boxes, unless they are assisting a voter who has a disability or who otherwise needs assistance.

The bitterness of the campaign was on full display at a recent rally, where Mr. Trump promised to punish Pennsylvania and its governor for trying to thwart his rallies in the state.

"He shut us out, and he tried shutting us out of two other venues," said Mr. Trump, who was not shut out and held three rallies this week in the state.

A spokeswoman for the governor denied the claims and said the president's campaign had not contacted the governor's office about the rallies.

Mr. Trump promised revenge nonetheless.

"I'll remember it, Tom," he said in Allentown. "I'm going to remember it, Tom. "˜Hello, Mr. President, this is Gov. Wolf. I need help, I need help.' You know what? These people are bad."

Law enforcement officials, at least in Philadelphia, were unbowed by the president's threats.

"Keep your Proud Boys, goon squads and uncertified "˜poll watchers' out of our city, Mr. President," Mr. Krasner, the district attorney, said. "Break the law here, and I've got something for you."

[Rad]

"˜Under a cloud': Another stunningly arrogant Supreme Court opinion threatens the 2020 election

on October 29, 2020
By Cody Fenwick, AlterNet
- Commentary

In yet another disturbing U.S. Supreme Court decision, three conservative justices signed on to an opinion clearly suggesting they're open to arguments that might invalidate some Pennsylvania ballots after the election.

To understand what's going on, let's start with the positive news. The court as a whole rejected a plea from Republicans to reconsider a case in which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended the deadline for mail-in ballots received three days after Election Day, as long as they're postmarked by Nov. 3 (or the postmark is absent or unclear). The court had already declined to involve itself on the issue in a 4-4 split decision, leaving the state court's extension in place.

Newly confirmed Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose nomination was not yet complete at the time of the previous decision, recused herself from the latest case. According to the Supreme Court's Public Information Office: "Justice Barrett did not participate in the consideration of this motion because of the need for a prompt resolution of it and because she has not had time to fully review the parties' filings."

But while the Supreme Court did not take up the case again, Justice Samuel Alito, one of the court's staunch conservatives, wrote a statement making it clear that he objected to the state court's extension and desperately wanted to overturn it. He also made clear that he would be open to reconsidering the issue after the election - that is, he would be open to throwing out at any mail-in ballots received and counted after Election Day in Pennsylvania, despite the fact that they would be cast and counted in accordance with the rules as they are. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas signed on to Alito's statement.

"The Court's denial of the motion to expedite is not a denial of a request for this Court to order that ballots received after election day be segregated so that if the State Supreme Court's decision is ultimately overturned, a targeted remedy will be available," Alito wrote, in an extreme understatement for such an extraordinary claim. What he means is he's leaving open the possibility to later toss out some voters' ballots.

Alito's position is superbly arrogant. Whatever one may think of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's extension of the deadline to receive ballots, it is, in effect, the law of the state - just as the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions determine the state of federal law.

But rather than recognizing the court's authority, Alito warns that "the election in Pennsylvania" is "being conducted under a cloud." This claim is based on the idea that Alito himself objects to the court's ruling and nothing more.

In fact, it's his own statement, which threatens to invalidate ballots after they're cast and counted, that is putting the state's election "under a cloud."

Many legal experts argue that it's clearly the state supreme court's role to interpret questions of law in their state, and the Supreme Court shouldn't insert itself to intervene on state law matters. Alito, along with at least some of the other conservatives on the court, argue instead that because the Constitution grants authority over elections to state legislatures, the U.S. Supreme Court can and should step in to uphold the will of the Pennsylvania legislature, which did not want to extend the mail-in deadline.

Regardless of the merits of that debate, however, the legal facts are what they are. The state supreme court ruled, and a challenge to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court before the election failed. Voters are currently planning to act under the laws as they've currently been established. Alito himself acknowledges that there is not enough time at this point to take the case up again, which is why he did not dissent from the decision of his colleagues not take up the case now.

What's truly arrogant, though, is that in spite those facts on the ground, Alito is continuing to assert that the U.S. Supreme Court should have a say and might overturn the existing rules. He sees it as so necessary that he and the Supreme Court involve themselves in a case that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has decided that he's openly forecasting that they might overturn an election result and throw out ballots that were legitimately cast under the rules at the time. A more small-c conservative or modest justice would recognize that, whatever his objections in the case, his view hadn't won the day. But that's not how Alito sees it.

This arrogance is especially egregious give the matter at hand. While the issue, of cours,e has the potential to be highly influential, and thus the stakes are high, the state supreme court's decision is about the handling of ballots that would be cast by legitimate voters and presumably delivered by election day. Many states conduct elections this way - it's not as if the change is some extreme or unheard of remedy. Alito's extreme threat to disenfranchise people after the fact is not proportionate to the issue.

All that said, Pennsylvania voters with mail-in ballots would be well-advised at this point to not rely on the postal service to deliver their ballot, given the risks. They should seek out advice from their local election offices and potentially turn in their ballots in person or at official drop boxes, if possible.

Now, despite all the legitimate reasons I've described to be disturbed by Alito's statement, there are several reasons to think the issue is not particularly dire, as law professor Steve Vladeck explained.

In theory, Alito, along with Gorsuch, Thomas, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Barrett, could potentially hear a case after the election and decide to throw out enough ballots in Pennsylvania to swing the presidential race from Biden to Trump. But that seems quite unlikely to happen in fact, because a whole slew of factors would have to be in place for the move to work.

First, Pennsylvania would have to be the tipping point state in the electoral college. That's plausible, but far from guaranteed. Even more important, though, is that Pennsylvania would have to be the decisive state. This would mean that Biden only barely won the presidential election, with no extra states. That would likely mean Biden lost in North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Arizona, and Texas, where he is currently either leading slightly or running neck-and-neck with Trump. Again, this is possible, but it probably isn't the most likely scenario.

The Pennsylvania race would also have to be extremely close, close enough for the mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day to make the difference between Biden and Trump. Again that's possible, but it doesn't seem most likely when the New York Times polling average has Biden leading in the state by 6 points. Any ballots arriving after Election Day will be split between Trump and Biden - they could even potentially favor Trump - so it's only the final margin that would matter.

And for the Supreme Court's intervention to make the difference, Alito would need Barrett and at either Kavanaugh and Roberts to join him. It's impossible to give odds on how likely this is, but we can content ourselves by saying at least it's not a sure thing that a full five of six conservative justices on the court would be interested in going along with this plan after the votes have been cast.

Vladeck also noted that Pennsylvania has taken the wise step of planning to segregate any late-arriving ballots from the rest of the ballots it counts. That should forestall the possibility that the Supreme Court (or state legislature) would be inclined to say the state's whole election has been tainted by the inclusion of late-arriving ballots and try to circumvent the will of the people.

[Rad]

Trump's massive rallies amid COVID-19 pandemic are flopping in key battleground states

on October 29, 2020
By Meaghan Ellis, AlterNet

It is no secret President Donald Trump loves to bask in MAGA glory at his rallies, but a new survey shows his campaign blitz may be backfiring as voters wonder if the president bears responsibility for hosting potential super-spreader events while COVID-19 batters the Midwestern United States.

A new survey, compiled of voters in six battleground states-Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin-found that a great number of voters view Trump "much less" or "somewhat less favorably" due to his continued behavior amid the coronavirus pandemic, reports US News. Despite alarming upticks in cases across the Midwest, Trump has continued to visit vulnerable states and hold massive rallies all while disregarding COVID-19 mitigation practices.

Over the last few weeks, footage and photos have captured hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of mask-less Trump supporters standing shoulder to shoulder at the president's in-person rallies. Despite contracting COVID-19 and being hospitalized for the virus, Trump has not changed his campaign practices to protect his supporters.

Guy Cecil, chairman of Priorities USA, weighed in on Trump's actions admitting that it appears voters are catching on to his antics.

"Bad public health policy is bad politics, and voters are onto this," Cecil said.

Below is the survey breakdown, according to the publication.

"In Arizona, 56% saw Trump less favorably because of his rallies compared to 26% who saw him "much more" or "somewhat more" favorably; in Florida, the split was 58% unfavorable to 22% favorable; in Michigan, it was 57% unfavorable to 25% favorable; in North Carolina, it was 55% unfavorable to 25% favorable; in Pennsylvania, the divide was 58% unfavorable to 22% favorable; and in Wisconsin, it was 55% unfavorable to 25% favorable."

The state-of-the-race report comes just days ahead of Election Day. Based on the findings, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden appears to be in a positive position to win the election. States that appear to be solidly or favorably Democratic have reached a tentative total of 334 Electoral College votes.

Trump, on the other hand, appears to have a total of 126 Electoral College based on states solidly Republican which may make his road back to the White House more of an uphill battle. While Trump believes his rallies are working in his favor, he could be in for an upset on November 3 if the election results suggest his plan backfired.

[Rad]

Right-wing judges threaten to toss Minnesota ballots that don't arrive by Election Day - even if they were sent on time

on October 30, 2020
Raw Story
By Matthew Chapman

On Thursday, a three-judge panel for the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals tossed out a consent decree protecting mail-in ballots in Minnesota that arrive later than Election Day, as long as they are postmarked by that date.

The 2-1 order, issued by judges appointed by George W. Bush and Donald Trump, argues that the Minnesota Secretary of State usurped the authority of the legislature. The decision does not automatically throw out ballots that arrive late - but orders state election officials to set them aside, and suggests that they could be invalidated after the election.

    Here is a link to the order.

    "The Secretary (@MNSteveSimon) has no power to override the Minnesota Legislature."https://t.co/BHnnpaVjf9 pic.twitter.com/s2sL8KHDJh

    - Theo Keith (@TheoKeith) October 29, 2020

    NEW: In a 2-1 decision, the 8th Circuit ordered Minnesota to set aside and not count absentee ballots received after Election Day until legal challenges to a later deadline the state agreed to is all over - meaning those ballots could be invalidated https://t.co/TDAdd3Mltr pic.twitter.com/kdCgY7qjLI

    - Zoe Tillman (@ZoeTillman) October 29, 2020

Law professor Rick Hasen, writing for his Election Law Blog, called the decision "outrageous," noting that the legislature was not even a party to the case, and that it contradicts settled precedent that prevents federal courts from changing election rules while a vote is in progress.

"The majority suggests that a consent decree extending the deadline for absentee ballots in Minnesota, entered into by the Secretary of State and plaintiffs and approved by a state court, usurps the power of the state legislature under article II of the Constitution (under a theory a majority of the Supreme Court has not endorsed-at least not yet)," wrote Hasen. "The court reached this conclusion despite the fact that the Legislature did not object (the court found that Electors have standing, quite a dubious proposition that they could assert the rights of the legislature), that the Legislature delegated the power to the Secretary of State to take these steps, and despite the fact that we are on the eve of the election."

[Rad]

"˜Toss up': Trump's in danger of losing this red state that hasn't gone blue since 1976

on October 30, 2020
By Roger Sollenberger, Salon

With less than one week until Election Day and an unprecedented number of early votes already cast, President Donald Trump's campaign appears to be faltering in more states. And the most consequential slip seems to be underway in the historically unassailable conservative stronghold of Texas - an electoral prize Democrats have eyed for years. On Wednesday, the influential Cook Political Report shifted the deep red state towards Democratic nominee Joe Biden, from "lean Republican" to "toss-up."

While unprecedented, the shift should not come as a surprise given current polling in the state, as well as its leftward voting trends over the last few years, according to Cook's analysis. Indeed, Texas Republicans themselves appear jittery about the prospect, going to lengths to try to skew the electorate in their favor. If Texas turns blue, it would seal a Biden victory and preclude a deluge of Republican litigation, which experts anticipate would follow a tight result.

"Recent polling in the state - both public and private - shows a 2-4 point race," Cook election analyst Amy Walter writes. "That's pretty much in line with the hotly contested 2018 Senate race in the state where [Republican] Sen. Ted Cruz narrowly defeated [Democrat] Rep. Beto O'Rourke 51% to 48%."

The shift comes amid data that shows the Lone Star State far and away leads the nation in early voting. As of Oct. 28, Texas had already seen more than 8 million votes cast. That's 90% of the state's total 2016 electorate, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Elections Project at the University of Florida. Walter points out that this fact, combined with an influx of new voters, "adds a level of uncertainty" to their typical electoral equation for the state.

Texas Republicans have indicated they share that unsteadiness.

"Governor Greg Abbott has gone to extreme lengths to suppress voting, canceling the plans of its most populous counties to offer convenient drop boxes for voters to return their ballots," Corey Goldstone, spokesperson for the Campaign Legal Center, a group which advocates for fair elections, previously told Salon, referring to Abbott's controversial rule still working its way through the courts. "Rather than letting the counties go through with their plans, the governor has insisted on only one dropbox per county. This is voter suppression in its simplest form."

The Campaign Legal Center has sued the state over the rule.

Despite the dirty fight, Democratic leaders have pressed the Biden campaign and outside political groups to throw more resources at what once appeared a long-shot. O'Rourke argues that a Biden win in Texas obviates any debate about the national results, writing in a Washington Post op-ed earlier this month that the election would be decided "before Trump's lawyers can get through the courtroom doors."

"Thanks to Republican efforts to suppress voter turnout, Texas did not expand vote by mail in midst of a global pandemic. As a result, we will know the winner of the Texas presidential election on election night," O'Rourke wrote. "If Texas turns blue that night and its 38 electoral votes go to Biden, then Trump would have no viable path to victory, and the election would be over that night before Trump's lawyers can get through the courtroom doors to stop the vote counts in other states."

If Biden takes Texas - along with other Democratic-favored states like Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico and Virginia - he could still afford to lose Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin combined. Trump, meanwhile, has no viable path to victory without Texas.

Indeed, Trump's chances of winning Texas are now lower than other swing states, Cook says.

"At this point, Ohio and Maine's 2nd District are probably the most promising for Trump, followed by Texas and Iowa," Walter writes.

But even if Trump were to add those states to the ones he already has a lock on, he'd only have 188 electoral votes - still 82 shy of the magic 270. Of Cook's toss-ups, the site gives Biden a slight lead in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina.

Trump now has 20 safe states worth a combined 125 electoral votes, Cook projects. Biden, on the other hand, has 24 states in his column, worth 290 electoral votes - 20 more than he needs.

With such a map, Trump would need to win all of Cook's "toss up" states: Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine's 2nd District, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas. He would then need to add at least two of the seven states which Cook ranks "lean Democrat": Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Arizona poses the best opportunity, where Biden holds a small but steady 3-point lead Walter says. Still, Trump would need to eat into the former vice president's appeal with key voters in suburban Phoenix, a narrow prospect in Walter's view.

The Trump campaign has staged several rallies in Pennsylvania, which it sees as one bright spot on the map. FiveThirtyEight's polling average of the state has tightened, but Biden still leads by 5 points. Walter's analysis suggests that Biden has built on Clinton's margins in the suburbs, while Trump has slipped in regions which delivered the state for him in 2016 by a razor-thin 44,292 votes.

Biden does not need to win Texas, though the possibility is no longer a stretch. In concluding, Walter notes that skepticism in the recent past appears to have led pollsters to underestimate that possibility: A Cook analysis of 2016 and 2018 polling errors found that polls in the American Southwest "undershot Democrats' final margin in 17 of 19 cases, including by an average of 1.4 points in 2016 and 4.2 points in 2018."

[Rad]

"˜Mind-blowing': Experts stunned by 3 AM Trump tweets threatening Supreme Court Justices

on October 30, 2020
By David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement

President Donald Trump in the middle of the night launched a 45 minute Twitter tantrum that ended with an attack on the Supreme Court's justices, one-third of whom he placed on the bench.

Trump clearly was furious about a recent ruling handed down by eight of the now-nine justices. The Court ruled that Pennsylvania and North Carolina can accept absentee ballots after Election Day.

The president went ballistic, threatening the nation's top jurists.

"If Sleepy Joe Biden is actually elected President, the 4 Justices (plus1) that helped make such a ridiculous win possible would be relegated to sitting on not only a heavily PACKED COURT, but probably a REVOLVING COURT as well. At least the many new Justices will be Radical Left!"

The president is making clear not only that he is planning to contest the results of the election all the way to the Supreme Court, but that he fully expects the Court to hand him the win.

To be clear, unlike in some states, there is nothing in law that allows a presidential candidate to contest the results of an election. But Trump's legal team, and Jared Kushner, reportedly have been planning how to take the election to the Court for months.

Experts weighed in.

Princeton professor Steven Strauss, who "has advised governments on public policy issues" responded:

    Strange it is almost like Trump thinks SCOTUS selects the President and he does not believe these are non-partisan Justices - very odd https://t.co/xS1sh2GMNT

    - Steven Strauss (@Steven_Strauss) October 30, 2020

ACLU attorney Josh Block mocked the president and his defenders:

    Shameful that Democrats and progressives would sully the good names of principled originalist Justices by accusing them of doing exactly what the President who nominated them says they are doing. https://t.co/c0NvjwRjE6

    - Josh Block (@JoshABlock) October 30, 2020

Joshua Geltzer, a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center and a former Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice, among other government roles, slammed Trump's attack as "mind-blowing":

    For a US President to attempt to pressure Supreme Court Justices into issuing a ruling handing him the election to avoid potentially unwanted new colleagues on the Court is "¦ mind-blowing.

    And yet very on brand for Trump: what's in it for them, he asks, if I win?

    His answer: pic.twitter.com/b7ksvnkirX

    - Joshua A. Geltzer (@jgeltzer) October 30, 2020

[Rad]

"˜I've got a jail cell': Trump and his "˜goons' threatened with arrest by angry Philly DA if they disrupt Election Day

on October 30, 2020
By Tom Boggioni
Raw Story

In a very blunt warning on CNN on Friday morning, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner served notice to Donald Trump that a jail cell awaits him if he keeps encouraging his rabid followers to interfere with voters on Election Day.

Speaking with host Alisyn Camerota, Krasner was asked about a tweet he directed at the president this past week and what message he was trying to send to Trump when he wrote, "I've got something for you."

"That means I've got a jail cell and I've got criminal charges and you can stand in front of a Philadelphia jury, which, by the way, is a diverse jury, and you can explain why you thought it was okay to come to Philly and steal our votes. This is the birthplace of democracy and we are not doing this - wannabe fascists stay home," Krasner explained.

"So you are dispatching detectives or prosecutors to try to make sure that there's no voter intimidation?" Camerota pressed.

"We are dispatching both. and the Philadelphia Police Department has a very good plan for Election Day," he replied. "We have a bigger bunch than ever - they are extremely well trained and we're looking for new things. We've never really had to be concerned that a bunch of knuckleheads were going to show up at the polls with guns. if they do it this time, they're going to have a problem. Because the fact is, the Second Amendment does not protect people who claim to be in a militia and have not been summoned by the governor."

"Militia is not something you get to be by saying it - it's something you get to be when governmental authority summons you," he continued. "If you want to dress up like GI Joe and claim you are protecting the polls when we all know what you're really doing is intimidating voters, you're getting locked up."

"I think the truth is, the president is a lot of talk," he added. "These guys with the little skinny gray-beards are a lot of talk. When when the Proud Boys tried to do a march in Philly, they had to import people from Indiana. They couldn't do enough to do a small march in Philly. I think this is a lot of talk - we're going to be very vigilant and expect to have a very, very successful voting day."

Watch: https://youtu.be/5aRXkOtFxsg

[Darja]

'Red mirage': the 'insidious' scenario if Trump declares an early victory

The situation could develop if the president appears to be leading on election night before all votes are counted - and for some officials, it's too realistic for words

Tom McCarthy
Guardian
11/1/2020

Scenarios for how an election disaster could unfold in the United States next week involve lawsuits, lost ballots, armed insurrection and other potential crises in thousands of local jurisdictions on 3 November.

But there is one much simpler scenario for election-night chaos, centering on a single address, that many analysts see as among the most plausible.

'To me, it's voter suppression': the Republican fight to limit ballot boxes..Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/29/us-election-drop-boxes-partisan-legal-battles

The scenario can be averted, election officials say, by heightening public awareness about it - and by cautioning vigilance against carefully targeted lies that Donald Trump has already begun to tell.

Known as the "red mirage", the scenario could develop if Trump appears to be leading in the presidential race late on election night and declares victory before all the votes are counted.

The red mirage "sounds like a super-villain, and it's just as insidious", the former Obama administration housing secretary Julían Castro says in a video recorded as a public service announcement to voters this week.

"On election night, there's a real possibility that the data will show Republicans leading early, before all the votes are counted. Then they can pretend something sinister's going on when the counts change in Democrats' favor."

In the scenario, Trump's declaration of victory is echoed on the conservative TV network Fox News and by powerful Republicans across the US. By the time final returns show that in fact Joe Biden has won the presidency, perhaps days later, the true election result has been dragged into a maelstrom of disinformation and chaos.

To some officials, the scenario is too realistic for words. A potential multi-day delay in counting votes is anticipated in Philadelphia, whose mostly Democratic votes are crucial for Biden to win in Pennsylvania, currently the state the quants see as most likely to tip the election one way or the other.

After counting only 6,000 absentee ballots in the 2016 election, the city of Philadelphia, where Democrats outnumber Republicans seven to one, expects to receive and count as many as 400,000 mail-in ballots this year, with the coronavirus pandemic raging.

All of those ballots will be counted inside the city's cavernous convention center on Arch Street, beginning at 7am on the day of the election, by an army of poll workers, including many new recruits, using recently purchased equipment.

The delay that officials know will be required to finish the counting could be enough time for Trump to sow doubt about the result, an effort the president has already begun.

"Bad things happen in Philadelphia," Trump said at the first presidential debate in September, warning about "tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated" and "urging my people" to watch polling sites carefully, despite there being no evidence of widespread fraud in US elections.

Current and former Pennsylvania officials and activists say that the antidote to the "red mirage" is as simple as the scenario itself.

The public must understand, these officials say, that Philadelphia will not be able to report its election result on the night of 3 November, and may not be able to do so for days afterward, owing to the extraordinary circumstances that the pandemic has wrought.

In turn, the surge of Democratic votes out of Philadelphia, when they do land, will probably create the perception of a huge swing in the state to Biden. And finally, that swing could well be large enough to erase a lead that Trump might build up in rural counties elsewhere in the state - to appear to turn Pennsylvania from "red" to "blue" - and to potentially decide the entire election.

"All votes will not be counted by midnight on November 3," said Tom Ridge, a former Republican governor of Pennsylvania and homeland security secretary under George W Bush who decries Trump's "absolutely despicable conduct and rhetoric" about the election.

"Because of Covid-19, there'll be millions of mail-in votes that it'll take several days to tally," Ridge said in a phone interview. "One of the ways to reduce the anxiety level is to remind Americans of that reality, and call for peace and patience so that every vote can be counted."

The blood-curdling thing about the red-mirage scenario, for some analysts, is that some aspects of it look more like a certainty than a scenario.

    People should know that there will not be a result on election night

Lisa Deeley

"People should know that there will not be a result on election night," said Lisa Deeley, chair of a three-member panel of Philadelphia city commissioners that runs the election. "So people will go to bed and we won't have that count finished. But we will be working continuously, through the night, to make sure we get that count as quickly and accurately - we won't sacrifice accuracy for speed."

"The key term is "˜election week'," said Patrick Christmas, policy director of the non-partisan Committee of Seventy good government organization in Philadelphia. "There's no longer going to be an election day here."

As plausible as it is, however, there are also many reasons why a "red mirage" scenario might not unfold. Biden could put the race away with a win earlier on election night in a key battleground state such as Florida. Or Biden could win the state of Pennsylvania, where he leads by 6 points in polling averages, without needing the last 200,000 or so votes out of Philadelphia.

Alternatively, a "red mirage" for Trump might develop elsewhere in the country, outside of Philadelphia - anywhere that a big city in a swing state, from Milwaukee to Miami to Cleveland, ends up taking a long time to report results.

But the enormous task that Philadelphia faces in counting an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots while observing social distancing and other coronavirus mitigation measures means the city is in a uniquely difficult spot.

Making life more difficult for Philadelphia election officials, negotiations broke down last week between the state's Republican-led legislature and the Democratic governor to allow the processing of mail-in ballots - meaning removing the ballots from their envelopes and smoothing them for insertion into counting machines - before election day itself.

Florida allows weeks for such early processing, as do North Carolina, Arizona and other battleground states, making it possible for those states to report results promptly on election night. Wisconsin, another key battleground, does not have early processing, while Michigan allows just one day for early processing.

"It's very sad to me, it's very troubling, that the political parties couldn't agree on this," said Ridge, who is involved in two bipartisan organizations to secure the ballot, Vote Safe and the National Council for Election Integrity.

At the Pennsylvania convention center in downtown Philadelphia, mail-in ballots are already on site, under lock and key, waiting for election day.

Promptly at 7am, officials will begin to feed the ballots into new extraction machines that use suction cups to open the ballots' outer envelopes so that officials can remove an inner privacy envelope containing the ballot. Then the ballot must pass through the extraction machine again. Then the ballot must be smoothed, and then put through a counting machine.

    The key term is "˜election week'. There's no longer going to be an election day here

Patrick Christmas

Many representatives from each party will be allowed inside the convention center to observe the process, but arrangements for media to be inside have been shelved. Any ballot whose validity is contested - perhaps because the voter neglected to use the inner envelope, rendering a so-called "naked" ballot - must be reviewed by commissioners in a process that has not been publicly described.

"There are challenge guidelines that are outlined in the state election code, and we will follow those guidelines," Deeley said.

Some election observers fear that the presence inside the hall of Trump supporters could create an opportunity for havoc - especially with concerns about coronavirus - that could interrupt the operation in a way that could allow Trump to amplify his claims of fraud in Philadelphia.

Deeley said election officials were prepared for attempts to tamper in the election.

"There's security at the convention center," she said, and pointed to statements by Philadelphia's district attorney, Larry Krasner, that the city was ready to prosecute election-related wrongdoing.

"He announced he's ready to go, and that's not going to be allowed on Philadelphia election day."

In each election, voters entrust their neighbors who volunteer as poll workers to tally election results, and that trust is as well-placed this year as in years past, no matter what Trump says, Ridge said.

"For him to suggest that these local officials would engage in willful, intentional, massive fraud, in order to discredit or delegitimize the process, is unfathomable and unpresidential," Ridge said.

"We've hopefully begun to inoculate and educate Americans around the necessity of patience so that every vote can be counted."

[Rad]

"˜Mail has been sitting for over a week!': Disturbing video from inside Florida post office - mail-in ballots "˜piled up'

11/1/2020
By David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement

A top Florida congressman just tweeted out video from inside a Miami post office that shows what appears to be an out of control sorting facility with mail in bins and boxes in no discernible order. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy for months worked to slow down the processing and delivery of mail, and this video seems to show he was successful.

"Mail has been sitting for over week!" Florida House of Representatives Democratic Leader Kionne McGhee says, noting "mail in ballots are within these piled up in bins on the floor."

"Speaking with a resident within the area and being told some in the area haven't received their mail from the below mentioned post office in five days."

Take a look:

    Raw footage of mailroom in post office here in Miami Dade. Source revealed "mail in ballots are within these piled up in bins on the floor. Mail has been sitting for over week!." @AmandiOnAir @PeterSchorschFL @MarcACaputo @GlennaWPLG @CNNPolitics @NewsbySmiley @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/DO8jx1VUnz

    - Dem House Leader (@kionnemcghee) October 30, 2020

Some responses via Twitter:

    What. And I can't emphasize this enough. The. Fuck. https://t.co/9il3AnluFH

    - The Hoarse Whisperer (@TheRealHoarse) October 30, 2020

    How do you feel knowing you took all steps necessary to mail your ballot well ahead of deadline only to find out it is intentionally sitting around unsorted, undelivered and that Republicans are in courts to make sure it doesn't count if late, even though you followed the rules? https://t.co/Q0WVtuuYfK

    - Jennifer Hayden (@Scout_Finch) October 30, 2020

    This video should have 1 million retweets.

    It won't"¦and that sucks"¦

    Because if this is happening at other post offices across the country this could be directly responsible for Trump winning. https://t.co/3v1TOnx3Cp

    - Don Winslow (@donwinslow) October 30, 2020

    America.

    Don't accept this.

    This was Trump and DeJoy's plan all along. https://t.co/3v1TOnx3Cp

    - Don Winslow (@donwinslow) October 30, 2020

    If things come down to Florida, look for @JennaEllisEsq and Co. to no doubt argue these votes should be excluded if they fail to arrive in time after USPS left them sitting for days. https://t.co/Nid6RtIF09

    - Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) October 30, 2020

    What is being done about this??? https://t.co/dLiKgCQKBx

    - Jodi Jacobson #BlackLivesMatter (@jljacobson) October 30, 2020

    All according to the GOP plan. https://t.co/7GAnWQRKpR

    - Markos Moulitsas (@markos) October 30, 2020

    This is un-American.

    And why we must vote in person or use a drop off box whenever possible.

    This cannot stand. VOTE.

    And then we must prosecute all responsible for USPS sabotage"¦ https://t.co/jpu3SWxw4S

    - Rex Chapman (@RexChapman) October 30, 2020

    WHAT THE FUCK

    Everyone in media needs to get on this. These ballots better be counted!!! https://t.co/C4vXyN3z6G

    - Fred Guttenberg (@fred_guttenberg) October 30, 2020

[Rad]

Voting wars: Inside the Republican Party's most overt voter suppression effort in years

11/1/2020
By Steven Rosenfeld, Independent Media Institute

Two countervailing forces are competing to determine the outcome of the 2020 elections' highest-stakes contests before the close of voting on November 3.

President Trump and his Republican allies are pursuing a full-court press where their success hinges less on winning popular vote majorities and more on disqualifying volumes of absentee ballots via lawsuits to be filed after Election Day-if preliminary results in a few key states are close. The Democratic Party and their allies, meanwhile, have been pushing their party's more highly motivated voter base to continue their turnout lead seen in early and absentee voting, so Republicans cannot gain traction when they turn to the courts to disqualify late-arriving absentee ballots, or cite other technicalities to disqualify votes.

"We are targeting 8.8 million students, faculty and staff in universities in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. We have state-specific ads for every one of our campaigns," said Andrea Miller, executive director of People Demanding Action, which has been turning out voters in communities of color. "And then we are also advertising our election protection tool, "˜See Something, Say Something"˜"¦ We have done outreach to nearly 20 million people and the election isn't over."

More than 85 million people have already voted as of Friday, October 30, according to the U.S. Elections Project early voting tracking website. So far, more than 55 million absentee ballots have been received by local election officials, 30 million people have voted in person, and another 35.5 million absentee ballots have yet to be returned. According to those voters' party registrations, Democrats and Republicans have split the in-person voting, but Democrats lead in absentee ballots-where sizable numbers of voters registering as independents have cast ballots.

Whether or not the apparent enthusiasm gap continues through Election Day-or shifts via what the Republicans hope will be a large in-person turnout on November 3-is an open question. However, the Trump campaign and its allies are not counting on popular vote victories to secure a winning margin among state Electoral College delegations. Their litigation strategy arguably has been the Republican Party's most overt voter suppression effort in years-building on Trump's ongoing and baseless attacks on the legitimacy of absentee balloting.

The voting wars are legal fights over technicalities in processes that can end up disqualifying-or empowering-blocs of voters to tilt close-margin contests. The 2020 election has seen more litigation over these technicalities, especially surrounding the use of mailed-out (or absentee) ballots, than any recent presidential election. While Democrats secured many early victories, especially in state and federal district courts, Republicans in recent days have won notable decisions-and legal arguments-in the Supreme Court and federal appeals court.

There's a common thread running through these decisions that appears to give Republicans an opening to initiate post-Election Day litigation. In rulings affecting Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Minnesota, conservatives have highlighted a way to disqualify what may become thousands of absentee ballots that were properly mailed and postmarked (by Election Day), but are received by election officials days later via mail delivery.

Various judges-including a likely Supreme Court majority among the high court's conservatives without Chief Justice John Roberts-have said that only state legislatures have the authority to regulate elections with federal candidates. That construction is based on the U.S. Constitution, whose opening articles delegate no power to state supreme courts, state constitutions, secretaries of state or statewide election boards to run elections. These non-legislative actors took steps this year to issue regulations to assist voters and election officials in response to COVID-19.

Thus, in Wisconsin, the Supreme Court said absentee ballots that were not received by November 3 would not be counted-because the state's (Republican majority) legislature did not extend the deadline. Justice Brett Kavanaugh also commented that election results should be known by election night, which mirrors Trump's rhetoric but does not reflect the reality of states like Wisconsin where local clerks will only start processing 1.1 million ballots that morning.

In Pennsylvania and North Carolina, the Supreme Court said one week before Election Day that it was too late to overturn ballot-return deadlines that went past Tuesday. (In Pennsylvania, it's Friday, November 6. In North Carolina, it's Thursday, November 12.) While much national press coverage said those two rulings were Democratic victories, those assessments glossed over statements, concurrences and dissents from four conservative justices that basically said that ballots arriving after Election Day could be disqualified if a legislature didn't extend the return deadline. Newly seated Justice Amy Coney Barrett didn't participate in those cases.

In response, Pennsylvania's attorney general told the Supreme Court that the secretary of state was directing all county election officials to "segregate" all absentee ballots arriving after November 3 and through the November 6 deadline. Election law experts said that Pennsylvania's move would insulate absentee ballots arriving earlier from challenges-because late-arriving ballots would not be mixed in with those earlier batches of ballots when counted.

North Carolina's state election board is not following Pennsylvania's lead-as a precautionary measure. It issued a statement urging all voters to return absentee ballots as soon as possible, but said the final deadline was on November 12.

A day after the Supreme Court ruling in the Pennsylvania and North Carolina suits, a federal appeals court in Minnesota threw out its week-long absentee ballot-return deadline extension-issued this summer by the secretary of state as part of a legal settlement with Republicans.

"The Secretary and his respective agents"¦ are ordered to identify, segregate, and otherwise maintain and preserve all absentee ballots," the Eighth Circuit Court's decision said, "in a manner that would allow for their respective votes [for president and vice president]"¦ to be removed from vote totals in the event a final order is entered by a court."

Taken together, the highest rungs of the federal courts have given the Republicans an opening to seek to disqualify any late-arriving ballots in Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Minnesota. (All other states with extended absentee ballot-return deadlines resulted from legislation.)

How many votes could be implicated should post-Election Day legal challenges arise? Former Oregon Secretary of State Phil Keisling, a Democrat who oversaw its shift to all-mail balloting, said that 90 percent of voters who apply to vote with absentee ballots return those ballots. According to the U.S. Elections Project, which gets its data from state election officials, as of Friday, October 30, hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots are still in play.

    In North Carolina, 883,000 ballots have been returned, out of 1.45 million requested ballots, a return rate of 61 percent. Nearly 600,000 absentee ballots have not yet been received.
    In Pennsylvania, 2.1 million ballots have been returned, out of 3.1 million requested ballots, a return rate of 68 percent. Nearly 985,000 absentee ballots have not yet been received.
    In Minnesota, nearly 1.6 million people voted early and returned their absentee ballots. The state doesn't further break down those figures. Statewide, 1.97 million absentee ballots were requested.

While there may yet be more federal litigation before Election Day, the big picture is that the Republicans appear to be placing little stock in popular vote victories and are on track to try to win some swing states via challenging late-returning absentee ballots-and as the opening move in post-Election Day litigation. Democrats, on the other hand, are continuing to push voters to return their absentee ballots in person, vote early or vote on Election Day.

Under any scenario, it's not likely a presidential election winner would be known until later in the week-at the earliest. The U.S. Senate's majority will take longer, as some states such as Georgia are likely to see runoffs. And control of state legislatures may take longer still, if the balance comes down to a few contests where recounts are triggered.

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.

[Rad]

Student Voting Surges Despite Efforts to Suppress It

The coronavirus pandemic and new requirements in Republican-led states created voting obstacles for college students this year. Yet youth participation appears to be on the rise.

By Dan Levin
NY Times
11/1/2020 

With many campus quads resembling ghost towns and childhood bedrooms serving as lecture halls, politically active college students have moved their get-out-the-vote efforts online, hosting debate watch parties on Zoom, recruiting poll workers over Instagram and encouraging students to post their voting plans on Snapchat.

Young voters, traditionally a difficult group for politicians to get to the polls, are showing rare levels of enthusiasm in this election, even as college students have faced new obstacles to casting their ballots - some stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, and others from elected officials seeking to impede college voting.

At Bard College in New York State, students sued to bring a polling station to campus. Residential advisers at the University of Pittsburgh used Zoom to register new voters. And at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, students have signed up as poll workers to help their fellow Badgers navigate some of the nation's toughest voter identification laws.

"We've had to exhaust every possible option to continue energizing voters," said Roderick Hart, a junior at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

"In the past, we had massive rallies and all these people walking around with clipboards registering kids to vote," Mr. Hart, 20, said. "But now, social media is really our only way of connecting everybody at once, considering we're not on campus."

Despite the difficulties, efforts to mobilize the youth vote, along with greater accessibility through early-voting hours and mail-in ballot options, appear to be paying off, with potentially significant implications for races nationwide.
I
More than five million voters under 30 have already cast ballots for next week's election, including nearly three million in 14 key states that could decide the presidency and control of the Senate, according to data compiled by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.

That is more than double the number of ballots cast by young voters at a similar point in the 2016 presidential election, mirroring an increase in early voting among all demographics because of coronavirus concerns. The early-voting numbers for young people are particularly notable in states such as Texas, where, by the end of last week, nearly two-thirds as many had cast early votes as the total number of young voters four years ago, according to Tufts researchers.

A national poll conducted by the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School found that 63 percent of youth voters surveyed said they would "definitely be voting," suggesting turnout similar to 2008, when enthusiasm for Barack Obama's candidacy led to higher levels of youth voting than in any election since 1984.

Energized by issues like climate change and the Trump presidency, college students emerged as a crucial voting bloc in the 2018 midterms, when their turnout rate of 40.3 percent, according to the Tufts Institute for Democracy and Higher Education, was more than double the rate four years earlier.

Faced with those surging numbers among a voting group that leans heavily Democratic, Republican lawmakers in numerous states, including several battlegrounds, have taken actions that they said were intended to prevent voter fraud - including enacting restrictive ID rules and byzantine voter registration requirements - that have also made it more difficult for college students to cast ballots.

Elected officials have also moved to diminish the electoral power of campuses through redistricting, as well as by limiting early voting sites, purging voter rolls or refusing to permit polling stations on campus. And the logistics of the pandemic could alter where young people cast their ballots, potentially affecting races where candidates, typically Democrats, count on support from students living in their districts - but many of those students are now at home.

"Every aspect of students' ability to vote is under attack," said Maxim Thorne, managing director of the Andrew Goodman Foundation, a nonprofit group focused on protecting voting rights for young people. "You have to fight these battles on every front, whether you're in a state as blue as New York or as red as Georgia."

In New Hampshire, where six in 10 college students come from outside the state, a rate among the nation's highest, a Republican-backed law took effect last fall requiring newly registered voters who drive to obtain an in-state driver's license and auto registration, which can cost hundreds of dollars annually. The law passed after years of calls by state Republicans to clamp down on voting access for college students.

"They are kids voting liberal, voting their feelings, with no life experience," the state's Republican House speaker said in 2011 when discussing plans to tighten up voting requirements.

    Biden continues to outspend Trump on the airwaves in the final stretch of the campaign.
    As the U.S. votes, a frazzled world holds its breath.
    Obama will join Biden on the campaign trail in Michigan, hoping to drive turnout.

Is this helpful?

Republicans in North Carolina enacted voter ID requirements in 2018 that recognized student identification cards as valid but proved so cumbersome that large state universities were unable to comply. A later revision relaxed the rules, and a federal judge blocked the law in December, but confusion lingers.

"The thing that's hard is, everybody's like, "˜No I can't vote today because I don't have my ID with me,' and you have to explain they don't need that," said Kate Fellman, executive director of You Can Vote, a nonpartisan group in North Carolina.

In Wisconsin, Republicans have imposed some of the toughest restrictions, including a requirement that IDs used for voting expire within two years, which invalidates most student IDs issued by four-year schools. The University of Wisconsin, which has around 40,000 students in Madison, created a second form of ID that complies with the voter law.

When the pandemic shuttered campus last spring, the school developed a digital version of the voter ID, and students can now print them out at campus polling sites.

Not all colleges are so enthusiastic about ensuring students can vote. Last month, the University of Georgia canceled plans for in-person voting on campus, citing concerns about social distancing and insufficient space during the pandemic.

After an uproar from student voting groups and local officials - who noted that the school had chosen to allow up to 23,000 fans to attend home football games - the university reversed course and agreed to house voting booths in the basketball arena.

Organizers who have relied on traditional canvassing on college campuses have turned to virtual options during the pandemic. Jess Scott, a senior at the University of Pittsburgh, and a fellow student mapped out a network of resident advisers across campus, asking them to host voter information sessions on Zoom with the undergraduate students in their dorms.

"We just came in and got as many students as we could engaged on their floor," said Mr. Scott, a fellow with Rise, a college voter advocacy organization.

Max Lubin, the chief executive of Rise, said the group's target in Pennsylvania is to turn out more college voters there this year than President Trump's 44,000-vote margin of victory in the state in 2016. So far, 50,000 students have registered and made a plan to vote with the organization, including 4,000 at the University of Pittsburgh, Mr. Lubin said.

At Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., students and the school sued in September to get a polling site on campus; the closest place to vote was at a church located down a dirt road in the nearby town of Red Hook.

A New York State Supreme Court judge originally denied their petition, citing a Republican member of the Dutchess County Board of Elections who said it was too close to the election to change polling locations. Yet the very next day, the board moved two other polling sites in Red Hook.

On Friday, the judge reversed her decision and ordered the polling site to be moved to Bard's main student center.

"For the first time on this campus," said Sadia Saba, 21, a senior who was a plaintiff in the case, "students feel like their voices are being heard in the political process."

[soleil]

Hi Rad,

The article you posted about the handwriting expert who analyzed Trump's signature in 1988 was really interesting. I, too, have always thought Trump's signature was the most disturbing I have ever seen. Not to mention his hand movements---the hand gestures of a madman, who has to aggressively dominate even the space around him.

Even though the polls look good for Biden, the evil power-hungry Republicans already have a vote-cancelling infrastructure in place, so, unfortunately, Trump may still be able to steal the election.

Also, in the last week, several hospitals---coincidentally (not) in swing states---have been hit with ransomware coming from Russia. Who knows what will happen on election day.

Any final thought before the election?

Thanks so much. I appreciate your perspective.

Soleil

[Rad]

Hi Soleil,

In the end Biden/Harris will prevail is my final thought reflecting the MAJORITY of Americans. What happens in America for many years to come is another issue.

God Bless, Rad

Soleil here is yet another nauseating example of the evil of  this man called Trump:

Trump is ending his campaign on an ugly new low

on November 1, 2020
Raw Story
By Ray Hartmann
- Commentary

Donald Trump, tragically occupying the office of president of the United States, possibly has uttered the ugliest words of an ugly career defacing the national stage. And they barely led the news anywhere.

Trump has been claiming at his super-spreader rallies for the past week that American doctors are profiting from the death of COVID-19 patients. Take a step back and absorb this atrocity. This man just invented a mendacious lie from scratch, not even remotely rational and in the process denigrated the frontline heroes who have been risking their lives and those of their families in a 9-month struggle against the worst pandemic in a century.

It didn't even dominate a news cycle. The nation has been so numbed by this Hitlerian character that this singular slander cannot be distinguished from all his other regurgitations.

But it was far worse.

It was as ludicrous as suggesting people ingest Clorox to treat COVID-19.

It was as invented as the 3 million people who voted illegally in California in 2016.

It was as vulgar as talking about grabbing women by the genitals.

It was as unpatriotic as groveling at Putin's feet at Helsinki

It was as insulting as calling Mexicans rapists and murderers.

It was as vicious as telling four U. S. congresswomen to return to their home countries.

It was as monstrous as seeing fine people on both sides at Charlottesville.

It was all those grotesque abominations rolled into one.  But the nation is so exhausted and bitter and divided and crazed that it barely noticed that the most powerful man in the world created such an evil falsehood, apparently to find still another scapegoat for his complicity in one of the worst avoidable tragedies in human history.

Trump falsely ascribed some profit motive to wonderful men and women-across the spectrum of race and ethnicity- people who have wept at the bedsides of 225,000 Americans as they died despite every ounce of energy, knowledge and skill that they could muster to save them. And this swine-whose undeserving hindquarters were saved by the very medical profession he besmirches-he is going to convince millions of his incognizant followers that the doctors are to blame for the pandemic because they were cashing in on it?

This is like wishing cancer on the children of someone you despise. This is as low as human speech can descend.

And yet we barely noticed.

[Rad]

Texas Republicans ripped as "˜wholly un-American' for trying to invalidate 127,000 ballots from drive-thru voting

11/1/2020
By Jolie McCullough, The Texas Tribune

For 18 days of early voting, Harris County residents waited in line, had their identities verified by poll workers, and cast their votes in a presidential election that has seen record-breaking early turnout.

But for the nearly 127,000 people who did so at drive-thru polling places instead of in traditional indoor sites, many are now watching with fear as a wealthy conservative activist, a Republican state representative and two GOP candidates aim to throw out their ballots at the last minute. In the state's most populous - and largely Democratic - county, drive-thru voters are left anxiously awaiting court decisions before Election Day on Tuesday that could force them to go back to the polls. Likely many more are unaware of their votes' potential demise.

The Republican legal effort could jeopardize 10% of the in-person early votes that were cast at 10 drive-thru polling places throughout the county - a vote count higher than the entire early vote total in Nueces County, home of Corpus Christi and the state's 16th most populous county.

Two lawsuits by the group of plaintiffs have been filed in recent days after a similar challenge was already rejected by the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court.

"I'm just crossing my fingers and hoping for the best, but I think this is ridiculous," Christine Charles told The Texas Tribune Saturday. "They could have done this two weeks ago, and we could have voted inside in person."

Charles, 32, works at a medical center in Houston with her friend, so they opted to stay in her car to vote when they arrived at NRG Park. They didn't want to potentially expose other people to the coronavirus in a voting line, she said. She was "jazzed" about the process, which includes the same safeguards as voting indoors.

"We thought it was fine, and then I see these stories," she said, referring to the lawsuits seeking to toss the votes. "We can both still go on Tuesday and vote if we have to, but I want to know. If my vote's going to be thrown out, when are we going to know that's the case?"

The state's Republican leadership, meanwhile, has stayed silent on the issue.

Harris County first tested drive-thru voting in the July primary runoffs with little controversy, and the county's 10 drive-thru centers were established for the fall election to make early voting easier for people concerned about entering polling places during the pandemic. Voters pull up in their cars, and after their registrations and identifications have been confirmed by poll workers, are handed an electronic tablet through their car windows to cast ballots.

The plaintiffs, all Republicans, are conservative activist Steven Hotze, state Rep. Steve Toth of The Woodlands, congressional candidate Wendell Champion and judicial candidate Sharon Hemphill. They argue that the county's new drive-thru voting sites are an illegal expansion of curbside voting and violate Texas election law and the U.S. Constitution. Curbside voting, a separate option long available under Texas election law, requires workers at every polling place to deliver onsite curbside ballots to voters who are "physically unable to enter the polling place without personal assistance or likelihood of injuring the voter's health."

Hotze is an active GOP donor and is one of the most prolific culture warriors on the right. He's a fierce opponent of same-sex marriage and was a key figure in the unsuccessful push for the 2017 "bathroom bill" in the Texas Legislature. This year, he has filed numerous lawsuits seeking to overturn Gov. Greg Abbott's coronavirus restrictions and block Harris County's efforts to make it easier for people to vote. And he left a voicemail for Abbott's chief of staff this summer telling him to shoot and kill people protesting the in-custody death of George Floyd.

Teeing up a massive potential disenfranchisement of Harris County voters, the Republicans are asking the courts to not only declare drive-thru voting illegal in Texas, but to throw out the votes cast at such polling locations. An earlier legal challenge against drive-thru voting brought by Hotze, Hemphill and the Harris County Republican Party was rejected by the Texas Supreme Court last week.

"Unless stopped, illegal votes will be cast and counted in direct violation of the Texas Election Code and the United States Constitution and result in the integrity of elections in Harris County being compromised," the petition to the court said.

(Voters who used the drive-thru option are subjected to the same verification requirements as those who vote in traditional polling places.)

Harris County officials have continued to defend the legality of the program, and noted that the Texas secretary of state's office had approved of drive-thru voting. Keith Ingram, the state's director of elections, said in a court hearing last month in another lawsuit that drive-thru voting is "a creative approach that is probably okay legally," according to court transcripts.

Plus, the county argued in a Friday filing that Texas's election code, along with court rulings, have determined that even if the drive-thru locations are deemed violations, votes cast there are still valid.

"More than a century of Texas case law requires that votes be counted even if election officials violate directory election laws," the county's filing said.

Still, the challenges have arrived in front of conservative judges in part of what the county's attorney in the state lawsuit said is part of a national Republican strategy in the courts for what's expected to be a close presidential race. The lawsuits were filed as a record number of voters turned out in Texas and polls showed a narrowing presidential race in the state. There was no lawsuit or public expression of concern when the county first tried this method in the July runoffs.

Susan Hays, attorney for the Harris County Clerk's Office, said Saturday that if a court moved to invalidate the votes before Tuesday, voters could cast on Election Day a provisional ballot. Provisional ballots are reviewed after Election Day and counted once election workers determine they qualify. The clerk's office is confident the county's about 800 polling locations could handle the 127,000 people whose votes are at risk, she said, but that depends on the voter being aware of the fate of their first vote and able to make a second trip to the polls.

The challenges join a flurry of other lawsuits on Texas voting procedures filed in recent months, with Democrats and voting rights groups pushing for expanded voting access in the pandemic and Republicans seeking to limit voting options. The courts have recently ruled against other last-minute challenges on voting access by noting that cases were filed too late, and that changes to voting procedure during an election would sow voter confusion.

In the pending cases on drive-thru voting, the state's highest civil court could rule on the pending case at any time, and U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen has scheduled a hearing for Monday morning.

Since the first Republican challenge to drive-thru voting was filed on Oct. 12, the Texas secretary of state and Abbott have both ignored requests from reporters and Harris County officials to clarify their positions on whether the process was legal.

In the meantime, voters feel held in limbo.

Clifton House's 77-year-old mother-in-law, Annbell, voted at the Houston Community College - West Loop drive-thru center on Oct. 16 at his and his wife's insistence, House said. His mother-in-law had just been discharged from the hospital the day before, and they didn't want her standing in lines to potentially be exposed to the coronavirus. In hindsight, he said, it may have been bad advice.

"She specifically did not want to vote by mail to ensure her vote got counted," he said. "Because of the U.S.]Post Office stuff, and the signature matches and all the things they can do where you don't have any chance to defend yourself."

Shelby Strudler, 44, took the opportunity to vote in her car because a herniated disc and pinched nerve in her back makes standing for long periods of time painful. She called the lawsuits "wholly un-American." She also voted at the West Loop HCC location.

"It just causes a lot of chaos and confusion," she told the Tribune. "If this particular judge does nullify these votes, will I be allowed to vote on Tuesday? Am I not allowed to vote at all now? Does my vote not count at all?"

Strudler, who keeps up to date with news online, said even if there is another opportunity to vote, many of the other nearly 127,000 people won't know that or be able to again cast a ballot on Election Day.

"The GOP is doing everything possible to not allow people to vote, and I don't think they understand that there are Republicans who also took part in drive-thru voting."

[Rad]

Why Are Republicans So Afraid of Voters?

There is no "both sides do it" when it comes to intentionally keeping Americans away from the polls.

By The Editorial Board
NY Times
Nov. 1, 2020

As of early Sunday morning, more than 92 million Americans had cast a ballot in the November elections. That's nearly 62 percent of the total number of people who voted in 2016, and there are still two days until Election Day.

This is excellent news. In the middle of a global pandemic that has taken the lives of nearly a quarter of a million Americans, upended the national economy and thrown state election procedures into turmoil, there were reasonable concerns that many people would not vote at all. The numbers to date suggest that 2020 could see record turnout.

While celebrating this renewed citizen involvement in America's political process, don't lose sight of the bigger, and darker, picture. For decades, Americans have voted at depressingly low rates for a modern democracy. Even in a "good" year, more than one-third of all eligible voters don't cast a ballot. In a bad year, that number can approach two-thirds.

Why are so many Americans consistently missing in action on Election Day?

For many, it's a choice. They are disillusioned with government, or they feel their vote doesn't matter because politicians don't listen to them anyway.

For many more, the main obstacle is bureaucratic inertia. In New York City, a decrepit, incompetent, self-dealing board of elections has been making a mockery of democracy for decades. Just in the past four years, tens of thousands of absentee ballots have been sent to the wrong addresses, and hundreds of thousands of voters have been wrongly purged from the rolls. For the past few days, some New Yorkers have been forced to stand in line for four or five hours to cast their ballots.

But across the country, the group most responsible for making voting harder, if not impossible, for millions of Americans is the Republican Party. Republicans have been saying it themselves for ages. "I don't want everybody to vote," Paul Weyrich, a leader of the modern conservative movement, told a gathering of religious leaders in 1980. "As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
 
This strategy has become a central pillar of the G.O.P. platform. It is behind the party's relentless push for certain state laws and practices - like strict voter-identification requirements and targeted voter purges - that claim to be about preserving electoral integrity but are in fact about suppressing turnout and voting among groups that lean Democratic.

The strategy also is behind the partisan gerrymandering that Republican state lawmakers have mastered over the past decade, redrawing district lines to keep themselves in power even when they lose a majority of the statewide vote. (Democrats gerrymander when they can, too, but the most egregious examples of the past decade have been by Republicans.)

And the party is behind the early shutdown of this year's census, which the Trump administration insisted on over the objections of longtime Census Bureau officials, and which it hopes will result in an undercount of people in Democratic-leaning parts of the country.

The Supreme Court's conservative majority has greenlit the Republicans' anti-democratic power grabs. In 2013, by a 5-to-4 vote, the court struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act, giving free rein to states with long histories of racial discrimination in voting. Last year, the court, again by a 5-to-4 vote, refused to block even the most brazenly partisan gerrymanders, no matter how much they disenfranchised voters.

This year, in the face of the unprecedented hurdles to voting introduced by the coronavirus pandemic, Republicans are battling from coast to coast to ensure that casting a ballot is as hard as it can be. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott mandated a single ballot drop-box per county - including the increasingly Democratic Harris County, population 4.7 million. Republican lawmakers there are also suing to throw out more than 100,000 ballots cast by Harris County voters from their cars, at drive-through sites.

In Nevada, the Trump campaign and the state Republican Party have sued to stop counting mail-in ballots until observers can more closely monitor the signature-matching process. In Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin, Republicans have fought to prevent the counting of all mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, even if they are postmarked on or before Nov. 3.

This all amounts to "a concerted national Republican effort across the country in every one of the states that has had a legal battle to make it harder for citizens to vote," said Trevor Potter, a Republican lawyer who formerly led the Federal Election Commission and worked on both of John McCain's presidential campaigns.

The effort has been turbocharged by President Trump, who has spent the past year falsely attacking the integrity of mail-in ballots. Mr. Trump's lies have been echoed by the attorney general, William Barr, who has claimed that mail balloting is associated with "substantial fraud." Not remotely true. Mr. Trump's own handpicked F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, has said there is no evidence of any coordinated voter-fraud effort. Scholars, researchers and judges have said for years that voting fraud of any kind is vanishingly rare in this country. That hasn't stopped Republicans from alleging that it happens all the time. They know that accusations of fraud can be enough by themselves to confuse voters and drive down turnout.

When that tactic fails, Republicans turn to another tried-and-true one: voter intimidation. Frightening people, particularly Black people, away from the ballot box has a long history in the United States. Modern Republicans have done it so consistently that in 1982 a federal court barred the national party from engaging in any so-called anti-voter-fraud operations. The ban was renewed again and again over the decades, because Republicans kept violating it. In 2018, however, it expired, meaning that 2020 is the first election in which Republicans can intimidate with abandon.

All the while, Mr. Trump happily plays the part of intimidator in chief. He has urged his supporters to enlist in an "Army for Trump," monitoring polls. "A lot of strange things happening in Philadelphia," Mr. Trump said during a recent campaign stop in Pennsylvania. "We're watching you, Philadelphia. We're watching at the highest level."

Representative democracy works only when a large majority of people participate in choosing their representatives. That can happen only when those in power agree that voting should be as easy and widely available as possible. Yet today, one of the two major political parties is convinced it cannot win on a level playing field - and will not even try.

What would a level playing field look like? For starters, it would have more polling places, more early-voting days and shorter voting lines. Since the Supreme Court gutted the heart of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, almost 1,700 polling places have been shut down, most of them in the states that had been under federal supervision for their past discriminatory voting practices. It's no surprise that voters in predominantly Black neighborhoods wait 29 percent longer to cast ballots than voters in white neighborhoods.

A fair election would mean giving all states the necessary funds to implement automatic voter registration and to upgrade old voting machines. It would mean allowing people with criminal records to vote as soon as they have completed the terms of their sentences.

Many of these reforms have already been adopted in some states, and they have enjoyed bipartisan support. In the case of early voting, some Republican-led states are ahead of their Democratic counterparts. Georgia, for example, has long offered many weeks of early voting - far better than New York, which began the practice only last year, and for only 10 days. (It's worth noting that Georgia once had even more early-voting days. Republican lawmakers cut them back by more than half after Black voters started taking advantage of early voting in 2008.)

To help ensure that voting is easier for everybody, the federal government needs to take action. Currently, there are two comprehensive voting-rights bills in Congress, the Voting Rights Amendment Act and H.R. 1, also known as the For the People Act. The first bill would update the old map the Supreme Court invalidated in 2013 and would identify the states and localities that are racially discriminating against their voters today, requiring them to seek federal court approval before changing any election laws.

The second bill would, among other things, create a national voter-registration program; make it harder for states to purge voting rolls; and take gerrymandering away from self-interested state legislatures, putting the redistricting process in the hands of nonpartisan commissions.

The House of Representatives passed both of these bills in 2019, with all Democrats voting in favor both times. The Voting Rights Amendment Act got the vote of a single House Republican. H.R. 1 got none. The Republican-led Senate has refused to act on either. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, mocked H.R. 1 by referring to it as the "Democrat Politician Protection Act." Listen to him closely. He is only repeating what most Republicans have believed for decades: When more people vote, Republicans lose.

That's why, if either of these laws is going to pass, it will require, at a minimum, voting out Republicans at every level who insist on suppressing the vote. Only then can those who believe in representative democracy for all Americans reset the rules and help ensure that everyone's vote counts.