Ashley Cleaves and Matt Cohen at Democracy Docket:

Debunked claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election made by notorious conspiracy theorists and election deniers were the basis of the evidence used by the Trump administration to obtain a search warrant for the FBI to raid a Fulton County, Georgia election hub earlier this month, newly unsealed court records make clear.  The search warrant affidavit, which was unsealed Tuesday, revealed that the FBI’s criminal probe into the 2020 vote in Georgia — which President Donald Trump failed to subvert after losing to Joe Biden by a little over 11,000 votes — originated with Kurt Olsen, a special government employee at the White House who was recently appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity. “It’s no surprise that the Trump DOJ is recycling the same election conspiracy theories Georgia officials have already investigated and debunked,” Fair Fight CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo said in a statement to Democracy Docket. “We’re now watching those false claims – pushed by the very same network of election conspiracy theorists who fueled misleading claims after the 2020 election – get dressed up and passed off as new ‘evidence.’”

Olsen, a former Trump campaign lawyer, played a key role in the president’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. Olsen was involved in Texas’ challenge of the election results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Olsen also pushed DOJ officials to file a motion with the U.S. Supreme Court to nullify the election results, urging the court to order a special election in four states where Trump lost. And on Jan. 6, 2021, Olsen — who was deeply involved in the Stop the Steal efforts — spoke on the phone with Trump at least three times. It’s not surprising to see Olsen’s fingerprints on the Fulton County raid. Olsen joined the White House as a temporary special employee in October to reportedly investigate the 2020 election and other voting-related issues — including examining election machines.  But Olsen is far from the only election denier whose long-held, debunked claims that the 2020 vote was fraudulent were used to convince a federal judge to issue a warrant for the FBI to confiscate nearly 700 boxes of ballots and voting materials from Fulton County’s central election facility.

The affidavit mentions evidence collected by Clay Parikh, a cybersecurity specialist with ties to MyPillow CEO and conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, who is currently working as a special government employee. Parikh, according to the affidavit, was contacted by an unnamed witness described as a “member of the Election Oversight Group, LLC.”  The witness had drafted a report regarding the election in Fulton County and asked Parikh to review the data. It’s unclear exactly who the witness is, but the report described in the affidavit by the Election Oversight Group, LLC was released in early January and authored by a group of known election deniers led by Kevin Moncla — a conservative researcher whose claims about the 2020 election have been routinely rejected. Moncla, whose work has been promoted by leading election deniers like the anti-voting activist Cleta Mitchell, recently told ProPublica that he’d been interviewed by various federal investigators and attorneys about his Fulton County 2020 investigation. 

The basis for the FBI’s lawless raid on Fulton County, Georgia’s election hub were from debunked claims of “election fraud” from the 2020 election by right-wing election deniers.

See Also:

The Guardian: Trump news at a glance: Why did FBI raid Georgia election office? Trump-loyal election deniers told them to

Republicans don’t like it when students vote. In red states, the GOP makes voting as difficult as possible for students living on campus or in college towns. And they would like to make it even more difficult.

One Trump Republican was particularly blatant about saying so at a gathering of filthy rich GOP donors.

A top Republican legal strategist told a roomful of GOP donors over the weekend that conservatives must band together to limit voting on college campuses, same-day voter registration and automatic mailing of ballots to registered voters, according to a copy of her presentation reviewed by The Washington Post.

Cleta Mitchell, a longtime GOP lawyer and fundraiser who worked closely with former president Donald Trump to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, gave the presentation at a Republican National Committee donor retreat in Nashville on Saturday.

Just to clarify, that was Saturday April 15th.

The presentation — which had more than 50 slides and was labeled “A Level Playing Field for 2024” — offered a window into a strategy that seems designed to reduce voter access and turnout among certain groups, including students and those who vote by mail, both of which tend to skew Democratic.

Mitchell did not respond to a request for comment, and it is unclear whether she delivered the presentation exactly as it was prepared on her PowerPoint slides. But in addition to the presentation, The Post listened to audio of portions of the presentation obtained by liberal journalist Lauren Windsor in which Mitchell discussed limiting campus and early voting. 

Brace yourself for some idiotic GOP attempt at stereotyping.

“What are these college campus locations?” she asked, according to the audio. “What is this young people effort that they do? They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed.”

Personally, I’ve always felt energized – empowered – when I’ve voted. And since polls don’t close anywhere in the US before 6 PM (at the very earliest), the thought of waking up to go to vote and going back to bed right afterwards seems like Republican asininity in the extreme. 

Basically Cleta admitted that this isn’t about winning elections. It’s part of a greater blueprint to keep people the GOP doesn’t like from voting at all.

Mitchell told her RNC audience that her organization, the Election Integrity Network, “is NOT about winning campaigns,” according to the text of the presentation. But the slides gave little other rationale for why campus or mail voting should be curtailed. At another point in the presentation, she said the nation’s electoral systems must be saved “for any candidate other than a leftist to have a chance to WIN in 2024.”

Pumpkin Face himself weighed in.

In Trump’s private comments to donors at the event, he said that he eventually wants to end all mail and early voting, according to audio obtained by The Post. But until that happens, he said, Republicans had to get better at it.

Remember Trump’s infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger? Apparently ol’ Cleta had something to do with that.

Mitchell advised Trump and was on the call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021 when Trump asked Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn the result.

“All we have to do, Cleta, is find 11,000-plus votes,” Trump said on the call, which is now under investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis as part of a broader inquiry into efforts to overturn the 2020 result in Georgia.

No matter how inconvenient it may be, we need to vote in every single election and for every office. There’s no such thing as an unimportant election. Voting consistently is the only way to preserve democracy.

People on the far right have been successful because they’ve taken the long view. It took them 49 years but by never missing an election they paved the way for the repeal of Roe v. Wade. And they’re still not finished trying to drag us back to the pre-Enlightenment dark ages.

Do whatever it takes to register and vote – in EVERY single election and for every office. 

Be A Voter - Vote Save America

A friendly reminder that voter registration is done by address. If you’ve moved since the last election, even just down the street, you must register at your new address.

Before these hearings, most people had never heard of the “interagency consensus,” which is apparently the foreign policy position of the United States toward every country in the world that is agreed to by career federal personnel, notwithstanding the contrary views of the elected president of the United States.

This entire episode, and many more, should cause us to rethink certain legal principles related to federal employees that have governed us for decades.

In particular, the hearings provide ample grounds to overturn the Supreme Court’s 1984 decision in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. National Resources Defense Council, in which the court articulated a principle that federal agency decisions should receive deference in federal litigation because of the “expertise” of the federal agency in matters involving the agency. Known popularly as Chevron deference, it presupposes that the agency and its employees are not only experts, but are philosophically neutral in the discharge of their duties.

What we’ve seen during the Rep. Adam Schiff hearings is that “experts” in federal agencies exhibit bias and political philosophies of their own. They are not neutral.

None of the precincts in and around Washington DC are red. When the votes are cast, 100 percent of the precincts populated by large numbers of federal workers are blue. Every review of political contributions by federal employees reveals that federal employees give virtually no campaign contributions to Republican candidates.

Matt Cohen at Democracy Docket:

Cleta Mitchell and activists from a top anti-voting group with close ties to the White House met last week to discuss plans to push for severely limiting early and mail voting. Those potential cutbacks, which are close to what President Donald Trump has called for, would radically curtail access to the ballot, taking the U.S. back decades to the era of one-day elections. Mitchell told fellow activists that the group wants nearly all voting to take place in person on Election Day.  

“In-person voting on Election Day should be primary,” she said.  The plan was discussed at a meeting of Mitchell’s influential Election Integrity Network (EIN), held Friday at a Worcester, Mass. hotel. Democracy Docket exclusively obtained notes from the meeting, and a copy of the agenda. Two state lawmakers who support restrictive voting laws — including one Maine Republican who marched on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 — also spoke at the confab.

On a panel entitled “Restoring Election Day,” Mitchell said she has worked with state lawmakers to develop model legislation to ensure that most voting takes place in person on Election Day at voting precincts.  That plan would mean an end to the larger vote centers that states including Arizona and California use and that many election administrators say can help expand access by accepting voters from a wide area. It also would dramatically limit early in-person voting, which has helped make it easier for voters who work long hours or lack flexibility in their schedule to cast a ballot. Mitchell falsely claimed that early-voting polling places are more prone to voter fraud because they are less transparent.  Mail voting also would be curtailed, with voters needing an excuse to receive a mail ballot. Currently only 13 states require an excuse.  And not just any excuse would count, Mitchell suggested. Even being confined to a care home should not count, Mitchell said, falsely claiming that Service Employees International Union (SEIU) members who work at care homes for the elderly frequently steal ballots from their patients. Mitchell added that states should bar local election officials from printing additional ballots if they run out on Election Day — which would allow voters to be disenfranchised because of poor planning by election administrators. She claimed that some polling sites in Pennsylvania ran out of ballots during Election Day, forcing poll workers to run to Staples to print more. 

John Knefel at MMFA:

Over the last several weeks, the outlines of a plot have begun to emerge that could signal how President Donald Trump, along with MAGA media figures and activists, could attempt to severely curtail voting rights under the pretext of declaring a national emergency posed by China. The details of the scheme remain publicly vague, and may not yet come to pass, but the short version looks something like this: First, the White House would declassify and release documents purporting to show foreign interference in U.S. elections, especially by the Chinese Communist Party.

Next, Trump would use that supposed “proof” of a stolen election to declare a national emergency, thereby — according to those pushing this idea — giving him extraordinary powers over the upcoming midterms. That move would serve as a way to advance the anti-voting rights measures in the SAVE America Act, like forcing voters to prove their citizenship, without having to actually pass the law — which Congress, so far at least, appears reluctant to do. The main players here come not only from the fever swamp backwaters of MAGA media, but also from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the White House. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is a central node, attempting to advance the operation on his War Room podcast, aired on right-wing network Real America’s Voice, long a major source of misinformation about the 2020 election. Bannon’s RAV colleague John Solomon, whose role in the plot appears to be running the declassification effort, was recently appointed to a White House “task force” into supposed election integrity. Solomon was Media Matters’ Misinformer of the Year in 2019 for his role in laundering misinformation about the Bidens and Ukraine through his opinion columns.

Also in the mix is Peter Schweizer, who founded the Government Accountability Institute with Bannon and has moved from spreading misinformation about the Clintons to claiming that China is taking over the United States by exploiting birthright citizenship. Then there’s Cleta Mitchell, a right-wing lawyer who was on the January 2021 call when Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough ballots to tip the state his way. She referenced Schweizer in a June 20 appearance on War Room, positively paraphrasing an argument he made on his podcast acknowledging that much of the voting activity he wants to suppress is actually legal.

“Peter Schweizer put it pretty well last week in a podcast that he does with Eric Eggers, and the question they posed is: If fraud is made — if election fraud is made legal, is it still fraud?” Mitchell asked. “Because what's happened in California over the last decade is that the far-left Democrat, socialist, Marxists, communists have completely upended every vestige of election integrity.” (Bannon had teed her up by referencing the Los Angeles mayoral primary, claiming without evidence: “They stole it right in front of our face and laughed at us the entire time.")

Mitchell is supported by a loose array of election deniers who have called on Trump to issue an executive order to seize “king-like powers” over voting systems, supported by the national emergency decree. Bill Pulte, the newly installed acting DNI, and his recently appointed chief of staff, former Republican National Committee official Christina Norton, also appear to figure heavily into the plan. On June 20, Bannon said Pulte’s role at DNI is “to get to the bottom of the 2020 stolen election.” Ten days later, Bannon described Norton as “one of the top election fraud people in all of the RNC” and said Pulte is “signaling where he's going on this” with her hiring, adding that “my understanding is that there is going to be real revelations about the stealing of the 2020 election."

[...]

The Supreme Court’s narrow June 30 decision to protect birthright citizenship could turbocharge the Bannon-Solomon-Pulte scheme, in part by providing fodder for anti-Chinese sentiment on the right. On Solomon’s website, Just The News, an article about the birthright citizenship case referenced Schweizer’s book and hyped the supposed China menace.

Yunior Rivas at Democracy Docket:

Cleta Mitchell’s anti-voting group released a sweeping new “model laws” handbook Thursday that urges lawmakers and election officials to severely restrict mail-in voting, eliminate same-day voter registration, conduct mass voter challenges and empower officials to deny and delay certification.  The release by the Election Integrity Network (EIN) marks a dangerous escalation from one of the most influential election denial operations in right-wing politics. It outlines a vision that would transform voting from a fundamental democratic right to a complicated, rule-bound process accessible only to those who can navigate a maze of requirements. 

Cleta Mitchell’s anti-voting group released a sweeping new “model laws” handbook Thursday that urges lawmakers and election officials to severely restrict mail-in voting, eliminate same-day voter registration, conduct mass voter challenges and empower officials to deny and delay certification.  The release by the Election Integrity Network (EIN) marks a dangerous escalation from one of the most influential election denial operations in right-wing politics. It outlines a vision that would transform voting from a fundamental democratic right to a complicated, rule-bound process accessible only to those who can navigate a maze of requirements. 

“Today, Election Integrity Network releases the Model Election Laws Handbook,” wrote Mitchell, the lawyer who joined President Donald Trump’s infamous call pressuring Georgia’s chief election official to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, in a post on X. “This is the culmination of 5 years of work by hundreds and hundreds of election integrity volunteers, leaders, and experts from across the country.” The handbook is framed as a state-by-state legislative guide for “election integrity.” But its proposals are rooted in the same distrust of elections and conspiracy-laden claims about fraud, noncitizen voting and corrupt election officials that have animated the GOP’s anti-voting push since 2020.

“What has become clear is that those who oppose election integrity really want corruption of our elections,” Mitchell wrote in a letter accompanying the handbook. “Ours is a binary choice when it comes to election policy: choose either election integrity vs. corrupt, inaccurate, and insecure elections.” EIN’s influence makes the handbook more than a fringe document. Several Trump administration appointees and federal officials with election-related roles have direct ties to Mitchell’s network Mitchell and EIN call the handbook a plan to “restore” election integrity. But for voters, election workers and democracy advocates, its most extreme proposals point in another direction, fewer voting options, more rejected ballots, more surveillance of voters, more opportunities for mass challenges and more power for officials to deny legitimate election results. The extensive handbook translates the election denial movement’s wish list into model legislation that lawmakers, local officials and activists can copy into state law. EIN says the document is meant for “state lawmakers, election administrators, and citizen advocates,” and provides language to “select complete bills or individual sections” and combine them into state proposals.

The result is a far-reaching roadmap to make voting harder and election administration more vulnerable to partisan interference. One of the most alarming proposals would redefine election certification — the formal step where officials sign off on election results — as a discretionary act. That means officials could claim they have the power to refuse or delay certification if they say they have unresolved concerns.

[...] It calls for limiting early voting to no longer than seven days and restoring Election Day as the main voting period. It also calls for repealing no-excuse absentee voting — the policy that allows voters to cast absentee ballots without having to provide a qualifying reason. Trump has called for the same rollback of mail voting. “No-excuse absentee voting is repealed,” the handbook states. “Absentee voting shall be permitted only for voters who meet … verifiable categories.” The proposal would also ban drop boxes, prohibit permanent absentee voter lists and reject all mail-in ballots that arrive after polls close on Election Day, even if they were sent and postmarked before the deadline.

[...] The document also targets election technology, showcasing the election denial movement’s growing obsession over voting machines and electronic systems.  It calls for banning touchscreen voting machines, direct-recording electronic devices and ballot-marking devices. It also calls for prohibiting electronic pollbooks as the primary check-in system at polling places and early voting sites. Finally, the handbook contains provisions explicitly aimed at some of the country’s most vulnerable voters.  It proposes that homeless voters not be allowed to register or vote at shelters or resource centers, requiring them instead to use election offices or government facilities.

“Homeless voters shall not be required or permitted to register or vote at an advocacy center, homeless shelter, or partisan organization’s office, in order to minimize potential undue influence and to preserve neutrality in the voting environment,” the handbook states. For voters in nursing homes, hospitals and other care facilities, the handbook calls for special voting deputies to be deployed, review identification documents and observe voters inserting completed ballots into security envelopes.