#election administration

Paul Blumenthal at HuffPost:

With a combination of executive orders, legal maneuvers and staffing decisions, President Donald Trump has already put in motion his next effort to subvert upcoming federal elections in 2026 and 2028. Since taking office, Trump has installed loyalists who follow his orders into key positions at the Department of Justice, issued executive orders centralizing decision-making within the White House, attempted to unilaterally change state and local election laws, demanded unprecedented access to voter data, dismantled election security protections, threatened elections officials and workers, law firms and others who have historically stood up to protect elections and defended, hired or pardoned those involved in previous efforts to subvert elections.

All of these actions combine into a “concerted strategy” to undermine federal elections, according to a new report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning nonprofit that advocates for voting rights. The report highlights how these actions are being used together to set the stage for future lies about election integrity and attempts by the White House to try to change the outcome of elections altogether. It also details how they are being fought by states, election officials and voting advocates. “We are seeing this as an unprecedented intrusion by the White House into the way that our elections work in a way that really makes us concerned for our elections moving forward,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center.

Trump has made the subversion of elections central to his political career, which he launched by questioning whether President Barack Obama was eligible to be president. He has claimed every election since 2012 that did not go Republicans’ way was rigged with illegal votes and fraud, even claiming that his 2016 win would have been bigger if not for alleged fraud. This false campaign culminated after his 2020 loss when he illegally attempted to remain in power and sparked an insurrection aimed at stopping the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021.

That effort was “haphazard and desperate,” according to Morales-Doyle, but with four years of planning and an even more supine Republican Congress, Trump returned to office with time to put a similar plan into place.

[...] The most important change from his first administration is that Trump has shied away from hiring experienced eminences into key posts in the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Department of Defense and instead appointed toadies who follow his orders.

After the 2020 election, Trump’s attempt to steal the election was hamstrung by his appointees, including Attorney General William Barr, who refused to seize voting machines at Trump’s request, and other DOJ officials who fought Trump’s efforts to appoint Jeff Clark as acting attorney general in order to issue a letter saying the election was marred by fraud. This second Trump administration is instead staffed with people who helped Trump lie about the 2020 election, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon and Ed Martin, a right-wing attorney who now leads a Justice Department task force on the “weaponization” of the federal government. The shift means voting rights advocates are now fighting the federal government itself rather than fringe outside actors.

[...] Unlike Barr, these appointees may have no qualms with fulfilling Trump’s election fraud fantasies by seeking to seize voting machines, publicly claim election fraud or pressure state or local election officials to take actions to undermine the election results. They have already begun this process by targeting and threatening election officials through the Weaponization Working Group headed by Martin and the election integrity task forces set up in the offices of the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, previously held by Trump’s former lawyer Alina Habba, and the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., led by former Fox News anchor Jeanine Pirro. [...]

Trump’s appointees are aided by many of the president’s other actions, which aim to cast a cloud of doubt over the integrity of elections. On March 25, Trump issued a sweeping executive order aiming to allow the president to directly set state election law, despite the president having almost no constitutional role or legal power in the administration of elections.

The order directed the Election Administration Committee to mandate that states require voters to show proof of citizenship in order to vote, rescind certifications for almost all voting machines and ordered the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Government Efficiency to obtain full voter files from every state, including sensitive data like Social Security numbers. The order also directs the attorney general to target states that count mail-in ballots that arrive after election day for legal action.

[...] Refusal to comply with Trump’s executive order could fuel propaganda claiming the results from those states are fraudulent or as a pretext to declare an election-related emergency and seize voting machines. Requests for voter files could lead the administration to demand specific individuals be removed from the voter rolls, both altering the electorate or, if states do not comply, provide propaganda fodder and pretexts for interference. [...] The Trump administration and Republicans could do something similar by using whatever alleged violation of Trump’s executive order or claim about voter roll errors to challenge the outcome after the election. If Democrats had won a majority in the House or Senate, it’s theoretically possible for Congress to refuse to seat anyone in one of these contested seats. That could allow Republicans to remain in control even if they lost, at least temporarily.

By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews The replacement ballots are in the mail. The crisis, by Maryland’s official account, is resolved. But a disclosure made quietly at a state board meeting Thursday has raised a question that neither of the previous two chapters of this story had to answer: what exactly happens if a voter ignores the replacement and sends back the original ballot they were told to…

Yunior Rivas at Democracy Docket:

The Republican National Committee (RNC) is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to dramatically restrict mail-in voting nationwide and asking the justices to rule that ballots arriving after Election Day — even if mailed on time under state law — should not be counted.  If the Court sides with the RNC, millions of voters who depend on mail-in voting could be disenfranchised.

The brief filed Monday comes in a high-stakes case challenging Mississippi’s election law, which allows mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if they arrive within five business days. After a lower court upheld the law, a conservative appeals court struck it down, holding that federal law requires ballots to be received and counted by Election Day.  Mississippi appealed to the Supreme Court, setting up a case that could fundamentally reshape how federal elections are run in dozens of states.

From its opening pages, the RNC frames the routine counting of legally cast mail ballots – which has been practiced for decades — as a dangerous modern experiment that undermines public trust.  “Most Americans remember a time when results came quickly after election day,” the committee wrote. “Each election cycle dims that memory as States experiment with novel ballot-handling rules. One of those experiments is the prolonged receipt of mail ballots — three, five, fourteen, or even more days after election day.” The RNC goes on to suggest that counting mail ballots after Election Day inherently invites wrongdoing, despite the lack of evidence that counting timely cast ballots leads to fraud. 

“These post-election receipt deadlines invite ‘the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election,’” the RNC wrote. “It’s hard to blame Americans for those suspicions when some States produce quick results, while others take days to even know how many ballots need to be counted. When news anchors remind voters, ‘It’s not over yet,’ they’re right under any ordinary understanding. As long as ballots are still coming in, the election isn’t over.” That framing echoes years of Republican conspiracies that cast doubt on election outcomes whenever late-counted mail ballots — which tend to favor Democrats because of demographic patterns — narrow or erase GOP leads.

Jim Saksa at Democracy Docket:

The U.S. Supreme Court blessed grace periods for ballots mailed by Election Day Monday, rejecting a GOP bid to restrict mail voting and preserving pro-voter laws in 14 states.  In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court upheld a 2020 Mississippi law that let mail ballots postmarked by Election Day still count if they arrived within five days later.  Writing for the majority in Watson v. Republican National Committee (RNC), Justice Amy Coney Barrett rejected the GOP’s argument that federal laws setting a date for elections preempted states from accepting ballots after that day.* “[E]lection-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked after election day yet received afterward,” Barrett wrote.

“The Framers recognized the difficulty of crafting election laws ‘applicable to every probable change in the situation of the country.’ So instead of constitutionalizing election law, they decided that ‘a discretionary power over elections’ needed to be lodged ‘somewhere,’” Barrett wrote. “Suffice it to say, that power was not lodged in this Court. The election-day statutes say nothing about ballot receipt, and we cannot add to the words Congress chose.”

Barrett was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

In addition to protecting similar laws in 13 other states and Washington D.C., the ruling will make it harder for the GOP to mount a legal assault on early voting, which legal experts said would be likely if the court ruled for the RNC. It also spares laws in 17 states that specifically provide ballot receipt grace periods for military and overseas voters.

Good news for fair elections and accurate vote counting: SCOTUS ruled 5-4 in Watson v. RNC that ballots postmarked before election day but arriving after election day are allowed to be counted. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the opinion in Watson, and joining her were the 3 Liberals (Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson) + Chief Justice John Roberts.

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Jacob Knutson at Democracy Docket:

President Donald Trump Thursday dismissed all remaining commissioners on the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), a bipartisan federal agency created to help states administer elections, according to multiple media reports. Trump’s firing of Democratic Commissioners Thomas Hicks and Ben Hovland and Republican Commissioner Christy McCormick leaves the four-commissioner federal agency without leadership just months before the upcoming 2026 election. Donald Palmer, a Republican and the agency’s fourth commissioner, abruptly resigned earlier this year.

In a statement, the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State (DASS) denounced the dismissals as “incredibly irresponsible.” “The EAC plays a critical role in supporting state and local election officials, and it will again fall on Secretaries of State and other election administrators to fill the gap,” DASS Chair and Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar said. “From cutting funding for cybersecurity to launching baseless investigations, this pattern of behavior from the Trump administration makes it harder for our election officials to do their work and does nothing to make elections more secure,” Aguilar added. The dismissals come after Trump has attempted to use the EAC in his efforts to assert control over U.S. elections. 

[...] In an anti-voting executive order last year, Trump directed the commission to add a proof of citizenship requirement to a federal voter registration form, make changes to the standards it uses to certify the voting systems used in all U.S. elections, and withhold federal funds from states that did not comply with other requirements. Trump’s decision to purge the EAC marks his first major dismissals following a landmark Supreme Court ruling last month that shattered decades of precedent and gave the president almost unlimited authority to fire officials at independent federal agencies.

[...] It remains unresolved whether the Supreme Court’s recent ruling actually allows the president to fire the heads of bipartisan election agencies like the EAC or Federal Election Commission, Rick Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told VoteBeat. They could potentially be protected by a separate exception because Congress structured them around bipartisan balance, he added.  “Most boldly (and I would argue illegally) Trump could try to direct the commissioner-less EAC to do his bidding, for example by stating that the EAC must amend the federal voter registration form that states must accept for federal elections to include documentary proof of citizenship,” Hasen wrote on his blog. “Trump’s first voting-related [executive order] tried to do this, and he was stymied. But that was acting through the commissioners and before” the Supreme Court ruling.

Satan-possessed traitor Donald Trump handed out dismissal slips to the remaining members of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission (EAC) in a grossly partisan attack on election administration with the quest to rig elections for the GOP.

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Reuters, via HuffPost: Trump Fires Election Assistance Commission Members Ahead Of Midterms