Concerted GQP Voter Suppression Efforts In Swing States

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The Washington Post reports, Republicans sue to disqualify thousands of mail ballots in swing states:

Republican officials and candidates in at least three battleground states are pushing to disqualify thousands of mail ballots after urging their own supporters to vote on Election Day, in what critics are calling a concerted attempt at partisan voter suppression.

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In Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court has agreed with the Republican National Committee that election officials should not count ballots on which the voter neglected to put a date on the outer envelope — even in cases when the ballots arrive before Election Day. Thousands of ballots have been set aside as a result, enough to swing a close race.

In Michigan, Kristina Karamo, the Republican nominee for secretary of state, sued the top election official in Detroit last month, seeking to toss absentee ballots not cast in person with an ID, even though that runs contrary to state requirements. When asked in a recent court hearing, Karamo’s lawyer declined to say why the suit targets Detroit, a heavily Democratic, majority-Black city, and not the entire state.

And in Wisconsin, Republicans won a court ruling that will prevent some mail ballots from being counted when the required witness address is not complete.

Over the past two years, Republicans have waged a sustained campaign against alleged voter fraud. Experts say the litigation — which could significantly affect Tuesday’s vote — represents a parallel strategy of suing to disqualify mail ballots based on technicalities. While the rejections may have some basis in state law, experts say they appear to go against a principle, enshrined in federal law, of not disenfranchising voters for minor errors.

The suits coincide with a systematic attempt by Republicans — led by former president Donald Trump — to persuade GOP voters to cast their ballots only on Election Day. Critics argue that the overall purpose is to separate Republicans and Democrats by method of voting and then to use lawsuits to void mail ballots that are disproportionately Democratic.

“They’re looking for every advantage they can get, and they’ve calculated that this is a way that they can win more seats,” said Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for Common Cause, a nonpartisan democracy advocacy organization. “Research has shown that absentee ballots are more likely to be discarded if they are voted by young people and people of color, which are not generally seen as the Republican base.”

Albert said legal battles over mail ballot eligibility have the potential to delay results and even change outcomes. In some cases, the disputes could wind up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The potential for chaos is especially high in Pennsylvania, where the legal fight is ongoing and could influence or postpone the outcome in some of the state’s tightest races, including a contest that could determine control of the U.S. Senate.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) issued a statement Sunday night in which he asserted that “no voter should be disenfranchised simply because they made a minor error in filling out their ballot.”

“This was not a controversial concept in our country or our commonwealth until recently, with the rise of the Big Lie and the efforts to spread mis- and disinformation in the days leading up to the general election,” Wolf continued. “I urge counties to continue to ensure that every vote counts.”

Election officials are braced for a repeat of a protracted standoff following Pennsylvania’s May primary between state officials and three counties — Berks, Fayette and Lancaster — that refused to include undated ballots in their certified results.

Wolf’s administration sued those counties in July to force them to include the ballots, the majority of which were cast by Democrats, court records show. In August, a state judge ordered the counties to include “all lawfully cast ballots,” including those with missing dates, in their certified results.

Republicans then successfully persuaded the state Supreme Court to reverse that policy for the general election in a decision released last week. The state court deadlocked on whether rejecting the ballots was a violation of voters’ federal civil rights.

Common Cause and others quickly filed a federal suit seeking to overturn the state court ruling on the grounds that rejecting ballots over a technical error violates the Civil Rights Act. The case remains pending.

The date printed on the envelope of a mail ballot is a “meaningless technicality” that has no bearing on officials’ ability to judge whether the ballot has been cast on time by a qualified voter, the complaint says.

The federal courts have already weighed in on the issue: Earlier this year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit found that failing to count undated mail ballots is a violation of federal civil rights law. However, the U.S. Supreme Court injected uncertainty into the issue by vacating that decision and instructing that the case be dismissed as moot because the election in question had already passed.

In the meantime, voting rights groups and others have launched a full-court press to notify voters across Pennsylvania whose ballots had been rejected and needed to be [cured] or replaced. At least 7,000 such ballots have been rejected statewide for a variety of reasons, including the missing date, according to data compiled by the Pennsylvania Department of State. Activists said the figure is probably much higher because many counties have refused to publish the information.

In Philadelphia, the state’s largest city and a Democratic bastion, more than 2,000 such ballots have been rejected. Election officials posted lists of voters online with instructions to come to City Hall up through Election Day to cast a replacement ballot. Nick Custodio, a deputy city commissioner, said in a telephone interview that a steady trickle of residents showed up over the weekend to vote anew.

Shoshanna Israel, a coordinator with the liberal Working Families Party in Philadelphia, said her organization assigned 49 volunteers to contact voters with ballots needing a fix. The group has contacted 1,800 voters since last Tuesday.

* * *

Republicans also sued to block counties from notifying voters who neglected to date their ballots to give them the chance to [cure] them. The effort failed, but counties may choose whether to do so, meaning not all voters will be given an opportunity to correct ballot errors.

Small numbers of votes could make a difference in the sort of close races to which Pennsylvania has become accustomed.

“If you can eliminate 1 percent of the votes and they tend to lean Democratic, then that gives you that statistical advantage,” said Clifford Levine, a Pittsburgh-based election lawyer for Democrats.

“This is not about stopping fraud,” Levine said. “It’s about discounting mail ballots. There’s just no question.”

Republican candidates in Pennsylvania, including gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano, have been vocal in urging supporters to cast ballots on Election Day, not by mail.

Jeff Mandell, a Democratic election lawyer in Wisconsin, said there has been less of a coordinated effort in that state to steer Republicans toward Election Day, although Trump made that pitch at an appearance this year.

Under Wisconsin law, an absentee voter must find a witness — usually a spouse, relative or friend — to attest that the voter legally completed the ballot. The witness must sign the ballot envelope and provide an address.

Republicans successfully sued this year to toss guidance from the Wisconsin Elections Commission allowing local election officials to fill in incomplete witness addresses on ballots. When voting rights groups sought new guidelines on what missing elements in the address would allow for tossing a ballot, judges ruled that it was too close to the election to change state policy.

“There is a concerted effort by the Republican infrastructure, the party, and others working with it, as well as Republican leaders in the legislature, to undermine absentee voting and make it harder for people to vote that way,” Mandell said.

Wisconsin Republicans who spoke out in favor of the suit said state law is clear that only a voter may correct an incomplete address.

“Lawless ballot curing cannot and will not be allowed to continue,” Republican Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu said in a statement issued at the time. “We’re putting the full weight of the legislature behind this lawsuit to shut down [the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s] defiant and flagrant abuse of the law.”

UPDATE: Wisconsin Republicans Try to Toss All Military Ballots:

Nothing says pro-military like trying to toss out their votes. But that’s where the modern Republican Party in Wisconsin is at now.

This is a long, convoluted story involving alleged felonies and attempts to show holes in the Wisconsin military voting system, but the important takeaway here is the system works well when people aren’t breaking the law to try to prove it doesn’t work.

Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R), the chairwoman of the State Assembly’s elections committee and a purveyor of lies about our elections, is trying to use another election official’s alleged attempt to demonstrate holes in the military voting system to toss out all military votes.

Conservative Bill Kristol, editor at large at The Bulwark, flagged the real takeaway from this story, “Republican chair of State Assembly’s elections committee in Wisconsin tries to get all military ballots thrown out.”

The Washington Post reported, “A Wisconsin lawmaker who has been a frequent promoter of false election claims is suing to prevent the immediate counting of military ballots in her state after she received three ballots under fake names.”

“Brandtjen and the others are using the incident to argue that military ballots should not be counted unless election officials can show they complied with a state law requiring them to maintain lists of all eligible military voters.”

“Thank you for your service,” conservative Charlie Sykes wrote dryly above the Washington Post article.

“These are service members defending our country that have the right to vote and their means to vote is by mail,” Will Attig, director of the Union Veterans Counci said. “We’ve got what to me appears to be an orchestrated plan by election deniers who do not truly support our democracy.”

The Democratic Mayor fired Kimberly Zapata, the election official who had obtained the ballots and sent them to the Republican lawmaker’s home, within days “after discovering she had sent the ballots in an apparent attempt to show committing such a crime was possible.”

Maybe if people stopped committing crimes to prove crime is possible, they would see that the crime wave is largely on the part of people orchestrating and committing election and voter fraud… because they fear it’s happening. (We saw this repeatedly with the Republicans who voted twice in the 2020 election.)

Charges were filed. ABC Chicago reported that prosecutors filed charges against a former top Milwaukee elections official after she “allegedly sent falsely obtained military absentee ballots to a Republican state lawmaker who has advanced election fraud conspiracy theories.”

But surprise! The Wisconsin Republican Party was waiting in the wings to clutch their pearls that they had something they could call election fraud, even though it was flagged and found and charged and no fake ballot was even counted: “Election officials need to follow the law. However, the vulnerabilities that continue to be exposed in the MyVote system for requesting absentee ballots should be shocking to everyone,” said RPW Communications Director Chad Doran.

How is it a vulnerability if the person who allegedly committed the fraud has already been caught and charged? That looks like a system that’s working well.

Republicans are old hat at accusing the military ballots of being fake.

Trying to prove voter fraud by committing election fraud is peak Trumpism, no matter who does it. But more importantly, these people were caught.

The Republican Party is trying to keep military votes from being counted because someone committed alleged election fraud trying to prove it could happen. This is a clear case of projection and egregiously anti-American. The Republican Party’s paranoia has infected them with a hatred for democracy.

If we cut out the fools trying to prove election fraud, there is no systemic issue of voter fraud.

Republicans and Democrats in Michigan say they think the lawsuit brought by Karamo, the GOP secretary of state nominee, has little chance of success. Democratic election lawyer Mark Brewer called the Karamo lawsuit “racist, frivolous, and sanctionable.”

In a text exchange, Karamo lawyer Daniel Hartman said the candidate, who is Black, filed the suit in Detroit in part because of what he described as the city’s history of election security breaches. Karamo has been an outspoken proponent of the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

Even if the suit fails, other challenges are playing out: In recent days, county clerks across Michigan have received emails from organized groups attempting to dispute the eligibility of voters who requested or cast absentee ballots, suggesting there could be more litigation to come.

UPDATE: Republicans Just Tried To Not Count Tens Of Thousands Of Detroit Votes But A Judge Said No:

A judge in Detroit, MI, has thrown out a lawsuit that would have disqualified tens of thousands of votes in the city.

Fox 2 reported:

A Detroit judge has dismissed a lawsuit that sought to prevent the city’s absentee ballots from being counted in the 2022 midterm election, calling the lawsuit by Kristina Karamo a “false flag of election law violations and corruption.”

In a blistering opinion authored by Judge Timothy Kenny, the chief official said an attorney for Karamo, who is running for secretary of state in Michigan, failed to show “any shred of evidence.”

“No exhibits, no testimony from any of the plaintiffs, no evidence…indicates the procedures for the November 9, 2022 election violate Michigan election laws,” read an opinion on the lawsuit, which was filed two weeks ago.

Just in case you thought that Republicans might wait until after the election to try to throw out Democratic votes, the case in Detroit demonstrates that Republicans are attempting to disqualify Democratic voters before the polls.

In 2020, judges stepped up and stopped Republicans from stealing elections, and in 2022 a judge put a halt to Republican plans to disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters in a city that is 80% African-American.

Republicans know that they can’t win if Detroit shows up to vote, so they are looking for ways to make sure that those votes never get counted.

Decades of Republican efforts to make the electorate smaller and whiter have failed, so the GOP is now trying to stop the votes that are cast from being counted.

In Michigan, one judge said no.

UPDATE: You know that he is right:





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