The GOP must choose, Trump or Democracy

gwb-trading said:
It appears that the Trumpy "poll watchers" are planning on causing complete chaos in the general election. In order to preserve your right as an American citizen to vote, you may need to punch a few of these idiots out to cast your ballot at your local precinct as they physically try to stop you from voting.

Election officials brace for confrontational poll watchers
https://apnews.com/article/2022-mid...iden-cabinet-c3d31b3b3c8957a51a2cc32e009d59be

The situation with the poll watcher had gotten so bad that Anne Risku, the election director in North Carolina’s Wayne County, had to intervene via speakerphone.

“You need to back off!” Risku recalled hollering after the woman wedged herself between a voter and the machine where the voter was trying to cast his ballot at a precinct about 60 miles southeast of Raleigh.

The man eventually was able to vote, but the incident was one of several Risku cited from the May primary that made her worry about a wave of newly aggressive poll watchers. Many have spent the past two years steeped in lies about the accuracy of the 2020 election.

Those fears led the North Carolina State Board of Elections in August to tighten rules governing poll watchers. But the state’s rules review board, appointed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, blocked the new poll watcher regulations in late September, leaving election officials such as Risku without additional tools to control behavior on Election Day, Nov. 8.

“It becomes complete babysitting,” Risku said in an interview. “The back and forth for the precinct officials, having somebody constantly on you for every little thing that you do — not because you’re doing it wrong, but because they don’t agree with what you’re doing.”

Poll watchers have traditionally been an essential element of electoral transparency, the eyes and ears for the two major political parties who help ensure that the actual mechanics of voting are administered fairly and accurately. But election officials fear that a surge of conspiracy believers are signing up for those positions this year and are being trained by others who have propagated the lie spread by former President Donald Trump and his allies that the 2020 presidential election was riddled with fraud.

In Michigan, groups that have spread falsehoods about that race are recruiting poll watchers. In Nevada, the Republican Party’s nominee for secretary of state, Jim Marchant, denies President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory and was a featured speaker at a party poll watcher training.

Cleta Mitchell, a prominent conservative lawyer and North Carolina resident, is running a group recruiting poll watchers and workers in eight swing states. Mitchell was on the phone with Trump when the then-president called Georgia’s secretary of state in January 2021 and asked that official to “find” enough votes for Trump to be declared the state’s winner.

Chris Harvey, who was Georgia’s election director in 2020 when Trump claimed the election was being stolen from him, recalled how swarms of Trump backers came as self-appointed poll watchers to observe the state’s manual recounts, harassing election workers and disrupting the process. Harvey fears a repeat this year.

“The whole tension that we’re expecting to see at polling places is something we’re talking to election officials about, something we’re talking to law enforcement about,” said Harvey, who is advising a group of election officials and law enforcement before November.

The laws governing poll watchers vary from state to state. Their role is generally to observe, question any deviations from required procedure and, in some states, lodge formal complaints or provide testimony for objections filed in court.

The worries this year are similar to those during the 2020 election, when Trump began railing against mail voting and the Republican National Committee launched its first national operation in decades. It had recently been freed from a consent decree that limited its poll watching operation after it previously was found to have targeted Black and Latino voters. But voting went smoothly that November.

Mitchell said her organization, the Election Integrity Network, is just trying to ensure that everyone follows the law.

“We are not a threat,” she told The Associated Press during a text message exchange. “Unless you think elections that are conducted according to the rule of law are a threat. We train people to follow the law.”

Risku said there were issues with poll watchers from both parties during the primary in May. But of the 13 incidents she reported to the North Carolina board from Wayne County, all involved Republicans.

In addition to the poll watcher who had to be ejected, Risku said another Republican poll watcher in her district waited after hours in the parking lot of the Mount Olive Train Depot early voting site until Chief Judge Susan Wiley began carrying boxes of marked ballots to her car.

On two occasions, the man tried to follow her back to the elections office in Goldsboro, about a 20-minute drive.

Recognizing that the job has become “a scary ordeal” in the last year, Risku said she has stepped up security before November and offered raises to entice precinct officials to stay. She expects many won’t return after this year.

The North Carolina GOP chairman, Michael Whatley, said that’s not what the party is teaching its poll watchers.

“What we saw in terms of some of the activities that were at play may have been coming from Republicans but were not things that we have been teaching people in our training sessions,” Whatley said. “What we want to do is make sure that we have people that are in the room that are going to be very respectful of the election officials at all times, be very respectful of the voters at all times and, if they see issues, then report them in.”

He has declined to allow reporters to attend the training sessions, which he said have trained 7,000 potential poll watchers so far this year.

As in many states, poll watchers are only permitted in North Carolina if they have been designated by the major parties. But in Michigan, organizations that register with local election offices also can provide poll watchers. A coalition of groups that have questioned the 2020 election are scrambling to get as many of their members in place as possible in the politically critical state.

“The best I can do is put a whole bunch of eyeballs on it to make sure that anything that doesn’t look right gets a further look,” said Sandy Kiesel, executive director of the Michigan Election Integrity Fund and Force, part of a coalition that recruited 5,000 poll watchers for the state’s August primary.

Kiesel said several of her coalition’s poll watchers and poll challengers — Michigan law allows one person to observe and another person to formally lodge challenges at precincts — were prevented from observing or escorted out of polling places in August.

Michigan election officials are bracing for more confrontations in November. Patrick Colbeck, a former Republican state senator and prominent election conspiracy theorist who is part of Kiesel’s coalition, announced this past week that a comprehensive fall push to scrutinize every aspect of voting would be called “Operation Overwatch.”

“They are talking about intimidating people who have the right to vote,” said Barb Byrum, clerk of Michigan’s Ingham County, which includes Lansing, the state capital.

In a sign of the importance the state’s Republicans place on poll watchers, the GOP-controlled Legislature last week agreed to let election offices throughout Michigan start processing mailed ballots two days before Election Day — something most states with mail voting allow long before then — but only if they allow poll watchers to observe. The ballots are not actually counted until Election Day.

In Texas, a new law allows every candidate to assign up to two poll watchers, raising the potential that observers could pack polling locations, particularly around big cities such as Dallas and Houston where ballots are the longest.

According to records from the secretary of state’s office, more than 900 people in Texas already had received poll watching certification in the three weeks after the state opened required training on Sept. 1.
More...

Will they be asking for papers (voter ID) like their Reich counterparts?
 
gwb-trading said:
Fraudulent Document Cited in Supreme Court Bid to Torch Election Law
Supporters of the “independent state legislature theory” are quoting fake history.
https://www.politico.com/news/magaz...ument-supreme-court-bid-election-law-00056810

Supporters of a legal challenge to completely upend our electoral system are citing a fraudulent document in their brief to the Supreme Court. It’s an embarrassing error — and it underscores how flimsy their case really is.

This fall, the court will hear Moore v. Harper, an audacious bid by Republican legislators in North Carolina to free themselves from their own state constitution’s restrictions on partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. The suit also serves as a vehicle for would-be election subverters promoting the so-called “independent state legislature theory” — the notion that state legislators have virtually absolute authority over federal elections — which was used as part of an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The North Carolina legislators’ case relies in part on a piece of paper from 1818. But there’s a problem: The document they quote in their brief is a well-known fake. So as the Supreme Court considers whether to blow up our electoral system, it should know the real American history.

The story starts at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, when an ambitious young South Carolinian named Charles Pinckney submitted a plan for a new government. We don’t know exactly what was in Pinckney’s plan, because his original document has been lost to history. The Convention records, however, reveal that the framers hardly discussed Pinckney’s plan and, at key moments, rejected his views during the debates.

Those documents were sealed for decades following ratification. This created a vacuum in the historical record, into which Pinckney strode. In 1818, when the government was gathering records from the Convention for publication, Pinckney submitted a document that, he claimed, represented his original plan. It was uncannily similar to the U.S. Constitution.

James Madison, one of the main authors of the Constitution, was “perplexed” when he saw Pinckney’s document. He was “perfectly confident” that it was “not the draft originally presented to the convention by Mr. Pinckney.” Some of Pinckney’s text, Madison observed, was impossibly similar to the final text of the U.S. Constitution, which was painstakingly debated over the course of months. There was no way Pinckney could have anticipated those passages verbatim. In addition, Madison was quick to point out, many provisions were diametrically opposed to Pinckney’s well-known views. Most telling, the draft proposed direct election of federal representatives, whereas Pinckney had loudly insisted that state legislatures choose them. Madison included a detailed refutation of Pinckney’s document along with the rest of his copious notes from the Convention. It was the genteel, 19th-century equivalent of calling BS.

We’ll never know for certain why Pinckney concocted this fraud. Many scholars assume he was trying to sell himself to history as the true father of the Constitution. Whatever Pinckney’s motivation, though, nearly every serious historian agrees that the 1818 document is a fake. John Franklin Jameson, an early president of the American Historical Association, observed back in 1903, “The so-called draft has been so utterly discredited that no instructed person will use it as it stands as a basis for constitutional or historical reasoning.” Since then, the document has become, in the words of a modern-day researcher, “probably the most intractable constitutional con in history.”

Pinckney’s fraud has, however, proved irresistible to the North Carolina legislators, who cited his 1818 document in their current bid for control over congressional elections.

Here’s why. The Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution dictates that the “times, places, and manner” of congressional elections “shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof” (unless Congress chooses to “make or alter” the rules). The framers understood this authority to be subject to the ordinary checks and balances found in state constitutions — for example, the governor’s veto and state judicial review. We know this, in part, because some framers themselves voted to approve state constitutions circumscribing the legislature’s power over congressional elections. We also know that the framers — Madison chief among them — deeply distrusted state legislatures.

The North Carolina legislators, however, would have the Supreme Court believe that, in assigning federal election administration to state legislatures, the framers intended to sweep aside the traditional checks and balances — preventing state courts, the governors and other authorities from policing partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression by the legislature.

And they point to Pinckney’s fraudulent document as proof. The plan Pinckney released in 1818 assigned the administration of congressional elections to “each state.” Proponents of the independent state legislature theory argue that, if the framers deliberately changed the chosen election administrator from the “state” to “the legislature thereof,” they must have meant to eliminate other state actors from the process.

That argument is premised on a 204-year-old lie.

Whatever proposal Pinckney presented to the Convention almost certainly did not contain this provision. As mentioned, Pinckney emphatically opposed popular elections and, after he lost that debate, derided them as the “the greatest blot in the constitution.” His 1818 fraud tells us absolutely nothing about what the framers believed in 1787.

Nevertheless, the North Carolina legislators claim they have discovered that our 200-year understanding of the meaning of the Constitution is wrong, that the framers actually intended to give state legislatures nearly unchecked power over congressional elections. They claim that the Supreme Court must throw out all our election rules and reorder our governing practice to effectuate that purpose.

This interpretation of the Elections Clause is both unwise and patently ahistorical. It is, nevertheless, surprising that the legislators’ brief to the Supreme Court describes Pinckney’s version of the Elections Clause as the “earliest reference to the regulation of congressional elections,” even though it was clearly drafted 31 years after the curtains fell on the Constitutional Convention and is the product of a well-established falsehood.

Debate in the Supreme Court is increasingly littered with bad history. But if you’re going to do originalism, at least use originals. Pinckney’s 1818 fraud simply isn’t one.
More...

Civil Rights Groups Warn Supreme Court that N.C. GOP’s Independent State Legislature Theory ‘Would Wreak Havoc’ on ‘American Democracy’
https://lawandcrime.com/supreme-cou...eory-would-wreak-havoc-on-american-democracy/

A civil rights group filed an amicus brief on Wednesday in an upcoming and high-profile Supreme Court case that could prove pivotal to American electoral politics at the federal level.

In the case stylized as Moore v. Harper, North Carolina’s GOP-controlled General Assembly sued the Tarheel State’s Supreme Court for invalidating serially-contested congressional maps that had been gerrymandered to benefit Republican Party candidates.

In the state court’s February 2022 decision, the 4-3 majority chided Republican legislators for “discriminating against certain voters by depriving them of substantially equal voting power.”

But the state legislature effectively ignored the state supreme court’s decision – issuing a second gerrymandered map. This prompted the state supreme court to order a special master to create the maps that are currently in effect for the upcoming midterm elections.

Republican legislators, led by Rep. Tim Moore, argue the state’s highest court has usurped their authority to regulate federal elections as they see fit under the U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause.

The question presented in the case is whether the state’s judicial branch can nullify the state legislature’s regulations governing the election of U.S. senators and representatives. The operating theory of the case relies on the controversial “independent state legislature” theory – which suggests that state legislatures have the ultimate say over how federal elections are conducted within their respective states.

Taken to its logical conclusion, and viz. the facts of the present case that will soon be heard by the nation’s high court, applying that theory would mean the North Carolina Supreme Court was wrong to reject the partisan gerrymandered maps – even though they based their conclusion on the same state constitution that created both the General Assembly and the state supreme court itself.

In some ways, the theory also nullifies the notion of judicial review — the long-held theory that the courts exist for the specific reason of providing a channel by which people may seek a redress of grievances. Rather, the theory suggests, the courts must sit back and watch the process churn without intervening.

Some legal scholars consider the theory to be “debunked” and nonsensical ,but it is being tested, in full and on the merits, for the first time before a 6-3 conservative majority on the Roberts Court. And several conservative justices – past and present – have expressed interest in the theory.

The friend of court brief submitted by Common Cause argues that the GOP’s theory “would upend election administration nationwide” by nullifying “countless state constitutional provisions” and would “potentially eliminate any judicial forum for ensuring that state actors follow state election laws — while requiring legislatures to regulate even the most minute election details. ”

But, at a more basic level, the brief argues, the theory is “inconsistent with constitutional text, structure, history, and precedent.”

The filing goes on to say that the Election Clause clearly “does not abrogate” constraints on the state legislature imposed by the state constitution or “preclude state courts from enforcing those constraints” just because elections are at issue.

The brief says the Framers of the U.S. Constitution would have never understood or accepted that the Elections Clause gave state legislatures unchecked power over federal elections, but, rather, that they were the part of the process that enacts “Regulations.”

And, the filing heavily leans into the notion that the independent state legislature theory simply does not make much sense.

“[T]he Constitution’s structure confirms that the Elections Clause does not upend fundamental principles of judicial review,” the amicus brief continues. “Just as the term ‘Congress’ in the second half of the Elections Clause does not immunize Congress from judicial review, so too for state ‘Legislature’ under the first half of the Elections Clause.”

Common Cause also marshals “founding-era history” and “a century of precedent” to make their case that the petitioners’ argument is foreclosed. The brief also notes a recent case in which Common Cause was the lead respondent, and where they lost, but wherein “all nine Justices agreed that state courts could apply substantive provisions in state constitutions to congressional redistricting.”

That theory, the civil rights group argues, is also inimical to the long-held idea that state supreme courts can review state laws.

From the filing at length:

The North Carolina Supreme Court carefully reviewed the text, history, and purpose of the North Carolina Constitution, including its Free Elections Clause — a clause with no analogue in the Federal Constitution. Its decision was the product of the principled state-court judicial review that this Court embraced in [Rucho v. Common Cause.]


Adopting Petitioners’ interpretation, by contrast, would wreak havoc. Running elections is already “extraordinarily complicated and difficult.” Petitioners’ theory could require state officials to run two elections simultaneously: one for state elections that are subject to the state constitution, and one for congressional elections that are not. Petitioners’ theory would also call into doubt indispensable features of States’ election apparatuses — which empower executive officials to administer elections and permit state courts to adjudicate election disputes. Perhaps worst of all, Petitioners’ theory would require this Court to second-guess state-court interpretations of state constitutions, often in an emergency posture on the eve of an election — an intolerable affront to the principles of federalism.

“It is rare to encounter a constitutional theory so antithetical to the Constitution’s text and structure, so inconsistent with the Constitution’s original meaning, so disdainful of this Court’s precedent, and so potentially damaging for American democracy,” the brief argues in summary. “This Court should reject Petitioners’ theory.”

The relevant amicus brief is here.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top