Gerrymandering explained

[Athos_131]

(Asshelmet) McConnell says bill that would make Election Day a federal holiday is a ‘power grab’ by Democrats

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday that a Democratic bill that would make Election Day a federal holiday is a “power grab,” sparking a fierce backlash online.

McConnell was speaking about H.R. 1, legislation that Democrats have made a centerpiece of their agenda since retaking the House earlier this month.

In remarks on the Senate floor, McConnell (R-Ky.) said Democrats “want taxpayers on the hook for generous new benefits for federal bureaucrats and government employees,” including making Election Day a “new paid holiday for government workers.”

“So this is the Democrats’ plan to ‘restore democracy,’” McConnell said, describing the legislation as “a political power grab that’s smelling more and more like what it is.”

The far-reaching legislation would also prohibit the purging of voter rolls, require presidential and vice-presidential candidates to release their tax returns, compel states to adopt independent redistricting commissions and create a matching system for small-dollar donations to congressional campaigns, among other changes.

In his Wednesday remarks, as well as in a Washington Post op-ed earlier this month, McConnell mocked the legislation as the “Democrat Politician Protection Act.”

“H.R. 1 would victimize every American taxpayer by pouring their money into expensive new subsidies that don’t even pass the laugh test,” McConnell said on the Senate floor.

His remarks prompted a wave of criticism by Democrats, some of whom argued that McConnell was acknowledging that Republicans want to make it more difficult for Americans to vote.

“Voting is a power grab. By citizens,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said in a tweet Wednesday afternoon.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) shared a link to a story about McConnell’s comments and tweeted, “Why are Republicans always afraid of making it easier for Americans to vote?”

Ezra Levin, a former Capitol Hill staffer who co-founded the Indivisible network of liberal activist groups, accused McConnell of “rehearsing old lines.”

“In 1977, after Watergate and Nixon, Jimmy Carter was inaugurated and proposed expansive reforms to campaign finance and to make it easier to vote,” Levin said on Twitter. “The GOP called it a ‘power grab’ and killed it in the Senate.”

Walter Shaub, a former director of the Office of Government Ethics, noted that a significant number of federal workers are military veterans and suggested combining Election Day with Veterans Day, a proposal that has made the rounds in recent years.

“A ‘power grab’ to let people vote?” Shaub said in a tweet. “He also says it’s just a holiday for bureaucrats, almost ⅓ of whom are veterans. How about McConnell compromises by moving Veterans Day to the 1st Tuesday in November? What better way to honor veterans than by making it easier for them to vote?”

#Resist

[Lois]

Why of course he does Athos.  That's because he knows the majority favor Democrats and he's terrified of majority rule.

[Athos_131]

If you support someone who thinks voting should be more difficult, you're a terrified bigot.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

NC elections chief details 'coordinated, unlawful absentee ballot' scheme in 9th District

In her opening remarks, Strach detailed an alleged ballot-tampering scheme operated by Leslie McCrae Dowless, a political operative in rural Bladen County who she said hired workers to falsify absentee ballot request forms, collect absentee ballots and falsify witness certifications in an apparent violation of state election laws.

The alleged scheme was coordinated and well resourced, Strach said. She also said that security at the elections office in Bladen County, where some of the alleged ballot tampering took place, had been insufficient.

Dowless allegedly paid workers $150 for every 50 absentee ballot request forms they collected and $125 for every 50 absentee ballots collected, Strach said. What’s more, Red Dome, a consulting firm hired by Harris’s campaign, paid Dowless $131,275 between July 3, 2017, and Nov. 7, 2018.

Now do the Florida Senate and Georgia Governor elections.

#Resist

[Lois]

It's interesting how anti-Democrats like to point at corruption for why they don't vote Democrat. The same group also points to Abraham Lincoln for why the Republic party can't possibly be racist.

These people are so last century.

Learn the facts Jack!

[Athos_131]

Hmm, Yellow Wall is crying about ethics complaints.

That person never addressed the election fraud in North Carolina.

Weird.

GOP candidate Mark Harris's son testifies in NC ballot-tampering hearing

John Harris, the son of Republican congressional candidate Mark Harris, said Wednesday that he does not believe his father knew about an alleged ballot-tampering scheme by a political operative working for the campaign.

Testifying at a hearing of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, John Harris said that believed that the operative, Leslie McCrae Dowless, “lied” to his father and the campaign officials about the legality of the alleged ballot-tampering scheme.

But he acknowledged that he had reservations about Dowless’s absentee ballot program. He said he told his father that he believed the operation may be illegal.

"I just didn’t believe McCrae because the numbers didn’t add up," John Harris, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of North Carolina, said.


The alleged scheme has left the outcome of the election for North Carolina’s 9th District unresolved for months.

Mark Harris currently leads Democrat Dan McCready in the race by 905 votes. But state election officials have refused to certify Harris as the winner amid allegations that Dowless paid workers to illegally collect absentee ballots from voters.

Democrats want the state elections board to order a new election in North Carolina’s 9th District, insisting that absentee voting in the race was tainted by fraud and that the final results cannot be trusted.

Republicans, on the other hand, argue that not enough absentee ballots were affected by the alleged scheme to change the outcome of the race. They’re asking elections officials to certify Harris as the winner.

John Harris’s testimony on Wednesday was the latest in an explosive evidentiary hearing that has so far lasted for three days.

Throughout the hearing, witness testimonies and state elections officials have detailed allegations of a sweeping ballot-harvesting operation led by Dowless, a longtime political operative in rural Bladen County.

Testifying on Tuesday and Wednesday, Andy Yates, the co-founder of the consulting firm Red Dome, acknowledged that the campaign did little to keep tabs on Dowless.

When it came to reimbursing Dowless for expenses related to his campaign work, Yates said he never asked to see receipts, invoices or any proof of the number of absentee ballot request forms being collected.

But Yates insisted that he was not aware of any illegal activities by Dowless, who Yates said joined Mark Harris’s campaign before he was ever hired.

The hearing is also expected to examine what Mark Harris knew about the alleged ballot-tampering scheme, if anything.
The candidate has insisted that he had no knowledge of any illegal activities by Dowless and that he was never warned about the operative, who has faced questions in the past about his absentee ballot operation.

Mark Harris personally directed Dowless’s hiring to the campaign.

John Harris said Wednesday that he believes that was because Dowless appeared to have a record of success in past elections.

“If he had lost repeatedly, I don’t think that they would have decided to go with him,” he said.

But he also said that he told his father after a meeting with Dowless in 2017 that collecting absentee ballots was a felony in North Carolina.

In an April 2017 email to Mark Harris, John Harris noted that a “good test” of Dowless’s operation was whether his father was “comfortable with the full process he uses being broadcast on the news.”

“I thought what he was doing was illegal,” John Harris said on Wednesday. “And I was right.”

#Resist

[psiberzerker]

Can you just stop repeating the same things 6 times (So far) in a row, so nobody else can get a word in edgewise?  Spamming, and posting clickbait for game piracy servicies are not endearing, nor helping your case.

#Desist.

[joan1984]

  I like that.

#Desist...

Can you just stop repeating the same things 6 times (So far) in a row, so nobody else can get a word in edgewise?  Spamming, and posting clickbait for game piracy servicies are not endearing, nor helping your case.

#Desist.

[Athos_131]

  I like that.

So once again you cowardly refuse to answer?

#Resist

[psiberzerker]

So once again you cowardly refuse to answer?

#Resist

Funny, because I was obviously asking you that.  Repeatedly.  Coward.

[Athos_131]

N.C. board declares a new election in contested House race after the GOP candidate admitted misspeaking under oath

RALEIGH, N.C. — The North Carolina State Board of Elections on Thursday ordered a new election in the 9th Congressional District, ending a dramatic, months-long investigation into allegations of widespread ballot tampering.

“It appears to me the irregularities and improprieties occurred to such an extent that they tainted the results of the entire election and cast doubt on its fairness,” said the board chairman, Bob Cordle, shortly before the five-member panel voted unanimously to throw out the November results between Republican Mark Harris and Democrat Dan McCready. “I believe the people of North Carolina deserve a fair election and deserve to have their votes counted properly.”

The board’s vote came moments after Harris admitted that he misspoke under oath earlier in the day.

Harris said he is recovering from a serious infection that led to sepsis and two strokes, which in turn affected his memory. The episode made him realize, he testified, that he was not prepared for the “rigors” of the evidentiary hearing. He called for a new election, then promptly excused himself from the proceeding.

“I believe a new election should be called,” Harris said, eliciting gasps from the hearing room in Raleigh. “It’s become clear to me that public confidence in the 9th District has been undermined to an extent that a new election is warranted.”

Harris’s testimony came the day after his son, John Harris, a federal prosecutor, testified that he warned his father in phone calls and emails that he believed a political operative named Leslie McCrae Dowless had broken the law in a previous election and should not be hired for the 2018 campaign. Mark Harris hired Dowless anyway.

In his initial testimony Thursday, the elder Harris maintained as he had in interviews with reporters that he was unaware of red flags about the operative’s alleged tactics — notwithstanding what his son told him in the spring of 2017.

Harris was also asked if he had told anyone this week that he did not expect his email exchanges with John Harris to be made public in the hearing. Harris said four times that he did not recall. After the fourth time, Harris’s lawyer, David Freedman, abruptly stood up and asked the board chairman if he could speak to the board in private.

When the board reconvened, Harris explained that he had been mistaken about that recollection — and had in fact told his younger son, Matthew, in a phone conversation Tuesday evening that he did not expect those emails to surface the next day.

The emails did surface. In one exchange from 2016 displayed during John Harris’s testimony Wednesday, the two Harrises discussed the anomalies that year — as well as the irony that Dowless had submitted a complaint to state elections officials that Democrats had employed similar tactics in Bladen County.

Investigators also shared an email between father and son about whether to hire Dowless in which the younger Harris wrote: “Good test is if you’re comfortable with the full process he uses being broadcast on the news.”

Harris, a Baptist minister, had taken the stand on the fourth day of dramatic hearings into allegations that widespread election fraud tainted the results in the 9th Congressional District, the last undecided congressional race in the country. Harris leads by 905 votes over Democrat Dan McCready.

Harris said he hired the operative on the advice of a number of Republican friends and colleagues. He said he believed Dowless when he offered to run a legal absentee-ballot program for Harris’s campaign.

Earlier Thursday, Harris said he knew nothing of the alleged ballot-tampering scheme that Dowless ran.

Harris said he didn’t follow his son’s advice in part because John Harris was just 27 years old at the time and added that the younger Harris is “a little judgmental and has a little taste of arrogance and some other things. And I’m very proud of him and love him with all my heart.”

Former U.S. Rep. Robin Hayes, the chairman of the N.C. Republican Party, said the party supported Harris’s decision to call for a new election.

“This has been a tremendously difficult situation for all involved and we wish him the best as he recovers from his illness and subsequent complications,” Hayes said. “We will continue to work with legislators and investigators on how we can improve the electoral system so that these kinds of situations can be avoided in the future. The people of North Carolina deserve nothing less than the full confidence and trust in the electoral system.”

Harris’s testimony followed the dramatic opening moments of Thursday’s hearings, in which Josh Lawson, general counsel for the State Board of Elections, disclosed a letter rebuking Harris's campaign lawyers for failing to turn over the emails between Harris and his son until 15 minutes before John Harris appeared Wednesday.

“The timing of your disclosure raises significant and material concerns regarding the Committee’s compliance and candor prior to, and now during, the hearing,” Lawson wrote. He said John Harris's subsequent testimony “strongly suggests” that the campaign’s explanation — that the query for emails had been incomplete — “was not accurate.”

Before the hearing was paused for that closed session, Harris explained on the witness stand how he had met Dowless — the 63-year-old native of Bladen County at the center of a suspected ballot-tampering scheme that has left the 9th District in limbo since November, when the board declined to certify a winner and launched an investigation instead. The district runs along the South Carolina border from Charlotte to rural eastern North Carolina.

Dowless was a “good ole boy” who “ate, slept and drank” politics and was recommended to him by a former state judge, Harris said. He met Dowless in 2017 at a local furniture store in the 9th District, and the two, along with other Republicans, sat on couches in the store's showroom so that Dowless could describe his absentee-ballot operation.

Harris had heard that Dowless was responsible for delivering an overwhelming share of the absentee ballot vote in the 2016 Republican primary for Todd Johnson, which Harris had lost to the incumbent at the time, Robert Pittenger. Harris was still smarting that he had lost to Pittenger by so few votes, and believed that if he had hired Dowless that year, he would have won.

“I turned to McCrae and said, ‘Well, what makes you so special? What is it that you do?’” Harris recalled.

Harris said Dowless explained to him that his operation was strictly legal. He would hire workers who would collect ballot request forms from voters, and then return once actual ballots had been sent out and help the voters fill out and mail the ballots. “We don’t touch the ballots,” Harris recalled the operative saying. Collecting or filling out another voter’s ballot is a felony in North Carolina.

Harris’s testimony drew skepticism from some board members. He was questioned about how Dowless paid his workers for each ballot request form they turned in — and whether that should have raised a red flag.

Harris claimed very little knowledge about the inner workings of his campaign, which he said was handled primarily by his campaign consultant, Andy Yates of Red Dome Group. Yates completed two days of testimony on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, the younger Harris, now 29, said he offered the advice to his father as he considered whether to hire Dowless to run his absentee-ballot program in the 2018 congressional race. He conveyed similar concerns to Yates, he said. Mark Harris hired Dowless despite his son’s concerns.

At one point during his testimony, John Harris’s voice cracked and his father wept.

“I thought what he was doing was illegal, and I was right,” John Harris said about Dowless. He added: “I had no reason to believe that my father actually knew, or my mother or any other associate with the campaign had any knowledge. I think Dowless told them he wasn’t doing any of this, and they believed him.”

The younger Harris told the board Wednesday that he began studying absentee-ballot tallies in the 9th District in June 2016, when his father narrowly lost the Republican primary.

John Harris described digging into the numbers and discovering that mailed ballots for Johnson had arrived at county election offices “in batches” — which he believed suggested that they had been collected illegally by campaign workers. 

Harris said he told his father then of his suspicions. Dowless, who declined to testify this week to avoid self-incrimination, is accused of doing just that in the 2018 cycle — hiring a team of workers to illegally collect, sign, forge and turn in ballots.

Both Yates and Harris have denied knowledge of those alleged tactics.

“Guess he didn’t like the Dems cutting into his business!” the elder Harris wrote.

In a televised interview in early January, Mark Harris told Spectrum News in Raleigh that reports, including one in The Washington Post, that he had been warned of Dowless’s alleged tactics, were untrue.

In his testimony Wednesday, the younger Harris also called into question the account of Yates, whose political consulting firm had paid Dowless on behalf of the campaign.

John Harris said he was surprised to hear how little oversight Yates provided to ensure that Dowless was performing the services that he was being paid for. He was also surprised to hear Yates say he was shocked to learn of Dowless’s alleged tactics once the investigation began in November.

“Mr. Yates said he was shocked and disturbed by the testimony,” the younger Harris said. “I was disturbed. Less shocked.”

Harris said that after he warned Yates of Dowless, “Andy assured me, ‘Yeah, we’re going to make sure that he does what he says he’s going to do.’ ”

John Harris emphasized his belief that his parents did not know of Dowless’s alleged tactics, but he also acknowledged in wrenching testimony that they “wanted” to believe Dowless — perhaps against their better judgment.

The younger Harris asked the elections board if he could make a few final remarks after lawyers had completed their questioning of him.

“I love my dad, and I love my mom,” he said. “I certainly have no vendetta against them, no family scores to settle. I think that they made mistakes in this process, and they certainly did things differently than I would have done them.”

I guess once his son testified against him the jig was up.

#Resist

[_priapism]

In true Evangelical form, Harris cries when finally caught red handed, by his own son.

[Athos_131]

Criminal prosecution anticipated in District 9 case, Wake County DA says

RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) – Following the state Board of Elections hearing on fraud in the 9th Congressional district, Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman says she expects to take the case before a grand jury in the next month.

Freeman said that case largely focuses on the 2016 general and 2018 primary elections, knowing the state was conducting its own investigation into the 2018 general election.

“I think it is fair to say at this point that a criminal prosecution should be anticipated,” said Freeman in an interview with CBS17. “It has taken time. It is detailed work. But, I feel confident we will at the end of the day be able to present something that the public will feel satisfied that justice has been sought and obtained.”

After months of saying he should be seated in Congress, Republican Mark Harris walked into the hearing room Thursday and abruptly called for a new election.

“Through the testimony I’ve listened to over the past three days, I believe a new election should be called. It’s become clear to me that the public’s confidence in the 9th district seat general election has been undermined to an extent that a new election is warranted,” he said.

State investigators say Bladen County political operative McCrae Dowless ran an “absentee ballot scheme” in which his employees paid people to register for absentee ballots but would then collect those ballots and take them Dowless.

Harris denied knowing about that activity, but his son John testified that he warned his father in April 2017 about his concerns regarding Dowless.

Harris led Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes in November when the Board of Elections declined to certify the results of the race and ordered an investigation.

“I imagine that the district attorney’s office and the U.S. Attorney will probably be picking things up,” McCready said Friday at a gathering with supporters.

While Freeman confirmed some details about what her office is doing, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Robert Higdon declined to comment.

Freeman said she followed this week’s hearing closely.

Even as it took place, she said investigators were in Bladen County continuing to gather evidence.

“This is also an investigation, quite frankly, and I think you saw some of that this week, that has changed and evolved as it has been going on,” she said, noting the Bladen County district attorney referred the case to her office a little over a year ago.

“It certainly has been one of the most, if not the most, time-consuming investigations I’ve been involved in since I have been here,” she said.

Freeman said she will seek the evidence presented at this week’s hearing from the Board of Elections as well as other material investigators have gathered.

While the grand jury will initially hear evidence from the 2016 general and 2018 primary elections, she hopes to wrap up the investigation into the November 2018 general election in the next few months.

“It’s hard to project how long it’ll take for us to go through that information,” she said.

All the witnesses at this week’s hearing testified voluntarily, including some who did not have attorneys.

“There were no offers of immunity going into this week’s hearing,” said Freeman.

Lisa Britt, McCrae Dowless’s stepdaughter, testified for hours about the details of the absentee ballot operation in Bladen County, saying she got paid to collect absentee ballots and bring them to Dowless.

She also said she filled in some ballots in races that voters left blank. She said that did not include the races for Congress or sheriff.

“I think you saw some individuals who were likely taken advantage of,” said Freeman.

She also noted the investigation includes any violations of campaign finance laws.

When asked how Mark Harris factors into her investigation, she said, “I think we have tried to say from the beginning that not only are we focused on and interested in trying to get to the bottom of what, if any, illegal activity was involved in what clearly appear to be irregular handling of absentee ballots, but also as to who might have been funding that and what did they know?”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Republican Cries Against Voter Fraud Go Mostly Quiet After Scheme Tied to Party

RALEIGH, N.C. — Republican politicians across the country have for years railed against the threat of voter fraud. Some have made unproven claims about how rampant it has become in order to pass voter ID laws and open sweeping investigations. The sanctity of the vote, they have said, must be protected at all costs.

But when a hard-fought congressional election in North Carolina — in which a Republican candidate appeared to narrowly beat his Democratic opponent — was overturned this week because of election fraud by a Republican political operative, the party was measured, and largely muted, in its response.

The state party chairman, Robin Hayes, issued a statement after officials ordered a new election calling the affair “a tremendously difficult situation for all involved.” National Republicans have been mostly mum. President Trump, who has made election fraud one of the hallmarks of his administration, was quiet on Twitter, although on Friday, facing reporters at the Oval Office, he condemned fraud — “all of it, and that includes North Carolina.”

Mark Harris, the Republican nominee, had eked out a 905-vote lead over Dan McCready. But the North Carolina Board of Elections refused to certify Mr. Harris as the winner and opened an investigation into irregularities. This week, the five-member board, made up of Republicans and Democrats, convened an evidentiary hearing in Raleigh at which witnesses described a voter-turnout effort that relied on the rogue collection of absentee ballots.

In several hours of testimony on Thursday, after his campaign acknowledged that it had withheld damning records from the board, Mr. Harris denied wrongdoing but also appeared to mislead regulators. He then surprised everyone by abandoning his claim to the Ninth Congressional District seat, which covers part of Charlotte and much of southeastern North Carolina.

Witnesses detailed how people working for a Harris campaign operative, L. McCrae Dowless Jr., had filled out parts of some absentee ballots and improperly collected others. On Friday, Lorrin Freeman, the district attorney in Wake County, said she could seek charges within weeks against Mr. Dowless and some of the people he hired.

“Obviously, it’s within the province of the grand jury as to whether they will return indictments,” Ms. Freeman said. “But do I anticipate there will be a criminal prosecution going forward? I do.”

State Republicans, who over the past few years have tightened voting laws and had fought to preserve Mr. Harris’s victory, were far less vociferous in denouncing voter fraud than they have been in the past.

That stands in marked contrast to 2016, when the state’s Republicans filed many complaints and claimed for a month that Roy Cooper, the Democrat who was elected governor that year, should not be seated because rampant fraud had enabled his victory. The charge proved baseless.

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On Friday, State Senator Phil Berger, the president pro tempore of the North Carolina Senate and among the most powerful Republicans in Raleigh, said Mr. Harris should have heeded warnings that Mr. Dowless could not be trusted.

“If you failed to take notice of the things that are there to see and the things that you’re hearing that are repeated by people that you ought to trust, I think you deserve a fair amount of criticism,” he said.

Mr. Berger, who said he had been surprised by Mr. Harris’s decision to ask the elections board to order a new election, did not say whether Mr. Harris should run again. (In an interview, Mr. McCready said on Friday he would run in the new election, which has not been scheduled.)

“I think there was enough going on to create questions, and the results were close enough where we just needed to clean this out and start over,” Mr. Berger said in an interview at the Legislative Building.

Mr. Berger, who helped craft a voter ID law that a federal appeals court later said contained provisions that targeted “African-Americans with almost surgical precision,” said that he expected the Ninth District case to lead to new discussions about how to combat fraud in North Carolina.

Among Mr. Harris’s supporters, Tami Fitzgerald, the executive director of the North Carolina Values Coalition, a group that works with pastors throughout the state and has close ties to Mr. Harris, would not say whether fraud had taken place in the Ninth District. Instead, she called the board’s unanimous decision a “stolen victory.”

A congressional election has not been redone in more than 40 years, and doing so because of fraud is almost unheard of. But there have been ample causes for suspicion — Lyndon B. Johnson’s first Senate victory foremost among them — that illegal votes have been cast for candidates who won.

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The National Republican Congressional Committee, which organizes and finances the party’s House strategy, used the debacle in North Carolina to demand that Democrats support a national ban on the collection of absentee ballots — a practice that is legal in many states but not in North Carolina.

Prosecutors in the Trump administration have been conducting a high-profile investigation in North Carolina for months to find noncitizens who cast illegal ballots, many of them in apparent ignorance of the law. But although the state elections board sent Justice Department officials evidence of absentee-ballot fraud by Mr. Dowless as early as January 2017, they took no action before last November’s House election, and it is unclear whether they are investigating the matter.

In Oval Office remarks to reporters on Friday, Mr. Trump condemned voter fraud throughout the country, falsely claiming “they found a million fraudulent votes” in California, and calling the 2018 vote count in Florida a “catastrophe” because vote totals for Republican candidates decreased during recounts.

But Mr. Trump said he looked forward to a final report on the disputed election in that state.

Indeed, no one has been more vocal about the evils of rigged votes than Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly made the false claim that the 2016 election, in which he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, was rife with Democratic fraud.

And shortly before the midterms, when Democrats flipped the House, Mr. Trump said on Twitter that “all levels of government and Law Enforcement are watching carefully for VOTER FRAUD.”

“Cheat at your own peril,” he warned.

The president’s obsession led him to create a presidential commission charged with reining in voter fraud. Led by the Kansas secretary of state at the time, Kris Kobach, the panel sought voter data from all 50 states in an effort to prove the president’s theory of massive illegal voting. But the commission was disbanded after election officials from both parties refused to hand over the data and critics filed multiple lawsuits challenging its conduct.

Mr. Kobach, who built his political career on thinly sourced allegations of unchecked illegal voting by noncitizens, said in an interview on Friday that it “is never appropriate for either side of the political debate to be silent about voter fraud.”

“People who downplay it say it’s just a small percentage of the total vote, but that argument is meaningless in a close race,” he said.

In a column on Breitbart News, Mr. Kobach suggested that the case was a comeuppance for Democrats and voting-rights advocates who oppose the stringent controls on voting that Republicans have enacted for a decade or more. But those restrictions, limiting who can vote and how ballots are cast, only shield elections from cheating by individual voters, a kind of fraud that experts say is exceptionally rare.

The party has given scant attention to the more frequent kind of election fraud — the inside-job schemes in which campaigns or election officials manufacture fake votes and destroy their opponents’ real ones — that appears to have taken place in the Ninth District race. Absentee ballots are especially susceptible to manipulation.

On Friday, Mr. Berger, the Republican state senator, resisted suggestions that his party had ignored the fraud potential and noted that state law already banned the misconduct outlined at the hearing this week. But he said, “I think it’s clear that something needs to be done if there’s a reasonable thing that can be done.”

#Resist

[_priapism]

And let’s make a distinction between widespread voter fraud, and individual fraudulent voting.  Most of the reported cases of fraudulent voting involve Republicans also.  In recent years there has also been a big uptick in GOP voter fraud.  The reason?  Declining demographics.  Angry white males are dying, and being replaced by more socially aware millenials, X, Y’s, and Z’s.  Can’t win honestly, so engage in widespread voter intimidation, suppression, and fraud.

[psiberzerker]

The reason?  Declining demographics.

Eh, as far as the NC Legislature is concerned, I'd have to say more oversite.  They do everything in their Power to consolidate their dominance of state politics, and Evangelical agenda, they have for decades.  Pretty much exactly like the wealthy doing everything they can to protect their money, and make more of it than they would ever need, because they can, and they don't understand the concept of "Enough money and power."  They just didn't have watchdogs like Athos there to call them on it back in the day.

#Resist.

You want a breif synopsis of the career of Jesse Helms, just for 1 example?  Because I can do that, I grew up with him.

[Athos_131]

N.C. political operative indicted, and prosecutor signals that more charges are likely

The political operative at the center of allegations of ballot-tampering in a congressional race in North Carolina has been indicted on seven felonies, the start of what is expected to grow into one of the most sweeping criminal investigations ever of fraud in a federal election.

Leslie McCrae Dowless, who worked for Mark Harris, the Republican nominee in the state’s 9th Congressional District last year, was arrested and charged with three counts of obstruction of justice, two counts of conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice and two counts of possession of absentee ballots, according to the Wake County district attorney’s office in Raleigh.

The charges reflect a swift transition to the criminal phase of an investigation of mail-in ballot irregularities in the 9th District, following hearings last week before the State Board of Elections.

The board voted unanimously to throw out the November results between Harris and Democrat Dan McCready after hearing voluminous evidence that Dowless had led a scheme to tamper with absentee ballots.

Harris, an evangelical minister from Charlotte, had led by 905 votes in unofficial results from November. He announced Tuesday that he would not run in the new election, which has not been scheduled yet.

Dowless, 63, is charged with orchestrating a scheme to illegally collect, fill in, forge and submit mail-in ballots from voters in two rural North Carolina counties. State election officials heard hours of testimony last week from witnesses who described the scheme in detail.

Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman’s decision to seek indictments almost immediately after the close of those hearings sent a “clear signal,” she said, “that we take seriously the public’s confidence in the electoral process and that we intend to pursue this case vigorously and see that justice is done.”

And more charges are likely, Freeman said. She said her office’s “very large-scope” investigation will examine “who was aware of and helped finance these fraudulent absentee ballot activities” — a sign of potential legal peril for Harris, who hired Dowless. She also plans to determine whether anyone else besides Dowless tried to obstruct either the criminal or state board investigations.

Dowless’s lawyer, Cynthia Singletary, had no comment, according to a woman who answered the phone at her law office.

Freeman said the obstruction charges stem from Dowless’s alleged participation in the ballot scheme itself but also from evidence that he attempted to interfere with witnesses.

Harris has claimed no knowledge of Dowless’s methods and said there were no red flags before he hired him in 2017. But he was contradicted during last week’s hearings by his son John, an assistant U.S. attorney who testified that he warned his father in conversations and emails in 2017 against hiring Dowless because he suspected the operative had used illegal tactics to win votes in a previous election.

During testimony the next day, Mark Harris claimed not to recollect a conversation with another son just two days earlier in which he said he did not think his emails with John would become public during the hearings.

Facing potential perjury charges for that testimony — and days of potentially damaging cross-examination about his own role in the ballot scheme — Harris abruptly called for a new election. He said ballot fraud had sufficiently tainted the outcome in November to warrant a new election.

Also at least week’s hearings, the elections board’s general counsel, Josh Lawson, rebuked Harris’s lawyers for failing to turn over those emails between Harris and his son John in a timely way, as required by a board subpoena for all campaign communications related to Dowless.

Evidence also surfaced during the hearings that Harris structured his campaign so that it didn’t directly pay Dowless, avoiding public disclosure of the payments and potentially shielding Harris from accusations that he was aware of the scheme.

Freeman would not say whether any of that evidence could lead to an obstruction charge against Harris, but she said “that is still very much a matter of investigation.” She added: “This is an investigation that has grown in scope and continues to grow in scope.”

She also would not say whether a perjury charge is possible against Harris. Such charges are unusual in North Carolina, especially when a witness corrects his testimony, as Harris did last Thursday.

Election experts said they were unaware of fraud investigations as sweeping as the one playing out in North Carolina, noting that its impact on a federal election likely elevated its significance both for election officials and prosecutors.

It might have been the first recorded instance of a federal election being thrown out over fraud.

“It’s been quite a while since we’ve had allegations like this,” said Michael McDonald, who leads the United States Election Project at the University of Florida. “I mean, you have to go back — well, actually I’m drawing a blank. You could go to some local elections. Not at the federal level.”

McDonald guessed that Freeman’s swift action was intended to send a signal ahead of the special election in the 9th District, to discourage further fraud and to give voters in the district confidence in the system’s integrity. The district runs along the South Carolina line from Charlotte to rural eastern North Carolina.

The state elections board’s executive director, Kim Westbrook Strach, praised Freeman Wednesday for seeking charges so quickly and declared: “Today is a new and better day for elections in our state.”

Although Freeman moved just days after the close of the state board’s hearings, the allegations of ballot-tampering have been swirling in Bladen and Robeson counties for years.

Election officials first alerted state and federal prosecutors in early 2017 of their suspicions that Dowless was running a ballot-collection scheme. Because of Dowless’s ties to the local Republican Party, the local Bladen County prosecutor recused himself from investigating, pushing the case to Freeman, who is based in Raleigh.

Robert Higdon Jr., the federal prosecutor for eastern North Carolina, does not appear to be investigating the 9th District case. Higdon has instead prosecuted cases of noncitizen voting, producing minimal penalties. President Trump and other Republicans have portrayed noncitizen voting as a widespread phenomenon, although there is little evidence to support their claim.

The indictment of Dowless names two co-conspirators, Rebecca Thompson and Kelly N. Hendrix, who have not been charged. It also describes three voters whose ballots were illegally tampered with.

Hendrix, who testified last week that she illegally collected and signed ballots for Dowless, wept on the witness stand as she described how she began helping him after he had given her rides to her job at a Hardee’s fast-food restaurant. Dowless occasionally gave her gas money while she helped him collect ballots, she said.

Her testimony vividly displayed the pervasive economic hardship of eastern North Carolina, which was devastated by Hurricane Florence weeks before the November election — and where many of Dowless’s associates were drawn to him because he was kind to people in need. He is a native of the area.

Freeman said whether those who participated in the ballot scheme cooperate with investigators will be factored in her office’s decisions to prosecute. She said her paramount concern is “trying to restore public confidence in that area of the state in the election process.”

Wednesday’s charges relate to the 2016 general election and 2018 primary, according to the indictment. But Freeman said she will also examine evidence of election fraud in the 2018 general election — the focus of the State Board of Elections’s hearings last week.

“We have not yet begun our investigation into the 2018 election, knowing that the state board was doing a thorough investigation and fully anticipating that we would gain access to that,” she said. “We have met with the state board to begin gaining access to that. We expect that to take several months.”

Dowless was charged with low-level felonies, which under North Carolina statutes are punishable with sentences ranging from six months to two years, depending on prior records, Freeman said. Court records show he was convicted of fraud, perjury and passing a worthless check in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The case has been scheduled for a late March court appearance. Dowless was held on $30,000 bond and ordered to have no contact with anyone named in the indictment.

Now do the Florida Senate and Georgia Governor elections.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

House Democrats pass H.R. 1, their answer to draining the swamp

The House approved a far-reaching elections and ethics bill Friday — one that would change the way congressional elections are funded, impose new voter-access mandates on states and, in one of several provisions targeting President Trump, force disclosure of presidential candidates’ tax returns.

Democrats dubbed the bill H.R. 1, a designation meant to signal its place as a centerpiece of their congressional agenda. The measure, which has more than 500 pages, contains dozens of provisions favored by liberal advocacy groups, labor unions and other Democratic allies.

“It’s a power grab, a power grab on behalf of the people,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said at an event on the Capitol steps ahead of the planned vote.

House Republicans sought to portray the legislation, which passed 234 to 193 along party lines, as a self-interested proposal that tilts the political playing field toward Democrats. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) called it “a massive federal government takeover that would undermine the integrity of our elections.”

The bill is headed for a brick wall in the Republican-controlled Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has made clear it will not get a vote. However, Democrats and their allies said the bill’s passage would build momentum for action in coming years if and when Democrats solidify control in Washington.

“If Mitch McConnell is the immovable object, H.R. 1 is the unstoppable force,” said Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.), the lead author of the bill. “We’ll keep pushing on it.”

A central provision establishes public financing for congressional elections, giving candidates as much as a 6-to-1 match for small donations to participating campaigns. Republicans have attacked the measure for funneling taxpayer money to political candidates; Democrats reworked the bill to tap revenue from fines from people and companies found guilty of corporate malfeasance.

The change did little to stem GOP attacks. Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) said Friday it would funnel “billions upon billions of dollars into the coffers of members of Congress.”

“That’s the height of hypocrisy,” Davis said. “No one is asking for more corporate dollars to line the campaign coffers of members of Congress.”

Another key campaign finance provision would require nonprofit “dark money” groups that engage in political activity to disclose their large donors — a provision that has generated opposition from the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups that argue the disclosure could chill free speech.

The bill also aims to end partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts by requiring independent state commissions, rather than legislatures, to draw lines. It also would create an automatic voter-registration system, bar states from disenfranchising felons who have completed their sentences, create stricter rules surrounding voter-roll purges and weaken state laws requiring voters to present photo identification.

Several parts of the bill appeared to be aimed at the alleged abuses of Trump and his administration — none more clearly than a requirement that presidential and vice presidential candidates disclose 10 years of past tax returns, a voluntary practice that the president has ignored. The bill was amended this week to require the disclosure of the tax returns of companies owned or controlled by those candidates.

Presidential inaugural committees would be subject to stricter disclosure requirements under the bill, and several provisions are aimed at executive-branch travel spending — including a measure that would prevent federal funds from being spent at hotels and resorts owned by Trump.

Other provisions include a new mandatory ethical code for the Supreme Court, an end to most first-class travel for federal officeholders and a provision making Election Day a national holiday.

McConnell called the last proposal a Democratic “power grab” this year in one of several Senate floor speeches in which he has attacked various provisions of the bill as unnecessary, unconstitutional or unfair.

“This new House Democrat majority’s top priority is apparently assigning themselves an unprecedented level of control over how they get elected to Washington, D.C., along with how, where and what American citizens are allowed to say about it,” he said Tuesday. “More than anything else, Washington Democrats want a tighter grip on political debate and the operation of elections, nationwide.”

Democrats insisted this week that they are interested in good government, not in amassing power.

“We must reject the culture of corruption here and put the power back in the hands of the people we represent,” Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.) said Thursday during remarks on the House floor. “We can clean up the muddy swamp behaviors by passing H.R. 1.”

At the event on the Capitol steps earlier Friday, Pelosi acknowledged the difficulties the bill faces in the Senate, saying Democrats planned to fight “until we win.”

Fred Wertheimer, an activist who is a veteran of campaign finance and ethics reform battles dating back to the 1970s, said good-government advocates have a “three- to five-year strategy” in mind.

“The argument that McConnell is not going to schedule this is really not relevant to what we’re trying to do,” he said. “This is the beginning of an effort that will go into 2021, that will go into the congressional and presidential campaigns. If we get a responsive Senate and president, we’ll be on the doorstep. If we don’t, it will go forward in 2022 and into 2023. This is a long game.”

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Congress Opens Investigation Into Georgia’s Historic Voter Suppression

In a letter to Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, Congressional leaders revealed their plans to investigate the “Wizard of Voter Suppression” and his years of suppressing black voters’ access to the polls.

“The Committee on Oversight and Reform is investigating recent reports of serious problems with voter registration, voter access and other matters affecting the ability of people in Georgia to exercise their right to vote,” begins the letter to Kemp from Committee Chairman Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. “The Committee is particularly concerned by reports that Georgians had unprecedented challenges with registering to vote and significant barriers to casting their votes during your tenure as Secretary of State and during the 2018 election.”

Citing reports of Kemp’s historic voter suppression, purges, poll closings and election equipment mismanagement—including The Root’s exclusive report on the mysterious undervote in the Georgia Lt. Governor’s race—the committee requested documents, emails and communications regarding almost every aspect of Georgia elections.

Brian Kemp served as Georgia’s Secretary of State and election chief from 2010 until he won the governorship in a 2018 election, where he pulled out every voter suppression trick in the book. He warned Republican donors about the danger of widespread minority voters. He purged 1.4 million voters from the rolls. In a state that is 32 percent black, an Associated Press analysis showed that 70 percent of the 53,000 registrations he put on hold in 2018 belonged to black voters. He rejected thousands of absentee ballots.

This is in addition to the numerous hacks into Georgia’s voting system that he has repeatedly denied. This also doesn’t include the security flaws in the state’s voter database. The fact that the state’s voting machines are old and unable to be audited is also proof that Kemp is terrible at his job. Kemp is or has been a party in at least a dozen lawsuits regarding voter suppression in Georgia.

He hasn’t won a single one.

In February, the Committee on House Administration made a field trip to Georgia to investigate voter suppression in Georgia. Stacey Abrams, who lost the governor’s race in spite of the tiny, insignificant fact that more voters may have voted for her, testified before the committee that same day before rushing off to another meeting where Brian Kemp’s legislative allies were trying to replace Georgia’s unauditable election machines with different unauditable election machines, only this time they would be provided by Brian Kemp’s political cronies.

Brian Kemp has not publicly responded to the House Oversight Committee’s letter.

To be fair, he may have seen Elijah Cummings’ name and purged the letter, out of habit.

#Resist

[Athos_131]

Senate Democrats push to match House’s ethics and election reforms

Responding to action in the House, Senate Democrats unveiled their own version of a sweeping election and ethics reform bill Wednesday — one that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has vowed never to bring to a vote.

Dubbed, like the House bill, the For the People Act, the Senate legislation includes a vast suite of proposals — including measures meant to expand voting, provisions aimed at unmasking and diluting the power of moneyed interests, new ethical strictures for federal officials and a new public financing system for congressional campaigns.

The bill, according to its lead author, Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), has the support of all 47 senators in the Democratic caucus. The House bill passed 234 to 193 this month with unanimous Democratic support, meaning every congressional Democrat is on record in support of the bill.

[House Democrats pass H.R. 1, their answer to draining the swamp]

“Today we are seizing their momentum and the momentum of the American people,” Udall said at a news conference Wednesday. “Now the ball is in Senator McConnell’s court. . . . This should not be about Democrats versus Republicans, this is about people versus special interests.”

That is not the view of McConnell (R-Ky.) and other Republicans, who have called the bill a Democratic “power grab” and vowed to resist its advance.

“More than anything else, Washington Democrats want a tighter grip on political debate and the operation of elections, nationwide,” McConnell said when the House bill passed.

The Senate bill unveiled Wednesday is mostly identical to the House bill, also known as H.R. 1, but it expands the public financing mechanism to include Senate campaigns and it goes further to require divestment, not just disclosure, of financial conflicts by presidents and vice presidents.

The broad Democratic support for the bill now includes several 2020 presidential candidates serving in the Senate. One of them, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), attended Wednesday’s rollout.

Acknowledging the Republican blockade, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said its good politics for Democrats to continue pushing the bill.

“We’re the minority, but we’re putting them on the defensive,” he said. “Where do they stand? Where do they stand on dark money cascading into the system? Where do they stand on making it easier, not harder, for people to exercise their right to vote? Where do they stand on cleaning up the swamp? . . . If you don’t agree with us, what’s your answer? They don’t have one.”

#Resist