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Uncounted mail-in ballots discovered in Harris County add uncertainty to two Democratic races

HOUSTON — Two notable Democratic primary races have gained a new level of uncertainty after Texas’ largest county said it “identified approximately 10,000 mail-in ballots (6,000 Democratic and 4,000 Republican) that were not added into the original Election Night count.”

Harris County said the weekend after Tuesday’s primary election that the ballots were scanned into its tabulation computer but “were not transferred and counted as a part of the unofficial final results as they should have been.” The results from those ballots will be added to the vote count on Tuesday, the county said.

In the Democratic race for the seat to represent parts of downtown and northeast Houston in the statehouse, incumbent state Rep. Harold V. Dutton Jr. leads challenger Candis Houston by 136 votes, 50.8% to 49.2%.

And the race to determine the Democratic candidate for attorney general of Texas could also be impacted. Rochelle Garza, a former American Civil Liberties Union lawyer from Brownsville, led a crowded primary field and is already locked into the runoff election, but her Democratic opponent could hinge on the Harris County tally.

Former Galveston Mayor Joe Jaworski leads civil rights attorney Lee Merritt by 1,418 votes overall.

Houston, Dutton’s opponent, conceded the race on Thursday in an email to supporters, though The Texas Tribune’s election partner Decision Desk has not called the race. Houston’s campaign did not immediately respond to questions from the Tribune about the discovery of uncounted ballots.

Dutton said he’s skeptical of the situation.

“It seems to me that somebody should’ve known that 10,000 ballots were missing,” Dutton said in an interview Sunday. “If 10,000 ballots were missing and nobody knew that, God help us.”

Dutton said he has not heard from the county and they haven’t returned his phone calls.

The county said in its statement that the error occurred in the hours after election night, between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. Officials are investigating how “the missteps took place in the process.”

“While we understand the seriousness of this error, the ability to identify and correct this issue is a result of a lengthy and rigorous process and is a positive example of the process ultimately working as it should,” the statement said.

Harris County experienced a handful of issues on election day this year. The county, which is more populous than 26 states, took more than a day to report its results in part due to more than 1,600 ballots sheets being damaged. Like many counties, it also reported having a shortage of election workers. And two voting sites in the counties reported minor technical problems with machines.

Dutton’s House District 142 makes up only a portion of Harris County, so not all of the 6,000 votes found will factor into the race. It’s not immediately clear how many votes will be added into the race.

In the attorney general’s race, Jaworski declared victory in getting the second runoff spot on Friday. Merritt, however, has not conceded and Decision Desk has not declared who has secured the second spot.
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/03/06 ... c-primary/

And they were all found in closet number 13.Just following a tradition in Texas politics. :sarcasm:

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-polit ... ask-alice/

As my Dad said about the politics in his hometown of Madisonville TX. "People go to church on Easter and hear about the resurrection and how all will be resurrected when Christ returns. Well I don't see that as a big deal because the dead around here are resurrected every time we have an election."
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

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Ballot still in limbo.

https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm ... 8ea52734be
Rejected mail ballots are relatively uncommon in a typical election. But the initial rejection rate among mail voters in the Texas primary was roughly 17% across 120 counties, according to county-by-county figures obtained by AP. Those counties accounted for the vast majority of the nearly 3 million voters in Texas’ first-in-the-nation primary.

Although the final number of discounted ballots will be lower, the early numbers suggest Texas’ rejection rate will far exceed the 2020 general election, when federal data showed that less than 1% of mail ballots statewide were rejected.
What a shit show.
"Being Republican is more than a difference of opinion - it's a character flaw." "COVID can fix STUPID!"
The greatest, most aggrieved mistake EVER made in USA was electing DJT as POTUS.

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At least 11,000 Texas mail-in votes were rejected in the first election under new GOP voting rules

Thousands of Texans who attempted to vote by mail in the March primary were disenfranchised in the state's first election conducted under a new Republican voting law. The state’s largest counties saw a significant spike in the rates of rejected mail-in ballots, most because they did not meet the new, stricter ID requirements.

Local ballot review boards met this week to finalize mail-in ballot rejections, throwing out 11,823 mail-in ballots in just 15 of the state’s 20 counties with the most registered voters. That doesn’t include Harris County, where thousands more votes had been flagged for rejection if voters couldn’t correct them in time. The final statewide count for rejected ballots is still unknown; counties are still reporting numbers to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office.

The rates of rejections range from 6% to nearly 22% in Bexar County, where almost 4,000 of the more than 18,000 people who returned mail-in ballots saw their votes discarded. In most cases, ballots were rejected for failing to comply with tighter voting rules enacted by Republicans last year that require voters to provide their driver’s license number or a partial Social Security number to vote by mail, according to rejection data collected by The Texas Tribune. A few counties’ rejection rates also included ballots that arrived past the voting deadline, but problems with the new ID requirements were the overwhelming cause for not accepting votes.

The impact of the ID requirements was particularly pronounced in several larger counties, including Bexar. In Dallas County, ID issues were to blame for nearly all of the lost votes reported, accounting for 682 of the 694 ballots that were rejected. Most ballots that were rejected because of the ID requirements were missing an ID number altogether. The county had an overall rejection rate of 6.5%

In Hays County, a suburban county south of Austin, all but one of the 208 rejected ballots were lost to ID issues. The county’s total rejection rate was 8.2%.

In Hidalgo County, just five of the 526 mail-in ballots that were rejected were scrapped because they arrived late. Most were rejected because of the ID requirements, officials said. The county had an overall rejection rate of 19.4%.

In Williamson County, roughly 73% of the 521 rejected ballots were lost to ID issues. The second main reason for rejection was late returns. Overall, 11.6% of ballots were rejected in the county.

“The rate of rejections is unprecedented in our county and, from what I’m hearing from my colleagues, in other counties as well,” said Chris Davis, the elections administrator for Williamson County.

The rejection rates easily outstrip those seen in previous elections. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission found less than 2% of mail-in ballots were rejected statewide in the 2018 midterm election. The statewide rejection rate in the 2020 presidential election was less than 1%. In that higher-turnout election, the commission found 8,304 ballots were tossed.

Texas’ strict eligibility criteria for voting by mail means the thousands of tossed votes most likely belonged to people 65 and older and people with disabilities. The requirements were championed by Republicans as part of a package of voting changes and restrictions, contained in legislation known as Senate Bill 1, which they argued was meant to enhance the security of the state’s elections — despite no evidence of widespread irregularities.

"Make no mistake: The rate of rejection of mail ballots in the primary is catastrophic and undemocratic,” said James Slattery, a senior staff attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project. “This is a direct result of the new ID number requirement in SB 1. Those who chose to pass this law are directly responsible for disenfranchising tens of thousands Texas voters.”

Slattery was among various voting rights advocates who warned state lawmakers of the potential fallout of the new ID requirements. The rejection numbers in the new law's first test make it vital for the Legislature to “recognize the grievous harm that it inflicted on voters” and repeal the requirements, Slattery said.

Texas Republican leaders who championed the law, including its author, state Sen. Bryan Hughes, and Gov. Greg Abbott, have not responded to requests for comment about the ballot rejection issues. Hughes often said the legislation would make it easier to vote and harder to cheat.

For months, the possibility that a crush of Texans’ votes would be lost under the new rules loomed over the March primary election — the first election since the voting law went into effect — even though primaries typically see fairly low turnout. Just 17.5% of registered voters participated, according to preliminary turnout data.

The earliest signs of trouble came in January when counties reported an alarming increase in the number of rejected applications for mail-in ballots based on the new ID rules. When the actual ballots began arriving at local elections offices, the surge continued, as ballots were initially rejected by the hundreds and then thousands because many voters appeared unaware of the new ID requirements.

Early rejection rates hovered between 30% to 40% but dropped as thousands of voters worked to safeguard their votes, often by visiting county elections offices after their ballots were flagged for rejection. Hundreds of other voters canceled their mail-in ballots and opted to vote in person instead, according to county data.

That included more than 300 voters in El Paso County who had initially requested absentee ballots but voted in person, with several voters surrendering their ballots at polling places. The county ended the election with a 16% rejection rate, throwing out 725 votes — 94% of them because of the ID rules.

“In the 2020 primary, we rejected 39 ballots,” Lisa Wise, the elections administrator in El Paso, said ahead of election day when the county had flagged more than a thousand ballots for review. “You don’t have to be a math wizard to see it.”

But the opportunity to resolve rejections — or to alternatively head to a polling place — was out of reach for some voters. County officials have said mail-in voters often include people for whom voting in-person can be a challenge or who are unable to travel to the county elections office, which for voters in some counties can be a long distance away.

Voters facing a rejected ballot because of ID issues were also directed to the state’s new online tracker to try to validate their information, but technical issues with the tracker’s setup shut out nearly a million registered voters from even accessing it.

Under state law, a voter must provide both a driver’s license number and the last four digits of their Social Security number to log in to the tracker; both numbers must be on file in their voter record even though voters are required to provide only one number when they first register to vote.

Despite the secretary of state’s office’s efforts to backfill ID numbers in the state’s voter rolls, more than 700,000 voters lacked one of those ID numbers on their voter records as of Dec. 20. Another 106,911 voters didn’t have either number.

It’s likely not all of those voters are eligible to vote by mail, but the barrier risked hindering enough of Kara Sands’ voters that she pulled references to the online ballot tracker from the guidance she was providing Nueces County voters. Sands, the Republican elected county clerk, said most of the older voters in her county first registered to vote with a Social Security number and that remained the only ID on file for them.

“Why am I going to send them [materials saying] ‘Go here to fix it’ knowing they can’t fix it?” Sands said in an interview ahead of election day.

Implementation of the ID rules also came amid a voter education crunch in the quick turnaround between when the law was enacted and when the first applications to vote started coming in at the start of the year.

The ID requirements forced a redesign of those applications and the specialized envelope to return completed ballots, but those were not finalized until December. Even if there had been room for earlier voter education, county officials said they feared running afoul of a different provision of the voting law that prohibits them from “soliciting” requests for mail-in ballots from voters.

Several were forced to abandon specific outreach to regular mail-in voters that could’ve included instructions about fulfilling the new ID requirements. Before the new voting law went into effect, election administrators in some counties would proactively contact eligible voters who previously cast mail-in ballots at the start of every year to remind them they needed to reapply if they wanted to continue receiving absentee ballots.

“We kind of have to watch what we do or say because of how the bill is worded,” Roxzine Stinson, the elections administrator for Lubbock County, said during early voting. “We have to stay as close to the intent of the bill.”

Even the Texas secretary of state’s office felt the pressure as it prepared formal guidance to counties on how to implement the raft of changes contained in the voting law. For example, when the state’s new online portal for mail-in voters launched mid-January, county election officials had not received training from the state on how to interface with it so voters could use it.

Despite the rule changes, the Legislature did not appropriate funding for voter education.

But the secretary of state added the mail-in requirements to the education campaign the office has been required to carry out since a 2016 court order in the litigation over the state’s photo ID requirements for voting in person. That campaign largely focuses on sending voters to votetexas.gov, the state’s main website containing voting information.

“This year is a new challenge due to the new ID requirements for mail voting in Texas, but we are confident we have the data and research we need to apply any lessons learned during the primary campaign to a more robust campaign heading into the November General Election,” Sam Taylor, a spokesman for the secretary of state, said in an email.
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/03/11 ... g-lawsuit/

No money for voter education. We don't want those liberals and the minorities knowing how to have their vote to be counted. :sarcasm:
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

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Biden's approval polls have improved slightly, but with inflation and high gas prices don't know how long it will hold.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/bi ... al-rating/

Harris' polls are even lower.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/po ... la-harris/

The generic poll still favors Republicans in the lead up to the midterms.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/po ... ic-ballot/
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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The hapless Repubs, however, keep hammering that it's Joe who is responsible for inflation, but that is being countered by the many voices showing it's corporations making record profits that are driving up gas prices--after all only 10% of our oil comes via Russia, so we can see that the Repubs are blowing smoke. They know the J6 Committee is going to keep up telling America how all these pinheads are seditious conspirators. An Oath Keeper pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy, so it's only a matter of time until the J6 folks climb up the ladder.

CDFingers
Crazy cat peekin' through a lace bandana
like a one-eyed Cheshire, like a diamond-eyed Jack

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But as long as the Rightwing Idiots only watch and listen to the right wing media they will not know the real facts and heaven forbid they actually do any research on what they are told.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

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It's tough to say, "No, I didn't plead guilty" when it's public record. Sooner or later someone will check. Moreover, along the ladder to the bigger fish, the desire to keep right wing eyes on faux news will get stronger, and a headline will cause pearl-clutching. All the way to November the ladder will get clumb, again and again. He he.


CDFingers
Crazy cat peekin' through a lace bandana
like a one-eyed Cheshire, like a diamond-eyed Jack

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TrueTexan wrote: Sat Mar 12, 2022 9:36 am But as long as the Rightwing Idiots only watch and listen to the right wing media they will not know the real facts and heaven forbid they actually do any research on what they are told.
Truth. Goes for most subjects and all idiots.
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"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated!" Loquacious of many. Texas Chapter Chief Cat Herder.

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Speaking of idiots:
Although this research provides new insight into the relationship between populist attitudes and gullibility, the findings are correlational and therefore, it is impossible to conclude the causal direction of this relationship. In other words, we cannot know from this data whether populist worldviews cause people to become more gullible or if generally gullible people are more drawn to populist worldviews.

“While populist movements frequently articulate a critical view of the way society is governed, paradoxically it may require an uncritical mind to support such movements,” the researchers conclude.

The study, “Populist Gullibility: Conspiracy Theories, News Credibility, Bullshit Receptivity, and Paranormal Belief“, was authored by Jan-Willem van Prooijen, Talia Cohen Rodrigues, Carlotta Bunzel, Oana Georgescu, Dániel Komáromy, and André P. M. Krouwel.
https://www.psypost.org/2022/03/new-stu ... lity-62715

CDFingers
Crazy cat peekin' through a lace bandana
like a one-eyed Cheshire, like a diamond-eyed Jack

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Biden could have pressured the Fed to raise interest rates, but he wanted a good economy going into the midterms. Now he has a double battle inflation and high gasoline, natural gas and heating oil prices. He's betting that Americans will support Ukraine and the accompanying high energy prices, but I wouldn't bet big money on that one. Like with the pandemic "Ukraine fatigue" will set in before the election which won't be good for Democrats. Biden should have sent a lot of arms to Ukraine before Russia invaded as a deterrent, now he's trying to make up for it and it could be too late.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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highdesert wrote: Sun Mar 13, 2022 11:23 am Biden could have pressured the Fed to raise interest rates, but he wanted a good economy going into the midterms. Now he has a double battle inflation and high gasoline, natural gas and heating oil prices. He's betting that Americans will support Ukraine and the accompanying high energy prices, but I wouldn't bet big money on that one. Like with the pandemic "Ukraine fatigue" will set in before the election which won't be good for Democrats. Biden should have sent a lot of arms to Ukraine before Russia invaded as a deterrent, now he's trying to make up for it and it could be too late.
Agree all.
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"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated!" Loquacious of many. Texas Chapter Chief Cat Herder.

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Biden's approval rate is going up due to the war.
And get this;
Fifteen Republicans and two Democrats made up the nay votes, at a time when a Quinnipiac University poll that suggests a majority of Americans, 71%-22%, support a ban on Russian oil even if it translates to higher prices at the pump. Another YouGov poll found 3 out of every 5 U.S. adults support the decision while 17% don't. Two House members, Reps. Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz., and Bill Johnson, R-Ohio, did not vote.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/pol ... 987618001/
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,”

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Polls go up and polls go down. I doubt the numbers will be the same when we're going into Summer months and people want to travel and gas prices are still high. Summer blend gasoline is also more expensive than winter blend, March and April are the transition months and Summer blend is about $.15 a gallon more. And refineries get shut down for maintenance in Spring to gear up for Summer. The longer the war drags on, the harder it will be to maintain high numbers of support for Ukraine, when average Americans are suffering with high gasoline costs.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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Count this in Democrats' favor: Americans are blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin for the war in Ukraine, and they are also backing President Joe Biden's move to ban Russian oil imports -- even if that means higher gas prices.

Count this in another direction: Americans are blaming Biden for inflation, gas prices and the economy broadly -- and remain divided on how the president is handling the crisis in Ukraine.


Those twin sets of findings from the latest ABC News/Ipsos poll point to political perils for Biden and the Democratic Party that are separate from the national security challenges that are themselves growing in urgency.

The poll found 77% of Americans overall and 72% of Republicans backing the concept of banning Russian oil, even when asked in the context of the impact on gas prices. Only 31% of Americans give Biden either a "good amount" or a "great deal" of blame for the war; 34% assign that level of blame to former President Donald Trump, who's been out of office for nearly 14 months.

But Biden's standing on issues of economic fallout is wobbly at best. Asked as two separate questions in this poll, 70% disapprove of his handling of both gas prices and inflation, while 58% disapprove of his handling of the economic recovery.

The White House hasn't been subtle in assigning blame for economic challenges to Putin, via hashtags and more: "Make no mistake, inflation's largely the fault of Putin," the president told House Democrats on Friday.

There's reason to think blaming Putin could be effective in the kind of midterm messaging the president is outlining. There's also reason to think that won't be nearly enough to insulate Democrats from voters' backlash over higher prices.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/limits- ... d=83419232
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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Shortsighted polls. The issues relating to Russia should have been handled right after the Soviet Union fell apart. Doing so could have given the world a more democratic Russia and perhaps avoided putin.
https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-h ... 022-2?op=1
I’ve been holding biden responsible for many of our failures. He was a leading voice that lead us to this point. His misjudgment is the main reason I won’t vote for him ever.
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"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated!" Loquacious of many. Texas Chapter Chief Cat Herder.

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sikacz wrote: Mon Mar 14, 2022 1:55 pm Shortsighted polls. The issues relating to Russia should have been handled right after the Soviet Union fell apart. Doing so could have given the world a more democratic Russia and perhaps avoided putin.
https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-h ... 022-2?op=1
I’ve been holding biden responsible for many of our failures. He was a leading voice that lead us to this point. His misjudgment is the main reason I won’t vote for him ever.
So I read that whole article and I fail to see where it holds Biden responsible for not adding Ukraine to NATO. He said "schools out" as a senator?
Were we to add Russia to NATO as well?
Please be specific.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,”

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I doubt Putin could be deterred from anything by sending arms. The only thing that makes him hesitate is the nuke umbrella. And maybe invading his personal space.

Yes, Herbert Walker supposedly told Gorby that we wouldn't push to add the Baltics to NATO. They still wanted in, they followed the rules to apply, and telling them no would have put them higher up Putin's list than Ukraine was. Expanding NATO was certainly not the least provocative option available in the 90s, but the EU wasn't exactly standing up to replace it as a collective security agreement. I think NATO's involvement in the Yugoslavian conflict played a much stronger role in alienating Russia's apparatchiks than anything else. They still have a chip on their shoulder about that. Still, I agree with sikacz that we missed many real opportunities to offer Russia assistance in growing into a real democracy instead of declaring victory and ignoring them for twenty years.

Back on topic. The latest take on redistricting.
The Crystal Ball favors Democrats in 185 of the seats that have been drawn, to 169 for Republicans (22 districts are Toss-ups). But the 5 states that have yet to produce maps account for a sizeable 59 seats. Perhaps more notably, Republicans, at least on paper, technically control redistricting in 4 of those states — Florida, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Ohio — while they also may end up getting their way in the 5th, Louisiana, despite its Democratic governor.

Altogether, Republicans currently hold 39 of the quintet’s 59 seats, so in terms of the overall House count, even a relatively status quo arrangement would likely benefit the GOP (while Ohio is losing a seat, Florida is gaining one).
https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalba ... hats-left/

Lessee, how many fingers do I have left? Current redistricting has Dems up by 16 seats, remaining seats favor the GOP by 20 prior to redistricting, carry the two - that's a four seat edge for the GOP with 22 tossups. The GOP have few pickup opportunities remaining, with Ohio's Supreme Court gutting their gerrymandering efforts.

This is likely to be close.

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If the Dems do their jobs, they will win. That means showing what they've done, showing what the R's failed to do, and that J6 thing. They work those correctly and the R's will be out of power for a generation. The peeled orange has become worth less than a bucket of moldy KFC.

Meanwhile,
Trump’s unraveling is akin to a “decline by 1,000 cuts.” Let’s examine it.
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/59 ... -has-begun

CDFingers
Crazy cat peekin' through a lace bandana
like a one-eyed Cheshire, like a diamond-eyed Jack

Re: 2022 Midterm Elections

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Under Trump, DHS directed to probe bogus claims about voter fraud

In late April of 2020, a top political appointee in the Trump administration called for Department of Homeland Security officials to scrutinize an unusual topic for a national security agency: possible voter fraud in the upcoming election. A subsequent directive included a focus on mail-in voting, according to a document reviewed by POLITICO.

That guidance came as then-President Donald Trump fomented claims that the expansion of mail-in voting would corrupt the 2020 election — which later fed his unsubstantiated assertions that the election was stolen.

DHS’ intelligence office did not release any materials substantiating the president’s claims. But it did find that the Kremlin spread lies about mail-in voting.

The issuance of a directive involving voter fraud to the DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis, which has not been previously reported, casts a new light on the extent of Trump World’s efforts to use government resources to investigate spurious claims about U.S. elections.

It also raises new questions about how a domestic political complaint found its way onto the intelligence community’s to-do list.

The House Jan. 6 committee has been probing how Trump’s false claims led to an attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the extent of the president and his allies’ efforts to interfere with aspects of the election.

The DHS saga began in late April of 2020, when Ken Cuccinelli — the former Virginia attorney general with close ties to Trump who was then the department’s second-in-command — asked a senior DHS official to have I&A analysts look into the potential for voter fraud related to mail-in voting, according to a former DHS official.

Cuccinelli declined to comment through a spokesperson. A former Trump administration official who worked with him made a sarcastic defense: “How dare a political appointee give work to the agency he oversees?”

The immediate aftermath of that conversation isn’t clear. But later that summer, I&A’s headquarters sent guidance to its Field Operations Division related to elections, which POLITICO has reviewed.

The guidance told employees in the division to look into a host of topics related to elections and security, including hacking attempts targeting campaigns, efforts to intimidate voters, and illegal entry into polling places.

Then came a list of further topics: “attempts to alter, destroy, sell, or hide mail-in ballots,” among other mail-related issues.

The fact that intelligence professionals were directed to look into whether people were selling, hiding, changing, or destroying ballots delivered by mail stuck out to election and intelligence observers because it had not been a focus of widespread credible complaints in earlier elections.

“What makes this inappropriate is that the underlying activity is a fantasy,” said Ben Wittes, a senior fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, who tracks issues related to U.S. intelligence agencies. “And there are no circumstances in which the Intelligence Community should be tasked to collect on fantasies.”

By that time, Trump himself had been amplifying conspiracy theories about voting by mail. “Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country, because they’re cheaters,” he said at a White House briefing on April 7, 2020, per NPR. “They’re fraudulent in many cases.” And in a July interview, he told Fox News that mail-in voting would “rig the election.”

Those comments came as many states increased the practice because the pandemic heightened the risks of in-person voting. The notion that selling mail-in ballots is a serious problem — a notion the I&A guidance instructed its personnel to scrutinize — is not supported by widespread evidence.

“The ‘sell, destroy, or hide mail ballots’ — that’s a theoretical conspiracy that I’ve heard talked about, but there’s no evidence that that has occurred,” said Amber McReynolds, a former Colorado election official who works with voting access groups.

Trump referred to this notion in the Sept. 29 presidential debate. “Take a look at West Virginia,” he said. “Mailmen are selling the ballots. They’re being sold.”

In the same debate, Trump also claimed that mail-in ballots get dumped in rivers and creeks.

In I&A’s Field Operations Division, directions to eye voter fraud caused concerns. People in the division raised complaints in a series of listening sessions held in September and October.

“People questioned a tasking related to reporting on voter fraud,” read a memo on the sessions, which POLITICO reviewed. “‘Is this criminal activity appropriate for an IC agency?’ Thresholds and priorities are judgment calls from leadership and many people questioned whether taskings were politically motivated.”

The memo signals that those concerns were part of a larger problem: distrust within the workforce toward management, along with friction over whether the intelligence community should be involved in domestic political affairs.

“The workforce has a general mistrust of leadership resulting from orders to conduct activities they perceive to be inappropriate, bureaucratic, or political,” it continued.

It’s unclear if people in the Field Operations Division looked into whether mail-in ballots were being stolen or sold. But I&A did scrutinize election security issues. On Sept. 3, 2020, the office distributed a product about Russia’s efforts to undermine confidence in American election processes — specifically by using its state media to try to cast doubt on the security of mail-in voting.

As this all unfolded, Joseph Maher was a top lawyer at DHS handling intelligence law matters. A DHS official who wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter said that given his post at the time, Maher likely would have seen the tasking before it received the final greenlight. And he may have been aware of employees’ concerns about it, given he temporarily took over the office in August of 2020.

On Aug. 6, 2021, the Jan. 6 select committee chair announced Maher had joined the staff there, on detail from his post at DHS. The move drew significant criticism, given I&A’s well-documented failures to warn about possible violence in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 attack. “How in the world do you hire someone who you are investigating?” national security lawyer Mark Zaid told The Wall Street Journal at the time.

The Jan. 6 committee has said Maher has recused himself from all investigative matters related to DHS. Reached for comment, a committee spokesperson directed POLITICO to that prior statement.

A DHS spokesperson said the Department has renewed its commitment to providing quality intelligence to its partners.

“Under the Biden-Harris Administration and the leadership of Secretary Mayorkas, the Department of Homeland Security is focused on ensuring the safety and security of communities across our country, while ensuring that all of the Department’s work is conducted with integrity and in ways that protect privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties, and adhere to all applicable laws,” the spokesperson said. “DHS has also renewed its commitment to providing accurate, timely, and actionable information and intelligence to our partners across every level of government, in the private sector, and local communities.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/1 ... d-00018365

Using government agencies to further your political gains.

We also have this.
Analysis: When 1 in 8 Texas mail ballots gets trashed, that’s vote suppression

If you say — or write — that it’s harder to vote in Texas today than it was a year ago, or four years ago, someone will tell you how easy it is and how full of beans you are.

But what are we supposed to make of the thousands of rejected mail-in ballots during the Republican and Democratic primaries this month? The Texas Tribune’s Alexa Ura and Mandi Cai reported that 18,742 ballots were tossed in 16 of the 20 Texas counties with the most voters. And the Associated Press reported, after a survey of 187 of the state’s 254 counties, that 22,898 mail ballots — 13% of the total — were rejected this year.

The normal rate of rejection is 2%. In the 2020 presidential election, the rejection rate was under 1%.

Republicans in the state Legislature (and above) wanted to tighten the screws on elections in Texas last year, their answer to unsubstantiated claims of widespread irregularities and cheating in the 2020 election. That complaint started with President Donald Trump’s anguish over his reelection loss to Joe Biden and his efforts to upend voting results in enough states to flip the results.

Trump won in Texas in a 2020 election that, all carping aside, marked a pretty good day for Republicans in the state. It was also an election that put a big dent in the popular Democratic idea that “Texas is not a Republican state — it’s a low-turnout state.” In that high (for Texas) turnout election, Republicans won all of the statewide elections and held or improved their numbers in the congressional delegation and the Texas Legislature.

But whining winners and whining losers are nothing new in politics, in Texas or anywhere else. With the former president stewing loudly about his loss, the state’s governor, lieutenant governor and top legislators came to Austin last year with reform on their minds.

Over noisy and temporarily effective opposition from elected Democrats, Gov. Greg Abbott signed a new Texas voting law that included, among other things, bans on around-the-clock voting, drive-thru voting, public officials sending vote-by-mail applications to voters who didn’t request them and changes to mail voting — including new ID requirements — that complicated longstanding practices and evidently confused a lot of voters.

Changes in voting laws often go to courts, and if they’re coming to the courts from Texas, the judges frequently find discrimination and disenfranchisement, whether the subject is voting, elections or redistricting. This new Texas law, being challenged on some of that same familiar ground, is no exception, but the rules have changed. Texas and other states with histories of discrimination used to be required to get federal permission before making changes. That’s no longer the case, so it’s easier for the state to make changes that might not have won approval in the past. While the judges are looking at the latest challenges, there’s an election underway, and in this first test of the new law, about one of every eight mail ballots was thrown out.

Every eighth person who voted by mail didn’t get their vote counted. Depending on where those voters live and how they voted, that’s a big enough number to change the results of some races. In Harris County, the AP reported, 19% of the mail ballots were tossed out, or nearly 7,000. By comparison, the state’s largest county rejected only 135 ballots in the last midterm election in 2018.

It’s not like Texas has a lot of votes to throw away. The turnout was dismal in these primaries: 82.5% of the state’s registered voters were no-shows. About 3 million voters took part: a little under 2 million in the Republican primary and just over 1 million in the Democratic primary. About 14.2 million of registered voters in Texas blew off the primaries.

Every voter in a low-turnout election has more clout; their choices are diluted by fewer other voters than in a high-turnout election. Trashing 23,000 votes in the wake of new legislative restrictions on voting almost sounds like a crime. The election-doubters who tightened Texas voting laws in the name of secure elections would have gone to town if they had found that many people disenfranchised by scammers.

They’d have found their long-sought but never-proved evidence of widespread election tampering. At least they know who did it this time — and so do the rest of us.
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/03/18 ... n-ballots/

But the Repugs will say those voters didn't have legal ballots and the right to vote. It would be interesting to find out how many of the 23,000 ballots were for Dems vs Repugs and how many would have made a difference in the outcome of the election.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: 2022 Midterm Elections

99
TrueTexan wrote: Fri Mar 18, 2022 12:09 pm It would be interesting to find out how many of the 23,000 ballots were for Dems vs Repugs and how many would have made a difference in the outcome of the election.
Heather Cox Richardson on her Facebook blog said "Officials in counties that lean Democratic rejected mail-in ballots at a higher rate than officials in counties that lean Republican: 15.1% to 9.1%." I didn't check her sources though.

Re: 2022 Midterm Elections

100
wooglin wrote: Fri Mar 18, 2022 12:28 pm
TrueTexan wrote: Fri Mar 18, 2022 12:09 pm It would be interesting to find out how many of the 23,000 ballots were for Dems vs Repugs and how many would have made a difference in the outcome of the election.
Heather Cox Richardson on her Facebook blog said "Officials in counties that lean Democratic rejected mail-in ballots at a higher rate than officials in counties that lean Republican: 15.1% to 9.1%." I didn't check her sources though.
Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College with a Harvard PhD, I assume she has sources. It's like Democrats scream that Republicans are gerrymandering red states, but they never admit that they also gerrymander blue states.
https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/mcas/ ... rdson.html
Last edited by highdesert on Sat Mar 19, 2022 12:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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