By Joe Miller
This Week: Election Deniers Engage In Lawsuits & Investigations As Early Voting Begins
Last week, the January 6th Committee unanimously voted to subpoena former President Trump over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election – demonstrating a continued pursuit of accountability and transparency as the Jan. 6 investigation begins to wrap up. The committee seems poised to recommend further criminal investigation, and the Department of Justice appears to be largely on the same page. This week, a judge released sentencing recommendations for former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, including six months in prison and $200,000 in fines for refusing to testify about Jan. 6.
Meanwhile, state-level investigations are following suit. In Georgia, Trump operative Scott Hall (who was caught on surveillance footage breaching a Coffee County voting machine) testified before the Fulton County special grand jury. A lawsuit against the Wisconsin GOP’s fraudulent slate of 2020 Trump electors could soon be expanded to include communications between Congressional staffers and Senator Ron Johnson, who came under fire last week for making payments to a Trump attorney connected to the false elector plot. Further, the Nevada ACLU filed an emergency appeal in the state Supreme Court earlier this week, seeking to end Nye County’s plans to use hand-counted, paper ballots during the midterm elections.
Speaking of Georgia, early voting for the midterm elections launched on Monday, setting new turnout records compared to previous midterm elections. Almost 124,000 people showed up to vote on the first day of early voting – much higher than the 71,000 who showed up on the same day in 2018 and nearly equal to the 136,000 first-day Georgia voters in 2020. In preparation for launch day, the State Elections Director released a memo to county officials clarifying that state law bars voter challenges in polling places, noting that it constitutes illegal voter intimidation. In response to heightened threats against poll workers and voters, the state has also launched a text alert system to notify officials about threats at the polls.
Elsewhere, election deniers are working to subvert the will of voters ahead of early voting:
In Arizona, Cochise County officials are considering hand-counting all ballots in November, an effort voting rights experts say would produce inaccurate results and voter confusion, while taking extra time, money, and labor.
In North Carolina, a state judge ruled that the regulations governing partisan poll observers at election precincts will be relaxed this year, ignoring objections from the State Board of Elections and allowing the North Carolina GOP to deploy partisan-trained observers in far greater numbers.
In Michigan, state Republicans have pushed a majority of election officials in the state’s larger communities to refuse absentee ballot pre-processing in November.
And finally, in Pennsylvania, the state and national Republican parties are suing (once again) in an effort to exclude undated absentee ballots in the November election’s final ballot count.
