This Week: As Prosecutors Get Closer to Indicting Trump, Conservatives Try to Make It Harder to Vote
“As he prepares to face a likely indictment” in New York for allegedly funneling hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about an alleged tryst, former President Donald Trump asked a state court in Georgia to prohibit Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from indicting him for election fraud. Her office is now also considering “racketeering and conspiracy charges” related to Trump’s effort to overturn the election results in Georgia in 2020.
Meanwhile, Special Counsel Jack Smith is moving forward with his investigation of Trump’s role in the January 6th insurrection.
In Georgia, a federal judge ruled that a lawsuit by a voting rights group against True the Vote, a conservative organization that emerged from the Tea Party, can move forward. True the Vote allegedly violated the Voting Rights Act by trying to disenfranchise voters through mass voter eligibility challenges before Georgia’s U.S. Senate runoffs in early 2021.
The North Carolina Supreme Court, “now controlled by Republicans following the November midterms,” reheard a case to determine if Republicans in the state legislature gerrymandered districts so unfairly that they violate the state constitution’s guarantee of free elections. The court also reheard a case to determine if voter identification legislation is racially discriminatory.
In Arizona, bills to financially punish the State Bar and Arizona Supreme Court for disciplining lawyers who bring “baseless election fraud complaints” in state courts and to end the secret ballot by posting voters’ personal information online along with their ballot images, continued to work their way through the state legislature.
In Wisconsin, promoters of election disinformation and supporters of overturning the 2020 presidential election continue to pour in campaign contributions into the state’s Supreme Court race.
In Nevada, Republicans kept alive a voter ID bill. Governor Joe Lombardo has said “he would support such a measure.”
In Pennsylvania, failed gubernatorial candidate and election denier Doug Mastriano is pushing a bill in the state senate that “would allow any registered voter to be a poll watcher in any precinct across the state.”
State officials in Florida were sued this week by the Florida Alliance for Retired Americans, Florida NAACP, and Vote.org over a law that makes it harder for poor people without driver’s licenses to register to vote by requiring them to provide a handwritten signature to register.
