This Week: While Trump Tries To Escape Federal Prosecution, MAGA Supporters Continue To Deny Election Results and Oppose Efforts To Ensure Free and Fair Elections
This week, as federal investigations against former President Donald Trump continued, federal prosecutors in Georgia fought back attempts by Trump’s lawyers to slow a case against him with “flawed” motions, including a motion to throw out evidence against him. Georgia Republican Party Chair David Shafer also sent a letter stating he should not be prosecuted for assembling a team of fake electors, because he was following legal advice provided by Trump’s lawyers. Meanwhile, “election skeptics” in the state who are on the lookout for fraudulent absentee ballots from the 2020 presidential election continued to fight for the right to do so in court.
Virginia joined Florida and the five other states that left the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), which states use to share data to ensure accurate voter rolls and prevent voter fraud. MAGA-dominated states are abandoning the use of such tools in the wake of conspiracy theories about the systems to prevent election fraud.
In Arizona, lawyers for failed MAGA gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake argued in court that ballot tabulators malfunctioned during the 2020 general election, and she continued to fight in court to have absentee ballots thrown out on a technicality. She thinks too many votes were counted. Her lawyers presented what they claim is “new relevant evidence the election was ‘rigged.’” Meanwhile, failed MAGA attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh thinks not enough votes were counted. He thinks too many provisional ballots were rejected.
Despite the support of Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford, who “spent months investigating a fake elector scheme orchestrated by Nevada Republicans,” MAGA supporters in Nevada opposed a bill to make being a fake presidential elector a felony. Ford told lawmakers that his office is barred from bringing charges against alleged fake electors under current state policy.
In Wisconsin, Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu appointed Dan Knodl, an election denier, to chair the committee that oversees elections. Knodl “was one of 15 Wisconsin lawmakers” who signed a “letter to ask then-Vice President Mike Pence to put off certifying the 2020 presidential results a day before a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol.”
In Pennsylvania, “an extremist right-wing pressure group” agreed to drop a lawsuit to force the state “to purge thousands of citizens from its voter rolls.”
New members of North Carolina’s State Board of Elections were sworn in this week. The board is “tasked with helping implement a photo voter identification law later this year” after the GOP-controlled state Supreme Court “upheld a photo voter identification law that colleagues had struck down as racially biased.”
