By Joe Miller
This Week: MAGA Election Deniers Target Election Administrators As January 6th Committee Prepares Findings
Election deniers have been working tirelessly to derail state and local election proceedings this week, all while the January 6 Committee prepares to release its findings about the Capitol insurrection. Yesterday, the Jan. 6 Committee re-convened to discuss plans for the upcoming hearing (tentatively scheduled for Sept. 28) and report laying out the evidence that Trump and his MAGA allies planned and paid for a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. Across the National Mall, the Department of Justice has issued 40 subpoenas over the past week for the Jan. 6 federal grand jury investigation.
News from the Jan. 6 Committee hearings comes at a dire time for democracy in the states. Across the country, Trump supporters have flooded local election offices with often-identical requests for 2020 voting records, burying local officials in communications and paperwork in order to sow chaos ahead of the midterm elections and attack the integrity of our election administration. In Michigan, MAGA training sessions for poll workers and partisan observers are encouraging new recruits to ignore local election regulations and break rules to act as “undercover agents” in future elections, needlessly warning them about “bad stuff happening” during the election. A new survey found that almost half of Michigan local election officials are reporting harassment and abuse.
A Wisconsin judge banned ballot curing last Wednesday, ruling that election clerks will be penalized for filling in missing information like blank dates or incorrect zip codes on witness certification envelopes for absentee ballots. Yesterday, a county judge rejected a request to stay the ruling, ordering the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) to inform local election officials of the policy change. The lawsuit, pushed by Wisconsin’s MAGA legislature, relied on a conspiracy theory purporting that ballot curing enabled so-called “fraud” during the 2020 election – though the WEC’s first authorized ballot curing in 2016.
In North Carolina, Trump lawyer and top election-subversion conspirator John Eastman filed an amicus brief supporting the state legislature’s pending case before the Supreme Court, Moore v. Harper, urging the court to adopt a radical legal theory known as the “independent state legislature” doctrine. 13 state attorneys general also filed an amicus brief backing the MAGA legal theory, while all 50 states’ Supreme Court chief justices urged the court to reject the case. If applied, the theory would render state legislatures unaccountable to both the popular vote and state/federal court oversight in dictating election law.
Elsewhere, in ongoing anti-democratic efforts to subvert the will of voters:
A group of MAGA plaintiffs in Pennsylvania, led by Jan. 6 conspirators and high-ranking former Trump staffers Stephen Miller and Mark Meadows, are suing Lehigh County over ballot drop boxes. In rustic Lycoming County, the board of elections rescinded a ballot initiative that would have banned electronic ballot tabulators if approved.
In Georgia, a newly-released video, showing a Georgia election official escorting Trump lawyer Sydney Powell into a Coffee County election office to copy election data, has raised a number of legal questions for Fulton county prosecutors about investigating potentially compromised voting systems in the rural county. Notably, a group of election security experts are calling for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to take extra precautions in light of the incident.
In Arizona, a federal judge halted the rollout of a new restrictive election law that would have enacted onerous new identification statutes, requiring county officials to manually confirm voter registration information or purge unconfirmed voters. The judge also temporarily blocked enforcement of a law that would have made it a misdemeanor to film police within eight feet.
And finally, in rural Nevada, Elko County Commissioners were barred from ordering a forensic “audit” of the primary election by a District Attorney after the commissioners attempted to investigate Dominion Voting Systems — the company who has been the target of many conspiracy theories post-2020.
