GOP House candidate and QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA) on Friday defended a threatening photo she posted to Facebook a day before that shows her with a gun and suggested she wanted to “go on the offense” seemingly against three Democratic congresswomen.
This Week Laid Bare Trump’s Disdain For The Military
The sun went down Thursday on a buzzing swarm of online rage as an article in The Atlantic called “Trump: Americans Who Died In War Are ‘Losers’ Or ‘Suckers’” hit the internet.
Biden Slams Trump’s Obsession With Conspiracy Theories: ‘What In God’s Name Are We Doing?’
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden on Friday afternoon swiped at President Donald Trump’s penchant for outlandish conspiracy theories, including his embrace of the infamous QAnon conspiracy theory.
‘Disgusting!’: A Fiery Biden Tears Into Trump Over ‘Losers’ Remarks About Troops, McCain
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said Friday that he has never been “as disappointed” in his nearly half-century career in politics as he was when he learned of President Donald Trump’s remarks about troops.
Is Your State Ready For The Pandemic Election? A Look At AZ, FL, NH, SC And VA
Our journey through America’s varying levels of pandemic-voting preparedness continues this week with looks at Arizona, Florida, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Virginia.
Every week, we’re looking at what states have done — or not done — to make voting easier during the coronavirus outbreak, where the fights over those moves have been the most contentious, and which states feature the kind of competitive races that could make things extra messy and volatile come November.
Here’s this week’s installment of our survey, and check out the other states we’ve examined.
Arizona
Arizona may not have it so bad this year. The state has used widespread, no-reason-required voting-by-mail longer than nearly any other. Eighty-eight percent of voters in the state’s August primary voted by mail, and even that volume did not significantly delay the reporting of the results. And yet, questions do persist about whether the state has invested enough to expand its absentee voting capacity above its already considerable level, amid partisan rancor that has blocked reforms which could help the situation. Attacks on the postal service have also put the state in a uniquely vulnerable spot.
Meanwhile, Arizona has become a battleground state in 2020, with President Trump vying to win it again and Sen. Martha McSally (R-AZ) fighting for her life to hold onto Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)’s former seat, which Mark Kelly, an astronaut and husband to former Rep. Gabby Giffords, hopes to claim.
President Trump has targeted the state with his bogus allegations of voter fraud, and the state’s voting rules are caught in a number of legal tussles that could change the state of play before Election Day. The attorney general’s office is controlled by a Republican, while the secretary of state is a Democrat, leading to fights between the two over, for example, conflicting deadlines on how to fix ballots that have various errors — that question is subject to a DNC lawsuit filed against the state in June. A separate case over that issue as well as over who can transport a ballot to a precinct is pending before the Supreme Court — the case’s acceptance could trigger more restrictive rules being reinstated.
This partisan rancor has meant that the state has put in place no changes to contend with COVID-19. In spite of that, election officials have cited a law that allows them to start counting votes received more than two weeks before Election Day as helpful in alleviating backlogs. Its solid history of remote voting has otherwise left it in a relatively prepared place for holding an election during a pandemic.
Florida
Beyond its typical swing state status, Florida will be watched closely on Election Day because it could serve as an early indicator of the type of Joe Biden landslide that would wrap the presidential race up that night, or soon thereafter.
Florida already had an expansive mail-in voting program before the pandemic, as it offered no excuse absentee voting and operated a semi-permanent absentee voting list that allowed voters to sign up to receive mail ballots for two general election cycles at a time. That approach had been embraced by Florida’s GOP, who saw it benefiting the Republican-leaning elderly population in the state. With election officials used to seeing a third of their ballots come in by mail, they were at an advantage over other states in figuring out what additional scaling-up was needed to accommodate the pandemic election, in which they estimate that mail ballots could make up 50 percent or more of the votes cast. Florida also has the kind of rules on the books that will help the counting process happen quickly.
Nonetheless, there was still some frustration over the state’s slowness to approve some additional rule changes that local election officials were seeking and its delays in dispersing the federal election funding Congress approved in its COVID-19 package this spring.
Furthermore, voting rights advocates are calling for early voting to start earlier in the state, and also want more drop boxes to be set up outside, in addition to the ones that are planned indoors at Florida’s early vote centers.
A major ongoing legal fight over ex-felon voting could inject additional chaos into November’s election. When the Supreme Court reinstated for August’s primary the state’s 2019 law barring ex-felons from voting until they had paid all fines, court fees and restitution associated with their conviction — described by voter advocates as a “poll tax” — it caused confusion for the ex-felons who registered to vote under a federal judge’s previous order partially blocking that 2019 law. It’s still TBD whether the law, which stands to prevent hundreds and thousands of people from voting, will be in place for the general.
In addition to the presidential race, Florida’s Democrats are hoping to flip at least one of its statehouse chambers to break up the GOP’s unified hold on its state government.
New Hampshire
Unlike most states, New Hampshire hasn’t faced the pandemic’s electoral test quite yet: Primary day is next week, Sept. 8.
But the state has made a few allowances for the virus: Concern about COVID-19 is now a valid excuse to cast an absentee ballot. First-time voters can also register through the mail, despite the state’s voter ID laws, by providing a copy of their state ID or other proof of their identity and address. The state also recently allowed voters with certain disabilities, such as blindness, to fill out a ballot online and print and return it, rather than requesting a typical print ballot and relying on another person’s assistance to fill it out.
Then there are the “Live Free or Die” accommodations, like separate polling areas for people who refuse to wear masks.
Voters may return ballots directly to election officials, and they may want to: New Hampshire allows voters to request absentee ballots up until the day before Election Day. At that point, sending it through the mail likely won’t get it counted in time.
Before a few years ago, the last substantial change to the state’s laws came in 1976, with legislation that allowed 18-year-olds to vote and allowed voting absentee. But after Donald Trump lost the state to Hillary Clinton by less than half of one percent in 2016, Republicans passed laws that made voting harder, especially for students.
SB3, a 2017 law that made voter registration more complicated, was struck down by a state judge in April. But judges didn’t stop HB 1264, which requires students and others who vote in New Hampshire to be considered legal residents of the state.
Voting rights advocates feared the initial lack of clarity over HB 1264 might discourage potential college student voters who’d rather not take steps otherwise required of residents, like getting new drivers licenses or registering their vehicles in New Hampshire — but, as the state’s Supreme Court made clear in an opinion in May, such steps are not required to vote. At this point, the line from Democrats and voting rights attorneys is straightforward: “If you live in New Hampshire, you can vote in New Hampshire.”
Last month, a memo from the secretary of state’s office articulated restrictions on the use of dropboxes — voters may only use them when they are staffed by an election official. Those restrictions and others were subsequently targeted in a lawsuit brought by the American Federation of Teachers, which said the rules would suppress the pandemic vote. The Trump campaign and Republican National Committee have asked a state superior court judge to allow them to intervene against the teachers’ union, on the side of New Hampshire’s secretary of state. If successful, the AFT suit could loosen state restrictions on everything from absentee ballot postage requirements and Election Day return deadlines to rules on third party absentee ballot collection.
The purple state will be the site of some contentious elections. Gov. Chris Sununu (R) is running for a third term as the state’s governor. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) is also seeking a third term and faces a Democratic primary election in a few days. And while Trump could turn the tables this year — Joe Biden came in a crushing fifth place in the state’s Democratic presidential primary — Biden is up against Trump in recent polling.
South Carolina
South Carolina is, as Greenville County spokesperson Conway Belangia put it, still waiting for the dust to settle. Decisions that will dramatically affect the November election — namely, whether or not all voters will get to cast absentee ballots — are still up in the air. There has been some recent progress, as the Republican-led state Senate passed a bill allowing voters to use a “state of emergency” excuse to vote absentee in the fall, after months of kicking the can down the road. Republicans refused to pass other measures called for by election officials, like waiving requiring voters to have a witness when signing their absentee ballots to letting them submit their ballots in dropboxes, saying it would expose the process to fraud. There are two ongoing lawsuits in federal court that, while centered on the now-almost moot absentee voting issue, touch on some of those rejected measures.
The General Assembly passed a bill during the primaries letting voters temporarily use the “state of emergency” excuse to vote absentee, which brought in double the number of absentee ballots cast in 2016. But for the 75 percent of voters that cast a ballot in person, the process was plagued by COVID-19-caused problems. The day before the June 9 primary, the state election commission announced the movement of 250 polling places due to a lack of poll workers or unavailable sites, leading to significant voter confusion. The poll closures suffered by Richland County, the second-most populous in the state, disproportionately affected Black voters, many of whom stood in 5-hour lines well into the night. There were also problems with incomplete or incorrect ballots, an issue worsened, the state election commission determined, by inexperienced poll workers.
Displeased with the problems of the primary, the election commission went to work to smooth things out for the June 23 runoffs. In Richland County in particular, the commission recruited poll workers and held intensive training sessions for them, and assisted with the testing of voting machines. As a result, the runoffs went much more smoothly, with the caveat that they had lower turnout than the July 9 round. For the general, up to three times more voters are expected than the 767,187 people who voted in the primary. The state election commission had been pushing for county officials to start tallying ballots as early as the Friday before Election Day — they are currently required to keep the interior envelopes sealed until Election Day, a recipe for long wait times for results, especially if turnout in November is as high as expected. The state Senate bill would allow workers to start opening envelopes two days before the election. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is facing a surprisingly competitive reelection race against the well-funded former lobbyist Jaime Harrison, and Republicans are trying to flip Rep. Joe Cunningham’s (D-VA) House seat.
Virginia
Last week, the Virginia General Assembly passed a series of recommendations from Gov. Ralph Northam (D) to make voting in the general election even easier, building on the measures the completely-Democratic-led state government had already put in place. The new bills included setting aside $2 million for prepaid postage on ballots, waiving the requirement for a witness to the absentee ballot signature and mandating that drop boxes be placed in voting precincts. State Republicans balked at the inclusion of drop boxes, which they baselessly say will invite fraud, and prepaid postage, which they say the state can’t afford, but Democrats used their majorities to muscle through the measures. After a couple more procedural steps, Northam is expected to sign the bills into law.
The new measures are a complement to a battery of voting laws that Democrats, who have had a trifecta in the state since the 2019 elections, passed in April, just before the COVID-19 pandemic struck the United States in earnest. That package extended early voting to a 45-day period, eliminated the photo ID requirement, made Election Day a state holiday and made voter registration automatic for all who use DMV services. A law was also passed to get rid of the excuse needed to vote absentee, though that didn’t go into effect until July 1, causing some temporary consternation around the June primary. Ultimately though, the excuse requirement was waived via a court order. The primary went smoothly, extremely high turnout notwithstanding — a record-breaking 1.3 million Virginians voted, including twice as many who voted absentee than did in the 2016 Democratic primary. In general though, the state has low absentee ballot percentages though it managed to cope with the influx well in the primary.
Last month, there was a flurry of concern when a third-party voter advocacy group sent around absentee ballot applications to hundreds of thousands of voters, some of which had an incorrect return address. The group, The Center for Voter Information, apologized for the mistake, and state election officials are encouraging people to apply for absentee ballots online.
The state is set to see some competitive House races. There is also a referendum on the ballot to create a bipartisan commission that would handle redistricting. Democratic nominee Joe Biden is well up in the state, and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) seems poised to win reelection.
How Atlanta Voters Faced The Perfect Storm Of Pandemic Election Disasters
Murphy’s law was in full force in Fulton County — the Georgia county containing much of Atlanta — as it prepared for its pandemic primary in June. Everything that could go wrong pretty much did.
Voters faced long in-person voting lines coupled with issues in obtaining and sending in absentee ballots, making the county the poster child this summer for how the coronavirus outbreak was rocking elections. The voting nightmare was cast across national newspaper headlines, dominated cable news segments and ultimately prompted an investigation by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into how exactly things unraveled the way it did.
“I didn’t see any evidence of dereliction or indifference from them. I think they tried,” Chris Harvey, Georgia’s elections director, recently told the state elections board, which heard the findings of the investigation this week and last.
”Unfortunately, I believe the process in Fulton County of trying to deal with the absentee ballots was insufficient and ineffective,” he said.
Fulton County meanwhile said its election officials felt “vilified” by the state for how they’d been singled out for problems that arose all over Georgia during the primary. The board, nonetheless, voted to send allegations of election law violations over to the state attorney general’s office for further investigation.
“We know that many other counties, including ones in our metropolitan area as well as rural counties that are hours away, experienced long lines, malfunctioning voting machines and not enough poll workers, just to name a few. All issues caused by the pandemic,” Amanda Clark Palmer, a lawyer representing the local election officials, told the board on Thursday.
It’s undeniable that election officials were faced with a perfect storm of elements that were out of their control. The secretary of state investigation also pointed to unforced errors. The county is now taking measures for November’s election that it says will prevent things from going so horribly wrong again.
But the investigation revealed how any singular shortcoming — be it a failure to train new poll workers adequately, a lack of supplies for provisional voting, or unclear directions for submitting absentee ballot applications — could still cause chaos elsewhere in the country, if the lessons of the Fulton County fiasco aren’t fully heeded.
A Backlog Of Mail Ballot Applications That ‘Snowballed’
Georgia election officials were expecting a crush of absentee ballot applications as the pandemic took hold, particularly after the state sought to proactively send out applications to all Georgia voters. That move was intended to relieve county officials of some of the costs and logistics burdens of expanding their mail-in voting programs.
But Fulton County was thrown another curveball: a COVID-19 outbreak among its own election staff that took the life of one of its longtime staffers, while putting in the hospital a top election official.
The staffer’s death had a “devastating, emotional impact” on the office, Fulton County voter registration supervisor Caryn Ficklin said at a hearing last week on the investigation. “We were all touched by her passing and it took a toll on our production.”
Logistically, it meant that the office was closed for cleaning for four days in mid-April, right as the onslaught of applications was ramping up, putting election officials deep in a hole that they struggled to dig out of upon their return.
But that was only the start of Fulton County’s problems. The county email address the state listed on its materials for returning ballot applications automatically forwarded emails to 20 separate email accounts, meaning that every application took 20 times the space on the election office’s servers.
IT staff were constantly being called to assist with the problems caused by the 80,000 emailed applications the county ultimately received.
Officials adopted other questionable practices to manage the service issue, according to the state investigation. Some employees would immediately delete applications from their inbox — without taking record-ing keeping steps like printing them first — once they were processed, in order to open up server space (though one inbox was used to preserve all the applications that came in).
The digital chaos was exacerbated by the fact that voters were apparently not given a clear instruction for how they should submit applications via email, meaning all kinds of extensions (pdfs, jpegs, etc) were used to attach the forms, which made it difficult to print out some applications.
Trying to catch up on the absentee ballot backlog pulled staff away from dealing with another issue that would prove to be consequential: a pandemic-caused shortage in poll workers and locations to host voting sites.
Amid the frenzy, according to the state’s investigation, election officials also did an inadequate job of updating the ballot tracking platforms voters are supposed to be able to use to confirm their mail ballots’ status.
“Voters who had applied for their absentee ballots as early as April had not gotten ballots, hadn’t not gotten any communication, which resulted in them sending in more applications, which was adding to the snowball that was building already and was making the problem worse,” Harvey said.
This also had a domino effect on in-person voting, according to the investigators. Any voter who applied for an absentee ballot but then showed up in person had to fill out a form voiding their mail ballot, regardless of whether they received the ballot, and that led to longer wait times.
The secretary of state’s office reviewed the complaints of 254 county residents who reached out for the probe with stories of not receiving in time the mail ballots they applied for. That failure resulted in 107 of those residents not voting at all.
“This is just those that reached out to our office to submit a complaint,” Francis Watson, an investigator for the secretary of state, told the board last week. “I anticipate the numbers to be much higher for those that did not receive their ballots, as evidenced by the large numbers that went to the polls and reported not receiving an absentee ballot.”
In-Person Voting Debacles
Long lines were a problem all over Georgia during the June election, as poll workers struggled with the new voting machines that were being deployed for the first time during the primary. (The equipment was initially supposed to be rolled out during March’s presidential primary, which usually has lower turnout than the other primary election that happens later in the spring. But the elections were combined once the pandemic caused a delay to both.)
According to state officials, Fulton County was unique, however, in its inability to recover from initial delays caused by technological difficulties, while the pandemic caused other kinds of in-person voting confusion.
More than 40 polling locations were changed — the vast majority due to COVID-related closures — and some voters told the investigators that they didn’t receive in time the notices election officials sent out indicating that their precincts had moved.
The reworked location plan assigned way too many voters for single locations. Some 16,000 voters were assigned to a restaurant called Park Tavern.
Once voters showed up, some found waits as long as six hours to vote, and several people were seen leaving the lines. Poll workers told investigators they struggled to get in touch with county officials, and some reported waiting several hours for technicians to show up to help deal with the technological issues.
The state said that 54 percent of the poll managers they spoke to reported a lack of adequate supplies. The 50 sets of provisional ballot accoutrements the county provided for each precinct quickly ran out at some sites, as many more were needed for voters who showed up after seeing their attempts to vote absentee stymied.
A third of the managers told the state their polling places were not adequately staffed, while about half said that the training they received was inadequate, the state investigators said.
Palmer, the attorney for the local officials, stressed in her rebuttal to the investigation that the pandemic had disrupted in-person training plans, while hundreds of workers who had been trained in person before the pandemic bailed on working the polls because of the outbreak.
An online training session was developed instead, and the county also offered webinars for workers to call in questions.
“I recognize that virtual training, especially when you’re dealing with new equipment, is not as good as in person training, but given the limitations they were facing at that point in time, I don’t know what they could have done differently,” she said.
MI Joins States Refusing An Inadequately Vetted But Trump-Approved COVID Vaccine
The State of Michigan said that it would not agree to distribute a COVID-19 vaccine absent adequate data from the federal government, joining a growing list of states that would refuse to dole out a vaccine if they believe it was approved on a political schedule.
Continue reading “MI Joins States Refusing An Inadequately Vetted But Trump-Approved COVID Vaccine”
Where Things Stand: It’s A Little Too Optimistic To Ask John Kelly To Clear The Air
As President Trump and the White House collectively go after the Atlantic for its recent report on Trump’s remarks about the late-Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and fallen American soldiers, pundits and journalists across the spectrum are suggesting there’s one person who could easily set the record straight: John Kelly.
The Endorsement Extortion Stays Under Wraps
I wanted to update you on some new news on the Falwell/Trump 2016 endorsement scandal. Since we last checked in on this story another Liberty University student has come forward to say that Becki Falwell pursued him sexually. But it’s the Michael Cohen part of this story that remains the really newsworthy part.
Two Senior Officials Confirm Trump’s Remarks About Fallen Soldiers To AP
DELRAY BEACH, FLa. (AP) — President Donald Trump is angrily denying a report that he made disparaging remarks about U.S. service members who have been captured or killed, including that he described American war dead at the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France in 2018 as “losers” and “suckers.”
“This is more made up Fake News given by disgusting & jealous failures in a disgraceful attempt to influence the 2020 Election!” Trump tweeted late Thursday.
The allegations were reported in The Atlantic. A senior Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of the remarks to The Associated Press, including the 2018 cemetery comments.
The White House swiftly mounted a concerted defense of the president, with Trump’s campaign and allies taking to social media and broadcast interviews to denounce the report.
In the article, defense officials said Trump made the comments as he begged off visiting the cemetery outside Paris during a meeting following his presidential daily briefing on the morning of Nov. 10, 2018.
Staffers from the National Security Council and the Secret Service told Trump that rainy weather made helicopter travel to the cemetery risky, but they could drive there. Trump responded by saying he didn’t want to visit the cemetery because it was “filled with losers,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to discuss it publicly.
The White House blamed the canceled visit on poor weather at the time.
In another conversation on the trip, The Atlantic said, Trump referred to the 1,800 Marines who died in the World War I battle of Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
Trump, who traveled to Pennsylvania on Thursday, told reporters after he returned to Washington that the Atlantic report was “a disgraceful situation” by a “terrible magazine.”
“I would be willing to swear on anything that I never said that about our fallen heroes,” Trump told the reporters, gathered on the tarmac in the dark. “There is nobody that respects them more. No animal — nobody — what animal would say such a thing?”
Trump also reiterated the White House explanation of why he didn’t visit the cemetery. “The helicopter could not fly,” he said, because of the rain and fog. “The Secret Service told me you can’t do it. … They would never have been able to get the police and everybody else in line to have a president go through a very crowded, very congested area.”
“It’s sad the depths that people will go to during a lead-up to a presidential campaign to try to smear somebody,” said White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told “Fox & Friends” on Friday that he was with the president for a good part of the trip to France. “I never heard him use the words that are described in that article,” Pompeo said.
Former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders tweeted that she was part of the discussion about visiting the cemetery. “This never happened. I have sat in the room when our President called family members after their sons were killed in action and it was heart-wrenching. … I am disgusted by this false attack.”
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said that “if the revelations in today’s Atlantic article are true, then they are yet another marker of how deeply President Trump and I disagree about the role of the President of the United States.”
“Duty, honor, country — those are the values that drive our service members,” Biden said in a statement Thursday night, adding that if he is elected president, “I will ensure that our American heroes know that I will have their back and honor their sacrifice — always.” Biden’s son Beau served in Iraq in 2008-09.
The Defense officials also confirmed to The AP reporting in The Atlantic that Trump on Memorial Day 2017 had gone with his chief of staff, John Kelly, to visit the Arlington Cemetery gravesite of Kelly’s son, Robert, who was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan, and said to Kelly: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
The senior Marine Corps officer and The Atlantic, citing sources with firsthand knowledge, also reported that Trump said he didn’t want to support the August 2018 funeral of Republican Sen. John McCain, a decorated Navy veteran who spent years as a Vietnam prisoner of war, because he was a “loser.” The Atlantic also reported that Trump was angered that flags were flown at half-staff for McCain, saying: “What the f—- are we doing that for? Guy was a f—-ing loser.”
Trump acknowledged Thursday he was “never a fan” of McCain and disagreed with him, but said he still respected him and approved everything to do with his “first-class triple-A funeral” without hesitation because “I felt he deserved it.”
In 2015, shortly after launching his presidential candidacy, Trump publicly blasted McCain, saying “He’s not a war hero.” He added, “I like people who weren’t captured.”
Trump only amplified his criticism of McCain as the Arizona lawmaker grew critical of his acerbic style of politics, culminating in a late-night “no” vote scuttling Trump’s plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act. That vote shattered what few partisan loyalties bound the two men, and Trump has continued to attack McCain for that vote, even posthumously.
The magazine said Trump also referred to former President George H.W. Bush as a “loser” because he was shot down by the Japanese as a Navy pilot in World War II.