As we’ve documented closely over the last 12 days of Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine, Republicans are offering up a confusing mix of reactions and deflections in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion. Some have praised Putin, others have condemned him. But all are mostly mad at President Biden, for a slew of reasons mostly tied to a vague assertion that he’s been weak on foreign policy since taking office.
But Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) offered up a rather unique and entirely backwards hypothesis last week when he suggested that somehow those involved in impeaching President Trump the first time might be to blame for the current war in Europe. Of those attracting his ire: retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who was himself born in Kyiv and also became an important whistleblower in the impeachment drama.
The AP has a new story about how unforced errors are potentially getting in the way of the GOP’s path back to a Senate majority in 2022. Most of us are aware of the developments the piece is referring to. You can review them here. I don’t want to get too deeply into the ins and outs of how bad this is for the GOP, whether it’s enough of a problem to keep the Democrats in power. But we know that in general this is a very real dynamic. Democrats managed to hold on to the Senate in 2010 in what was otherwise a brutal midterm rout. It happened again in 2012 — even though Democrats had to defend a ton of marginal pickups from the 2006 cycle. The dynamic is clear cut enough that it’s worth asking whether this is really a matter of “unforced” errors or whether this is what politics is like when politicians run in non-gerrymandered districts (i.e., states).
The Pentagon on Monday extended the National Guard’s deployment in Washington, D.C., following the Capitol Police Board’s emergency request in response to a trucker convoy protesting COVID-19 mandates over the weekend.
One feature of this almost two-week conflict between Russia and Ukraine is that civilians actually have access to lots of military information. Through open source intelligence, on the ground reporting and more we’re getting lots of details about battlefield losses of armor and aircraft, lines of control, shelling, ground movements, civilian and military casualties and more. But for most of us it’s pretty hard to know what these things mean. For instance, presumably it’s bad news for Russia if a couple of their planes get shot down. But are those expected combat losses or does it tell us something meaningful about the progress of the conflict? This is particularly important since Ukraine and its advocates are flooding social media with pictures of destroyed armor and downed airplanes. That makes total sense. They’re trying to maintain national morale and demonstrate their fighting capacity both to allies and to the Russian public. But assuming the photos are genuine, what do they mean? To help myself with this I’ve created the beginnings of a Twitter list specifically made up of military analysts. You can follow it here.
This new list is different from the one I’ve assembled for following the Russia/Ukraine Crisis in general. It only has a few members so far since this new list is focused on a very rarefied class of people: knowledgable military analysts with a special focus on NATO, Russia, Eastern Europe, the Russian “near abroad” etc. who are also prolific on Twitter. But I will be adding to it and would invite any suggestions.
This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
At a wedding hall in rural northwest Wisconsin, an evangelist hollered a question to an eager crowd of conferencegoers: “Who thinks Wisconsin can be saved?”
He was answered with enthusiastic whistles and cheers. The truth, he said, would be revealed. “We need transparency!”
The subject: the nation’s election systems. The preacher was among a group of conservative speakers, including politicians, data gurus and former military officers, who theorized on the mechanics of voter fraud in general — and specifically distrust in the voter rolls, the official lists of eligible voters.
“Voter rolls are very, very important to the process,” Florida software and database engineer Jeff O’Donnell told the gathering of 300 in late January in Chippewa Falls, deeming the rolls “the ground zero” of what he called Democratic plots to steal elections. The only way former President Donald Trump could have lost his reelection campaign in 2020, O’Donnell said in an interview, was if voter rolls had been inflated with people who shouldn’t have been able to cast ballots.
Ever since Trump failed to convince the world that he lost the 2020 election because of fraud, like-minded people across the country have been taking up the same rallying cry, revisiting that vote with an eye toward what will happen in 2022.
Now, a new group is stepping into a more conspicuous role in that world by providing easily accessible tools for people in Wisconsin, other Midwest battleground states and, eventually, the entire country to forge ahead with a quest to prove election irregularities.
Calling its work unprecedented, the Voter Reference Foundation is analyzing state voter rolls in search of discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters credited by the rolls as having participated in the Nov. 3, 2020 election.
The foundation, led by a former Trump campaign official and founded less than a year ago, has dismissed objections from election officials that its methodology is flawed and its actions may be illegal, ProPublica found. But with its inquiries and insinuations, VoteRef, as it is known, has added to the volume in the echo chamber.
Its instrument is the voter rolls, released line by line, for all to see.
In early August, the foundation published on its website the names, birthdates, addresses and voting histories for 2 million Nevada voters, information that is normally public but only available on request, for a fee. It claimed to have found a significant discrepancy between the number of voters and the number of ballots cast, despite being warned by state election officials that its findings were “fundamentally incorrect.”
In the months since, VoteRef has reported similar discrepancies in rolls posted for 17 other states, including the 2020 election battlegrounds of Michigan, Georgia, Ohio and Wisconsin. It intends to post the rolls of all 50 states by year’s end.
“Voter File Transparency site adds Michigan; large discrepancy found,” read a headline on a Dec. 6 press release put out by the organization, which is led by Gina Swoboda, a high-ranking officer in the Republican Party of Arizona.
The project is still in its early stages, and the people at the Chippewa Falls conference did not mention VoteRef specifically.
Still, the VoteRef initiative is an important indication of how some influential and well-funded Republicans across the country plan to encourage crowdsourcing of voter rolls to find what they consider errors and anomalies, then dispute voter registrations of specific individuals. Visitors to the VoteRef site are able to scroll through data on more than 85 million people in a free, easy-to-use format. The VoteRef data includes personal identifying information of every voter and the years they voted, but not how they voted.
VoteRef’s methods have already led to pushback from state officials. The New Mexico Secretary of State believes posting data about individual voters online is not a permissible use under state law and has referred the matter to the state attorney general for criminal investigation.
And an attorney for the Pennsylvania Department of State notified VoteRef in January that state law prohibits publishing the voter rolls on the internet and asked that the data be removed. VoteRef complied.
ProPublica contacted election officials in a dozen of the states where VoteRef has examined voter rolls, and in every case the officials said that the methodology used to identify the discrepancies was flawed, the data incomplete or the math wrong. The officials, a mix of Democrats and Republicans, were in Colorado,Connecticut, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.
“The accuracy and integrity of Michigan’s election has been confirmed by hundreds of audits, numerous courts and a GOP-led Oversight Committee analysis,” said Tracy Wimmer, director of media relations for Michigan’s secretary of state.
“This is simply another meritless example of election misinformation being disseminated to undermine well-founded faith in Michigan’s election system, and from an organization led by at least one former member of the Trump campaign,” Wimmer said.
VoteRef, records show, is an initiative of the conservative nonprofit group Restoration Action and its related political action committee, both led by Doug Truax, an Illinois insurance broker and podcaster who ran unsuccessfully in the state’s GOP primary for the U.S. Senate in 2014.
A ProPublica review found that VoteRef’s origins and funders are closely linked to a super PAC predominantly funded by billionaire Richard Uihlein, founder of the mammoth Wisconsin-based packaging supply company Uline. A descendant of one of the founders of the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, Uihlein is a major Trump supporter and a key player in Wisconsin and Illinois politics. Among his political donations: $800,000 in September 2020 to the Tea Party Patriots political action committee, a group that helped organize the Jan. 6 rally that led to the Capitol insurrection.
Uihlein and his wife, Elizabeth Uihlein, have contributed in excess of $30 million combined over two decades to mainly Republican candidates on the state and local level, particularly in Illinois and Wisconsin, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan organization that tracks campaign donor information. The total includes money given to groups that advocate on behalf of candidates as well as direct contributions.
Voter rolls are public information, typically used by campaigns to identify potential supporters, target messages or persuade people to go to the polls. Journalists and some businesses also at times use the rolls for newsgathering or commercial purposes.
VoteRef has said its aim is to increase transparency in the elections process, echoing the language used to justify door-to-door address checks, painstaking ballot audits and other efforts that Trump supporters are continuing to employ to parse the 2020 election. To publicize the results of its analysis of ballot inconsistencies, it crafted press releases that then were parroted on sites that purport to be legitimate news outlets and were connected to a media network that received large sums of money from VoteRef.
“VoteRef is the beginning of a new era of American election transparency,” Swoboda, VoteRef’s executive director, said in its Nevada press release. “We have an absolute right to see everything behind the curtain.”
Until a few months before the 2020 election, Swoboda, a resident of Scottsdale, a Phoenix suburb, was a professional in Arizona’s election system, working as the campaign finance and lobbying supervisor in the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office.
Swoboda then served as Election Day operations director for the Trump campaign in Arizona, according to a sworn court affidavit she gave in Arizona in November 2020 as part of Trump’s legal challenge to election results there. She described how she took complaints from people who thought poll workers allowed defective ballots to be submitted, in what later became known as “SharpieGate.” (Votes made with a Sharpie do count, the state said.)
She and others associated with VoteRef declined to be interviewed for this story. But Swoboda did respond via email.
“In each of the states we’ve researched to date, the election data math simply doesn’t add up,” she wrote. “That requires reform. We seek to spur this reform through the sustained spotlighting of inaccuracies or wrongdoing.”
Flawed Methodology
As of late February, VoteRef showed 431,173 more ballots cast overall than people credited by voter rolls with having participated in the 2020 election.
To those unschooled in the mechanics of elections, VoteRef’s approach could seem reasonable: Compare the total number of ballots cast in the Nov. 3, 2020 election with the number of current voters on the rolls who have recorded histories of having participated in the vote.
For example, the VoteRef table for Nevada shows 8,952 more ballots cast than individuals credited with voting, based on histories obtained in February 2021.
“Theoretically, these numbers should match,” VoteRef claimed in an August press release.
But there are valid reasons the numbers do not match.
Nevada election officials explained it this way in a press release: “If ‘John Doe’ votes and has his ballot counted in Lander County, then moves to Mineral County, once he is registered in Mineral County, he will show no vote history because he has no vote history in Mineral County. The farther away from the election the data is acquired, the more it will have changed.”
In Connecticut, there were 1,839,714 ballots cast in 2020, according to VoteRef, but the group’s examination of voter histories in October, 2021, showed 1,802,458 people voting. VoteRef’s conclusion is that there was a discrepancy of 37,256 ballots.
But state election officials said that the registration database is “live,” and voting histories of those who moved out of state or died in the months after the election would have been removed from the rolls, accounting for the discrepancy.
“The list is not a static list,” said Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill. “It changes all the time.”
In Michigan, where VoteRef found a difference of more than 74,000 votes, an elections official said that state’s qualified voter file also constantly changes as it’s updated, making the data the foundation relied on in late May 2021 — more than six months after the election — out of date.
In a recent email to ProPublica, Swoboda conceded as much.
“It’s up to election officials who run election offices to reconcile their data, not the Voter Reference Foundation, which merely publishes their information in a consumer-friendly format,” she said. “Of course, our election experts are well aware of the time lag between certification and data pulls — we posted the documents online for all to see!”
Federal law requires that election supervisors make reasonable efforts to update voter lists, but provides leeway in how states carry out the task. The law prohibits administrators from removing people for simply not voting in repeated elections, unless notices go unanswered and officials wait for two federal election cycles before putting the voters on an inactive list.
Counties haven’t always done a good job, however, in maintaining the voter rolls, leading some people to distrust the system. One of VoteRef’s key aims is to task ordinary people with the chore of finding anomalies.
Scrutinizing Voter Rolls and Neighbors
In announcing the launch of its website, the Voter Reference Foundation touted it as a “first of its kind” searchable tool for all 50 states “that will finally give American citizens a way to examine crucial voting records.”
“Citizens will be able to check their voting status, voting history, and those of their neighbors, friends and others. They will be able to ‘crowd-source’ any errors,” the press release stated.
The group’s backers have encouraged scrutiny outside of one’s own household.
“With VoteRef.com you can find out who voted and who didn’t. Did your aunt who died 10 years ago ‘vote’ after she died? Did your ‘neighbor’ who moved to another state vote? Did 55 votes emerge from a five-unit apartment complex?” Jeffrey Carter, a partner in a venture capital group who earlier had appeared on Truax’s podcast, wrote on the newsletter site Substack in December.
Matt Batzel, whose organization American Majority recently highlighted VoteRef’s efforts in Wisconsin, said in an interview with ProPublica that VoteRef’s vision is for citizens to detect and then report potential problems with the voter rolls, such as people who are registered to vote at vacant lots or unusually high numbers of votes coming from nursing homes.
Election experts say the type of work being done by VoteRef risks leading to further misinformation or being weaponized by people trying to undermine the legitimacy of the past election or give the sense that voter fraud is a more encompassing problem than it’s proven to be. Or it could be used to harass or intimidate valid voters under the guise of challenging their legitimacy.
Even without any clear evidence of fraud during the 2020 election, the vast, decentralized election system still is drawing scrutiny from those who believe that the system can be easily manipulated. At the daylong voter integrity conference in Chippewa Falls, speakers invoked war imagery, spoke of coverups, and urged people to “expose the tactics” of the political left. The group — saluted via video by Trump acolyte and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — is seeking to put like-minded individuals in vote-certifying secretary of state offices nationwide.
The voter rolls have been targeted, too, by others in Wisconsin, including special counsel Michael J. Gableman, a former state Supreme Court justice and Trump supporter who the state’s Republican Assembly speaker appointed in June to conduct a review of Wisconsin’s administration of the 2020 election. On March 1, Gableman released a report blasting what he called “opaque, confusing, and often botched election processes.”
Gableman urged the Legislature to consider legal methods to enable citizens or civil rights groups to help maintain election databases.
“As it stands, there is no clear method for individuals with facial evidence of inaccurate voter rolls to enter state court and seek to fix that problem,” he wrote. He envisioned a system that “could even provide nominal rewards for successful voter roll challenges.”
While information about voters is available in most states, it comes at a cost and with limits on how it can be distributed to avoid having some private information be easily accessible.
In January, an official with the Pennsylvania Department of State wrote to Truax warning that it appeared that the Voter Reference Foundation had “unlawfully posted Pennsylvania-voter information on its website” and demanding that the organization “take immediate action” to remove the information.
Soon, Pennsylvania data disappeared from the website. Swoboda declined to answer questions about the matter. Attempts to reach Truax were unsuccessful.
In New Mexico, Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver also said the undertaking is not an allowable use of voter data. By state law, she said, the rolls can only be used for governmental or campaign purposes.
“Having voter registration data ‘blasted out across the internet’ violates state law limiting use of the voter rolls solely for campaign or government activities,” she said. In December, Toulouse Oliver’s office referred the matter to the state attorney general for investigation and possible prosecution.
Associates of the Voter Reference Foundation dismiss these privacy concerns.
“You are joking, right?” said Bill Wilson, chairman of the conservative-leaning Market Research Foundation of Fairfax, Virginia, which paid more than $11,000 to the state of Virginia in March 2021 for the voter roll data and shared it with the Voter Reference Foundation.
“Big tech, both political parties and big media have no interest or concern for privacy and have mountains of data on individuals that is shared and sold on an hourly basis. You called me at my home, after all.’’
Support in GOP Circles
Restoration Action/PAC describes itself on its website as an “effective dynamo against those trying to destroy our country.” It produces ads on behalf of state and national candidates, castigates Planned Parenthood, “biased liberal media” and “Big Tech” and advocates for fair elections.
Truax, the group’s head, frequently assumes the role of news anchor to host the First Right video podcast, interviewing far-right conservatives. In early June last year, he introduced his audience to VoteRef, telling them: “We helped create the organization, and we’ll have much more to say about it in the coming weeks.”
Richard Uihlein’s quiet role was essential. He’s been the primary funder of Restoration PAC since its inception in 2015, contributing at least $44 million, according to the data from OpenSecrets. In May 2021, Federal Election Commission records show, Uihlein donated $1.5 million to Restoration PAC. That same month, the Voter Reference Foundation was incorporated in Ohio.
Two weeks after the Uihlein donation, money started flowing from Restoration PAC to a media network that did some data procurement and analysis for VoteRef, with payments totalling more than $955,000 as of the end of 2021, the FEC records show.
The network, which includes Pipeline Media, is operated by Bradley Cameron, a Texas business strategist, state corporation records show. Brian Timpone is listed as a manager at Pipeline Media. He made headlines a decade ago after his firm, then called Journatic, came under fire for outsourcing hyperlocal news offshore using phony bylines.
In recent months, VoteRef has released press releases about its activities that have been turned into stories on sites owned by Metric Media, which Cameron leads, according to his online profile. The sites mimic legitimate news outlets but print press releases, shun bylines, do little to no original reporting and rely on automated data. “New website to publish which Arlington residents voted, did not vote in gubernatorial election,” read an Oct. 28 headline in the Central Nova News of Virginia, a Metric Media site.
Uihlein did not respond to calls or emails from ProPublica seeking comment. Cameron and Timpone also did not reply to messages seeking an interview.
Political figures with ties to Trump have been touting the efforts of VoteRef.
Among them: former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, an immigration hard-liner appointed by Trump to serve as acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Cuccinelli now heads the Election Transparency Initiative, a Virginia organization opposed to expanding early voting or easing registration requirements. The initiative, a project of the conservative group Susan B. Anthony List, says it partners with The Heritage Foundation’s political arm.
Cuccinelli spoke in September to about 100 party loyalists at a gathering at a suburban Milwaukee hotel about how they could use the VoteRef tools and become involved in securing the elections process.
Similarly, J. Hogan Gidley, former national press secretary for the 2020 Trump campaign, promoted the work of VoteRef on Philadelphia conservative talk radio before Christmas.
“We’re doing some work with them, too. We know the folks over there really well,” said Gidley, who is now with the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit packed with Trump administration alums.
Truax, meanwhile, brought in Swoboda for his podcast last summer. They talked about the Arizona ballot audit and briefly referenced her work with the Voter Reference Foundation.
“It always feels like to me that the states, in general, have gotten a little sloppy in different areas and just you know nobody’s really paying a lot of attention to it,” Truax said.
He added: “Now I think as conservatives we’re in a place we really got to pay a lot more attention. There’s a lot of energy now on this.”
Former President Donald Trump exploded at ex-Attorney General Bill Barr in a newly published letter to NBC News anchor Lester Holt, who recently interviewed Barr about Trump’s attacks on the 2020 election.
In the scathing letter, which was sent last Wednesday and published by Axios on Monday, Trump was answering questions that Holt’s team had sent him regarding the Barr interview, which was pre-recorded.
“Bill Barr cares more about being accepted by the corrupt Washington Media and Elite than serving the American people,” Trump wrote. “He was slow, lethargic, and I realized early on that he never had what it takes to make a great Attorney General.”
Also Barr “didn’t want to stand up to the Radical Left Democrats because he thought the repercussions to him personally, in the form of their threatened impeachment, would be too severe,” according to the former president.
“In other words, Bill Barr was a coward!” he added.
Trump’s letter came before NBC News began releasing clips of Holt’s interview with Barr, who is doing a series of interviews to promote a new book. He recounted his ex-boss’ rage at being told during a Dec. 2020 meeting that the election voter fraud allegations were “bullshit.”
“He was asking about different theories, and I had the answers. I was able to tell him, ‘This was wrong because of this,'” Barr told Holt, adding that Trump was “obviously getting very angry about this.”
The former attorney general told Holt he then offered his resignation to Trump, who slapped his desk and said “’Accepted. Go home. Don’t go back to your office. Go home. You’re done,'” according to Barr.
Barr also said he believed Trump was responsible for the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
“I do think he was responsible in the broad sense of that word, in that it appears that part of the plan was to send this group up to the Hill,” the ex-Trump official said in the interview. “I think the whole idea was to intimidate Congress. And I think that that was wrong.”
But in spite of all that, plus the way Trump raked him over the coals in the letter, Barr signaled during a “Today” interview on Monday that he’d still vote for Trump in 2024 if he were the GOP nominee.
“Because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party, it’s inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t vote for the Republican nominee,” said Barr, who had written in his book that Trump had become “dangerous” after the 2020 election.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Curious
An investigation by the New Yorker discovered that former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows registered to vote in the 2020 election with an address of a mobile home in Scaly Mountain, North Carolina that he’s apparently never spent a night in.
The person who used to own the property told the New Yorker that she’d rented it out to Meadows’ wife for two months within the past two years, but she only spent a night or two there during that time. The ex-Trump official “never spent a night in there,” the former property owner said.
The guy who now owns the property said it was “really weird” of Meadows to list it as his place of residence. “That’s weird that he would do that,” the owner said.
Meadows voted absentee by mail in the 2020 election.
Russia Assault On Ukraine Continues As Civilians Try To Flee
Russia’s new proposed humanitarian corridors would funnel Ukrainian civilians trying to escape the war into Russia or Belarus.
The Washington Post: “Ukraine denounces proposed evacuation corridors to Russia, Belarus”
New York Times: “Negotiators prepare for 3rd round of talks as Kremlin offers evacuation path for Ukrainians to Russia.”
The Guardian: “As many as 5 million Ukrainians are expected to flee the country if Russia’s bombing of Ukraine continues, the EU’s top diplomat has just warned.”
CNN: “Russia has fired 600 missiles; 95% of amassed combat power now in Ukraine, senior US defense official says”
Armed Intruder Arrested At Joint Base Andrews Around Time Of Kamala Harris’ Arrival
Officials at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland announced early Monday that its security forces had arrested an armed person who was in a vehicle that failed to follow security personnel’s commands at a security checkpoint. The incident happened around the time Vice President Kamala Harris and four Cabinet members had arrived at the base en route back to Washington Sunday night.
Both that person and another individual tried to run away after the forces stopped their vehicle, according to the press release.
The base was shut down for most of the night while authorities searched for the second person, who got away and is no longer believed to on the base.
Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff were safely flown off the base, according to a press pool report.
DeSantis Spokesperson Says Opponents Of ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bill Are Pro-Pedophilia
Christina Pushaw, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) spokesperson, is trying to whitewash the bill that would ban classroom discussions on LGBTQ+ topics as an “Anti-Grooming” bill.
Anyone who’s against the measure is “probably a groomer” or otherwise doesn’t “denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children,” Pushaw tweeted on Friday.
Pushaw suggested without evidence on Sunday that an LGBTQ+ Florida lawmaker who had slammed her tweets about the bill was a groomer himself, saying that “A hit dog hollers.”
The bill is slated to be put to a votein the Florida Senate today, where it’s expected to pass and get sent over to DeSantis’ desk.
Texas Abortion Ban Not Doing Much To Actually Stop Abortion
This new New York Times report and its graph on Texas abortion rates after the state passed its six-week ban says it all:
“The law has not done anything to change people’s need for abortion care; it has shifted where people are getting their abortion.” https://t.co/rJPrC0EyB2
Utah Republicans’ bill banning trans girls from participating in school sports on women’s teams isn’t likely to pass if Gov. Spencer Cox (R) goes through with his promise to veto it. Cox expressed sympathy for trans student athletes on Friday, saying “I just want them to know that it’s gonna be okay” and that “[w]e’re gonna work through this.”
Georgia Trump Candidate Throws Fit Over Speaking Order At Event
Vernon Jones, a former Democrat-turned-Trumper who’s running for Congress in Georgia, stormed out of a Republican county event on Saturday because they changed the speaking order, robbing him of the second-place slot he’d apparently been promised.
It was a classic case of dirty “politricks,” Jones fumed before leaving.
Naturally, the event also included some form of 2020 election fraud trutherism. Clock the “Trump Won Georgia” poster in the background of the video:
Former Democrat Vernon Jones – now a Trump-backed candidate in Georgia’s 10th District — walks out of a Jackson County GOP event last night … because he was mad about the speaking order. #gapol#ga10pic.twitter.com/jl8S8gCl68
