‌‌‌‌‌Sheriffs Mull New Voter Surveillance Efforts

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Hello readers!

A band of far-right sheriffs convened in Las Vegas last week to share notes on how to combat drummed-up fantasies of voter fraud. It got weird.

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Your County Sheriff Is Watching

We wrote a few weeks ago about the so-called “constitutional sheriffs” movement, which asserts that sheriffs are both the absolute law enforcement authorities in their counties, and also that they have a duty to ignore federal and state laws they personally deem unconstitutional. The movement, led by Richard Mack and his Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, has been tied up in the anti-gun-control movement as well as county-level resistance to pandemic health measures. 
 

More recently, CSPOA has pivoted hard into election denialism, boosting the ridiculous documentary “2000 Mules” as proof that the 2020 election was basically the worst crime ever committed. So now, Mack and CSPOA are rallying sheriffs to fight back against “voter fraud.” Mack told me recently that he even would have supported the Mike Flynn-endorsed proposal to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. 
 

At a CSPOA event in Las Vegas last week, several sheriffs from around the country (representing counties with a combined population of 1 million people) addressed the crowd. And members from the group “True the Vote,” whose research fueled “2000 Mules,” announced a new fundraising initiative to, among other things, raise money for surveillance cameras stationed at drop box locations.

“If we would know about you guys back in 2020, things would have been a little bit different,” True the Vote’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, told the sheriffs.

“Promote The Vote” In Michigan

A “Promote the Vote” effort to expand voting rights in MICHIGAN submitted 670,000 signatures last week as part of the process to appear on the November ballot to amend the state’s constitution.

The proposed amendment would ensure nine days of early voting, drop box access for voters across the state, prepaid postage on absentee ballot requests and ballot envelopes, and the ability for voters without IDs to sign an affidavit of identity in their place, among a slew of other measures.
 

It would also establish a permanent absentee ballot list for voters to join voluntarily, and would ensure that military and overseas ballots that arrive to election officials late — but which are postmarked in time — are still counted.

The effort would counteract another signature-gathering operation, from “Secure MI Vote,” aimed at restricting voter access through various measures. That effort is still gathering signatures after revealing last month that it found several thousand invalid entries among its petitions.

Around The States

The PENNSYLVANIA Department of State sued several counties that refused to certify 2022 primary election results “based on a full and accurate count of every lawfully cast vote.” The dispute comes down to undated mail-in ballots that were nonetheless received by election officials in time to be counted. The counties have not counted those ballots, despite a state court and the U.S. Supreme Court — in cases involving the GOP U.S. Senate primary and an earlier state-level judicial race, respectively — allowing undated ballots to be counted. 
 

NEW YORK gubernatorial candidate Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) was struck from an additional “Independence Party” line on New York ballots (though he’ll still be listed under the Republican and Conservative Party lines) after the state’s election board determined that he submitted thousands of invalid signatures. 
 

Nationwide, the loss of “swing” congressional districts is entirely attributable to Republican redistricting, while Democratic redistricting actually contributed new seats to the swing seat count, according to Cook Political Report. 

The Latest In Election Sabotage

Correction: Four prior issues of The Franchise incorrectly referred to the criminal charges pending against Mesa County, Colorado Clerk Tina Peters as federal charges. They are in fact state charges. We regret the error.

A COLORADO judge issued — and eventually revoked — an arrest warrant for Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters after finding she violated the terms of her release by attending the above-mentioned Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association event in Las Vegas without first receiving the court’s permission. 
 

Peters recently said, predictably, that she has reason to believe “extensive malfeasance” occurred in her losing bid for the Republican nomination to be Colorado’s next secretary of state. Court documents related to Peters’ case recently alleged the involvement of Sherronna Bishop, Rep. Lauren Boebert’s (R-CO) former campaign manager, in the scheme.
 

The IDAHO Republican Party formally joined the Texas GOP and several other GOP groups in adopting the official position that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president — in other words, that they reject the results of a democratic election. 

A county-level district attorney in WISCONSIN, who’s also running as a Republican for attorney general, is prosecuting five voters on election fraud charges, including a couple who lives in a trailer following farm work around the state, because they used the address of a local UPS store to vote by mail, rather than a residential address as is technically required by state law. 
 

The district attorney, Eric Toney of Fond du Lac County, has also said he would prosecute members of the Wisconsin Election Commission for pandemic-era voting accommodations if he had jurisdiction to do so.

Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden
Won the 2020 Presidential Election
 

NPR: Some who think 2020’s election was stolen are going door-to-door to audit the results
 

AP: No major problems with ballot drop boxes in 2020, AP finds
 

States Newsroom: Election officials risk criminal charges under 31 new GOP-imposed penalties

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