‌‌‌‌‌If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Impeach ‘Em!

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Frustrated by her consistent rulings against redistricting maps that favor the GOP, Ohio Republicans are taking aim at the state Supreme Court’s Republican chief justice.

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All Eyes On Ohio GOP

Wednesday night brought a notable benchmark in OHIO: It was the third time that the Republican-majority state Supreme Court rejected legislative maps from the Republican-majority redistricting commission. It’s a stiff arm in the face of Gov. Mike DeWine (R) and several other high-profile Republicans on the mapmaking body. 

The court’s Republican chief justice, Maureen O’Connor, again sided with the court’s liberal wing in ruling that the latest set of maps violated a constitutional amendment against overly partisan districts.

Republicans’ reaction? Maybe… let’s just impeach her.

"It's time to impeach Maureen O'Connor now," one legislator, Rep. Scott Wiggam (R), tweeted Thursday.

The Columbus Dispatch reported on the murmurs, which included a state Republican Party official claiming in an email that a Republican legislator would move to impeach the chief justice. The situation recalls a similar one recently in NORTH CAROLINA, where conservative lawmakers floated the threat of impeachment of liberals on the state’s highest court. 

DeWine, for his part, has panned the impeachment idea.

The state Supreme Court, in its latest decision, offered a simpler option: The redistricting commission should hire an independent mapmaker who answers to commissioners of both parties, it said. 

For now, as in other states, the legal battle is messing with state elections. For the upcoming May 3 primary election, Secretary of State Frank LaRose told county boards of elections Thursday that they should assume state legislative races won’t be on the ballot. 

Texas’ Ballot Rejection Problems Weren’t Limited To Big Counties

We reported last week on the impact of TEXAS Republicans’ new voter restriction law, which requires that voters list an ID number — driver’s license, last-four Social Security digits, etc. — on both their absentee applications and mail-in ballots. The tricky thing is that the number must match whichever number they used to register to vote.

Lots of people registered decades ago, and plenty more didn’t notice the apparently minimal space on their ballot envelopes where they need to list their ID number. So thousands of ballots were rejected.

Our initial reporting covered some of the largest counties in the state. Harris, Texas’ largest and home to Houston, rejected a whopping 19% of ballots due to issues stemming from the law. 

Those rejections include a significant race gap. In Harris County, “areas with large Black populations were 44 percent more likely to have ballots rejected than heavily white areas,” according to the New York Times.
 

But large, urban counties weren’t the only ones affected: According to an Associated Press tally, “Roughly 13% of mail ballots returned in the March 1 primary were discarded and uncounted across 187 counties in Texas.” (The state has 254 counties total.) 

Around The States

An ARKANSAS judge struck down four new voting laws passed by the Republican legislature, finding them to be unconstitutional. The laws introduced various rules that would make voting more difficult, including new signature matching requirements and a shortened window to return absentee ballots.

KANSAS state senators have approved a bill mandating complicated watermarks on ballots, even though they’re unnecessary and expensive. Another aspect of the bill, requiring that voters physically sign poll books, could disenfranchise voters with disabilities, according to some concerned advocates. 

NEW HAMPSHIRE Gov. Chris Sununu (R) said he would veto Republicans’ proposed congressional redistricting map, which would make the state’s two congressional districts — both currently held by Democrats — more Republican and more Democratic, respectively. "I want something that more matches the character of the state,” the governor said. “We're a purple state."

The PENNSYLVANIA Supreme Court unanimously approved of state House and Senate maps created by the state’s legislative reapportionment commission, which are slightly friendlier to Democrats than past maps that have favored the GOP.  

MARYLAND’s top judge has delayed that state’s primary season due to ongoing legal challenges over redistricting. 

The IDAHO House of Representatives approved legislation that would disallow the use of post-secondary student IDs to verify voter identity at polling places. (Concealed carry licenses are still kosher.) Legislation to ban drop boxes for mail-in ballots, however, seems dead on arrival in the state Senate after a key committee chair said she was flooded with correspondence from voters against the measure. 

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday over a NORTH CAROLINA voter ID dispute.

The Latest In Election Sabotage

VIRGINIA governor Glenn Youngkin (R) on Friday quietly appointed a former aide to the very Trumpian state Sen. Amanda Chase (R) as the new commissioner of the Virginia Department of Elections. Her predecessor, Chris Piper, was known for operating in a nonpartisan fashion and fighting back against election fraud lies. He’d hoped to stay on in the position. Chase is a major promoter of the MAGAland lie of a stolen election.

The WISCONSIN Election Commission won’t sanction Republicans who took part in the bogus “alternate elector” scheme — including one of their own members. But the GOP has sure learned its lesson: The State Assembly speaker, Robin Vos (R), recently met with activists who are calling for the legally impossible action of “decertifying” the last election. Afterward, he said that even though decertification was impossible, “there was widespread fraud.” True leadership. 
 

The House Oversight Committee is investigating the politicized “audit” of Otero County, NEW MEXICO — which was awarded to EchoMail, one of several contractors who made numerous basic mistakes in the Maricopa County, Arizona “audit.” 

During the Trump administration, the-”acting”-but-not-really DHS Deputy Ken Cuccinelli directed intelligence staffers to look into various claims about voter fraud that mirrored Trump’s own delusions on the topic.

Speaking of voter fraud… Mark Meadows may have dabbled in it? It’s hard to say for sure at this point, but things aren’t looking good for the former White House chief of staff. 

Bolts Mag: “The Goal Was to Scare People, but It Could Boomerang.” (Pamela Moses, a Memphis activist sentenced to six years in prison for registering to vote, talks about the prosecution and suppression of Black voters in Tennessee.)

NYT: Republicans Push Crackdown on Crime Wave That Doesn’t Exist: Voter Fraud

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