Hello and welcome back to The Franchise!
Two current and former Republican election officials have now thrown cold water on President Trump’s new push to demand the creation of dystopian state-by-state citizenship lists and scale back the use of mail-in ballots in the upcoming midterm elections.
As we mentioned last week, the likely unconstitutional executive order has already been hit with five separate lawsuits filed by voting rights advocates, Democratic leadership in Congress and nearly two dozen state attorneys general.
“This is probably going to be enjoined very quickly,” said Stephen Richer, the Republican former recorder of Maricopa County, Arizona who served during the aftermath of the 2020 election and who was in office during all of the various investigations, recounts and audits into how the election was run in that county.
During a Sunday interview on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” both Richer and current Republican Secretary of State in Pennsylvania Al Schmidt expressed concerns that Trump’s latest executive order, combined with his administration officials’ recent efforts to investigate the 2020 election in key U.S. counties, might further erode voters’ faith in how states administer elections in this country.
“My biggest concerns are twofold,” Schmidt, whose state AG is among the aforementioned suing to overturn the order, said during the interview. “One, that things like this cause some degree of confusion. We want voters to know that the election is going to be free, fair, safe and secure, and that everyone knows what the rules are prior to going into this. So, confusion is never a positive thing, unless you are seeking to sow distrust in the outcome of an election.”
Richer, who has been vocal about his opposition to the administration’s recent seizure of election records in Maricopa County, reiterated his belief that Trump is simply trying to resurrect Big Lie conspiracy theories.
“2020 has been investigated up the wazoo,” Richer said. “In Arizona alone, we’ve had 11 different independent investigations and audits. The attorney general of Arizona previously spent over 10,000 man-hours investigating, but this seems to be a trend, and I don’t know what to end, other than to sow further confusion, sow further doubt in the election process.”
The two are just the latest in the election administration community to go on-record about the dangers of Trump’s executive order but also to assuage concerns about its legal viability.
“People will eventually see there is no there there,” Richer said.
More on other election news below. Let’s dig in.
— Nicole LaFond
Wisconsin Supreme Court Gains Expanded Liberal Edge Ahead of Anticipated Ballot Disputes
Wisconsin, once known as the test lab for various right-wing experiments (memorably described by Charlie Pierce in 2014 as “the former state now doing business as the midwest subsidiary of Koch Industries and managed by Scott Walker”), has seen quite a reversal in recent years, with liberals winning first the governor’s mansion and then four successive seats on the state Supreme Court. The latest victory came Tuesday, when Chris Taylor, the Democratic-backed candidate for the Supreme Court, steamrolled Republican-backed Maria Lazar, winning more than 60% of the vote.
The Wisconsin judicial election is an abortion story and a labor story but it is, perhaps most importantly in the age of Trump, a voting rights story. The state was aggressively gerrymandered under Walker in 2011, maps that the newly liberal high court threw out in 2023. The wrangling over districts continues, but just as important is the state court’s role in adjudicating attempts to mess with elections to come. Wisconsin, a purple state, is perennially the site of countless disputes around what votes can and cannot be counted; Milwaukee became a particular fixation for right-wing activists as Trump tried to steal the 2020 election. Lazar was endorsed by many of those conspiracy theorists.
Tuesday’s election expands the liberals’ majority on the court, from 4-3 to 5-2. Equally notable was the exceptional margin by which Taylor won, and the fact that her victory cements a democracy-supporting majority on the court through 2030.
— John Light
California Sheriff Messing With Redistricting Ballot Results Is, Of Course, an Extremist
The constitutional sheriffs movement, Claremont and the Oath Keepers are all involved here.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco recently seized hundreds of thousands of ballots that were cast in California’s recent special election held to poll voters on their appetite for mid-cycle redistricting. The ballot referendum, called Proposition 50, was approved by California voters in November as an amendment to the state constitution that, essentially, temporarily allowed state officials to bypass normal protocol for drawing congressional district lines and approved new maps. It was one of many efforts in Democratic-led states across the country to offset the election-rigging damage Trump started when he successfully pressured Texas and a few other states to redraw their district lines in order to help Republicans keep their currently razor-thin majority in the U.S. House in the midterms.
Bianco reportedly seized 650,000 ballots that were cast in that election, just weeks after the FBI raided Fulton County’s 2020 election ballots and issued a subpoena to the Arizona state Senate for records related to the 2020 election in Maricopa County. On Wednesday, the California Supreme Court temporarily put a pause on Bianco’s supposed investigation while the state high court hears a legal challenge, which has been brought by California’s Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta.
Some have painted his actions as a campaign strategy. Bianco is currently the top Republican candidate running in the California gubernatorial race, and said during an interview with the Washington Post that if questions are raised about the validity of the primary election he’s running in, he’d consider seizing ballots again. But even just a shallow look at his recent history reveals that he’s cut from the same cloth as election deniers and other far-right extremists.
Bianco was previously a member of the Oath Keepers, the far-right militia group whose members were charged with seditious conspiracy related to their role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He has simultaneously suggested he doesn’t remember joining, while also defending the militia as “protecting the Constitution.” He also has ties to the constitutional sheriffs movement, an extremist group that believes sheriffs have supreme law enforcement authority, including the right to interfere in how elections are run. His ties to groups that espouse much of the right-wing extremist rhetoric that makes up the MAGA movement go deeper than that, too, per Democracy Docket:
He was also named the 2023 “Sheriff of the Year” by the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank that trains sheriffs to battle “wokeness.”
On top of all that, Bianco is apparently a prolific LinkedIn poster. In the past month alone he has posted comments suggesting “some people should never be allowed to vote” and has claimed on the social networking platform that Democrats have “created an environment where cheating and illegal voting is keeping them in office.”
We’ll keep you updated on how his own election meddling scheme plays out in the final months of his gubernatorial bid.
— Nicole LaFond
Red State Legislators Muck Up the Citizen Ballot Initiative Process
State Republican lawmakers are at it again. Incensed that voters are trying to actually, uh, engage in the democratic process and exercise their rights, legislators in Missouri, the Dakotas, Utah and beyond are trying to make it harder for citizens’ initiatives to pass, or to make it on the ballot at all.
This push comes as residents in red states have increasingly used ballot initiatives as an end-run around their conservative representatives, voting to, as the New York Times reports, expand Medicaid, raise the minimum wage, and secure abortion access. Per the Times,
- Lawmakers in South Dakota, Utah and North Dakota are sponsoring ballot measures that would raise the threshold for okaying citizen-initiatives from a simple majority to 60%.
- South Dakota lawmakers are also giving voters the opportunity to reverse their own successful ballot measure to expand Medicaid access. Thanks guys!
- Missouri is going a step beyond, putting a measure on the ballot that would require citizen-sponsored amendments to the state constitution to win in every single U.S. House district. Another measure would oh-so-kindly allow voters to reverse their successful 2024 initiative to establish a right to an abortion in the state.
Florida earns the unfortunate superlative of the state with the most egregiously undemocratic practices. The state already had a 60% threshold for ballot amendments to be approved, killing two 2024 efforts to protect abortion rights and legalize marijuana in the state, even though a majority of Floridians voted for those policies. It’s also the only state that charges fees to validate each signature collected in support of an initiative. The Republican legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) made things a whole lot worse last year, when they passed a truly draconian law that imposes felony penalties for those who collect ballot signatures without newly imposed registration and training. The law also raises the fees for signature validation “from an average of 70 cents a signature to $3.50,” per the Times, requiring a campaign to “pay about $4.5 million before [an amendment] even gets on the ballot.”
State Senator Carlos Smith called the measure “the final kill shot against direct democracy” in the Sunshine State. A coalition of organizations sued over the law, and the federal trial recently wrapped with a final decision pending.
— Allegra Kirkland
“Prejudices are what fools use for reason.” – Voltaire
The point of the very obviously illegal executive order is not to actually make any of it happen. The point is to be able to complain about it when it gets struck down and then use it to cry “Election Fraud!” when Republicans get wiped out in November.
Let me just say, as a former resident of Wisconsin, how happy I am that things have gone the way they have in my former home State. It definitely had been taken over by the Kochs and Walker and now we hear very little from either one of them, except through the still highly-partisan legislature. That’s most likely about to change, with or without re-districting.
Ditto, @becca656 .
Tuesday’s Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice election expands the liberals’ majority on the court, from 4-3 to 5-2. Equally notable was the exceptional 20% margin by which Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Taylor won.
I’ll bet they could write up a real good decision with legal reasoning (from the plaintiff opposing the Trump executive order) that would apply to all 50 states.
Seems like a real nice state to have a test case. Thank you to Wisconsin voters for trying to help to save our country. Please mention the thanks from others around the country to Wisconsin voters, Democrats, and activists when you see one. Everyone trying to save America needs all the encouragement we can get.