Battle for the Ballot
A top GOP lawyer wants to crack down on the college vote. States already are.
A top Republican election lawyer recently caused a stir when she told GOP donors that the party should work to make it harder for college students to vote in key states. But the comments from Cleta Mitchell, who worked closely with then-President Donald Trump to try to overturn the 2020 election, are perhaps less surprising […]
Federal agencies lag in registering voters despite Biden executive order, advocates say
Within weeks of taking office in 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order — hailed by voter advocates as potentially transformative — that for the first time committed the U.S. government to registering new voters at federal agencies. But just over two years later, most of the 10 agencies examined in a recent report […]
What will Wisconsin Republicans do after Spindell spilled the beans on suppressing Black votes?
Thanks to the excellent reporting of Bruce Murphy in Urban Milwaukee, we now know that fake Trump elector and Wisconsin Elections Commissioner Robert Spindell crowed about Republicans’ successful efforts to suppress the Black vote in Milwaukee in the November 2022 elections. The quotes Murphy pulls out of Spindell’s congratulatory message to Republicans, as party chair […]
U.S. House passes bill reforming Electoral Count Act to stop Jan. 6 repeat
WASHINGTON — The U.S. House passed on Wednesday a bill updating a 19th-century law in an attempt to prevent the subversion of future presidential elections. The Presidential Election Reform Act, which passed 229-203, is meant to deter a repeat of the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, in which the U.S. Capitol was attacked by a […]
Election officials can’t access federal funding for security as violent threats mount
Correction: An earlier version of this report misstated how much in funding an advisory board awarded to the Colorado Secretary of State’s office. The award totaled $241,000 in emergency funding. Colorado’s election officials, like so many across the country, faced a surge of violent threats after the 2020 election. Federal authorities are prosecuting a man […]
Jan. 6 panel to detail Trump’s 187 minutes of delay as insurrection grew
The U.S. House committee investigating the Jan.6 attack and Donald Trump’s role in it will focus in a Thursday evening hearing on the former president’s refusal for more than three hours to call off the rioters storming the U.S. Capitol, committee aides said Wednesday. The hearing will be the eighth in the panel’s series to […]
Trump’s fake electors: Here’s the full list
The 84 people who signed bogus documents claiming that Donald Trump won the 2020 election include dozens of local Republican Party leaders, four current candidates for public office, six current office holders and at least five previous state and federal office holders. Groups from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin all allegedly […]
Misinformation, violence and a paper shortage threaten midterm elections, officials say
Members of a U.S. Senate panel and election administrators raised a bevy of concerns Thursday about the challenges elections officials will face this fall, saying problems ranging from a lack of paper to coordinated misinformation campaigns could affect confidence in U.S. democracy. A bipartisan panel of current and former elections officials and experts told the […]
Law Forward asks DA Ozanne to go after false electors
Exactly one year after filing a complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission over the actions of the 10 false electors who claimed to represent Wisconsin at the Electoral College, the two lead attorneys at Law Forward wrote a letter to Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne, urging him to prosecute these false electors. The 10 false electors […]
U.S. Senate Republicans again block debate on voting rights legislation
WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Republicans blocked the advance of voting rights legislation Wednesday, the second time this year—thwarting again Democrats’ attempts to pass federal protections for voters amid a slew of new state elections laws. “When we are faced with a coordinated effort across our country to limit the freedom to vote, we must stand […]
Taking a swing at gerrymandering again, Republicans give themselves a black eye
On Friday, lawyers for the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block a federal lawsuit over Wisconsin’s next set of voting maps. In their petition, Republicans describe the federal lawsuit, brought by voting rights groups and Democrats, as “an affront to Wisconsin’s sovereignty.” They said it is an effort to usurp the […]
Kaul, 21 AGs tell congressional leaders to guard against voter suppression, possibly reform the filibuster
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, along with 21 other attorneys general, on Monday sent a letter to bipartisan congressional leaders urging them to pass legislation protecting against both voter suppression and election subversion and possibly reform the filibuster. “Following the 2020 presidential election, we witnessed something many of us considered unthinkable: an attempt by the then-sitting President of the United States […]