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☆ For Election Workers, Fentanyl-Laced Letters Signal a Challenging Year
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-22 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

For the people who run elections at thousands of local offices nationwide, 2024 was never going to be an easy year. But the recent anonymous mailing of powder-filled envelopes to election offices in five states offers new hints of how hard it could be. The letters, sent to offices in Washington State, Oregon, Nevada, California and Georgia this month, are under investigation by the U.S. And they presage the pressure-cooker environment that election officials will face next year in a contest for the White House that could chart the future course of American democracy. “Every way in which our elections are administered is going to be tested somewhere, at some time, during 2024.”

Persons: ”, Tammy Patrick Organizations: U.S . Postal Inspection Service, National Association of Election Locations: Washington State , Oregon , Nevada , California, Georgia

☆ Letters With Suspicious Substances Sent to Election Offices Spur Alarm
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-09 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Suspicious letters were sent to local elections officials in at least four states, the authorities said on Thursday, including to two locations in Washington State that were said to include white powders containing the toxic drug fentanyl. Preliminary tests indicated that letters sent to at least two of four Washington election offices — in Spokane County and King County, which includes Seattle — contained fentanyl, law enforcement officials said. Georgia authorities said that a letter bound for the election office in Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta, had been flagged as potentially including fentanyl but had not yet been delivered. And California authorities said that they were uncertain what was in letters sent to election offices in Sacramento and Los Angeles. None of the affected election offices reported that any employees were injured.

Locations: Washington State, Washington, —, Spokane County, King County, Seattle, Georgia, Fulton County, Atlanta, California, Sacramento, Los Angeles

☆ After Antifraud Crusade, a Trial Asks: Were Illegal Voters or Legal Ones the Target?
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-26 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

As Republican candidates and their supporters increasingly focus on specious claims of rampant voter fraud, a federal trial starting in Georgia on Thursday will examine whether a key campaign to unmask illegal voters in 2020 actually aimed to intimidate legal ones. The outcome could have implications for conservative election integrity organizations that are widely expected to ramp up antifraud efforts during next year’s general election. That question is serious enough that the Department of Justice has filed a brief in the case and will defend the government’s view of the act’s scope at the trial. The campaign, mounted in December 2020 by a right-wing group called True the Vote, filed challenges with local election officials to the eligibility of some 250,000 registered Georgia voters. The group also offered bounties from a $1 million reward fund for evidence of “election malfeasance” and sought to recruit citizen monitors to patrol polls and ballot drop-off locations.

Persons: ” Organizations: Republican, Department of Justice, Georgia voters Locations: Georgia

Six members of the Champaign County Preservation Alliance were touring the picturesque downtown in Urbana, the central Ohio town where Representative Jim Jordan has made his mark as a state champion wrestler, an aspiring politician and now a member of Congress. As they watched his attempt to end the tortured efforts to choose a new House speaker, the uncompromising figure he casts nationally is much the same as seen back home in the heavily gerrymandered, largely Republican, Fourth Congressional District that snakes and loops through hundreds of miles of mainly small towns and farmland. The district is much whiter and slightly poorer, less educated and older than the state at large. It went for Donald Trump in 2020 by nearly a 36 percentage point margin. Amanda McDaniel, a member of the preservation alliance, is rooting for Jordan’s speaker bid — seeing in him the same principles she holds.

Persons: Jim Jordan, Donald Trump, Amanda McDaniel Organizations: Champaign County Preservation Alliance, Republican, Fourth Congressional Locations: Champaign, Urbana, Ohio

☆ In North Carolina, Republicans Seek More Control Over Elections
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-24 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Roy Cooper, a North Carolina Democrat, began his first term in 2017, his rivals in the Republican-controlled legislature voted to strip the position of key powers, including the governor’s longstanding authority to appoint majorities to the state election board and local election boards in all 100 counties. After the state Supreme Court ruled that move illegal, the lawmakers put the idea on the ballot, but the state’s voters shot that down, too. Now, seven years after their first try, the legislators appear on the verge of getting what they have long sought. On Wednesday, the State House of Representatives followed the State Senate in passing legislation that would put the legislature in charge of all election board appointments. Under the newly passed bill, ties in local election boards would be addressed by the State Board of Elections — which, under the bill, would also have an equal number of members from each party.

Persons: Roy Cooper, — Organizations: Gov, North, North Carolina Democrat, Republican, State, Senate, Democratic, State Board Locations: North Carolina

☆ In Three Southern States, a Legal Battle Over Political Maps
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-21 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Last year, the same judges said that, even before full trials were held, the same maps were so likely illegal that replacements should be used for the 2022 elections. That did not happen: Thanks to a once-obscure Supreme Court rule that outlaws election-law changes close to campaign season, the disputed maps were used anyway. With an electorate so deeply split along partisan lines that few House races are competitive, the significance last November was glaring. Republicans took control of the House of Representatives by a bare five seats, three of them from districts they were poised to lose had new maps been used in the three states. Now the revived litigation is again churning through the courts — at least six of them, at last count — with the same political stakes and a sharply divided view of the likely outcomes.

Persons: WASHINGTON Organizations: Republican, Black Locations: Georgia , Louisiana, Alabama

☆ Ohio Voters Reject Constitutional Change Intended to Thwart Abortion Amendment
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-08 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Ohio voters rejected a bid on Tuesday to make it harder to amend the State Constitution, according to The Associated Press, a significant victory for abortion-rights supporters trying to stop the Republican-controlled State Legislature from severely restricting the procedure. The abortion question turned what would normally be a sleepy summer election in an off year into a highly visible dogfight that took on national importance and drew an uncharacteristically high number of Ohio voters for an August election. Initial results showed the measure losing by a roughly 3 to 2 margin. The contest was seen as a test of Republicans’ efforts nationwide to curb the use of ballot initiatives, and a potential barometer of the political climate going into the 2024 elections.

Organizations: Associated Press, Republican, Legislature, Ohio

☆ Abortion Drives Ohio Election on Amending the State Constitution
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-07 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

John Kasich of Ohio, a Republican, wrote on Twitter in April that he had watched voters reject policies that he and his legislative majority had backed. “It wouldn’t have been right then, and it isn’t right now.”Once, Ohio was the quintessential swing state. The 2022 election brought single-party control of the governor’s office and legislature to 39 states, the most in at least three decades. And 29 states, 20 of them Republican, have veto-proof supermajorities that control both houses of the state legislatures. “We can kind of do what we want,” Matt Huffman, the powerful Ohio State Senate president, told the Columbus Dispatch in a 2022 profile.

Persons: John Kasich of, ”, Matt Huffman, — Organizations: Gov, Republican, Twitter, Ohio State, Columbus Dispatch, Alabama Legislature, U.S, Supreme Locations: John Kasich of Ohio, Ohio

☆ Appeals Court Overturns Mississippi’s Lifetime Ban on Voting for Former Felons
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-04 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Mississippi’s lifetime ban on voting for people convicted of a range of felonies is cruel and unusual punishment that violates the Eighth Amendment and “is at odds with society’s evolving standards of decency,” a federal appeals court ruled on Friday. In an emphatic 2-to-1 opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upbraided Mississippi officials for what it called a pointless “denial of the democratic core of American citizenship." They added: “It is an especially cruel penalty as applied to those whom the justice system has already deemed to have completed all terms of their sentences. These individuals, despite having satisfied their debt to society, are precluded from ever fully participating in civic life. Indeed, they are excluded from the most essential feature and expression of citizenship in a democracy — voting.”

Persons: ” Organizations: U.S ., Appeals, Fifth Circuit upbraided

☆ Voting by Formerly Imprisoned in Tennessee, Already Hard, Gets Harder
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-25 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Tennessee has sharply restricted the conditions under which it will restore voting rights to people who have completed prison sentences for felonies, joining a growing list of Republican-controlled states that have rolled back access to the ballot by former felons. The state has for years permitted most people with completed felony sentences to restore their voting rights through an administrative process established in 2006 that is ostensibly automatic, but in practice almost unnavigable. Only 3,400 people, or less than 1 percent of all disenfranchised Tennesseans, have had their voting rights restored under the program, said Blair Bowie, the director of the Restore Your Vote initiative at the Campaign Legal Center, a voting-rights advocacy group in Washington. But in a letter sent to local election officials on Friday, the elections coordinator for Tennessee’s secretary of state said the state would now require that formerly incarcerated people also be granted clemency by the governor’s office or have their citizenship rights restored by a circuit court judge.

Persons: Blair Bowie Organizations: Republican Locations: Tennessee, Washington

Under orders from the Supreme Court to produce a voting map that no longer illegally dilutes the power of Black voters in Alabama, the state’s lawmakers are now facing a high-stakes scramble to come up with an acceptable replacement by the end of this week. A little over a month after the court’s surprise ruling, the Alabama legislature will convene for a special five-day session on Monday, with the Republican supermajority having given little public indication of how it plans to fulfill a mandate to craft a second district that allows Black voters to elect a representative of their choice — one who could well be a Democrat. The effects of the revised map, which must be passed by Friday and approved by a federal court, could reverberate across the country, with other states in the South confronting similar voting rights challenges and Republicans looking to hold onto a razor-thin majority in the U.S. House of Representatives next year. The session also comes at a pivotal moment in the debate over the constitutionality of factoring race into government decisions, as conservatives have increasingly chipped away at the 1965 Voting Rights Act and other longstanding judicial protections centered on equality and race.

Organizations: Democrat, U.S . House Locations: Alabama, U.S

☆ Utah G.O.P.’s Map Carved Up Salt Lake Democrats. Is It a Legal Matter?
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-11 | by ( Michael Wines | More About Michael Wines | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The 550,000 voters in Salt Lake County, Utah’s most populous, handed Joseph R. Biden Jr. an 11-percentage point victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 contest for president. On Tuesday, the Utah Supreme Court will consider whether to wade into the increasingly pitched nationwide battle over partisan gerrymanders. The justices will decide whether the state’s courts can hear a lawsuit challenging the House map, or whether partisan maps are a political issue beyond their jurisdiction. But voting rights advocates say Utah’s Constitution offers a stronger case than the federal one for reining in political maps. He said other relevant provisions in the State Constitution, but absent from the federal Constitution, include guarantees of free elections and the right to vote.

Persons: Joseph R, Biden, Donald Trump, ”, Mark Gaber Organizations: Republican, Utah Supreme, U.S, Supreme Locations: Salt Lake County, Utah’s, Utah, State, Washington

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