in Arizona, “poll watchers”…in tactical gear…with weapons…”hanging out” watching drop-boxes for mail-in ballots…Arizona is still reeling from flipping red to blue…the trumpers are doing everything in their power to take it back…from election deniers spreading disinformation and lies to wanting to take over the state and decide who wins and who loses, voters be damned…they’re starting by voter intimidation…from The Hill by Julia Mueller: “Arizona officials ‘deeply concerned’ by armed ‘vigilantes’ at ballot drop box: “Arizona officials on Saturday sounded alarms about voter safety after two armed individuals deemed “vigilantes” dressed in tactical gear were found outside a Maricopa County ballot drop box Friday evening.
We are deeply concerned about the safety of individuals who are exercising their constitutional right to vote and who are lawfully taking their early ballot to a drop box. Uninformed vigilantes outside Maricopa County’s drop boxes are not increasing election integrity. Instead they are leading to voter intimidation complaints,” said Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates and Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer in a joint statement.
“Although monitoring and transparency in our elections is critical, voter intimidation is unlawful. For those who want to be involved in election integrity, become a poll worker or an official observer with your political party. Don’t dress in body armor to intimidate voters as they are legally returning their ballots,” the statement continued.
The two armed individuals left the Mesa ballot drop box after Maricopa County law enforcement responded, according to the elections officials.
The incident comes after the Arizona secretary of state last week referred a case of possible voter intimidation to the Justice Department and the state’s attorney general after a voter attempting to cast their ballot in Maricopa County was reportedly “approached and followed by a group of individuals.”
Maricopa County was a focal point of election concerns during the 2020 presidential election. After former President Trump claimed the election was stolen from him, the Arizona state Senate contracted the firm Cyber Ninjas to conduct a controversial audit, which confirmed President Biden’s win in the state. “No matter how you choose to vote in Arizona, you should feel safe doing so,” the state elections officials said in their Saturday statement. “We will do everything possible in our roles to protect voters, election workers, and our free and fair elections,” they added.”…it’s not only this type of Voter Suppression and Intimidation…but it other ways repugnant Republicans are “playing dirty”…beside lying…they are Photoshopping Democrats…not only making their skin darker, if they are people of color, case in point, Mandela Barnes in Wisconsin, and Stacy Abrams in Georgia…they are also putting t-shirts on the candidates that read “Defund the Police”…completely bogus…Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor, is big on making election integrity shaking…she refuses to say that if she loses, she will accept the results…already making the trump “claim”…the only way she will lose is if there’s voter fraud…and in Arizona the Secretary of State oversees elections…Mark Finchem is the Republican nominee…pushes election disinformation…putting Biden’s win in doubt…he is trump’s choice and was at the January 6 rally…he wants to make the decision on who wins Arizona elections…never mind about your vote…it’s ugly…ugly!…
we have Clarence Thomas put a pause on Lindsay Graham’s subpoena to appear before the Georgia Grand Jury…Laurence Tribe says Thomas broke the law not recusing himself…”Justice Thomas violated 28 USC 455, requiring any “justice” to recuse when his or her “impartiality might reasonably be questioned” or his or her “spouse is known by the justice to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome”…this from Robert Reich: “Today, Justice Clarence Thomas agreed to temporarily freeze a lower court order requiring Lindsey Graham to testify before a grand jury investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Clarence Thomas has zero business ruling on cases involving Trump’s attempted coup. His wife was directly involved in an effort to overturn the 2020 election…Hello?
The Judicial Code of Ethics which applies to all other federal judges requires a judge to recuse “from hearing any case in which personal entanglements could lead a fair-minded member of the public to question impartiality.”
Each week it seems we learn more and more about the role Justice Thomas’ wife, Ginni Thomas, played in efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
She sent at least 21 text messages to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, contacted 29 Arizona state lawmakers (some of them twice), and pressured the chair of the Senate elections committee and at least one other Republican lawmaker in Wisconsin to set aside Biden’s popular-vote victory and “choose” new presidential electors that would vote for Trump.
Just as alarming is that Thomas used the “independent state legislature theory” as the basis for her argument, the same argument at the core of Moore v. Harper, the case soon to be heard by the Supreme Court.“…I had to look up Moore v. Harper…all about gerrymandering in North Carolina…from The Brennen Center for Justice by Eliza Sweren-Becker and Ethan Herenstein on August 4, 2022: Moore v. Harper, Explained: “The debunked “independent state legislature theory” is on the Supreme Court’s docket, with potentially disastrous consequences.:
What is Moore v. Harper about?
In Moore v. Harper, the Supreme Court will decide whether the North Carolina Supreme Court has the power to strike down the legislature’s illegally gerrymandered congressional map for violating the North Carolina Constitution. The legislators have argued that a debunked interpretation of the U.S. Constitution — known as the “independent state legislature theory” — renders the state courts and state constitution powerless in matters relating to federal elections.
Last year, North Carolina’s Republican-dominated state legislature passed, on a party-line vote, an extreme partisan gerrymander to lock in a supermajority of the state’s 14 congressional seats. The gerrymander was so extreme that an evenly divided popular vote would have awarded 10 seats to the Republicans and only four to the Democrats. The map was a radical statistical outlier more favorable to Republicans than 99.9999% of all possible maps.
Because the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that federal courts cannot hear partisan gerrymandering cases, voters contested the map in state court, contending that the map violated the state constitution’s “free elections clause,” among other provisions. In February 2022, the North Carolina Supreme Court agreed with the voters and struck down the map, describing it as an “egregious and intentional partisan gerrymander . . . designed to enhance Republican performance, and thereby give a greater voice to those voters than to any others.”
The unrepentant legislature proposed a second gerrymandered map, prompting a state court to order a special master to create a fair map for the 2022 congressional elections. Unwilling to accept this outcome, two Republican legislators asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and reinstate their gerrymandered map.
What has happened so far in the case?
The Supreme Court hasn’t made any substantive rulings yet. In March, the Court rejected the legislators’ emergency appeal to put the gerrymander back in place immediately. At the urging of four justices, however, the legislators filed a regular appeal asking the Court to consider whether to reinstate their map for elections after 2022. In June, the Court agreed to take up the case. The parties will file briefs over the summer and fall, with oral argument happening thereafter. The Court will likely issue its decision before July 2023.
What are the gerrymanderers arguing before the Supreme Court?
In urging the Supreme Court to reinstate the gerrymandered congressional map, the North Carolina legislators are relying on an untenable misreading of the Constitution’s Elections Clause known as the independent state legislature theory.
The Elections Clause delegates to states the power to regulate federal elections while giving Congress the overriding authority to make or alter such laws. Proponents of the independent state legislature theory — like the gerrymanderers — read the Elections Clause to give state legislators near-exclusive authority to regulate federal elections, prohibiting any other state entity — like state courts or governors — from placing checks and balances on that power. In this case, the gerrymanderers are arguing that the theory licenses them to violate the state constitution when drawing congressional maps and that the state courts do not have the power to stop them.
What’s wrong with the independent state legislature theory?
The independent state legislature theory runs contrary to the constitutional text, history, practice, and precedent. The framers famously distrusted state lawmakers, so much so that when they drafted the Elections Clause, they insisted that Congress retain the ultimate power to set the rules for federal elections. The framers would not have established — and indeed did not establish — a regime that would permit state legislatures to regulate federal elections without the ordinary checks and balances that apply to state lawmaking power. State practice, from the country’s founding to today, also refutes the theory. For example, many framers — including James Madison — voted to adopt state constitutions that regulated federal elections, as North Carolina’s does today.
On top of this overwhelming historical evidence, the theory makes no sense: it would be absurd for a state legislature to be allowed to violate the very state constitution that created it. Other problems doom the theory, as an avalanche of recent scholarship demonstrates. For these reasons, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the theory for over a century, including as recently as 2015 and 2019.
The Supreme Court could decide Moore without having to address the independent state legislature theory. As we have previously explained, the North Carolina General Assembly itself enacted the state constitutional provisions that prohibit extreme partisan gerrymandering and expressly authorized state courts to review and remedy unlawful congressional maps. In other words, the state courts just did what the legislature told them to do.
Why did the Court take the case?
The Supreme Court has not explained why it decided to take the case, although that’s not unusual. However, some justice’s statements at earlier points in the case shed some light. When the Supreme Court denied emergency relief to the gerrymanderers in March, three justices — Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch — voiced support for the theory, as they had previously done in other dissenting opinions in 2020 elections cases. A fourth justice — Brett Kavanaugh — voted to leave the court-approved map in place for the 2022 elections, but he said that he saw “serious arguments” on both sides.
None of these justices, however, have had the benefit of oral argument and full briefing before formulating their perspectives. And crucially, whereas it takes five public votes for the justices to decide a case, it only takes four private votes for the Court to take a case for review. So the fact that four justices voted to hear Moore doesn’t mean that a majority is willing to endorse the unprecedented arguments offered by the state lawmakers in the case. The Court could still reject the theory and reaffirm the way our elections have worked for over two centuries.
What are the broader stakes?
The immediate issue in Moore is whether the state legislators’ extreme partisan gerrymander will stand in North Carolina. But adopting the independent state legislature theory would also mean that voters across the country have no judicial remedy — in state court or in federal court — to fight partisan gerrymandering.
The potential consequences could stretch still further. The theory would throw elections into chaos, nullifying hundreds of election rules put in place through ballot initiatives, state constitutions, and administrative regulations — including foundational state policies like the processes for voter registration and mail voting and basic guarantees like the secret ballot. State lawmakers would be able to adopt vote suppression legislation without any checks or balances from state courts or even gubernatorial veto. In other words, the theory would upend key aspects of our elections.”…it irks the hell out of me that repugnant Republicans are “playing dirty”…doing everything in their power to keep power, no matter what…and gerrymandering is the “perfect” tool for them…especially with no consequences, so far…we have to give them a “shellacking” in the Mid-Terms…in 15 days we can throw them out on their respective butts…let it get uglier for them!…
Art Salazar 