“‘Preposterous’: Federal judge decries efforts to downplay Jan. 6 violence, label perpetrators ‘hostages'”

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Politico:

The longest-serving district judge on the federal bench in Washington, D.C., warned Thursday that false rhetoric about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — including the sorts of lies hurled by former President Donald Trump and some of his congressional allies — poses an ongoing danger to the nation.

Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee to the bench, said the “destructive” misinformation, spread by political leaders who have downplayed and misrepresented the attack, had become pervasive.

“In my thirty-seven years on the bench, I cannot recall a time when such meritless justifications of criminal activity have gone mainstream,” Lamberth lamented in a seven-page public court filing.

Though he did not mention Trump by name, Lamberth specifically called out language used by Trump and, more recently, Trump allies like Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), describing Jan. 6 defendants as “hostages.”

“I have been shocked to watch some public figures try to rewrite history, claiming rioters behaved ‘in an orderly fashion’ like ordinary tourists, or martyrizing convicted January 6 defendants as ‘political prisoners’ or even, incredibly, ‘hostages,’” he wrote. “That is all preposterous. But the Court fears that such destructive, misguided rhetoric could presage further danger to our country.”

It was a remarkable jeremiad from a veteran jurist who has presided over dozens of Jan. 6 criminal cases and more than 10 trials. Lamberth issued his comments in connection with sentencing proceedings for James Little, a Jan. 6 misdemeanor defendant who has decried his case as a political prosecution and said the government is trying to suppress his free speech rights.

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“Scholars unmask Trump election lawyers’ use of falsified evidence”

fraudulent fraud squad

Steven Rosenfeld:

Beadles’ reward wasn’t real. Nor was his purported evidence. But this stunt, and especially its use of irrelevant statistics to appear authoritative and smear elections, is common in Trump circles. A working paper by two Stanford University scholars, the Hoover Institution’s Justin Grimmer and the Democracy and Polarization Lab’s Abhinav Ramaswamy, underscores just how widespread these fabrications are. They are not just cooked up for propagandizing in the press. These bundles of bogus claims, erroneous assumptions, and alleged evidence — especially statistics like those cited by Beadles — were also centerpieces in scores of lawsuits to push judges to overturn the last presidential election. It was all hype, smoke and mirrors.

“Regardless of the reason why, every claim we analyze fails to provide evidence of illegality or fraud,” the scholars wrote near the start of their comprehensive 85-page paper. “We document that the supposed evidence of fraud that Trump relies upon is riddled with basic statistical misunderstandings and errors, confusion about how to use voter files or absentee voter history to analyze turnout and registration, and invented statistical techniques based on the impressions of what happens in a ‘normal’ election from ‘experts’ who never previously analyzed election data and provide no argument to justify their procedures. At no point did Trump or his allies present even remotely plausible evidence of consequential fraud or illegality.”

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“Elon Musk Is Spreading Election Misinformation, but X’s Fact Checkers Are Long Gone”

cheap speech

NYT:

In the spring of 2020, when President Donald J. Trump wrote messages on Twitter warning that increased reliance on mail-in ballots would lead to a “rigged election,” the platform ran a corrective, debunking his claims.

“Get the facts about mail-in voting,” a content label read. “Experts say mail-in ballots are very rarely linked to voter fraud,” the hyperlinked article declared.

This month, Elon Musk, who has since bought Twitter and rebranded it X, echoed several of Mr. Trump’s claims about the American voting system, putting forth distorted and false notions that American elections were wide open for fraud and illegal voting by noncitizens.

This time, there were no fact checks. And the X algorithm — under Mr. Musk’s direct control — helped the posts reach large audiences, in some cases drawing many millions of views.

Since taking control of the site, Mr. Musk has dismantled the platform’s system for flagging false election content, arguing it amounted to election interference.

Now, his early election-year attacks on a tried-and-true voting method are raising alarms among civil rights lawyers, election administrators and Democrats. They worry that his control over the large social media platform gives him an outsize ability to reignite the doubts about the American election system that were so prevalent in the lead-up to the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

As Mr. Trump’s victory in New Hampshire moved the race closer to general election grounds, the Biden campaign for the first time criticized Mr. Musk directly for his handling of election content on X: “It is profoundly irresponsible to spread false information and sow distrust about how our elections operate,” the Biden campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, said this week in a statement to The New York Times.

“It’s even more dangerous coming from the owner of a social media platform,” she added.

What is angering the Biden campaign is delighting pro-Trump Republicans and others who depict the old Twitter as part of a government-controlled censorship regime that aided Mr. Biden in 2020. Under a system now in dispute at the Supreme Court, government officials alerted platforms to posts they deemed dangerous, though it was up to the companies to act or not.

“Oh, boo hoo,” Harmeet K. Dhillon, a lawyer whose firm represents Mr. Trump, said of the Democrats’ complaints. Ms. Dhillon has sued the company for suspending an election-denying client’s account after receiving a notice from the California election officials — the sort of government interplay Mr. Musk has repudiated. She noted the platform was now “a much better place for conservatives,” and said of Mr. Musk, “he’s great.”…

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“No Labels director doubles down on 3rd-party ticket after New Hampshire”

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The Hill reports. It seems pretty definite that No Labels will enter the race, assuming they can find a candidate they consider suitable. The report quotes their national director as saying “if America wants another choice, we’re gonna offer it to them.” It also makes clear that they are still courting Nikki Haley after her New Hampshire defeat, which showed her winning independents but not Republicans (a record divergence according to Steve Kornacki’s data). She continues to say no thanks and may well stick with that position if she wants a future in the Republican Party (as Chuck Todd and Jonathan Martin discussed on a recent podcast).

But when is the media going to devote even a bit of attention to the fact that the inability of Nikki Haley or any No Labels candidate to be anything other than a spoiler is a function of existing election law and not the preferences of the voters? Take the exact same set of voter preferences and process them through a different set of election laws, and the No Labels (or equivalent centrist third-party) candidate would win the election, not Trump or Biden. And arguably the set of election laws that would cause the No Labels candidate to win (ones that are consistent with Condorcet’s principles, for those who know that reference) would be the fairest way to determine the preferences of the electorate treating each voter’s preferences among all three candidates equally.

Americans generally don’t have any understanding of this key point–that election results are a path-dependent function of which election procedures are employed and not just the preferences that the voters express through those procedures. Americans are not taught this in school but it is something that they need to understand in order to know how they can most effectively exercise their popular sovereignty in a system of republican self-government. Because this is not taught as part of civics education, it’s necessary for the media to educate the public about this. The time for doing this is now, when the current process is unfolding and many Americans are dissatisfied with the choices that the existing procedures are giving them. Moreover, once No Labels fields a candidate, assuming that it does, the media will need to educate the public on why the No Labels candidate can’t win–and can only be a spoiler–because of specific rules of the existing electoral system. We can anticipate some discussion of the fact that Ranked Choice Voting, as used in Maine and Alaska, would eliminate the spoiler problem. But there needs to be discussion also of the point that alternate forms of RCV (plus other electoral systems that do not require ranked-choice ballots) would not only solve the spoiler problem but would also elect the candidate whom a majority of voters prefer to each other candidate on the general election ballot.

Meanwhile, the best thing that the No Label candidate can do will be to exit the race once it’s clear that their campaign can only serve as a spoiler under the current system and, as part of existing with the help from the media, call for an ongoing effort at electoral reform to adopt a system that will actually enable a majority of voters to elect the candidate whom they most prefer.

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My New Piece in Politico: “Opinion: The 2024 Election Will Be Fair. People Still Won’t Believe It.”

election subversion risk, Real Right to Vote, The Voting Wars

I have written this piece for Politico. A snippet:

The current backdrop for the 2024 election may seem bleak: Many of those who helped to ensure a fair election and a peaceful transition of power in 2020 have been silenced, replaced or intimidated. Researchers who studied and reported on disinformation have been unfairly attacked as engaging in election interference in collusion with the government. Conservative states have passed new laws barring the use of private funds to help support election administration, derisively calling such money “Zuckerbucks” after Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s foundation provided hundreds of millions in crucial 2020 funding. Lawsuits and congressional hearings by the Orwellian-named House committee on the “weaponization of government” may be deterring some government agencies from reporting election disinformation and foreign interference to social media companies and others. The social media platforms that had deplatformed Trump after he encouraged the violence at the Capitol have restored his accounts.

Some Republican officials have been booted out of the party or out of power, including Aaron Van Langevelde, the Michigan state member of the board of canvassers who confirmed Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, and Republican members of the U.S. House, including Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who lost primaries or chose not to run for reelection. Attrition rates among election officials, who have faced relentless threats and intimidation while earning relatively low pay, are substantial.

And yet there is reason for hope.

Efforts have been made to ensure the 2024 election will be mostly fair. Congress amended the set of rules used for its counting of Electoral College votes to close off some of the shenanigans with alternative slates of electors that Trump and his allies tried in 2020. The Supreme Court last year in Moore v. Harper rejected an extreme theory that would have empowered legislatures to overcome even their own state constitutions and state courts in constricting voting rights. Election deniers who ran for chief election officer in swing states lost in 2022. People are now hypervigilant about attempts to subvert election results and are on guard against new forms of manipulation. Trump, no longer in government, has fewer tools to try to manipulate results. The 2022 elections, without Trump on the ballot, went off smoothly. (Of course, there is much more that can and should be done in law, politics, media and tech to assure a fair and safe election, as a group of us explained in a recently issued report, “24 for ’24.”)

But things look less promising when it comes to voter confidence in the fairness of election results — on both sides of the aisle.

Trump is already laying the seeds for claiming voter fraud in the 2024 elections should he lose, positing without evidence that Democrats are allowing illegal immigration into the United States so that these new arrivals can vote for Biden in the 2024 elections. (Noncitizens are ineligible to vote in U.S. presidential elections.) One of the mistakes I made in the run-up to the 2020 elections was believing that if the U.S. could pull off a free and fair election, it would take the oxygen out of false and outlandish claims of voter fraud. In fact, Trump has been able to manufacture doubt out of absolutely nothing; fraud claims untethered to reality still captivate millions of people looking for an excuse as to why their adored candidate may have lost. The upshot, of course, was an insurrection on Jan. 6. We should be deeply concerned about a sequel, even if Trump is not in the Oval Office this time…..

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“Trump leans into voter fraud playbook, preparing to cry foul if he loses expected Biden rematch”

election subversion risk, fraudulent fraud squad

AP:

For months, Trump has been alleging that he could be the victim of fraud in November, making the same sort of explosive, groundless allegations that fueled the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and have continued to spark a wave of threats against election workers nationwide. Trump made similar allegations before the 2020 election, predicting for months there would be widespread fraud that November and contending he could only lose if the election was stolen from him.

“He’s doing it out in full view,” said David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and coauthor of “The Big Truth,” about Trump’s 2020 election lies. “If he is the Republican nominee, he has made clear that he’ll lie about an election that he’s lost.”

His continued false claims about the 2020 election have resonated with Republican voters, a majority of whom believe Biden was not legitimately elected despite all evidence to the contrary. Trump lost dozens of court challenges, his own attorney general found no evidence of widespread fraud, and reviews, audits and recounts in the battleground states where he contested his loss all affirmed Biden’s victory.

Rachel Orey of the Bipartisan Policy Center said Trump’s preemptive allegations of fraud have become built into the nation’s political culture.

“It’s been normalized. I think what in 2020 was seen as somewhat outlandish is now an anticipated part of the process,” Orey said. “And, we see more and more candidates adopting the election denial tactics that Donald Trump is using, either as a way to thrust themselves into the national spotlight or as a way to fundraise.”

Setting the stage to blame an election loss on fraud has clear consequences, Orey said, pointing to the fact that threats and harassment against election officials after 2020 were especially severe in battleground states that Trump narrowly lost.

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