Reply to the Comment on ‘Matthew DePerno’s misdemeanors”

It’s not his first brush with controversy. DePerno said voting machines were rigged. And he’s facing accusations that he’s using those baseless claims to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel, who’s running for reelection against DePerno, says she faced a choice. “Could I proceed on the other potential defendants and not Matthew DePerno?” In an interview, she said. “But as it turned out, he was so intertwined with everything that had occurred that it was just impossible to extricate him.”

Nessel refuses to debate DePerno, partially citing the investigation. She believes he would bring it up and ethical standards from the American Bar Association would prevent her from discussing it, leaving her at a disadvantage.

Beyond that, Nessel, who’s also the first openly LGBTQ person to serve in statewide office, accuses DePerno of consistently making homophobic and bigoted remarks.

“All of those things we’re not talking about, because the media wants to ask questions about what Dana Nessel is doing to me, and sometimes not in a negative way like in terms of how bad that is for her,” he said during a recent rally with Trump.

DePerno said that he would fight to clean up the state if he were attorney general.

Innocuous Crimes and the Refugeees of Michigan Attorney General Robust to Election Results: The Case of the Nessel Campaign

The campaign is partly related to culture war issues. Nessel made a joke about how drag queens would help schools at a conference this summer.

“She said she wants to put a drag queen in every classroom,” he said, before asking the crowd, “Do you think we need drag queens in every classroom?” “No, people,” DePerno said when the crowd’s response was “no”. Not just no — hell no.”

The Republicans had the ball in their court and the mandate was not crazy. And I feel like that’s the trap people have fallen into,” said former state Rep. Aaron Miller.

Nessel said last January that her office had been evaluating charges related to the effort to put forward a slate of fake electors from Michigan. At the time, Nessel said publicly she was “confident we have enough evidence to charge” people under state law for “forgery of a public record,” and other crimes. But ultimately, she decided to ask the Justice Department to investigate.

It’s unclear what exactly would happen if DePerno wins and is subsequently indicted and convicted. Michigan election law says the attorney general position becomes vacant upon the officeholder’s conviction of an “infamous crime.” While that’s not spelled out in statute, the Detroit Free Press has noted that it’s been historically interpreted as a crime punishable by a sentence in state prison.

Some wondered if the Republican Party would suffer because of DePerno’s track record of denying election results.

“Parties can adapt pretty quickly,” he said. “You can throw out the people you formerly were supporting and get in new people and people can suddenly pretend they didn’t know who they were yesterday.”

Ben Johnson and the Board of Elections in Georgia: Why Electronic Voting Machines Are Bad for Voting and How to Avoid Election-Day Violation

The meeting of the Board of Elections in Georgia may look like a group of bureaucrats being led by a no-nonsense chair.

“We hang our political hats at the door when we come in and do the people’s work,” Board Chairman Ben Johnson said at one meeting earlier this year. There isn’t any room for politics in elections.

But Johnson’s stated beliefs don’t appear to be so easily left at the door. Johnson authored a social media post proclaiming that Joe Biden was an illegitimate president, and he is an election-conspiracy believer.

On social media, he has called for banning electronic voting machines, early voting and mail-in voting; echoed debunked claims about “ballot trafficking;” and proudly posted a photo with MyPillow founder and election conspiracist Mike Lindell.

Johnson’s beliefs were visible in his work on the board. Johnson lied in a board meeting last year about a judge’s ruling on voting machines in Georgia. In April last year, he was in charge of the board in not renewing the county’s maintenance contract with Dominion, due to concerns about the expense of the contract and how well the company would be able to respond to election-day issues. Fox News, One America News and Sidney Powell are accused of making baseless accusations that the machines enabled vote fraud.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/20/politics/election-deniers-county-voting-offices-invs/index.html

Investigating Insider Investigations into the 2020 Election: A Spalding County Election Supervisor Responds to a Grand Jury Insight

To be sure, election regulations, long-standing rules on auditing and testing of machines, and other layers of oversight offer safeguards for the electoral process.

Ryan Macias, an elections security consultant said that the actions of insiders who cast doubt on the fairness of the process could affect whether people perceive the outcome of an election as real or fake.

The election board will only have people that support fair elections on it, according to a Democrat who sits on it. That makes no sense to me.

The move leaves the county primarily relying on its elections supervisor and trained staff to fix any mechanical or software problems that might arise in this November’s election.

Georgia Ethics Watchdogs has filed a complaint with the Georgia Attorney General’s Office about the election board chairman allowing his IT firm to do work on equipment used in an election on at least one occasion.

While the election board ultimately dropped that plan, emails show Johnson was involved in the effort to hire the firm SullivanStrickler to obtain forensic images of the county’s election system.

“Unless anyone else has any concerns we need to move forward quickly,” Johnson wrote to board members and the county election supervisor about that effort on August 17, 2021.

SullivanStrickler is involved in an investigation of election integrity matters, and is continuing to work with law enforcement, as indicated by the attorney.

An attorney representing the Spalding County elections board told CNN Wednesday that a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, intends to subpoena Johnson and two other Spalding County officials. CNN said that a grand jury is investigating an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The head of Georgia Ethics Watchdogs said it was a scary situation. “And that’s why we’ve called for the attorney general to investigate, because somebody has got to go in and make sure laws that we know of aren’t being broken.”

Over the past two years, the relentless, baseless MAGA campaign to claim the 2020 election was stolen from Trump has led to so much harassment of election officials – even in places where Trump won easily – that many have quit. In the past three years, 45 of 100 election directors in North Carolina have left, while Texas has seen a 30% turnover rate.

That exodus has led to the hiring of many new election officials. Some, through inexperience, have made mistakes that could feed further distrust – or, as one Michigan clerk found, unintentionally enable conspiracists.

Lake Township Clerk Korinda Winkelmann told state authorities investigating voting machine breaches that she turned over a tabulator and a laptop computer that served as a poll book to an unnamed person who claimed to be an investigator conducting an audit of the election. Winkelmann told investigators she knew she wasn’t supposed to turn over a tabulator, but that she did because “they were doing some type of audit.” She said she believed there was election fraud in 2020, though not in her township, according to the police report. Winkelmann declined comment to CNN.

She told CNN that she was terrified. I did not trust them from the beginning. They had contacted the county clerk and that she agreed to the audit, which makes no sense.

CNN obtained a video of the incident that was previously reported by the Record-Eagle, in which Keller asked if the men were from the state.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/20/politics/election-deniers-county-voting-offices-invs/index.html

Election conspiracists uncovered a conspiracy to attack the secretary of state and the bureaucracy of the Michigan bureau of elections

Authorities eventually determined that the plot to access the tabulator traced back to a woman named Tera Jackson, who claimed to be in touch with then-Trump attorney Powell and to have evidence of fraud tied to data stored on a satellite owned by the Vatican. Jackson pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of disturbing the peace in connection with the incident. Nobody else was charged.

“It was just a stupid, bungled thing. Keller said that he was too scared to do anything. “I was just so new to being a clerk, and I really questioned it, but I was also intimidated.”

In Michigan, election conspiracists have been able to gain access to at least five other vote-counting machines, and in some cases also to the software that operates them.

Adams Township Clerk Stephanie Scott was stripped of election duties last year by the secretary of state’s office, after spreading election misinformation and refusing to allow routine maintenance to be performed on voting machines. That has forced Hillsdale County to take over running Adams Township’s elections since October 2021, Abe Dane, chief deputy clerk of the county, told CNN in an email.

Scott “continues to regularly spread disinformation … falsely claiming that our Hart InterCivic election management system and tabulators are connected to the internet or contain voter-specific data,” Dane said. In August, in an email obtained by CNN, Scott told other clerks in the state to “uphold election integrity” by ignoring a directive about voting data from the Michigan Bureau of Elections, which she called “the unelected bureaucratic office.”

Scott refused to comply with the directive that his attorney said was in violation of the law. Lambert reiterated the baseless claim that the state’s elections are not secure.

Schroeder isn’t alone in drawing state oversight. Citing incorrect ballots sent out in the June primary and a recent misprint, Griswold also appointed a supervisor to oversee the upcoming elections in Pueblo County, which would otherwise be run by Clerk Bo Ortiz, a Democrat. Tina Peters, who lost in the June primary for secretary of state, was barred from overseeing the upcoming election in Mesa County. She faces a criminal trial, set for March 2023, for allegedly allowing unauthorized people to breach her county’s election system, to reveal what she believed was fraud in the 2020 election. She has denied the charges.

Over the past two years, a movement of conspiracy-theory-minded activists has loudly questioned and undermined the country’s electoral system. Their efforts have got the support of conservative organizations and their supporters and made them worry about the potential for violent intimidation and vigilantism on Election Day.

“They’re very surprised and disappointed,” he said. “Likely, it’s a result of the media sources and politicians they listen to, mainly on the Republican side, promoting this disinformation.”

Attempts to Shut Down the Electronic Voting Machines of Nevada Clerk Sandra Merlino and Vice-Clerk Doree Nevin

For example, in Nye County, Nevada, which sprawls over an 18,000 square-mile area between Las Vegas and Reno, veteran GOP clerk Sandra “Sam” Merlino called it quits in August, after 22 years at the job.

The final straw: County commissioners – based on meritless suspicions of voting machines – voted to have the 2022 general election ballots counted by hand.

Nye County voters don’t trust electronic voting machines because they aren’t secure according to the interim clerk.

Kampf plans to make Nye County one of the first in the nation to switch to hand-counting paper ballots, using electronic machines only for a preliminary tally this November. Nye County Commission Chairman Frank Carbone has said the commission hopes to do away with the machines completely in the future.

Nevada election officials, including GOP Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, have fought back against misinformation, saying their electronic voting machines have been reliable and accurate, haven’t been hacked, don’t have modems and can’t connect to the internet. Cegavske has also noted that ballots can be readily verified by paper record.

On October 17, the ACLU filed an emergency request to Nevada’s Supreme Court challenging Kampf’s hand-count plan. The group asked the court to rule by October 21, four days before county officials plan to start hand-counting mail-in ballots. Kampf did not return multiple calls from CNN.

Then there’s Storey County, a rural county of about 4,000 voters outside of Reno, where Jim Hindle was elected clerk and treasurer in June. Even though Biden won Nevada, six Republicans signed a false certificate promising to give the state’s electoral votes to Trump.

Doreayne “Dore” Nevin, who lost the June GOP primary to Hindle, left her post early. In an August email obtained by CNN, then-clerk Nevin wrote, “It breaks my heart because I do love my job and that’s why I ran not because I’m a politician like Jim.” Hindle declined to answer questions from CNN.

The Colorado Secretary of State and the Elbert County Primary Election: A Statewide Investigation of a Wireless-Visual-Driven Voting Machine

The Colorado Secretary of State stopped the clerk in Elbert County from being able to oversee the election in his county. Schroeder previously was blocked from overseeing his county’s primary election in June, after state officials discovered he’d copied two election-system hard drives containing sensitive data. While that violated the state’s election regulations, Schroeder has tried to justify his actions with the misleading claim that voting machines contain “wireless devices” that can be hacked through the internet.

He told CNN that all of the machines in his company have a wireless device, so there was no way to verify that they had not been used.

The lawsuit was brought by the office which launched an investigation into the matter and accused Schroeder of providing copies to individuals who were not authorized to have them.

This week, the incidents reported by officials were far from being stark. Despite widespread accusations of fraud, Republican candidates so far have mostly accepted the results when they’ve lost — including some of the loudest promoters of election conspiracy theories. Mr. Trump advocated for a protest. in response to relatively routine technical problems in Arizona and Michigan have so far been largely ignored.

Voting is now underway. The ballots for the election were handed out on Monday. Key battleground states such as Arizona and Michigan already are receiving mail-in ballots. If the upcoming election is anything like the next one, officials may find that their challenges are just beginning.

Updated-Tales Updates Lead the Nevada Senate Race Near a Dead Heat: An Overview of the State Board of Elections After Donald J. Trump’s 2020 Campaign

“Probably the biggest risk,” said Lawrence Norden, senior director of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center, is “further erosion of trust in the election, and political leaders using that distrust, if they are unhappy with election results, to challenge them and further undermine confidence in the American electoral system.”

Election officials have worried for months that activists will cause serious problems in the polls due to their belief that the election system is corrupt. The system was not disrupted by the scattered episodes during the vote.

The relative calm so far had election officials breathing a sigh of relief, even as they remained concerned about specious legal challenges and misinformation that could erupt in the coming weeks. The system was hit with baseless claims of fraud and widespread distrust after Donald J. Trump tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

They pointed to better and more frequent communication by elections officials, and transparency measures such as live cams at ballot boxes and in counting rooms. Some speculated that polling and right-wing media reports promising a Republican blowout in races across the country may have discouraged some right-wing activists from provocations at polling places.

“It was remarkably smooth,” said Damon Circosta, the chairman of the North Carolina State Board of Elections. “You can tell by my giddiness I was not expecting that.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/11/11/us/election-updates-midterms-results/updated-tallies-leave-the-nevada-senate-race-near-a-dead-heat

Election Lawyers are Gearing up for Legal Challenges in Two State Sensitive Disputes: Arizona vs. Nevada

There are many undecided races and there could be more to come in a few places. Two states in particular, Nevada and Arizona, feature several election-denying candidates in tight races and elections lawyers say they are gearing up for legal challenges aiming to once again put the soundness of the system on trial.

On Thursday, Mark Finchem, the Republican candidate for secretary of state in Arizona, disparaged the election system in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, and compared one part of the process to the notorious hanging chads of the 2000 election in Florida.

A lawyer for Protect Democracy says there are still issues to be concerned about. He helped the group file successful legal challenges to a group of men who were patrolling ballot drop boxes with long guns and wearing body armor.

Indeed, Kelli Ward, chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party, vowed to pursue such actions. She said that they had been preparing for it for over a year. There is a huge team of lawyers ready to act.

We can either choose to curl up on the ledge and give up or we can take a break from the hard work of election integrity, wrote the person in charge of Michigan Fair Elections. The group’s next online meeting was scheduled for Thursday.

One of Michigan Fair Elections’ preferred candidates, Kristina Karamo, running for secretary of state, has not conceded despite losing by 14 percentage points and on Thursday afternoon sent out a list of supposed electoral “violations,” saying there was more to come.

The Republicans who were running for Michigan governor and attorney general acknowledged defeat, as did the republican candidate for governor in Wisconsin, who had promised to change the voting system so that the Republicans wouldn’t lose elections again.

Concessions by candidates who spread unfounded theories of voting fraud are critical to ensure the stability of the election system, elections experts say. In addition, they note public outreach from election officials can help put out fires.

Mr. Sherman stated that they created a little bit of turbulence. Running on a treadmill is like running on inclines. He said he wouldn’t like an easy run because of the constant election denial.

According to Douglas Wilson, a Democratic strategist in Charlotte, N.C., polling predicting a large Republican wave may have also worked to cool the ardor of election deniers. Republican voters would only be discouraged if attempts to undermine faith in the results were made.

The Election Defenders organized many sessions to train people at polling places to prevent voter intimidation. Its goal was to recruit 1,250 volunteers, but instead was overwhelmed with more than 2,000 people who completed several hours of online training on how to intervene in tense situations, dispel confusion, de-escalate confrontations with potentially armed activists and, more than anything, keep things calm.

Tiffany Flowers was a lead organizer of the campaign and said they had more people sign up than they had room to put them. She said she worked 20 hours on Tuesday monitoring social media and checking in with partners around the country.

A previous article wrongly described Ms. Flowers’s hometown and the nature of her voting on Election Day. Ms. Flowers is from Baltimore, not Atlanta, and worked remotely on Election Day, rather than visiting polling places in person.

Ms. Flowers said that there are more Americans who wish to see everyone who was eligible to vote be allowed to vote fairly and with dignity.

Nessel, a Democrat who referred the matter to federal prosecutors, told reporters that she is concerned that more than a year has passed since she sent the cases to the DOJ, but she thinks there is strong evidence to support the charges.

The committee’s investigation has given a fuller and more nuanced picture of the interconnected plots that the DOJ has been investigating, including the scheme to put forward slates of illegitimate Trump electors from battleground states that Joe Biden won to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence and Congress to halt the certification of the results.

On Friday, the second anniversary of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol in DC, Nessel confirmed the state investigation was re-opened and she was not sure how the Justice Department probe was proceeding.

Witness emails, text messages and testimony from the House January 6 committee – all of which are now in the possession of DOJ prosecutors working under special counsel Jack Smith, show Trump’s role in pushing alternate slates of electors, pressing battleground state officials to overturn the election results, attempting to replace the acting attorney general with someone who would embrace election fraud claims, and laying the early groundwork to call his followers to the US Capitol.

That includes the Trump team’s efforts in Michigan, as newly released testimony from state officials revealed new details about the involvement of the former president’s campaign and legal team.