[EL] ELB News and Commentary 11/10/20

[Rick Hasen]

“‘Hoaxes and nonsense’: GOP election officials reject Trump fraud claims”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118422>
Posted on November 9, 2020 7:57 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118422> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

LAT:<https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-11-09/republican-officials-counter-false-claims-of-election-fraud>

Georgia’s too-close-to-call presidential contest devolved into a fight Monday among Republicans as the state’s top election official rejected calls from its two U.S. senators that he resign for challenging President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.

Monday morning, Gabriel Sterling, a lifelong Republican who manages Georgia’s voting system, took to a lectern at the Capitol to plainly and matter-of-factly dismiss criticism of election illegalities in the Southern battleground state as “fake news” and “disinformation.”

“Hoaxes and nonsense,” Sterling said. “Don’t buy into these things. Find trusted sources.”

Hours later, GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler — who are each in a Jan. 5 run-off that will determine control of the chamber — called on Sterling’s boss, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to resign for allegedly mismanaging the state’s elections.

“That is not going to happen,” Raffensperger said.

Georgia’s 16 electoral votes are no longer key to deciding the election. Democrat Joe Biden has already secured 290 electoral votes — 20 more than needed to win the White House.

With Biden leading Trump in Georgia by more than 12,000 votes — 0.25% of the total — Republicans in the state are nevertheless locked in a civil war as the presidential race heads for a recount. The upheaval shows how Trump’s persistent and unfounded claims of fraud and refusal to concede the election to Biden are dividing not just the country but his own party.

The back and forth began Monday morning when the secretary of state’s office held one of its regular news conferences, with Sterling updating reporters on the status of the vote count and debunking false information.

But this time, he went to greater lengths to push back on claims of election fraud.

“The facts are the facts, regardless of outcomes,” Sterling said<https://www.gpb.org/events/news/2020/11/09/secretary-of-states-office-addresses-georgia-election-results>.
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Posted in fraudulent fraud squad<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=8>

“False News Targeting Latinos Trails the Election; Rampant falsehoods evolved online on Wednesday, intended to make Spanish speakers question the unfolding election results and believe that President Trump was being robbed of victory.”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118420>
Posted on November 9, 2020 7:54 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118420> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

NYT:<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/us/spanish-language-misinformation-latinos.html>

The posts proliferated on election night before anything remotely definitive was known about the results of the presidential race. “Robado,” they falsely repeated again and again in Spanish: President Trump<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/elections/donald-trump.html> was being robbed of a victory. He had won Arizona. George Soros was funding violent “antifa riots.”

The baseless social media messages to Latinos trying to delegitimize the election and the results for Joseph R. Biden Jr.<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/elections/joe-biden.html> circulated online on Tuesday night and into Wednesday, part of a disinformation campaign to undermine Latino confidence in the vote as it unfolded.

Ahead of Election Day, false news in Spanish<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/us/politics/spanish-election-2020-disinformation.html> tried to turn Latinos against Black Lives Matter and tie Mr. Biden to socialism, tactics that experts said could depress the Hispanic vote. Now that voting is complete, the rampant falsehoods have only garnered larger audiences — including among immigrants less familiar with the institutions of American democracy. The gist of the falsehoods is that the election is “rigged” against Mr. Trump.

“These misinformation narratives are helping plunge the country further into chaos and confusion,” said Fadi Quran, a director at Avaaz, a nonprofit that tracks disinformation. He called the disinformation campaigns a “democratic emergency.” “The most vulnerable communities in the country are paying the highest price,” he said….

Yet 24 hours later, it appeared Facebook and Twitter might have overlooked the deluge of disinformation targeting Spanish-speaking Americans. Spanish-language accounts with huge followings falsely said that Mr. Trump had secured an early victory, that social media was censoring his win and that Mr. Biden was cheating.

Twitter accounts with large followings pushed a debunked conspiracy theory, adopted by some prominent American conservatives, that election workers in Maricopa County, Ariz., had given Trump voters pens that could not be detected by ballot scanners. Others claimed that armed protesters funded by the billionaire Mr. Soros were taking over the U.S. Capitol.

By Wednesday, disinformation experts like Mr. Quran likened the flood of Spanish-language disinformation to an emergency and called on social media platforms to retroactively inform anyone who engaged with the content that the claims were false.

The reach of the disinformation is vast. In just 24 hours, Spanish-language disinformation was generating traffic that eclipsed even the interference campaign by the Kremlin-backed Russian Internet Research Agency four years ago.
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Posted in cheap speech<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=130>, chicanery<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=12>


“Claims that dead people voted went viral. These are the facts”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118418>
Posted on November 9, 2020 7:46 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118418> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

CNN:<https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/08/tech/michigan-dead-voter-fact-debunking/index.html>

To hear some people tell it — including a handful of prominent Republicans, such as members of President Trump’s family and supporters like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell — you might think that Democrats were using dead people to steal Michigan’s Electoral College votes<https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/results/state/michigan/president> from Trump.

But, like much<http://www.cnn.com/2020/11/04/business/ballot-burning-fake-video/index.html> of the misinformation<http://www.cnn.com/2020/11/05/politics/arizona-sharpie-ballots-maricopa-trump/index.html> circulated online<http://www.cnn.com/2020/11/03/tech/pennsylvania-election-misinformation/index.html> this week by some Trump supporters<http://www.cnn.com/2020/11/04/tech/false-michigan-election-map/index.html>, the claim falls apart under scrutiny<http://www.cnn.com/2020/11/05/media/detroit-windows-covered-ballots-vote-center/index.html>. A CNN analysis of the claim and the purported backing for it did not find a single instance of that happening.

One of the supposed pieces of evidence was a list that circulated on Twitter Thursday evening allegedly containing names, birth dates, and zip codes for registered voters in Michigan. The origin of the list and the identity of the person who first made it public are not known.

CNN examined 50 of the more than 14,000 names on the list by taking the first 25 names on the list and then 25 more picked at random. We ran the names through Michigan’s Voter Information database to see if they requested or returned a ballot. We then checked the names against publicly available records to see if they were indeed dead.

Of the 50, 37 were indeed dead and had not voted, according to the voter information database. Five people out of the 50 had voted — and they are all still alive, according to public records accessed by CNN. The remaining eight are also alive but didn’t vote.The sample CNN reviewed is not representative, but the trend was clear — not a single one of the names examined was of a dead person voting.The version of the list CNN found has since been removed from the site hosting it.
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Posted in fraudulent fraud squad<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=8>


NYT: AG Barr’s Action on Election Investigation Prompts Leading Voter Fraud Attorney to Step Down From Role; Investigations Appear to Involve Allegations Unsupported By Evidence<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118416>
Posted on November 9, 2020 7:33 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118416> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

NYT:<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/us/politics/barr-elections.html>

 Attorney General William P. Barr, wading into President Trump’s unfounded accusations of widespread election irregularities, told federal prosecutors on Monday that they were allowed to investigate “specific allegations” of voter fraud before the results of the presidential race are certified.

Mr. Barr’s authorization prompted the Justice Department official who oversees investigations of voter fraud, Richard Pilger, to step down from the post within hours, according to an email Mr. Pilger sent to colleagues that was obtained by The New York Times.

Mr. Barr said he had authorized “specific instances” of investigative steps in some cases. He made clear in a carefully worded memo<https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/barr-memo-elections-fraud/9bf5cac375012c4c/full.pdf> that prosecutors had the authority to investigate, but he warned that “specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries.”

Mr. Barr’s directive ignored the Justice Department’s longstanding policies intended to keep law enforcement from affecting the outcome of an election. And it followed a move<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/07/us/politics/justice-department-election-fraud.html> weeks before the election in which the department lifted a prohibition on voter fraud investigations before an election….

Mr. Barr has privately told department officials in the days since the election that any disputes should be resolved in court by the campaigns themselves, according to three people briefed on the conversations. He has said that he did not see massive fraud, and that most of the allegations of voter fraud were related to individual instances that did not point to a larger systemic problem, the people said….

Mr. Pilger, a career prosecutor in the department’s Public Integrity Section who oversaw voting-fraud-related investigations, told colleagues he would move to a nonsupervisory role working on corruption prosecutions.

“Having familiarized myself with the new policy and its ramifications,” he wrote, “I must regretfully resign from my role as director of the Election Crimes Branch.” A Justice Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Mr. Pilger’s message.

Justice Department policies prohibit federal prosecutors from taking overt steps, like questioning witnesses or securing subpoenas for documents, to open a criminal investigation into any election-related matter until after voting results have been certified to keep their existence from spilling into public view and influencing either voters or local election officials who ensure the integrity of the results.

“Public knowledge of a criminal investigation could impact the adjudication of election litigation and contests in state courts,” the Justice Department’s longstanding election guidelines for prosecutors say. “Accordingly, it is the general policy of the department not to conduct overt investigations.”…

ustice Department investigators are looking into a referral from the Republican Party in Nevada, which claims over 3,000 people who live outside the state voted in its election, the department official said. The official would not say whether the department had opened a full investigation. A federal judge dismissed the claim<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/06/us/politics/election-courts.html> in court last week.

The department is also reviewing a sworn affidavit written by a postal worker in Erie, Pa., alleging that post office officials devised a plan to backdate mail ballots in the state, the official said.

The local postmaster has denied the allegations<https://www.goerie.com/story/news/2020/11/09/erie-postmaster-calls-claims-mishandled-ballots-100-false/6221116002/> and said that the accuser has been disciplined multiple times in the past. That affidavit was sent to the department by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who is a close ally of the president.

In the days after the election, Mr. Barr faced pressure from Mr. Trump and his aides to intervene to help the president. Conservative commentators have criticized Mr. Barr’s lack of action, saying that he was looking the other way.
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Posted in Department of Justice<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=26>, Election Meltdown<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=127>, fraudulent fraud squad<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=8>


“GOP fears conceding Trump loss would spark base revolt and loss of seats”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118414>
Posted on November 9, 2020 5:24 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118414> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

David Drucker<https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/gop-fears-conceding-trump-loss-would-spark-base-revolt-and-loss-of-seats> for the Washington Examiner:

Top Republicans in Washington are reluctant to call Joe Biden the president-elect publicly, fearing a rebellion by grassroots conservatives loyal to President Trump that would sink the party’s Senate majority.

Republican insiders privately concede Biden ousted Trump and dismiss suggestions voter fraud, ballot errors, or other issues would be uncovered sufficient to alter the election. But with the president claiming otherwise and two Georgia runoff elections set for January that will decide the Senate majority, plus midterm elections in 2022, most congressional Republicans are backing Trump. The move is purely transactional.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


“Growing Discomfort at Law Firms Representing Trump in Election Lawsuits; Some lawyers at Jones Day and Porter Wright, which have filed suits about the 2020 vote, said they were worried about undermining the electoral system.”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118412>
Posted on November 9, 2020 5:21 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118412> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

NYT<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/business/jones-day-trump-election-lawsuits.html?smid=tw-share>:

Some senior lawyers at Jones Day, one of the country’s largest law firms, are worried that it is advancing arguments that lack evidence and may be helping Mr. Trump and his allies undermine the integrity of American elections, according to interviews with nine partners and associates, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs.

At another large firm, Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, based in Columbus, Ohio, lawyers have held internal meetings to voice similar concerns about their firm’s election-related work for Mr. Trump and the Republican Party, according to people at the firm. At least one lawyer quit in protest.

Already, the two firms have filed at least four lawsuits challenging aspects of the election in Pennsylvania. The cases are pending.

The latest salvo came on Monday evening, when the Trump campaign filed a suit<https://cdn.donaldjtrump.com/public-files/press_assets/2020-11-09-complaint-as-filed.pdf> in federal court in Pennsylvania against the Pennsylvania secretary of state and a number of county election boards. The suit — filed by lawyers at Porter Wright — alleged that there were “irregularities” in voting across the state.
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


“Barr tells DOJ to probe election fraud claims if they exist”<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118408>
Posted on November 9, 2020 4:43 pm<https://electionlawblog.org/?p=118408> by Rick Hasen<https://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>

AP<https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-trump-elections-voting-fraud-and-irregularities-4eeb9e0c97301a23ae8d05b54c3144fd>:

Attorney General William Barr has authorized federal prosecutors across the U.S. to pursue “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities, if they exist, before the 2020 presidential election is certified, despite little evidence of fraud.

Barr’s action comes days after Democrat Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump and raises the prospect that Trump will use the Justice Department to try to challenge the outcome. It gives prosecutors the ability to go around longstanding Justice Department policy that normally would prohibit such overt actions before the election is certified….

In a memo to U.S. attorneys, obtained by The Associated Press, Barr wrote that investigations “may be conducted if there are clear and apparently-credible allegations of irregularities that, if true, could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual State.”

He said any allegations that “clearly not impact the outcome of a federal election” should be delayed until after those elections are certified and prosecutors should likely open so-called preliminary inquiries, which would allow investigators and prosecutors to see if there is evidence that would allow them to take further investigative measures.

Barr does not identify any specific instances of purported fraud in the memo.

“While it is imperative that credible allegations be addressed in a timely and effective manner, it is equally imperative that Department personnel exercise appropriate caution and maintain the Department’s absolute commitment to fairness, neutrality and non-partisanship,” Barr wrote.

Update: Here is the Barr memo<https://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/athena/files/2020/11/10/5fa9dc03c5b623bfac52fc75.pdf>, and it indicates he has already authorized some investigations:

Given this, and given that voting in our current elections has now concluded, I authorize you to pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections in your jurisdictions in certain cases, as I have already done in specific instances. Such inquiries and reviews may be conducted if there are clear and apparently-credible allegations of irregularities that, if true, could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual State. Any investigation of claims of irregularities that, if true, would clearly not impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual State should normally be deferred until after the election certification process is completed. While U.S. Attorneys maintain their inherent authority to conduct inquiries and investigations as they deem appropriate, it will likely be prudent to commence any election-related matters as a preliminary inquiry, so as to assess whether available evidence warrants further investigative steps.

(my emphasis)
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Posted in Uncategorized<https://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>


Rick Hasen
Chancellor's Professor of Law and Political Science
UC Irvine School of Law
401 E. Peltason Dr., Suite 1000
Irvine, CA 92697-8000
949.824.3072 - office
rhasen at law.uci.edu<mailto:rhasen at law.uci.edu>
http://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/hasen/
http://electionlawblog.org<http://electionlawblog.org/>


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