GOP Election Officials Say Trump’s Voter Suppression Exec Order Won’t Hold Up In Court

Hello and welcome to La Franchise!

Two current and former Republican election officials have now cast a chill over President Trump’s new initiative to require the creation of dystopian state-by-state citizenship lists and reduce the use of mail-in ballots in the upcoming midterm elections.

As we reported last week, the likely unconstitutional executive order has already been the subject of five separate lawsuits filed by voting rights advocates, Democratic leaders in Congress and nearly two dozen state attorneys general.

“It’s probably going to be banned very quickly,” said Stephen Richer, the former Republican clerk of Maricopa County, Arizona, who served in the aftermath of the 2020 election and was in office during all the various investigations, recounts and audits of how the election was conducted in that county.

In an interview Sunday on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” Richer and current Republican Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt expressed concerns that Trump’s latest executive order, combined with recent efforts by his administration officials to investigate the 2020 elections in key U.S. counties, could further erode voter confidence in how states administer elections there.

“My biggest concerns are twofold,” Schmidt, whose state AG is part of the aforementioned lawsuit to overturn the order, said during the interview. “First, things like this cause a certain level of confusion. We want voters to know that the election will be free, fair, safe and secure, and that everyone knows the rules before going into it. So, confusion is never a positive thing, unless you’re looking to sow distrust in the outcome of an election.”

Richer, who has expressed opposition to the administration’s recent seizure of election records in Maricopa County, reiterated his belief that Trump is simply trying to resurrect Big Lie conspiracy theories.

“The year 2020 was the subject of a massive investigation,” Richer said. “In Arizona alone, we’ve done 11 different independent investigations and audits. The Arizona Attorney General has already spent over 10,000 hours of work investigating, but this seems to be a trend, and I don’t know where to end, other than sowing more confusion, sowing more doubt in the election process.”

These two men are just the latest in the election administration community to publicly denounce the dangers of Trump’s executive order, but also to allay concerns about its legal viability.

“People will eventually realize there’s nothing there,” Richer said.

More on other election news below. Let’s dig.

—Nicole LaFond

Wisconsin Supreme Court enjoys increased liberal edge ahead of expected election conflicts

Wisconsin, once known as the testing ground for various right-wing experiments (memorably described by Charlie Pierce in 2014 as “the old state now doing business as the Midwestern subsidiary of Koch Industries and managed by Scott Walker”), has seen quite an upset in recent years, with liberals first winning the governor’s mansion and then four successive seats on the state Supreme Court. The latest victory came Tuesday, when Chris Taylor, the Democratic-backed Supreme Court nominee, trounced Republican-backed Maria Lazar by winning more than 60 percent of the vote.

Wisconsin’s judicial elections are an abortion story and a labor story, but perhaps most importantly in the age of Trump, it’s a voting rights story. The state was aggressively painted under Walker in 2011, maps that the newly liberal high court threw out in 2023. The wrangling over districts continues, but just as important is the state court’s role in judging attempts to spoil upcoming elections. Wisconsin, a purple state, is perpetually the scene of countless disputes over which votes can or cannot be counted; Milwaukee became a particular fixation for right-wing activists as Trump attempted to steal the 2020 election. Lazar was supported by many of these conspiracy theorists.

Tuesday’s election widens the Liberal majority in the field, from 4-3 to 5-2. Equally remarkable is the exceptional margin by which Taylor won and the fact that his victory cements a pro-democracy majority on the court through 2030.

-John Light

The California sheriff who is messing with the redistricting vote results is, of course, an extremist

The Constitutional Sheriffs Movement, Claremont and the Oath Keepers are all involved here.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco recently seized hundreds of thousands of ballots cast during California’s recent special election to survey voters on their appetite for mid-cycle redistricting. The referendum, called Proposition 50, was approved by California voters in November as an amendment to the state constitution that, in essence, temporarily allowed state officials to bypass normal protocol for drawing congressional district boundaries and approving new maps. It’s one of several efforts by Democratic-led states across the country to undo the damage caused by the election manipulation that Trump began when he successfully pressured Texas and a few other states to redraw their districts to help Republicans maintain their slim majority in the House of Representatives in the midterms.

Bianco allegedly seized 650,000 ballots cast in that election, just weeks after the FBI raided Fulton County’s 2020 election ballots and issued a subpoena to the Arizona State Senate for records related to the 2020 Maricopa County election. The California Supreme Court on Wednesday temporarily stayed the alleged investigation into Bianco while the state’s high court hears a legal challenge brought by California’s Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta.

Some have described his actions as a campaign strategy. Bianco is currently the leading Republican candidate in California’s gubernatorial race and said in an interview with The Washington Post that if questions were raised about the validity of the primary election he is running in, he would consider re-entering the ballots. But even a cursory look at his recent history reveals that he is cut from the same cloth as election deniers and other far-right extremists.

Bianco was previously a member of the Oath Keepers, the far-right militia group whose members have been charged with seditious conspiracy related to their role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He simultaneously suggested he didn’t remember joining, while defending the militia as “protecting the Constitution.” He also has ties to the Constitutional Sheriffs movement, an extremist group that believes sheriffs hold ultimate law enforcement authority, including the right to interfere in elections. His ties to groups that espouse much of the far-right rhetoric that makes up the MAGA movement also run deeper than that, according to Democracy Docket:

He was also named “2023 Sheriff of the Year” by the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank that trains sheriffs to combat “wokeness.”

On top of all that, Bianco is apparently a prolific poster on LinkedIn. In the last month alone, he has posted comments suggesting “some people should never be allowed to vote” and claimed on the social media platform that Democrats have “created an environment where cheating and illegal voting keeps them in power.”

We’ll keep you posted on how his own election interference plan plays out in the final months of his gubernatorial bid.

—Nicole LaFond

Red State Lawmakers Mess Up Citizens’ Ballot Initiative Process

Republican state lawmakers are at it again. Angered that voters are actually trying to engage in the democratic process and exercise their rights, lawmakers in Missouri, the Dakotas, Utah and beyond are trying to make it harder for citizen initiatives to pass, or even get on the ballot.

The push comes as residents of red states have increasingly used ballot initiatives to circumvent their conservative representatives, voting, as the New York Times reports, to expand Medicaid, raise the minimum wage and guarantee access to abortion. According to the Times,

• Lawmakers in South Dakota, Utah and North Dakota are supporting ballot measures that would raise the threshold for approval of citizen initiatives from a simple majority to 60 percent.
  • South Dakota lawmakers are also giving voters the chance to overturn their own successful ballot measure to expand access to Medicaid. Thanks guys!
• Missouri goes further by proposing a measure that would require citizen-sponsored amendments to the state constitution to win in every district in the U.S. House of Representatives. Another measure would very nicely allow voters to reverse their successful 2024 initiative to establish abortion rights in the state.

Florida deserves the unfortunate superlative of state with the most blatantly undemocratic practices. The state already had a 60% threshold for ballot amendments to be approved, killing two 2024 efforts to protect abortion rights and legalize marijuana in the state, even though a majority of Floridians voted for those policies. It is also the only state that charges a fee to validate each signature collected in support of an initiative. The Republican Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) made the situation worse last year, when they passed a truly draconian law that imposes criminal penalties on those who collect signatures on ballots without new registration or training. The law also increases signature validation fees “from an average of 70 cents per signature to $3.50,” according to the Times, requiring a campaign “to pay about $4.5 million before [an amendment] is even included on the ballot.

Senator Carlos Smith called the measure a “fatal blow to direct democracy” in the Sunshine State. A coalition of organizations sued over the law, and the federal lawsuit recently concluded with a final decision pending.

—Allegra Kirkland