On today’s BradCast, as we wait for the House to send Donald Trump’s Articles of Impeachment to the Senate, and we wait for the Senate to begin his impeachment trial, and we wait for Tuesday’s night final Democratic Presidential debate before the Iowa Caucuses, and we wait for primary voting to begin in earnest next month, the fight for voting rights and for the way voters will cast their votes has been long underway, and it cannot wait any longer. [Audio link to complete show is posted below summary.]
We’ve got several major court victories today in the fight for voting rights, and a follow-up to yesterday’s exclusive revelations of the massive failures discovered in the new, 100% unverifiable touchscreen voting systems set for first-time use in the critical 2020 Presidential election cycle in Los Angeles County, the nation’s largest voting jurisdiction.
First up today, a Wisconsin state courts of appeals panel has stepped in to put a freeze on the massive voter purge of some 200,000 voters, as demanded by a rightwing legal outfit and a state court judge who was apparently willing to do their bidding. A three-judge panel on Wisconsin’s District 4 Court of Appeals put the brakes on Ozaukee County Circuit Court Judge Paul Malloy’s order to immediately remove the voters and on his $250/day fine against each of the three Democratic appointees to the state’s Elections Commission who oppose the purge.
The voters who failed to respond to a verification postcard sent by the Commission were disproportionately found to be located in the state’s most Democratic-leaning jurisdictions. They had been initially set for removal from the rolls in 2021, until Wisconsin’s so-called Institute for Law and Liberty filed suit and found a very friendly judge in Malloy. He recently ordered the immediate removal of the voters, despite opposition from both the Democratic Commissioners and the state’s Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul. The ruling by the appellate court to protect as many as 200,000 voters is key in a battleground state said to have been won by Trump by just 23,000 voters in 2016.
Today’s decision in WI somewhat echoes a ruling by a federal judge in New York State late last week, who ordered that voters determined to be “inactive” due to a failure to respond to mailings or bad information from the U.S. Postal Service, must be listed in poll books on Election Day. A failure of so-called “inactive” voters to appear in poll books at state precincts led to chaos and disenfranchised voters during the 2016 election in New York.
During the course of last year’s trial in this matter, it was revealed that both members of the State Board of Elections and New York City Board of Elections found that many voters on the “inactive” list should not have even been on the list in the first place. Federal District Court Judge Alison J. Nathan ruled that State Board of Elections’ procedures were in violation of both the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause and the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.
Then, we turn to some of the fall-out from the hornets nest we helped kick over on Monday’s BradCast, when we detailed major security defects discovered by state certification testers in Los Angeles’ new “Voting Solutions for All People” (or VSAP) voting system. The brand-new $300 million system, as we discussed in details on yesterday’s program, is yet to be certified for use in California by Sec. of State Alex Padilla, but he is expected to sign off of it despite the massive failures discovered by the analysts that could put the 2020 elections in jeopardy in the nation’s largest voting jurisdiction, thanks to the completely unverifiable and highly flawed new touchscreen voting systems.
Today, we share some of the responses we’ve received following yesterday’s blockbuster show and some of the public comments sent by listeners to the Sec. of State seeking rejection of the new system in favor of hand-marked paper ballots for all voters. Letters must be sent to VotingSystems@sos.ca.gov before the Public Comment period for certification ends this Monday, January 20, at 5pm Pacific Time!
Finally, we’re joined by Desi Doyen for the latest Green News Report, with some news on a family feud and potential climate change shake-up at Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp in the wake of the devastating Australian bushfires that have ravaged the country for weeks; new details on the extraordinary costs of our climate crisis; and the weekly arrests of climate action champion Jane Fonda…
Great decision on the inactive voters case. I was pleased to provide testimony, which I see was cited in the decision.