And we are among the vast majority of Americans who support election-integrity measures. She denied that race had motivated her actions in Georgia. An Associated Press investigation found that, in , a hundred and eighty-two of the 3.
Four of the ballots have led to criminal charges. But the consensus among nonpartisan experts is that the amount of fraud, particularly in major races, is negligible. What explains, then, the hardening conviction among Republicans that the race was stolen?
Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the A. He won non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America. Alarmism about election fraud in America extends at least as far back as Reconstruction, when white Southerners disenfranchised newly empowered Black voters and politicians by accusing them of corruption. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act of , some white conservatives were frank about their hostility to democracy.
As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down. Like many conservatives of her generation, Cleta Mitchell was galvanized by the disputed election , in which George W. Bush and Al Gore battled for weeks over the outcome in Florida. She repeatedly spoke out on behalf of Bush, who won the state by only five hundred and thirty-seven votes.
A dispute over recounts ended up at the Supreme Court. Few people noticed at the time, but in that case, Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas , hinted at a radical reading of the Constitution that, two decades later, undergirds many of the court challenges on behalf of Trump. In a concurring opinion, the Justices argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors.
Birtherism, which attempted to undercut a landmark election in which the turnout rate among Black voters nearly matched that of whites, was a progenitor of the Big Lie. A year later, Mitchell successfully defended Trump, who had been exploring a Presidential bid, against charges that he had taken illegal campaign contributions.
She had been recommended to Trump by Chris Ruddy , the founder of the conservative media company Newsmax, which was also a Mitchell client. In the mid-two-thousands, Goddard recalled, Republican leaders erected many barriers aimed at deterring Latino voters, some of which the courts struck down.
But the Supreme Court ruling initiated a new era of election manipulation. Around this time, Mitchell became a director at the Bradley Foundation. Among the board members were George F. Will, the syndicated columnist, and Robert George, a Princeton political philosopher known for his defense of traditional Catholic values. By , Will, who has been a critic of Trump, had stepped down from the Bradley board. The foundation, meanwhile, has given nearly three million dollars to programs that George established at Princeton.
The board includes Art Pope , the libertarian discount-store magnate, who serves on the board of governors at the University of North Carolina.
He could not be reached for comment. The Alliance, whose membership is secret, distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money to many left-leaning causes. But, when it comes to influencing elections, the contrast with the Bradley Foundation is clear.
Mitchell has professional ties to several of the groups that received money, although she says that she has abstained from voting on grants to any of those organizations. One recipient of Bradley money is True the Vote, a Texas-based group that, among other things, trains people to monitor polling sites. Mitchell has served as its legal counsel, and hacked documents show that she advocated to the I. To earn such a designation, a group must file federal tax forms promising not to engage in electoral politics.
But, as with many voter-fraud allegations, the details of the case were less than advertised. The accusation involved a school-board election in a rural Black community in which a campaign had collected dozens of absentee ballots, in violation of the law.
The charges were eventually dismissed. The story linked the group and three other conservative nonprofits to at least sixty-one election lawsuits since Reuters noted that, during the same period, the four groups, along with two others devoted to election-integrity issues, have received more than three and a half million dollars from the Bradley Foundation.
Based in Indiana, it has become a prolific source of litigation; in the past year alone, it has brought nine election-law cases in eight states. It has amassed some of the most visible lawyers obsessed with election fraud, including Mitchell, who is its chair and sits on its board.
On January 4, , he visited the White House, where he spoke with Trump about ways to void the election. In a nod to the Independent Legislature Doctrine, Eastman and Trump tried to persuade Vice-President Mike Pence to halt the certification of the Electoral College vote, instead throwing the election to the state legislatures.
Pence was not persuaded. Eastman, who recently retired, under pressure, from Chapman University, and was stripped of his public duties at another post that he held, at the University of Colorado Boulder, told me he still believes that the election was stolen, and thinks that the audits in Arizona and other states will help prove it.
The Bradley Foundation declined to comment on him, or on Mitchell, when asked about its role in funding their activities. Both men have argued strenuously that American elections are rife with serious fraud, and in they got a rare opportunity to make their case, when Trump appointed them to a Presidential commission on election integrity. Within months, after the commission was unable to find significant evidence of election fraud, it acrimoniously disbanded. Adams and von Spakovsky, who are members of what Roll Call has termed the Voter Fraud Brain Trust, have nevertheless continued their crusade, sustained partly by Bradley funds.
At Heritage, von Spakovsky has overseen a national tracking system monitoring election-fraud cases. But its data on Arizona, the putative center of the storm, is not exactly alarming: of the millions of votes cast in the state from to , only nine individuals were convicted of fraud. Each instance involved someone casting a duplicate ballot in another state.
There were no recorded cases of identity fraud, ballot stuffing, voting by non-citizens, or other nefarious schemes. The numbers confirm that there is some voter fraud, or at least confusion, but not remotely enough to affect election outcomes. In , when he lost the popular vote by nearly three million ballots, he insisted that he had actually won it, spuriously blaming rampant fraud in California.
More than a year before the election, Cleta Mitchell and her allies sensed political peril for Trump and began reviewing strategies to help keep him in office. But, arguably, the Constitution permits state legislatures to take this authority back. Legislators could argue that an election had been compromised by irregularities or fraud, forcing them to intervene. In August, , e-mails show, Mitchell co-chaired a high-level working group with Shawnna Bolick, a Republican state representative from Phoenix.
Among the topics slated for discussion was the Electoral College. The working group was convened by alec , the corporate-backed nonprofit that transmits conservative policy ideas and legislation to state lawmakers. The Bradley Foundation has long supported alec , and Mitchell has worked closely with it, serving as its outside counsel until recently. Then, early this year, Bolick introduced a bill proposing a radical reading of Article II of the Constitution, along the lines of the Independent Legislature Doctrine.
Bolick has since announced her candidacy for secretary of state in Arizona. Her husband, Clint Bolick, is an Arizona Supreme Court justice and a leader in right-wing legal circles.
Clarence Thomas, one of the three U. Supreme Court Justices who signed on to the concurring opinion in Bush v. If Shawnna Bolick wins her race, she will oversee future elections in the state. And, if the Supreme Court faces another case in which arguments about the Independent Legislature Doctrine come into play, there may now be enough conservative Justices to agree with Thomas that there are circumstances under which legislatures, not voters, could have the final word in American elections.
Months before the vote, Lisa Nelson, the C. A video of the proceedings was obtained by the investigative group Documented, and first reported by the Washington Spectator. In her speech, Nelson noted that she was working with Mitchell and von Spakovsky. A younger member of the organization, Charlie Kirk—a founder of Turning Point USA , which promotes right-wing ideas on school campuses—injected a note of optimism. He suggested that the pandemic, by closing campuses, would likely suppress voting among college students, a left-leaning bloc.
Turning Point, which has received small grants from the Bradley Foundation, is headquartered in Arizona, and it has played a significant role in the radicalization of the state, in part by amplifying fear and anger about voter fraud. In the summer of , Rally Forge helped Turning Point use social media to spread incendiary misinformation about the coming elections.
In September, the Washington Post reported that Rally Forge, on behalf of Turning Point Action, had paid teen-agers to deceptively post thousands of copycat propaganda messages, much as Russia had done during the campaign. Adult leaders had instructed the teens to tweak the wording of their posts, to evade detection by technology companies. In , the company fabricated a politician—complete with a doctored photograph—to run as an Independent write-in candidate against Andy Biggs, a far-right Republican seeking an open congressional seat in Arizona.
The Guardian has shown how Rally Forge also created a phony left-wing front group, America Progress Now, which promoted Green Party candidates online in , apparently to hurt Democrats in several races. In October, , Rally Forge was banned from Facebook, and its president, Hoffman, was permanently suspended by Twitter. Undeterred, he ran as a pro-Trump Republican for the Arizona House—and won. This past spring, at a private gathering outside Tucson, Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action—the politically active arm of the Heritage Foundation—singled out Hoffman for praise.
Another bill by Hoffman banned state election officials from accepting outside donations to help pay for any aspect of election administration, including voter registration. There is nothing more important than ensuring every American is confident their vote counts—and we will do whatever it takes to get there. Hoffman, who formerly served as a town-council member in Queen Creek, a deeply conservative part of Maricopa County, did not respond to requests for comment.
Nevertheless, the video went viral. The next day, as Trump furiously insisted he had won an election that he ended up losing by roughly seven million votes, protesters staged angry rallies in Maricopa County, where ballots were still being counted. Adding an aura of legal credibility to the conspiracy theory, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation president, immediately filed suit against Maricopa County, alleging that a Sharpie-using voter he represented had been disenfranchised.
He regularly volunteered in his community, played masters football and was an avid West Coast Eagles fan. But underneath the 'family man' facade was a sexual predator who kept his depraved desire to rape and murder young women hidden from those closest to him for decades — a trait criminologist Aaron Sell said is common in organised serial killers.
Edwards' impulses first revealed themselves when he was a teenager. At the ages of 19 and 21 he attacked random women, but ended up abandoning the assaults after they fought back.
One of Edwards' rape fantasies, titled Chloe , had been edited just days before his arrest. It detailed a woman being abducted, bound, gagged and raped in a strikingly similar manner to one of his victims. Former girlfriends from the s shared similar experiences.
Edwards was a polite man who never tried to push their boundaries and never held a grudge when the relationship came to an end. Bradley Edwards receiving a community award prior to his arrest from then-deputy premier Eric Ripper.
Credit: Facebook. His first wife — who had an affair and fell pregnant by another man — cast Edwards as an emotionally stunted man, claiming she never saw him angry or upset about her affair or their subsequent divorce. He did not ask me to return. He [never voiced any upset about it] that I can remember," she said.
At the height of the hunt to catch Edwards in the late '90s, FBI profiler David Caldwell told a press conference the man police were looking for was likely someone who had recently found themselves living alone.
He's my next-door neighbour. Surely it can't be? Twenty years later, when Edwards was arrested, family members came to his defence, his nephew Adam Edwards describing him as "the most giving person who would drop everything to help you out". Professor Sell said organised serial killers often appeared normal to those around them but were typically psychopaths.
An Adjunct Research Fellow at Griffith University and specialist in offender profiling, Professor Sell said serial killers also often owned collections of disturbing pornography. And presumably he would have a lot of blood on him. On the morning police stormed Edwards' Kewdale home, he sat slumped in his hallway, dishevelled, surrounded by detectives.
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