2020 truthers are ringing doorbells in a bizarre attempt to prove Donald Trump won the election that he actually lost.
Kelly Weill
Reporter
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
Election vigilantes are knocking on doors, filming homeowners, and interrogating them on their 2020 votes. But at least some of these pro-Trump groups say they’ve started screening out volunteers with “pedophilic leanings.”
More than a year after Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, his diehard fans remain convinced that he is still the rightful president, even though their claims are flimsier than they were in December 2020. Repeated election reviews, including those by pro-Trump conspiracy theorists, have upheld President Joe Biden’s victory. So now, election denialists are pitching themselves into voter “canvassing,” a tactic that involves ringing doorbells and asking people how they voted.
Voters say it’s weird. Trump fans say it’s their next hope at overturning the election.
“This lie that the election was rigged has already done a great deal of damage and continues to do damage in a number of different ways,” Sean Morales-Doyle, acting director of the Brennan Center For Justice’s Democracy Program, told The Daily Beast. “Going around door to door and continuing to spread this misinformation can only do more harm.”
Until late September, election “audits” were the far right’s great hope for reinstalling Trump. Then their favorite audit—a chaotic, Republican-led, conspiracy-fueled review of Maricopa County, Arizona’s 2020 results—revealed that Biden had in fact received more votes than Trump.
Following that flop, Trump fans searched for reasons why pro-Biden votes were actually suspect. They latched onto a “canvassing” report, released by a failed GOP candidate earlier that month, that purported to show hundreds of thousands of suspicious votes or voter registrations. In fact, as Arizona journalists and officials quickly noted, the report cited virtually no evidence for its claims. The initial report’s one specific example (voters supposedly registered to a vacant lot) was soon debunked, with experts noting that the site was a legitimate home with three occupants.
Still, with audits losing popularity, some prominent election denialists have championed canvasses as the next best thing.
“Given the enemy’s intentional acts to sabotage the audits, I am told that the best course of action is canvassing,” QAnon-friendly attorney Lin Wood posted on Telegram late last month. He cautioned that some of the people whose homes canvassers visited might be enemies trying to trick them.
“But the questions asked in the canvassing process are important and the enemy may try to mislead you,” Wood wrote. (He doubled down on the canvassing-over-audits message several days later.)
Some of the shift toward canvasses, previously noted by Trapezoid of Discovery, appears driven by recent schisms in the far right. Wood, and several Telegram-based canvassing promoters, are currently on the outs with other fringe figures like former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, who helped fund the Maricopa County audit.
And outside Maricopa County, audit efforts have stalled, due to lack of participation from elected officials, who have to sign off on the costly and controversial reviews. Canvassing, which requires nothing more than a team of dedicated door-knockers, has fewer barriers.
In some states, it’s been underway for months.
In August, Pennsylvania residents reported visits from members of Audit The Vote Pennsylvania, a right-wing group that has tried for months to spearhead an Arizona-style audit of Pennsylvania’s election. During those visits, self-identified “election integrity” teams reportedly asked locals about their 2020 votes, prompting some of those residents to lodge complaints with local government officials.
Some of those officials described the tactic as an attempt to harass voters. “This is 100% voter intimidation and attempts to suppress voters in the future,” Chad Baker, chair of York County, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party, told the York Daily Record in August.
ATVPA has previously disavowed calls to violence that stemmed from those audit efforts. “The commissioners in Tioga County are receiving death threats,” an ATVPA leader wrote on Telegram this summer. (Tioga County was one of the group’s targeted areas of supposed election malfeasance.) “We never ever would condone violence and we would never advocate for that.”
The group has hit some canvassing barriers. In October, a moderator on the group’s Telegram expressed frustration that, when they tried questioning people at a nursing home, they were only able to speak with two residents. But during a late-September call-in to a conservative radio show, ATVPA founder Toni Shuppe claimed her group was canvassing “on the ground in 20 counties” claiming they had found issues with voting registrations and records. “We easily have enough anomalies to reverse the election,” Shuppe said.
The day after Shuppe’s comments, voters in Nebraska reported getting door-knocks, too. Matt Longley, a registered Democrat in Omaha told The Daily Beast that three women knocked on his door in September to ask questions about how the household voted. The women asked who lived in the house and how many occupants had voted in 2020.
“They reiterated, several times, that they did not want or need to know who [we] voted for,” Longley said. “They were asking for how I voted (by mail) and were interested to know if I thought my vote was actually counted (I did). I told them that there was a website that one could go to confirm receipt of their vote. I got a look at one of their clipboards and saw an e-mail address that ended in ‘nebraskaguardians.com’. I thought it was odd and it was pretty obvious what kind of agenda they had, but they did seem nice enough, and they seemed oddly insistent that they not know who I voted for.”
The Nebraska Guardians appear to be a group that promotes conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and the 2020 election online. Although the group did not return a request for comment, it appears linked to the “Voter Accuracy Project,” a group that was reported to be knocking on doors in early October. (The Guardians’ Telegram profile now calls itself “Nebraska State Canvassing” and promotes VAP materials.) Omaha’s 6News reported that the canvassers were not visiting homes across the city—only in “specific neighborhoods.”
Some of those efforts are part of larger interstate networks.
A Salt Lake City Tribune report this week revealed internal documents for a group called the “Utah Voter Verification Project,” which is connected to the Colorado-based election denial group “U.S. Election Integrity Project.”
Although the UVVP maintains a low online profile and could not be reached for comment, residents of Hurricane, Utah, recently told local officials that members of the group had been visiting homes and filming encounters. The group’s training manual “highly recommend[s]” that canvassers “record audio and/or video of activity (cell phone, body cam, ect.).”
Those recordings are legal. Utah is a one-party consent state, meaning that a person can film another without the subject’s permission. “We can record anyone without telling them. We don’t need permission,” one UVVP trainer said, according to the Tribune.
The UVVP training manual makes multiple references to the U.S. Election Integrity Project. UVVP volunteers who sign the training manual agree to give all their data to the project. The manual also indicates that the UVVP runs its communications through the project’s group chat (on a platform called Basecamp) and that the project conducts background checks on UVVP applicants. The USEIP did not return a request for comment.
The U.S. Election Integrity Project is one of the best-connected canvassing groups, with ties to the “three-percenter” militia movement and Sherronna Bishop, a former campaign manager for Rep. Lauren Boebert. But by its own admission, the group has previously had issues with its background checks.
Its training manual describes an old vetting process, stating that “this process was in place for many months, until we learned (roundaboutly) that there were a couple of people in our group, who were volunteering for our events, who had a criminal history of sexual misconduct.”
The group says it will no longer disclose its protocol for background checks, which it appears to conduct for UVVP applicants. “It’s unfortunate that we must check volunteers for pedophilic leanings, but welcome to 2021,” the manual reads.
The project continued its Colorado home visits through November, but indicated that it hoped to release a report on its findings soon, the Colorado Times Recorder reported. Other groups, like Pennsylvania’s ATVPA have announced that they will unveil their own canvassing reports soon.
Morales-Doyle, of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Project, said the broader threat of canvassing efforts is not intimidating individual voters at their doorsteps, but inspiring policies that chip away at fair elections.
“What’s most frightening to me is not that it’s a rallying cry for people to go out and vote for a certain candidate, but that it’s a rallying cry for actions that undermine democracy,” he said.
“This is the lie that justified a wave of passages of restrictive voting laws across the country, the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations. This is the lie that motivated people to go attack the Capitol on Jan. 6.”
FILE PHOTO: Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a joint news conference with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis following their meeting at the Bocharov Ruchei state residence in Sochi, Russia December 8, 2021. Sputnik/Evgeny Odinokov/Kremlin via REUTERSREUTERS
President Vladimir Putin has lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago as the demise of what he called “historical Russia” and said the economic crisis that followed was so bad he was forced to moonlight as a taxi driver.
Putin’s comments, released by state TV on Sunday, are likely to further fuel speculation about his foreign policy intentions among critics, who accuse him of planning to recreate the Soviet Union and of contemplating an attack on Ukraine, a notion the Kremlin has dismissed as fear-mongering.
“It was a disintegration of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union,” Putin said of the 1991 breakup, in comments aired on Sunday as part of a documentary film called “Russia. New History”, the RIA state news agency reported.
“We turned into a completely different country. And what had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost,” said Putin, saying 25 million Russian people in newly independent countries suddenly found themselves cut off from Russia, part of what he called “a major humanitarian tragedy”.
Putin also described for the first time how he was affected personally by the tough economic times that followed the Soviet collapse, when Russia suffered double-digit inflation.
“Sometimes (I) had to moonlight and drive a taxi. It is unpleasant to talk about this but, unfortunately, this also took place,” the president said.
Putin, who served in the Soviet-era KGB, has previously called the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was ruled from Moscow, as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, but his new comments show how he viewed it specifically as a setback for Russian power.
Ukraine was one of 15 Soviet republics and Putin used a lengthy article published on the Kremlin website this year to set out why he believed Russia’s southern neighbor and its people were an integral part of Russian history and culture. This view is rejected by Kyiv as a politically motivated and over-simplified version of history.
The West has accused Russia of massing tens of thousands of troops near Ukraine in preparation for a possible attack as soon as January. The Group of Seven wealthy democracies warned Moscow on Sunday of massive consequences and severe costs if it attacked Ukraine.
The Kremlin has said Russia has no plans to launch a fresh attack on Ukraine and that the West appears to have convinced itself of Moscow’s aggressive intentions based on what it calls false Western media stories.
Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014 and has backed separatists who took control of a swath of eastern Ukraine that same year and who continue to fight Ukrainian government forces.
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky dashed off a letter to President Joe Biden today pleading for expeditious federal relief aid to victims of a deadly 200-mile tornado that struck his state Friday.
That was of course the right to do. But Paul is a strange one to have done it.
Throughout his two terms in the U.S. Senate, Paul has prided himself as a Tea Party fiscal conservative willing to say no to the most milquetoast causes if federal spending is involved. Opposing federal disaster relief is one of his pastimes.
In 2017, Paul was one of just 17 senators to oppose an emergency $15.3 billion federal relief bill for victims of Hurricane Harvey. It had wreaked havoc similar to Friday’s tornado, but not in Kentucky.
In 2013, Paul was one of 31 Republican senators who voted against a $50.5 billion relief aid package for Hurricane Sandy — “after previously disaster aid for their home states,” as reported by ThinkProgress.org.
In 2011, Paul’s first year in the Senate, he was among 38 Republicans voting against a major FEMA funding package despite the fact — not lost upon publicintegrity.org — that his own state of Kentucky had been the nation’s largest recipient of FEMA funding ($293 million), mostly because of a 2009 ice storm.
A decade later, Paul wrote to Biden like the two were old liberal spendthrift friends.
“Last night and early this morning devastating storms swept across multiple states, including Kentucky. A single tornado from that system may have been on the ground for over 200 miles, and a large swath of the Commonwealth has been severely hit.
“As the sun comes up this morning we will begin to understand the true scope of the devastation, but we already know of loss of life and severe property damage.
“The governor of the Commonwealth has requested federal assistance this morning, and certainly further requests will be coming as the situation is assessed. I fully support those requests and ask that you move expeditiously to approve the appropriate resources for our state.”
Paul’s stinginess with federal aid to people outside of Kentucky has hardly been limited to aid responding to physical disasters.
In the very first coronavirus Senate aid package — a mere $8 billion passed on March 5, 2020 — Paul stood out as the lone Senator to vote no.
His complaint: Congress never cuts other spending as the direct offset he insists upon having for federal aid not earmarked for Kentucky:
“This isn’t the first time we’ve had emergency money,” Paul complained after the first COVID-19 spending passed. “This is probably the tenth time we’ve done emergency money in the past two or three years. So everything is an emergency.”
Rand Paul begs Biden for federal aid to Kentucky tornado victims — after a career of voting 'no' when others needed the same https://t.co/kvmA5TOmhB
Weird how the folks saying that #JussieSmollett proves progressives are just salivating to find evidence of racism in America sound just like the folks saying that #MeToo is a bunch of lying women making false accusations of sexual assault/harassment.
Law enforcement deserves no less skepticism and no more deference than any other entity or source. In fact, because of their powers over life and death, they deserve more skepticism and less deference. We have to do better. https://t.co/Q16Qh2b4d7
Why are journalists still, after all the evidence that law enforcement lies, that crime stats are trending down, that law enforcement has a vested interest in stories about rising crime, still allow law enforcement to drive so much coverage? https://t.co/nSW7DWMtWt
I made this cat tree with an animal cracker box at the center of it months ago. No cat entered, until finally Ollie broke the Cat Code of Ignoring Cat Trees in Proportion to How Much They Cost and/or How Much Labor Went Into Putting Them Up, and took a nap in it this afternoon. pic.twitter.com/Ma7tiXfS1E
I was surprised at the commenters who not only agreed with this cartoon but cheered it on. The misinformation in the US is overwhelming and dangerous. Let’s address each panel starting with the top left. Rittenhouse posed with white supremacist where he was flashing the white power finger sign while grinning seemingly real happy. Rittenhouse was declared not guilty of murder but he did kill two people after taking an assault style rifle to a place he did not belong because he knew that possible violence could happen and then antagonized others there to the point they attacked him causing him to fire his weapon to defend himself. I think he shouldn’t have been able to use the self defense argument but the court allowed it.
Second panel. If you watched the videos carefully Nick Sandmann did what he is accused of, he stepped down into the path of Phillips while his buddies cheered him on. Phillips couldn’t back up nor move sideways but Sandmann could. He knew that and what he was doing. A large teen blocking the path of a smaller older man with a cheering crowd at his side, you tell me if that is not deliberate intimidation.
Third panel. There is documented evidence of the cooperation between the tRump campaign and the Russians. There was obstruction documented in the Mueller report. the fact is no one investigated collusion as Mueller had already been told he couldn’t indict tRump and the term collusion has no specific legal meaning in criminal law; there’s no such criminal charge. But again there is no doubt of the tight way the tRump campaign worked with the Russians.
Fourth panel. And what boss would not fire an employee that lied to them? Hugs
Photo: Patrick Ouellette/Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images
The Supreme Court on Wednesday heard a case involving just 4,800 students in rural Maine. But because of the way the Court seems certain to rule, the case will affect everyone in America. The reason is a single word: discrimination.
On its face, the case, Carson v. Makin is an outlier. Maine has a unique system for students in far-flung rural areas: If there’s no public school available, then the state will pay around $11,000 to families toward private-school tuition, so long as the private school is not religious in nature. A consortium of right-wing organizations sued the state on behalf of two families who wanted to send their children to religious schools on the public dime. They argued that Maine’s policy amounts to anti-religious discrimination, a violation of the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause. And based on today’s oral arguments, they will win.
This result would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Until quite recently, state funding of religious schools was understood to be unconstitutional. Then, over time, it became permissible in the context of school-choice programs. Then, in 2020, in the case of Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, it became mandatory in such programs, since, the Court held, if the program included secular private schools, it had to include religious ones.
And now it looks as though it will be mandatory even for public-school-replacement programs like Maine’s, even if the schools in question require students to attend chapel, discriminate against LGBTQ students (or bar them from attending), teach religious dogma, and present all subjects (such as evolution) from a religious point of view — as the schools in the Maine case do.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett made it clear in their comments that not only is it constitutional for taxpayers to subsidize this religious education, but it is unconstitutional not to do so if a similar benefit is available to students at secular private schools. (True to his newly irrelevant status on the Court, Chief Justice John Roberts seemed eager to find a compromise, but the five justices to his right did not.)
The hinge of the case is “discrimination.” At one point, Justice Kavanaugh said that “discrimination against all religions, as opposed to secular, is a kind of discrimination that this Court has said is odious to the Constitution.” But wait, Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart replied for the Biden administration, “the question is whether to decline to fund religious instruction is discrimination.”
Nearly every conservative justice said that it is. At a later point in the argument, for example, Justice Kavanaugh said the religious parents “are seeking equal treatment, not special treatment; ‘Treat me the same as the secular parent next door.’”
“You’re saying equal,” Stewart replied, “but they’re seeking a benefit different from the one Maine is willing to provide. Maine is willing to provide a rough analog to a public-school education. It’s not willing to provide inculcation in religion.”
In fact, Carson is the latest in a long series of cases that have reversed the previous understanding of discrimination.
In the 2014 Hobby Lobby case, for example, a family-owned corporation sought to discriminate against women by excluding contraception from their health-insurance plans on religious grounds. But the Court found that, in fact, it was Hobby Lobby that was being discriminated against — by not being allowed to discriminate. Similar cases followed. In Masterpiece Cakeshop (2018), the Court held that Colorado discriminated against a religious baker by not letting him discriminate against LGBTQ people, or at least not taking his religious claims seriously enough. And in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia (2021), the Court held that Philadelphia discriminated against a Catholic foster-care agency by not letting it discriminate against gay parents. Notice a pattern?
Now, in Carson, the Court is poised to say that Maine is discriminating against religious parents (or schools) by not directing taxpayer money to schools, which, themselves, may discriminate against others — including LGBTQ people, who are barred from admission or employment by the two schools at issue, and members of other religions. At one of the schools in question, a listed objective of a social-studies class is to “refute the teachings of the Islamic religion with the truth of God’s word.” But, say the Court’s religious conservatives, it would be discrimination for taxpayers not to pay for that.
For this Court, nothing — not a woman’s right to access health insurance, not a queer person’s right to be admitted to school, and not Maine’s right to not fund sectarian indoctrination — is more important than the right of self-professed religious people to practice their religion as they see fit and, if necessary, get paid by the government to do so.
Kentucky’s governor has declared an emergency over the state’s chronic nursing shortage amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic
Kentucky’s governor declared the state’s chronic nursing shortage to be an emergency Thursday, taking executive actions amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic to boost enrollment in nurse-training programs.
Kentucky is projected to need more than 16,000 additional nurses by 2024, to help fill gaps caused by retirements and people leaving the profession, Gov. Andy Beshear said. His new executive order includes “immediate actions that we believe will provide some relief,” the Democratic governor said. “Obviously long term there is a lot to do.”
The nurse staffing emergency in Kentucky reflects a national epidemic created by the pandemic. Health leaders say the problem is twofold: Nurses are quitting or retiring, exhausted or demoralized by the crisis. And many are leaving for lucrative temporary jobs with traveling-nurse agencies.
Such severe shortages threaten “not only the health of patients but the entire health care delivery system,” Beshear said at a news conference.
He added that Kentucky is operating 12% to 20% short of “needed nursing volume.”
“In the midst of a pandemic, and in the midst of a shortage this dire, we’ve got to do things a little bit differently, to make sure that we get the results we need at the time that we need them the most,” the governor said.
His executive order aims to get more students into Kentucky nursing programs.
It requires the state Board of Nursing to approve requests for enrollment increases from schools that show sufficient resources to accommodate more students, he said.
Nursing schools will be expected to report the number of vacant student slots to the state nursing board each month, the governor said. Those vacancies will be posted on the board’s website to let prospective students know where spots are available.
The order aims to allow nursing schools to open new campuses more quickly, provided they have sufficient resources, he said. Nursing schools at full capacity will be required to refer qualified student applicants to other schools with vacancies, he said.
And schools unable to accommodate their full student capacity due to staffing shortages will be expected to notify state officials, with the goal of helping them hire more faculty, he said. Also, an advisory committee will be formed to offer additional proposals to overcome nursing shortages.
The governor also signaled that his upcoming state budget package will include proposals to attract and retain nurses. His plan will include some form of loan forgiveness or scholarship program for nurses who agree to remain in Kentucky for a designated amount of time, Beshear said. The governor will present his budget plan to the Republican-dominated legislature in early 2022.
Also, nurses who worked throughout the pandemic will be included in his proposal to award essential-worker bonuses. Beshear said he wants to use $400 million in federal pandemic aid to award the extra pay to a range of frontline workers employed throughout the pandemic.
Beshear made another pitch for the bonuses in hopes of winning support from GOP lawmakers.
“This isn’t about process, this isn’t about party,” he said. “This is about the people that have kept us alive, kept us safe, kept us healthy, kept us fed, kept us safely in our home with our lights and our heat on during this pandemic. Saying no to this program is saying no to them.”
It’s the second straight day the governor took executive action to confront a nagging state problem.
On Wednesday, Beshear awarded a 10% pay raise to Kentucky’s social service workers. The pay boost is aimed at halting the widespread loss of frontline employees demoralized by low salaries and bulging workloads who are serving vulnerable children and adults.
The pay increase takes effect Dec. 16 for social workers and family support services staff, the governor said. It’s the result of his action to reclassify their jobs to a higher grade.
Kentucky is projected to need more than 16,000 additional nurses by 2024 to help fill gaps caused by retirements and people leaving the profession. https://t.co/QnfqGWL349
Without Trump in the race, DeSantis is the GOP front-runner. But could he win it all?
New polling shows Gov. Ron DeSantis would lose the popular vote to either President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris if the Florida Governor squared off against either Democrat in 2024.
A Harvard/Harris Poll asked: “If the 2024 election for President were held today and it was between Ron DeSantis, the Republican, and Joe Biden, the Democrat, who would you vote for?”
Biden took a 43% share of respondents; DeSantis took 36%, with an additional 21% saying they were unsure. The Governor had 37% support against Harris, who had 42%. Again, 21% had not formed an opinion.
If Donald Trump weren’t running again, DeSantis would only be the nominee in this poll’s reckoning.
In a field including Trump, the former President commands 67% of the vote. DeSantis is a close third in this poll with 8% of the vote, one percentage point behind former Vice President Mike Pence.
Trump has discussed the potential of DeSantis running against him in recent days, telling a Florida radio audience that he wasn’t worried.
“If he wanted to run, that’s OK with me. I think we’d win by a lot,” Trump said.
In a field excluding the former President, DeSantis consolidates support in the hypothetical. The Governor drew support from 30% of respondents, five percentage points ahead of Pence.
The poll also measured the Governor’s net favorability, rating him as a +1, the second highest polling Republican. U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina was a +4.
DeSantis’ favorable rating of 32% put him between two leading Democrats: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer at 31%, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at 35%. His unfavorable number of 31% was between that of two other leading Democrats: Sen. Joe Manchin at 33% and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema at 29%
DeSantis continues to maintain he’s not interested in running for President, but he also continues to act like someone exploring a campaign, with frequent national travel and television hits.
Photo: Patrick Ouellette/Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images
Scottie's Playtime 