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Government Ethics
Win McNamee/Getty Images
President Trump at Saturday's poorly attended campaign kickoff rally in Tulsa, Okla.
Trump’s latest baseless claim about mail voting sows doubts that could help him
Jun 23 2020
Voting rights groups, good-governance advocates, independent fact checkers and Democratic operatives are working to repel President Trump's latest salvo against voting by mail: His unsubstantiated assertion that foreign governments plan to flood the country with bogus ballots to rig the results and create "the scandal of our times."
The bogus claim intensifies the president's campaign in recent months to sow doubt about the integrity of the November election — mimicking the sort of disinformation campaigns Russia mounted in 2016 and several foreign adversaries are working on now.
And his efforts to undermine the electorate's confidence in the system, under upheaval as states scramble to accommodate a voting-by-mail surge because of the coronavirus, ignores years of work by states to successfully safeguard against fraud, which now includes tracking systems to connect each ballot with a singular voter.
<p>But Trump's unfounded warnings could benefit him two ways. </p><p>They could prompt millions to buy the notion the system is corrupt and then decide not to vote this fall, when the president says he knows high turnout will hurt his re-election prospects.</p><p>At the same time, they could set the stage for the president challenging the results, claiming a count that shows him losing thanks to a flood of absentee votes is surely the consequence of a stolen contest.</p><p>The president's freshest and most dramatic attacks on voting-by-mail, in an all-capitalized tweet Monday, came just before an extensive Associated Press report about Vice President Pence and many senior administration and campaign officials routinely casting absentee ballots.</p><p>One such official, Attorney General Bill Barr, was the first to speculate without evidence about a flood of fake ballots from abroad. "Right now, a foreign country could print up tens of thousands of counterfeit ballots," he told Fox News in an interview that aired Sunday. "Be very hard for us to detect which was the right and which was the wrong ballot." </p><p>The president on Monday retweeted a news report on that and then added his own tweet: "RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!"</p><p>The campaign of Democratic challenger Joe Biden, who has said several times he suspects Trump will seek to delay the election or discredit the results, called Trump's tweets "a desperate attempt to rewrite reality to revive this president's faltering re-election campaign."</p><p>And the Republican-majority Senate Intelligence Committee, in one of its reports issued last year on Russian interference in the 2016 election, concluded that "sitting officials and candidates should use the absolute greatest amount of restraint and caution if they are considering publicly calling the validity of an upcoming election into question." </p><p>Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington conduct elections almost entirely by mail — with virtually all the printing of ballots and envelopes done domestically. Several other states have already taken steps to encourage more people to use mail-in ballots as a way of social distancing on Election Day — including two major battlegrounds, Michigan and Wisconsin, which are sending absentee ballot request forms to almost all voters.</p><p>A steady series of studies have found scant evidence of vote-by-mail fraud and no evidence of the system giving one party's candidates more of an advantage.</p><p>Still, Trump said in a Politico interview published Friday that the "biggest risk" to his re-election is the growing use of mail-in ballots, and suggested his chances may rest on the success of the GOP's efforts to combat a wave of Democratic and civil rights group lawsuits pushing to make absentee voting easier.</p><p>Depending on how that litigation turns out, the consensus expectation is between half and two-thirds of all presidential votes will be cast by mail this fall — either way, far more than the one-in-four share in recent contests. Processing the tidal wave of paper will take days, especially in places not long-prepared for so much remote voting, leaving the results of close races a mystery but providing time for those worried about losing to amplify allegations of foul play.</p><p>Trump himself voted by mail in the Florida primary this year, apparently after listing the White House as his permanent address — which would make him a D.C. resident ineligible for an absentee ballot in the swing state he now calls home.</p><p>Similarly, the AP said Pence uses the governor's residence in Indianapolis, where he last lived three years ago and has no business returning to again, as his address for claiming Indiana absentee ballots ever since — including this month's GOP primary. </p><p>Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has taken advantage of her home state's laws to register to receive an absentee ballot proactively for every election in Michigan, one of the states where Trump is fighting easements on vote-by-mail. </p><p>And, the news service reported, re-election campaign manager Brad Parscale used a liberal interpretation of strict excuse requirements in order to vote absentee in Texas in 2018, while senior Trump campaign officials Michael Glassner and Bill Stepien have repeatedly voted by mail in New Jersey. Campaign advisor Nick Ayers, a former Pence chief of staff, has voted by mail in Georgia since 2014.</p><p>Other news outlets have reported White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany's long history of voting by mail and Barr's use of mail ballots in Virginia last year and in 2012.</p><p>The president is "trafficking in debunked conspiracy theories to undermine the election and keep Americans from casting their ballots," said Ryan Thomas of Stand Up America, a progressive group focused on winning federal funds to help states with mail-in voting this year. While "Trump and his aides clearly have no shame lying to the public about a practice they themselves use, Americans should be disgusted by their reckless attempts to suppress the vote amid an ongoing national crisis."</p>
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Unbreaking America: Justice for Sale
New film argues political corruption prevents criminal justice reform
Jun 19 2020
Griffiths is the editor of Independent Voter News.
Current events have turned everyone's attention to the nation's criminal justice system. Most Americans agree that the system is broken. Yet, in a new "Unbreaking America" film, RepresentUs makes the case that the criminal justice system remains broken because the broken U.S. political system keeps it that way.
"Even though crime rates across the U.S. are going down, America locks up seven times more people now than we did in 1970," actor and RepresentUs Cultural Council member Omar Epps says in the opening. "We, as Americans, put more people behind bars than any other nation in the world — both as a percentage of population and in total numbers."
<p>
According to the Institute for Criminal Policy Research's
<a href="https://www.prisonstudies.org/" target="_blank">World Prison Brief</a>, the incarceration rate in the US is .67 percent, followed by El Salvador, Turkmenistan, Thailand, Palau, Rwanda, and Cuba.<br>
</p><p>
The United States also has a prison population of 2.3 million, which is substantially higher than China's 1.6 million, and China has a total population of approximately 1.4 billion people. Epps says if nothing changes oOne in 17 white men will be incarcerated in their lifetime along with one in six Latinos and one in four Black men.
</p><p>
"And we're putting women in jail even faster than we're locking up men," Epps points out.
<br>
</p><p>
It's important to remember that as incarceration increases, crime rates are dropping. In fact, according to the
<a href="https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=dcdetail&iid=245" target="_blank">Bureau of Justice Statistics</a>, violent crime dropped a staggering 71 percent from 1993 to 2018.
</p><p>
Epps says that while the nation is divided on many things, nearly all Americans agree that the system needs to be fixed. Yet, there is one thing standing in the way of substantive reform: the U.S. political system.<br>
</p><p>
As pointed out in a previous "Unbreaking America"
<a data-linked-post="2641554135" href="https://thefulcrum.us/big-picture/representus-anti-corruption-video" target="_blank">film featuring actor Michael Douglas</a>, no matter how much support something has there is a near zero percent chance that action will be taken by policymakers. Why? Because the incentive structure is skewed. <br>
</p><p>
Members of Congress are not incentivized to address the will of the people, Douglas argues. In fact, according to Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter, there is <a href="https://www.hbs.edu/competitiveness/Documents/why-competition-in-the-politics-industry-is-failing-america.pdf" target="_blank">virtually zero correlation</a> between acting on the will of voters and politicians getting re-elected. This is because the political system is controlled by private, gain-seeking organizations and entities that act out of their own self-interest. </p><p>
The latest film, which also features prominent voting rights activist Desmond Meade, points to a number of incentives that are outweighing the interests of voters:<br>
</p><ul class="ee-ul">
<li>The private, for-profit prison industry, which incarcerates 10 percent of U.S. prisoners and nearly three-quarters of immigrant detainees, spent $64 million in the last 10 years lobbying Congress for stricter laws, longer sentences and stronger enforcement policies, while they make $6 billion in revenue annually.</li>
<li>Many judges are elected by voters, and have been shown to give harsher sentences around election time. In areas that use partisan primaries to elect judges, the incentive structure is even worse because to keep their seat they have to appeal to a small partisan base.</li>
<li>As much as 60 percent of political donations for key judicial positions come from "lawyers, lobbyists, and business interests."</li>
<li>Corporations use inmates as practically free labor instead of hiring paid workers. After the BP oil spill, for instance, inmates were used to clean up the mess. They paid inmates pennies on the dollar and qualified for a $2,400 tax kickback for every inmate used.</li>
</ul><p>
(RepresentUs sources all of this information in the video.)<br>
</p><p>
"It's going to be hard to fix the problems," Meade explains, "unless we first fix America's corrupt political system."
<br>
</p><p>
Meade, who rose to prominence in the democracy reform movement by leading efforts to restore felons' voting rights in Florida, says this means "banning lobbyist gifts to politicians, closing the revolving door between Congress and industry," and enfranchising more voters "so politicians actually represent us." He says all of these ideas are part of one proposed that RepresentUs is encouraging, primarily at the state and local levels.<br>
</p><p>
The
<a href="https://anticorruptionact.org/whats-in-the-act/" target="_blank">American Anti-Corruption Act</a> not only has broad support across the political spectrum, but it has policy proposals to stop political bribery, end secret money, change the elections systems (its proposals include open primaries, vote-at-home options, term limits. and ranked-choice voting), and strengthen enforcement of anti-corruption laws already on the books.<br>
</p><p>"Let's be honest, America is facing a crisis and we need to act with an urgency commensurate to the severity of the problem," says Epps. "That's on you, it's on me, it's on all of us." <br></p><p>
Epps breaks down the choice before voters as he closes out the video:
<br>
</p><p>
"Here's the bottom line: Nearly every issue that matters to you, or that matters to the next generation of Americans, is blocked by our corrupt political system, and if you do nothing or if I do nothing, nothing is going to change. But if each of us does something, we can win. Together."
<br>
</p><p>
<em>Visit </em><a href="https://ivn.us/" target="_blank"><em>IVN.us</em></a><em> for more coverage from Independent Voter News.</em>
</p>
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Pool/Getty Images
Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, announced that he will introduce legislation on Thursday to boost protections for the network of inspectors general which identify wrongdoing within federal agencies.
Grassley steps up to Trump with new bill protecting inspectors general
Jun 18 2020
Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, a longtime champion of government oversight, plans to introduce legislation Thursday to strengthen the inspectors general system in the wake of several firings by President Trump.
While Grassley is usually supportive of Trump's positions, he had become increasingly dissatisfied with the president's removal of IGs, putting a hold on several presidential nominations to force the administration to provide more detailed explanations for the dismissals.
<p>Congress in 1978 created the inspectors general system, in which each federal agency has an internal watchdog looking for wasteful spending and employee misconduct. It has gradually grown to more than 70 IGs.</p><p>Grassley, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/chuck-grassley-why-im-introducing-a-bill-to-help-protect-inspectors-general/2020/06/17/236897f4-b0d2-11ea-8758-bfd1d045525a_story.html" target="_blank">who announced his plans</a> in a Washington Post op-ed, noted that the most recent update to the law governing inspectors general was approved in 2008 and requires the president to provide Congress with advance notice of the firing of an inspector general along with reasoning for the dismissal.</p><p>Trump has fired several IGs in recent months, criticized others and attempted to undermine the oversight components included in massive spending legislation passed to help offset the economic damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic.</p><p>Two of the most notable firings occurred in April and May. First Trump fired Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community, because he forwarded the whistleblower's complaint that led to Trump's impeachment earlier this year.</p><p>Then Steve Linick, the State Department's IG, was fired while investigating the conduct of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.</p><p>President Barack Obama also violated removal requirements, Grassley wrote, in his firing of the AmeriCorp inspector general without providing an explanation.</p><p>Grassley said his new legislation will beef up the mandate that the notification of firing by the president include a "substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons."</p><p>His legislation also attempts to address concerns that Trump has named unqualified candidates as temporary inspectors general by requiring that acting IGs be selected from the senior ranks within the watchdog community.</p><p>Grassley also hopes to safeguard ongoing investigations during the transition in inspectors general.</p><p>"It's really this simple: If inspectors general are doing good work, they should stay; if not, they should go. If the president is going to remove an inspector general, there'd better be a good reason," Grassley wrote.</p><p>Grassley has served in the Senate since 1981. He represents Iowa, where recent polling shows Trump in a dead heat with former Vice President Joe Biden.</p>
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Alex Wong/Getty Images
A new report from Issue One Action shows how the wealthy special interests have spread their influence under the Trump administration.
The D.C. swamp has gotten swampier under Trump, report finds
Jun 17 2020
Four years after Donald Trump campaigned on "draining the swamp," wealthy special interests wielding power in Washington have only become more pervasive.
Spotlight on the Swamp, a new project launched last week by the bipartisan advocacy group Issue One Action, details how lobbying activity and spending has increased during the Trump administration, the "pay to play" system has persisted and D.C.'s ethical standards have fallen. (Issue One Action is affiliated with Issue One, which is incubating — but has no editorial say in — The Fulcrum.)
With the November election 20 weeks away, and Americans grappling with the compounded crises of Covid-19 and racial injustice, efforts to make the system more equitable and representative for everyone have become even more crucial.
<p>To determine the extent to which the power of special interests have grown during Trump's presidency, Issue One Action's project posed three questions:<br></p><ol class="ee-ol"><li>Has lobbyist influence been reduced and the revolving door slowed?</li><li>Has donor access and the "pay to play" system been reduced?</li><li>Is D.C. more ethical and accountable?</li></ol>
<p>"The answer to all three is a resounding no," the report found.</p>
<p>The number of registered lobbyists and the money they've spent has increased every year since 2017. Last year, nearly 12,000 lobbyists spent $3.47 billion. More than 280 lobbyists have been hired to work in the president's administration, and Trump has named more lobbyists to Cabinet-level positions than former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush did in their eight-year terms.</p>
<p>Trump also hasn't addressed the growing presence of "<a data-linked-post="2636225613" href="https://thefulcrum.us/dark-money" target="_blank">dark money</a>" in elections. Since the Supreme Court's 2010 <a data-linked-post="2636209592" href="https://thefulcrum.us/citizens-united" target="_blank">Citizens United</a> decision, undisclosed donors have spent more than $1 billion. Additionally, more than 3,100 conflicts of interest within the president's administration have been flagged over the last three years.</p>
<p>"The facts are abundantly clear. More than ever, Washington, D.C., is a place where wealthy special interests buy access and influence and have an outsized say in government policymaking," said Issue One Action Executive Director Meredith McGehee.</p>
<p>While these problems didn't start with Trump, they have escalated during his presidency, according to Issue One Action, which outlines <a href="https://www.spotlightontheswamp.org/solutions" target="_blank">two dozen solutions</a> the Trump administration or Congress could take to reduce the influence of special interests and strengthen federal accountability standards. For instance, Congress could pass legislation to extend a mandated "cooling off" period between government officials leaving office and starting lobbying jobs. Other suggestions include releasing the White House visitor logs and nominating more qualified candidates to the Federal Election Commission.</p>
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