This article on the details of vote-rigging in Wisconsin is worth your time… the real problem and the reason for 2016’s perfect storm election is that an ensemble of efforts makes the GOP attack on democracy work.
It can at its most mundane, be the idiotic lawfare trying to stop adult entertainers from talking about illicit affairs, to the illicit affairs involving moving the money to hush them… At its more dangerous it involves the movements of dark money to support PACs and agitprop. And then there’s the onshore/offshore criminals supporting hacking, phishing, and other campaign mischief.
More interesting is Russian targeting of Wisconsin in 2016 combined with GOP gerrymandering. Swing states were no dark secret, but now that even more coordination has been revealed, President Dennison’s claim of no collusion continue to ring hollow. And then there’s “The president's whopping lie that "millions voted illegally" in 2016”.
To say that Republicans are facing a toxic political environment heading into the 2018 midterm elections would be a massive understatement. Donald Trump is the most unpopular president at this stage of his term in modern American history. Just three in 10 Americans have a favorable view of the Republican Party, and Democratic voters' enthusiasm to vote in 2018 tops Republican voters' by 17 points.
[...]
Since Trump's election, Republicans have accelerated their efforts to make it harder to vote. The president's whopping lie that "millions voted illegally" in 2016 led to the creation of a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which was run by figures like Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who have repeatedly spread false claims about voter fraud in order to pass policies that restrict access to the ballot. The commission was abruptly disbanded by Trump in early January after facing 15 federal and state lawsuits for violating a wide range of privacy and transparency laws, stemming from the commission's unprecedented request for sensitive voter data from all 50 states.
Despite the setback, Trump's Justice Department has reversed the Obama administration's opposition to voter-ID laws and voter purging. And Republican-controlled statehouses have passed more new voting restrictions in 2017 than in 2016 and 2015 combined. "It's not a coincidence that states that were badly gerrymandered during the last round of redistricting, like Texas, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, also passed some of the most oppressive voter-ID laws," says Holder. "They are two parts of the same attack by the Republicans: They have systematically attacked Americans' right to vote."
[...]
Nationally, $3 billion in outside money has been spent since the Citizens United decision, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, with at least $800 million of it from entities that don't have to disclose their donors (hence the term "dark money"). In 2017, Walker was head of the Republican Governors Association, which can accept unlimited contributions. In the first half of that year, the organization brought in a record haul of $36 million, $15 million more than Democrats. The Koch brothers have already pledged to spend $400 million on 2018 races.
www.rollingstone.com/...
Putin was unmoved by an indictment filed by special counsel Robert Mueller last month that accused 13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies of interfering in the election — including supporting Trump's campaign and "disparaging" Hillary Clinton's.
Mueller is investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin.
"So what if they're Russians?" Putin said of the people named in last month's indictment. "There are 146 million Russians. So what? ... I don't care. I couldn't care less. ... They do not represent the interests of the Russian state."
Putin even suggested that Jews or other ethnic groups had been involved in the meddling.
"Maybe they're not even Russians," he said. "Maybe they're Ukrainians, Tatars, Jews, just with Russian citizenship. Even that needs to be checked. Maybe they have dual citizenship. Or maybe a green card. Maybe it was the Americans who paid them for this work. How do you know? I don't know."
Asked whether he was concerned about Russian citizens attacking U.S. democracy, Putin replied that he had yet to see any evidence that the alleged interference had broken Russian law.
www.nbcnews.com/…
and the unhingery continues
Perhaps the above was what Prexy Dennison was really angry about...