Will the GOP make every US state a swing state. Reminder: no US state has online voting, even though you may be able to request forms online.
“Finally for the first time, elections are totally senseless,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace based in Moscow. Almost no one is allowed to participate, he added, referring to the opposition.
MOSCOW — Russians began voting on Friday in the first nationwide elections since the invasion of Ukraine in a climate of wartime censorship and repression, with the Kremlin trying to assure the public that it was business as usual.
The vote for local and regional governments across the country includes the first municipal-level elections in the capital of Moscow since 2017, when the opposition won a sizable minority of seats despite the Kremlin’s dominance of the political system and accusations of fraud. But the ranks of the opposition have since been depleted even further. Many anti-government politicians have fled the country while others have been arrested or blocked from running by the election commissions.
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The current elections are being held over three days on Friday, Saturday and Sunday — a schedule that Kremlin opponents say makes the vote more vulnerable to fraud because election observers are hard-pressed to monitor the polls for the entire duration. The government is also allowing people to vote online, making it easier to falsify ballots, according to critics.
Nearly all regions of the country are choosing either municipal representatives, regional lawmakers or governors or some combination of those offices.
www.nytimes.com/...
Unfounded and debunked claims that the results of the U.S. 2020 general election, when Democrat Joe Biden defeated former U.S. president Donald Trump, saw significant voter fraud continue to circulate online as the country gears up for midterm elections scheduled for November.
This article aims to provide information and context on how voter fraud in the U.S. is not a “widespread” issue, as some online commentators claim, but made exceedingly rare by existing safeguards.
A Reuters report ahead of the 2020 election containing evidence that voter fraud is rare can be found ( here ).
Speaking to Reuters, Wendy Weiser ( here ), vice president of the Democracy Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice (here) said that “the incidence of fraud and misconduct is infinitesimally rare.”
Weiser highlighted that there are “strong safeguards at every stage” of the voting process to guarantee its integrity.
Likewise, Thomas Hicks, commissioner of the independent and bipartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) ( here ) ( www.eac.gov/about-the-useac ) said that the “actual incidence of voter fraud is relatively small and for the most part is unintentional.”
For example, after the 2020 election, a months’-long analysis by the AP found fewer than 475 cases of potential voter fraud in the six battleground states challenged by Trump (here). For context, there were over 3.3 million votes casted for the presidential run in Arizona alone, the state AP found had the highest number of potential fraud cases (198) ( here ). The AP also found no signs of a coordinated effort and reported that “virtually every case was based on an individual acting alone to cast additional ballots.”
Studies compiled by the Brennan Center ( here ) ( here ), which reviewed cases of voter fraud (prior to the 2020 general election), also found voter fraud is rare.
As another example, an analysis by Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School and currently a White House Senior Policy Advisor for Democracy and Voting Rights ( here ) found 31 credible cases of voter impersonation between 2000 and 2014, out of a billion ballots ( here ).
www.reuters.com/...