Too Big To Ignore: Will of the People Weekly

Fifteen days from Election Day, Trump has turned an unverified list of 20,000 California voters into an arrest operation. His Justice Department gave the state 48 hours to set aside those voters’ mail ballots, sued when it refused, warned Los Angeles County officials that counting the ballots would make them accomplices to a federal crime, and by Monday morning his agents were reportedly making arrests from the same list. Trump’s DHS says the other state-by-state citizenship lists it is building are still coming soon, and his allies spent the week talking openly about martial law and commandeering ballots. But voters are showing up anyway: millions turned out for nearly 3,000 early-vote rallies on Saturday, Georgia shattered its first-day turnout record, and early voting opens today in Texas and four more states. What happens next is up to us, not them. When all of us show up, the will of the people wins. Try and stop us.

In the Administration

• Trump’s agents are making arrests from his administration’s unverified California voter list, with early voting underway. Homeland Security task force officers arrested more than two dozen people in the Los Angeles area Monday morning over alleged noncitizen registration or voting, reportedly chasing targets drawn from the same 20,000-name list, as the region’s top federal prosecutor announced “Operation Protect the Vote”: “Evidence of noncitizens voting. More to come.”

• Trump is threatening to jail California officials if they count ballots his administration wants thrown out. After California refused a 48-hour demand to set aside the flagged voters’ mail ballots, a Friday letter from his Justice Department warned Los Angeles County officials that tabulating them means they “risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime,” and Trump posted that they “will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!”

• Trump’s DHS says its state-by-state citizenship lists are coming soon, and no court has blocked them. Under his March executive order, the department is compiling a list of every adult citizen in each state to hand election officials, a national voter registry in all but name that could fuel mass challenges to registrations and ballots. The database behind it flagged 2,724 Texans as potential noncitizens last year, and at least 578 turned out to be citizens.

• Trump’s DHS kept airing his $20 million taxpayer-funded ad campaign after a federal court ordered it off the air. A judge blocked the ads, which praise Trump with money Congress appropriated for other purposes, on the evening of Oct. 11, and 570 more spots ran into the next morning, leaving the government’s own lawyer apologizing in court: “It was my bad.” The order now runs through Nov. 8, five days past the election, with arguments on a longer block set for Nov. 4.

• Trump’s allies are openly planning for martial law and ballot seizures if they decide the midterms were rigged. On a streamed call for election activists, Peter Ticktin, Trump’s childhood friend and the lawyer for convicted former clerk Tina Peters, said “there would have to be martial law” after “another rigged election,” then told Axios: “They’ll probably need to be commandeering of ballots and election equipment.” Another participant wants Trump to invoke the National Emergencies Act to force changes to how states run elections.

In Congress

• Senate Democrats are sending more than 100 election observers into nine battleground states. With Congress gone until Nov. 9, Senate Democrats announced that staffers trained to document interference will watch voting, counting and certification, starting in Georgia, Ohio and Michigan, with the destinations subject to change as threats develop.

• Three senators are demanding the Justice Department promise in writing that it will not seize ballots or voting machines. Sens. Alex Padilla, Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse told Attorney General Todd Blanche to reaffirm immediately that the department will not interfere with the midterms, writing that “Any DOJ action that could spoil an election would be one of the most serious constitutional violations imaginable,” with written answers due Oct. 29.

In the Courts

• United States v. California (U.S. District Court, Central District of California)
  • Trump’s DOJ sued Thursday to block California from counting mail ballots from 20,000 voters it labels likely noncitizens. The list it delivered has no Social Security numbers, no stated methodology, and addresses scattered across California. A similar federal list in Nevada shrank from 15,903 names to 185 to zero once the state checked it. Civil rights groups moved to intervene within a day, and with no judge yet assigned and no hearing set, the case could move at any moment.

• Common Cause v. U.S. Department of Justice (U.S. District Court, D.C.)
  • On Friday night, Trump’s DOJ appealed the ruling that struck down its nationwide voter purge program and asked the court to let the program keep running in the meantime, insisting that “there is no such policy,” despite defending it for months. The groups that won have warned the court that the California suit may violate the Oct. 9 order barring the department from using the voter data it collected, so rulings could come any time this week.

• League of Women Voters v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security (U.S. District Court, D.C.)
  • Three voter advocacy groups sued Thursday to force DHS to delete roughly 99 million voter records it amassed from at least 47 states, including 50.6 million passed over from the DOJ and 48.4 million more routed through senior DHS official Heather Honey, a longtime promoter of election conspiracy theories. The suit argues Congress created the department “not to conduct a voter-fraud dragnet centered on the private voting information of millions of Americans.”

• North Carolina Alliance for Retired Americans v. North Carolina State Board of Elections (U.S. District Court, Middle District of North Carolina)
  • A federal judge heard arguments last Wednesday on whether North Carolina’s new mail-ballot rules survive this election, with more than 30,000 absentee ballots already cast under them. The GOP-controlled state board’s September rules let counties disqualify ballots over signature mismatches and envelope-sealing errors, with no chance to fix a rejection that comes late. The judge said he would rule “as soon as possible,” so a decision could land mid-voting.

• Peoples v. Tarrant County (Tarrant County District Court, Texas)
  • A state judge declined to restore the 92 Election Day polling places that Republican commissioners closed in Texas’ third-largest county, even after the county’s own elections administrator testified that nobody examined the impact on minority voters and that he used no methodology to ensure equal access. Texas early voting opens today with those sites still closed.

In the States

North Carolina

• Days before early voting opened, the state board sent letters to 1,392 voters flagged as possible noncitizens by the error-prone federal SAVE database, and officials have confirmed that nobody is being removed and recipients can vote without responding.

Texas

• Early voting opens today under a second state-caused registration backlog, with about 15,000 stalled address updates landing on county offices days after they finished clearing the hundreds of thousands of registrations stranded by the state’s driver’s license portal failure.

Wisconsin

• A Dane County (Madison) court ruled that ballots in election officials’ hands by 8 p.m. on Election Day cannot be rejected over the officials’ own delivery mistakes, reversing the state commission’s decision to toss 23 ballots delayed by an administrator’s error.

Upcoming Elections & Deadlines

Monday, October 19

• Early voting begins in Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, South Carolina, and Texas
• Voter registration deadlines in Alabama, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota (no same-day voter registration offered)
• Advance voter registration deadlines in California, Iowa, Michigan, and Wyoming (later or Election Day registration still offered)
• Absentee ballot request deadline in Iowa and Oklahoma, 5 p.m.

Tuesday, October 20

• Mail-ballot request deadlines in Kentucky, New Mexico, and North Carolina

Wednesday, October 21

• Early voting begins in West Virginia
• Mail-ballot request deadline in Missouri

Thursday, October 22

• Early voting begins in Maryland
• Mail-ballot request deadlines in Florida and Indiana

Friday, October 23

• Mail-ballot request deadlines in Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia
• Voter registration deadline in Nebraska (no same-day voter registration offered)
• Advance voter registration deadlines in Idaho, Utah, and Virginia (same-day or Election Day registration still offered)

Saturday, October 24

• Early voting begins statewide in Florida, New Jersey, and New York
• Voter registration deadlines in Massachusetts and New York (no same-day voter registration offered)
• Mail-ballot request deadlines in Alaska and New York
• The Postal Service’s extraordinary measures for ballot mail begin nationwide, running through Election Day