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Five months after taking over the federal agency responsible for the health of all Americans, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to overhaul an obscure but vital program that underpins the nation’s childhood immunization system.

Depending on what he does, the results could be catastrophic.

In his crosshairs is the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a system designed to provide fair and quick payouts for people who suffer rare but serious side effects from shots — without having to prove that drugmakers were negligent. Congress created the program in the 1980s when lawsuits drove vaccine makers from the market. A special tax on immunizations funds the awards, and manufacturers benefit from legal protections that make it harder to win big-money verdicts against them in civil courts.

Kennedy, who founded an anti-vaccination group and previously accused the pharmaceutical industry of inflicting “unnecessary and risky vaccines” on children for profits, has long argued that the program removes any incentive for the industry to make safe products.

In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Kennedy condemned what he called corruption in the program and said he had assigned a team to overhaul it and expand who could seek compensation. He didn’t detail his plans but did repeat the long-debunked claim that vaccines cause autism and suggested, without citing any evidence, that shots could also be responsible for a litany of chronic ailments, from diabetes to narcolepsy.

There are a number of ways he could blow up the program and prompt vaccine makers to stop selling shots in the U.S., like they did in the 1980s. The trust fund that pays awards, for instance, could run out of money if the government made it easy for Kennedy’s laundry list of common health problems to qualify for payments from the fund.

Or he could pick away at the program one shot at a time. Right now, immunizations routinely recommended for children or pregnant women are covered by the program. Kennedy has the power to drop vaccines from the list, a move that would open up their manufacturers to the kinds of lawsuits that made them flee years ago.

Dr. Eddy Bresnitz, who served as New Jersey’s state epidemiologist and then spent a dozen years as a vaccine executive at Merck, is among those worried.

“If his unstated goal is to basically destroy the vaccine industry, that could do it,” said Bresnitz, who retired from Merck and has consulted for vaccine manufacturers. “I still believe, having worked in the industry, that they care about protecting American health, but they are also for-profit companies with shareholders, and anything that detracts from the bottom line that can be avoided, they will avoid.”

A spokesperson for PhRMA, a U.S. trade group for pharmaceutical companies, told ProPublica in a written statement that upending the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program “would threaten continued patient access to FDA approved vaccines.”

The spokesperson, Andrew Powaleny, said the program “has compensated thousands of claims while helping ensure the continued availability of a safe and effective vaccine supply. It remains a vital safeguard for public health and importantly doesn’t shield manufacturers from liability.”

Since its inception, the compensation fund has paid about $4.8 billion in awards for harm from serious side effects, such as life-threatening allergic reactions and Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune condition that can cause paralysis. The federal agency that oversees the program found that for every 1 million doses of vaccine distributed between 2006 and 2023, about one person was compensated for an injury.

Since becoming Health and Human Services secretary, Kennedy has turned the staid world of immunizations on its ear. He reneged on the U.S. government’s pledge to fund vaccinations for the world’s poorest kids. He fired every member of the federal advisory group that recommends which shots Americans get, and his new slate vowed to scrutinize the U.S. childhood immunization schedule. Measles, a vaccine-preventable disease eliminated here in 2000, roared back and hit a grim record — more cases than the U.S. has seen in 33 years, including three deaths. When a U.S. senator asked Kennedy if he recommended measles shots, Kennedy answered, “Senator, if I advised you to swim in a lake that I knew there to be alligators in, wouldn’t you want me to tell you there were alligators in it?”

Fed up, the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical societies sued Kennedy last week, accusing him of dismantling “the longstanding, Congressionally-authorized, science- and evidence-based vaccine infrastructure that has prevented the deaths of untold millions of Americans.” (The federal government has yet to respond to the suit.)

Just about all drugs have side effects. What’s unusual about vaccines is that they’re given to healthy people — even newborns on their first day of life. And many shots protect not just the individuals receiving them but also the broader community by making it harder for deadly scourges to spread. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that routine childhood immunizations have prevented more than 1.1 million deaths and 32 million hospitalizations among the generation of Americans born between 1994 and 2023.

To most people, the nation’s vaccine system feels like a solid, reliable fact of life, doling out shots to children like clockwork. But in reality it is surprisingly fragile.

There are only a handful of companies that make nearly all of the shots children receive. Only one manufacturer makes chickenpox vaccines. And just two or three make the shots that protect against more than a dozen diseases, including polio and measles. If any were to drop out, the country could find itself in the same crisis that led President Ronald Reagan to sign the law creating the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in 1986.

Back then, pharmaceutical companies faced hundreds of lawsuits alleging that the vaccine protecting kids from whooping cough, diphtheria and tetanus caused unrelenting seizures that led to severe disabilities. (Today’s version of this shot is different.) One vaccine maker after another left the U.S. market.

At one point, pediatricians could only buy whooping cough vaccines from a single company. Shortages were so bad that the CDC recommended doctors stop giving booster shots to preserve supplies for the most vulnerable babies.

While Congress debated what to do, public health clinics’ cost per dose jumped 5,000% in five years.

“We were really concerned that we would lose all vaccines, and we would get major resurgences of vaccine-preventable diseases,” recalled Dr. Walter Orenstein, a vaccine expert who worked in the CDC’s immunization division at the time.

A Forbes headline captured the anxiety of parents, pediatricians and public health workers: “Scared Shotless.” So a bipartisan group in Congress hammered out the no-fault system.

Today, the program covers vaccines routinely recommended for children or pregnant women once Congress approves the special tax that funds awards. (COVID-19 shots are part of a separate, often-maligned system for handling claims of harm, though Kennedy has said he’s looking at ways to add them to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.)

Under program rules, people who say they are harmed by covered vaccines can’t head straight to civil court to sue manufacturers. First, they have to go through the no-fault system. The law established a table of injuries and the time frame for when those conditions must have appeared in order to be considered for quicker payouts. A tax on those vaccines — now 75 cents for every disease that a shot protects against — flows into a trust fund that pays those approved for awards. Win or lose, the program, for the most part, pays attorney fees and forbids lawyers from taking a cut of the money paid to the injured.

The law set up a dedicated vaccine court where government officials known as special masters, who operate like judges, rule on cases without juries. People can ask for compensation for health problems not listed on the injury table, and they don’t have to prove that the vaccine maker was negligent or failed to warn them about the medical condition they wound up with. At the same time, they can’t claim punitive damages, which drive up payouts in civil courts, and pain and suffering payments are capped at $250,000.

Plaintiffs who aren’t satisfied with the outcome or whose cases drag on too long can exit the program and file their cases in traditional civil courts. There they can pursue punitive damages, contingency-fee agreements with lawyers and the usual evidence gathering that plaintiffs use to hold companies accountable for wrongdoing.

But a Supreme Court ruling, interpreting the law that created the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, limited the kinds of claims that can prevail in civil court. So while the program isn’t a full liability shield for vaccine makers, its very existence significantly narrows the cases trial lawyers can file.

Kennedy has been involved in such civil litigation. In his federal disclosures, he revealed that he referred plaintiffs to a law firm filing cases against Merck over its HPV shot in exchange for a 10% cut of the fees if they win. After a heated exchange with Sen. Elizabeth Warren during his confirmation proceedings, Kennedy said his share of any money from those cases would instead go to one of his adult sons, who he later said is a lawyer in California. His son Conor works as an attorney at the Los Angeles law firm benefiting from his referrals. When ProPublica asked about this arrangement, Conor Kennedy wrote, “I don’t work on those cases and I’m not receiving any money from them.”

In March, a North Carolina federal judge overseeing hundreds of cases that alleged Merck failed to warn patients about serious side effects from its HPV vaccine ruled in favor of Merck; an appeal is pending.

The Vaccine Injury Compensation Program succeeded in stabilizing the business of childhood vaccines, with many more shots developed and approved in the decades since it was established. But even ardent supporters acknowledge there are problems. The program’s staff levels haven’t kept up with the caseload. The law capped the number of special masters at eight, and congressional bills to increase that have failed. An influx of adult claims swamped the system after adverse reactions to flu shots became eligible for compensation in 2005 and serious shoulder problems were added to the injury table in 2017.

The quick and smooth system of payouts originally envisioned has evolved into a more adversarial one with lawyers for the Department of Justice duking it out with plaintiffs’ attorneys, which Kennedy says runs counter to the program’s intent. Many cases drag on for years.

In his recent interview with Carlson, he described “the lawyers of the Department of Justice, the leaders of it” working on the cases as corrupt. “They saw their job as protecting the trust fund rather than taking care of people who made this national sacrifice, and we’re going to change all that,” he said. “And I’ve brought in a team this week that is starting to work on that.”

The system is “supposed to be generous and fast and gives a tie to the runner,” he told Carlson. “In other words, if there’s doubts about, you know, whether somebody’s injury came from a vaccine or not, you’re going to assume they got it and compensate them.”

Kennedy didn’t identify who is on the team reviewing the program. At one point in the interview, he said, “We just brought a guy in this week who’s going to be revolutionizing the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.”

The HHS employee directory now lists Andrew Downing as a counselor working in Kennedy’s office. Downing for many years has filed claims with the program and suits in civil courts on behalf of clients alleging harm from shots. Last month, HHS awarded a contract for “Vaccine Injury Compensation Program expertise” to Downing’s firm, as NOTUS has reported.

Downing did not respond to a voicemail left at his law office. HHS didn’t reply to a request to make him and Kennedy available for an interview and declined to answer detailed questions about its plans for the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. In the past, an HHS spokesperson has said that Kennedy is “not anti-vaccine — he is pro-safety.”

While it’s not clear what changes Downing and Kennedy have in mind, Kennedy’s interview with Carlson offered some insights. Kennedy said he was working to expand the program’s three-year statute of limitations so that more people can be compensated. Downing has complained that patients who have certain autoimmune disorders don’t realize their ailments were caused by a vaccine until it’s too late to file. Congress would have to change the law to allow this, experts said.

A key issue is whether Kennedy will try to add new ailments to the list of injuries that qualify for quicker awards.

In the Carlson interview, Kennedy dismissed the many studies and scientific consensus that shots don’t cause autism as nothing more than statistical trickery. “We’re going to do real science,” Kennedy said.

The vaccine court spent years in the 2000s trying cases that alleged autism was caused by the vaccine ingredient thimerosal and the shot that protects people from measles, mumps and rubella. Facing more than 5,000 claims, the court asked a committee of attorneys representing children with autism to pick test cases that represented themes common in the broader group. In the cases that went to trial, the special masters considered more than 900 medical articles and heard testimony from dozens of experts. In each of those cases, the special masters found that the shots didn’t cause autism.

In at least two subsequent cases, children with autism were granted compensation because they met the criteria listed in the program’s injury table, according to a vaccine court decision. That table, for instance, lists certain forms of encephalopathy — a type of brain dysfunction — as a rare side effect of shots that protect people from whooping cough, measles, mumps and rubella. In a 2016 vaccine court ruling, Special Master George L. Hastings Jr. explained, “The compensation of these two cases, thus does not afford any support to the notion that vaccinations can contribute to the causation of autism.”

Hastings noted that when Congress set up the injury table, the lawmakers acknowledged that people would get compensated for “some injuries that were not, in fact, truly vaccine-caused.”

Many disabling neurological disorders in children become apparent around the time kids get their shots. Figuring out whether the timing was coincidental or an indication that the vaccines caused the problem has been a huge challenge.

Devastating seizures in young children were the impetus for the compensation program. But in the mid-1990s, after a yearslong review of the evidence, HHS removed seizure disorder from the injury table and narrowed the type of encephalopathy that would automatically qualify for compensation. Scientists subsequently have discovered genetic mutations that cause some of the most severe forms of epilepsy.

What’s different now, though, is that Kennedy, as HHS secretary, has the power to add autism or other disorders to that injury table. Experts say he’d have to go through the federal government’s cumbersome rulemaking process to do so. He could also lean on federal employees to green-light more claims.

In addition, Kennedy has made it clear he’s thinking about illnesses beyond autism. “We have now this epidemic of immune dysregulation in our country, and there’s no way to rule out vaccines as one of the key culprits,” he told Carlson. Kennedy mentioned diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, seizure disorders, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, peanut allergies and eczema.

President Donald Trump’s budget estimated that the value of the investments in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program trust fund could reach $4.8 billion this year. While that’s a lot of money, a life-care plan for a child with severe autism can cost tens of millions of dollars, and the CDC reported in April that 1 in 31 children is diagnosed with autism by their 8th birthday. The other illnesses Kennedy mentioned also affect a wide swath of the U.S. population.

Dr. Paul Offit, a co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, for years has sparred with Kennedy over vaccines. Offit fears that Kennedy will use flawed studies to justify adding autism and other common medical problems to the injury table, no matter how much they conflict with robust scientific research.

“You can do that, and you will bankrupt the program,” he said. “These are ways to end vaccine manufacturing in this country.”

If the trust fund were to run out of money, Congress would have to act, said Dorit Reiss, a law professor at University of California Law San Francisco who has studied the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Congress could increase the excise tax on vaccines, she said, or pass a law limiting what’s on the injury table. Or Congress could abolish the program, and the vaccine makers would find themselves back in the situation they faced in the 1980s.

“That’s not unrealistic,” Reiss said.

Rep. Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, last year proposed the End the Vaccine Carveout Act, which would have allowed people to bypass the no-fault system and head straight to civil court. His press release for the bill — written in September, before Kennedy’s ascension to HHS secretary — quoted Kennedy saying, “If we want safe and effective vaccines, we need to end the liability shield.”

The legislation never came up for a vote. A spokesperson for the congressman said he expects to introduce it again “in the very near future.”

Renée Gentry, director of the George Washington University Law School’s Vaccine Injury Litigation Clinic, thinks it’s unlikely Congress will blow up the no-fault program. But Gentry, who represents people filing claims for injuries, said it’s hard to predict what Congress, faced with a doomsday scenario, would do.

“Normally Democrats are friends of plaintiffs’ lawyers,” she said. “But talking about vaccines on the Hill is like walking on a razor blade that’s on fire.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Patricia Callahan.

The Democratic primary for the seat representing part of metro Atlanta on the Georgia Public Service Commission appears to be headed to a runoff. In the other competitive race in this week’s PSC primaries, Republican incumbent Tim Echols won his party’s primary in district two in east Georgia.

The commission oversees utilities, including Georgia Power, the state’s largest electric provider and a subsidiary of one of the largest utilities in the country. The PSC commissioners have final say over Georgia Power’s plans and rates – meaning they make decisions that affect millions of Georgia households’ finances, as well as how the state responds to climate change. 

State utility commissioners across the country have a substantial impact on climate action because they oversee electric utilities and have final say over how those utilities generate energy — one of the major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. 

In states like Georgia, where monopoly utilities dominate, the power of commissioners is magnified.

This year’s election came with more scrutiny than usual because it was the first election in five years and in that time Georgia Power bills to the consumer have increased repeatedly with the current commission’s approval. It was also the only statewide race on Georgia’s ballot this year. 

Two of the five seats on the commission are on the ballot this year.

No Democrat got 50 percent of the vote in the crowded race for the party’s nomination in district three, the one representing metro Atlanta.

Top vote-getters Peter Hubbard, an energy advocate, and Keisha Sean Waites, a former state lawmaker, will compete in a runoff election scheduled for July 15. 

The winner will face Republican incumbent Fitz Johnson in November, who was unopposed in the primary.

In district two, located in east Georgia,  Echols defeated challenger Lee Muns in the Republican primary. In the general election, he’ll face Democrat Alicia Johnson, a community advocate with a background in nonprofit work, who had no opposition in the primary.

This race is the first PSC election in Georgia in years, after a voting rights lawsuit delayed two election cycles. 

Three commissioners – Echols, Fitz Johnson and Tricia Pridemore – continue to vote on critical decisions about Georgia Power’s rates and energy plans despite not facing voters as originally scheduled. Pridemore will be up for reelection next year.

The PSC has signed off as Georgia Power bills have gone up six times in the past few years. 

Next week, commissioners will consider a proposed freeze on raising rates further, though the plan carves out the potential for a bill increase next year to cover damage from Hurricane Helene. 

The commission is also currently considering Georgia Power’s long-term energy plan as the utility looks to pause plans to close coal-fired power plants, make upgrades to nuclear and hydropower facilities, build more solar farms and upgrade energy infrastructure.  

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Georgia, a runoff looms for Democrats after primary results for public utility commission seat on Jun 18, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Emily Jones.

Janine Jackson interviewed independent journalist Bryce Covert about Medicaid work requirements for the May 23, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

The Nation (2/28/20)

Janine Jackson: Welcome to USA 2025, where the only immigrants deserving welcome are white South Africans, germ theory is just some folks’ opinion, and attaching work requirements to Medicaid and SNAP benefits will make recipients stop being lazy and get a job.

Everything old is not new again, but many things that are old, perverse and discredited are getting dusted off and reintroduced with a vengeance. Our guest has reported the repeatedly offered rationales behind tying work requirements to social benefits, and the real-world impacts of those efforts, for many years now.

Bryce Covert is an independent journalist and a contributing writer at The Nation. She joins us now by phone from Brooklyn. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Bryce Covert.

Bryce Covert: Thank you so much for having me back on.

JJ: Most right-wing, top-down campaigns rely on some element of myth, but this is pretty much all myth: that there’s a problem: Medicaid and also SNAP benefits discourage recipients from seeking work, that this response will increase employment, that it will save the state and federal government money, and that it won’t harm those most in need. It’s layer upon layer of falsehood, that you have spent years breaking down. Where do you even start?

BC: That’s a great place to start, pointing out those claims essentially are all false, and I think it’s important to know, the reason we know that those things are false is because we have years of experience in this country with work requirements in various programs, and they have produced the same results over and over again.

Urban Institute (4/23/25)

So this started, essentially, with welfare, which is now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. In the 1990s, with cash assistance to families, there was a work requirement imposed on recipients in that program that still stands today. And just wave after wave of research has found these requirements did not help increase employment on a long-term basis.

Most people were not actually working after they were subjected to the work requirement, and instead it increased poverty. It reduced the recipients of these benefits. So it essentially didn’t help them get to work, but it did take away the money that they were relying on.

That pattern plays out over and over again, and we have some newer evidence in Medicaid because, up until the first Trump administration, states could not impose a work requirement in Medicaid. The Trump administration allowed waivers to do so. Only one state actually did it. But Arkansas, the state that did impose this work requirement, kicked over 18,000 people off the program with no discernible impact on employment.

JJ: And it has to do with a misunderstanding about who Medicaid recipients are, and their relationship to the workplace, period, right?

BC: Right. Most Medicaid recipients are either working, or have some good reasons for why they’re not working. Either they can’t find full-time work, or they have conflicts, like they’re taking care of family members.

People are disabled, many of them have an official disability and they’re on the actual disability program, but many more are disabled and can’t get on that program. It is a very difficult program to enroll in. The burdens to enrollment are super, super high. And others say it’s because they are in school, or they’re trying to find work, or they’re retired.

So among those who aren’t working, there’s not a lot who are in any good position to go out and start working. And that’s true of a lot of recipients of other public benefits as well. So when you talk about imposing a work requirement on people in Medicaid, what you’re doing is adding administrative burden, which is to say extra steps they have to take to keep getting their benefits, that aren’t going to actually change the situation they’re facing when it comes to their employment.

Think Progress (4/13/17)

JJ: When you wrote about Mississippi, I know, with TANF, you were saying you had to prove you had a job, or were searching for one, before you could get help with childcare. And if people would just take a second and think, how do you search for a job or hold a job without childcare? So it’s not even logical. It’s more a kind of moral, strange misunderstanding of why people are outside of the workforce.

BC: I think this applies to other programs, too. It’s hard to get to work if you don’t have health insurance like Medicaid to get yourself healthy and in a good working position. If you’re not able to get food stamps and buy food for yourself, it’s going to be hard to be out there looking for a job.

These are basic necessities, and I think that’s another really important point to make here, is that Republicans have tried to paint lots of different programs as “welfare,” because that word is very stigmatizing. But what we’re talking about with Medicaid is healthcare. We are talking about feeling as if we need to force people to work—although really what we’re doing is forcing them to document on some pieces of paper that they’re working, which is an important distinction—in order to get healthcare, in order to take care of their bodies and be healthy.

Same with food stamps. We’re saying “you must work in order to eat.” These are basic, basic necessities that people need simply to survive.

JJ: And then we hear about the “dignity” of work. You need to work because there’s dignity there, and yet somehow a person whose grandfather owned the steel mill doesn’t need that dignity. Wealthy people who don’t work somehow are outside of this moral conversation.

BC: Yeah, and we’re talking about imposing work requirements on SNAP and Medicaid, which is what Republicans say they want to do, in the service of tax cuts for the wealthy. Essentially, they are literally paying for tax cuts for the wealthy, to return more money to the rich, by cutting programs for the poor. And those rich people, many of them do not work, or these tax breaks help them to avoid work—the inheritance tax, for example. So that moral obligation to work does not apply.

New York Times (5/14/25)

JJ: The New York Times column recently, from four Trump officials—I don’t remember the headline, but it was something like, “If You Can Work, You Must.” They didn’t marshal any evidence. They didn’t have data, just vibes. Those are some racist, racist vibes, aren’t they?

BC: Yes. That is an important point, that all of this cannot be separated out from racism.

I mean, the conversation over welfare and TANF in the 1990s, that was all race. It was about white Americans feeling like Black Americans were getting the dole, and were too lazy to work and had to be forced to work. The numbers at the time did not bear that out. More white Americans were getting cash assistance than Black ones.

But it’s a really deep-seated belief among Americans, and I think when you see, as in that op-ed, for example, or other places where Republicans are trying to call these other programs “welfare,” it’s barely even just a dog whistle. It is pretty blatant that they are trying to paint other programs as things that help Black people who are too lazy to work.

It’s all caught up in that idea, even though, again, the numbers do not bear this out. White people are more likely to be on these programs. We see equal employment rates among both populations. This is not actually a problem to solve for, but it is one I think a lot of Americans, unfortunately, really believe.

The Nation (6/8/23)

JJ: I’m going to ask you about media in another second. I just wanted to pull up another point about the racism, which is that it’s not just the mythologizing and the “welfare queen,” that those of us who are old enough will remember. But you wrote about how states with larger Black populations have stricter rules, and how when states were asked for exemptions on pushing these work requirements, they exempted majority white counties. So it’s not just the racism in the rationale, the racism in how it plays out is there too?

BC: Absolutely. I mean, these policies hit Black people more heavily. They are more stringently applied in Southern states that have higher Black populations, that are more hostile to their Black populations. And like you said, in the first Trump administration, when states were seeking exemptions, it was more majority white populations who got them. This is just really a fundamental racist myth we have in this country that’s proven very hard to shake, that Black people are lazy and rely on the government to get by and must be forced to work, when just nothing about the actual numbers and data bears that out.

JJ: I sometimes feel like reporters, even if they’re well-intentioned and trying to make it personal, they can kind of make it a thought experiment for folks who are better off. If you were struggling, wouldn’t you take the time to fill out a form? It’s just paperwork. Couldn’t you go across town to the office and fill out that form? And it just represents a total disconnect, experiential disconnect between anyone who has ever had to deal with this and those who have no idea about it at all and just kind of parachute in and say, Oh wow, filling out a form. What’s the big deal?

Bryce Covert: “This is not about, in fact, helping people to work. This is, instead, about kicking people off the program.” 

BC: Yeah, I think most well-off Americans have no idea how hard it is to apply for these programs, to stay on these programs, the paperwork that’s involved, the time that’s involved. And also when we’ve seen work requirements in Medicaid, for example, they are set up in a very complex way. Arkansas’s website was only available during the working day, and then it would shut down, and you couldn’t log your work requirement hours at night. I think that belies the fact that this is not about, in fact, helping people to work. This is, instead, about kicking people off the program.

You can see that in the fact that the reason Republicans are talking about work requirements right now is because they need to find spending savings to pay for the tax cuts. If this were not about kicking people off and spending less on benefits, then this wouldn’t be part of this current conversation about their “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” So these are huge administrative burdens, and it’s also a big burden for something that is a deep necessity. I think the mental impact, the emotional impact of being made to jump through these huge hoops for something as basic as food, it’s really extreme.

For example, I recently had to go to the DMV to get my Real ID. I had to go to the office in person. I had to wait for hours. I had to bring all the right paperwork. It was a huge burden, but this was for something that would just make it a little easier to travel on an airplane.

Think about going through the same process, having to show up somewhere in person, waiting for hours, making sure you have all the right documentation, and if you don’t, then you don’t get the thing that you’re seeking, but what we’re talking about is whether or not you get healthcare. What we’re talking about is whether you get food stamps. I think it’s an experience that’s hard for people who haven’t gone through it to grasp.

New York Times (5/13/25)

JJ: To bring it back to today, May 21, some coverage that I’m reading straight up says some 8.6 million people are going to find themselves uninsured. Other stories matter-of-factly describe work requirements, and some Republicans’ anger that they’re not going to kick in sooner, as about “offsetting” the tax cuts for the wealthy, as though we’re just kind of recalibrating, and this is going to balance things in a natural way.

I guess I would say I’m not getting the energy that there are 14 million children who rely on both Medicaid and SNAP, and there’s children who could lose healthcare and food at the same time, and that includes 20% of all children under the age of five. From news media, I’m getting Republicans versus Democrats; I’m not so much getting children versus hunger.

BC: Yeah, I think, unfortunately, these kinds of political debates tend to be covered like they are just political back and forth. Democrats think this, Republicans think that. It is legitimately harder to explain to people what this will mean in real life. I have reported on the impact of work requirements. For example, I went to Arkansas when they were in effect. It’s hard to report on. The people who are impacted are vulnerable. They have chaotic lives. They may not even know that they are subject to it.

Unfortunately, I think it’s likely that if this passes and these cuts are implemented, we will see more stories about what happens, because it will be a little easier to say concretely, “This kid right here doesn’t get food or healthcare anymore.” But it would be nice to have that conveyed ahead of time, so the public understood what was happening before it went into effect.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with independent reporter Bryce Covert. You can find her work online at BryceCovert.com. Bryce Covert, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

BC: Yeah, thank you for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

Janine Jackson interviewed independent journalist Bryce Covert about Medicaid work requirements for the May 23, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

The Nation (2/28/20)

Janine Jackson: Welcome to USA 2025, where the only immigrants deserving welcome are white South Africans, germ theory is just some folks’ opinion, and attaching work requirements to Medicaid and SNAP benefits will make recipients stop being lazy and get a job.

Everything old is not new again, but many things that are old, perverse and discredited are getting dusted off and reintroduced with a vengeance. Our guest has reported the repeatedly offered rationales behind tying work requirements to social benefits, and the real-world impacts of those efforts, for many years now.

Bryce Covert is an independent journalist and a contributing writer at The Nation. She joins us now by phone from Brooklyn. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Bryce Covert.

Bryce Covert: Thank you so much for having me back on.

JJ: Most right-wing, top-down campaigns rely on some element of myth, but this is pretty much all myth: that there’s a problem: Medicaid and also SNAP benefits discourage recipients from seeking work, that this response will increase employment, that it will save the state and federal government money, and that it won’t harm those most in need. It’s layer upon layer of falsehood, that you have spent years breaking down. Where do you even start?

BC: That’s a great place to start, pointing out those claims essentially are all false, and I think it’s important to know, the reason we know that those things are false is because we have years of experience in this country with work requirements in various programs, and they have produced the same results over and over again.

Urban Institute (4/23/25)

So this started, essentially, with welfare, which is now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. In the 1990s, with cash assistance to families, there was a work requirement imposed on recipients in that program that still stands today. And just wave after wave of research has found these requirements did not help increase employment on a long-term basis.

Most people were not actually working after they were subjected to the work requirement, and instead it increased poverty. It reduced the recipients of these benefits. So it essentially didn’t help them get to work, but it did take away the money that they were relying on.

That pattern plays out over and over again, and we have some newer evidence in Medicaid because, up until the first Trump administration, states could not impose a work requirement in Medicaid. The Trump administration allowed waivers to do so. Only one state actually did it. But Arkansas, the state that did impose this work requirement, kicked over 18,000 people off the program with no discernible impact on employment.

JJ: And it has to do with a misunderstanding about who Medicaid recipients are, and their relationship to the workplace, period, right?

BC: Right. Most Medicaid recipients are either working, or have some good reasons for why they’re not working. Either they can’t find full-time work, or they have conflicts, like they’re taking care of family members.

People are disabled, many of them have an official disability and they’re on the actual disability program, but many more are disabled and can’t get on that program. It is a very difficult program to enroll in. The burdens to enrollment are super, super high. And others say it’s because they are in school, or they’re trying to find work, or they’re retired.

So among those who aren’t working, there’s not a lot who are in any good position to go out and start working. And that’s true of a lot of recipients of other public benefits as well. So when you talk about imposing a work requirement on people in Medicaid, what you’re doing is adding administrative burden, which is to say extra steps they have to take to keep getting their benefits, that aren’t going to actually change the situation they’re facing when it comes to their employment.

Think Progress (4/13/17)

JJ: When you wrote about Mississippi, I know, with TANF, you were saying you had to prove you had a job, or were searching for one, before you could get help with childcare. And if people would just take a second and think, how do you search for a job or hold a job without childcare? So it’s not even logical. It’s more a kind of moral, strange misunderstanding of why people are outside of the workforce.

BC: I think this applies to other programs, too. It’s hard to get to work if you don’t have health insurance like Medicaid to get yourself healthy and in a good working position. If you’re not able to get food stamps and buy food for yourself, it’s going to be hard to be out there looking for a job.

These are basic necessities, and I think that’s another really important point to make here, is that Republicans have tried to paint lots of different programs as “welfare,” because that word is very stigmatizing. But what we’re talking about with Medicaid is healthcare. We are talking about feeling as if we need to force people to work—although really what we’re doing is forcing them to document on some pieces of paper that they’re working, which is an important distinction—in order to get healthcare, in order to take care of their bodies and be healthy.

Same with food stamps. We’re saying “you must work in order to eat.” These are basic, basic necessities that people need simply to survive.

JJ: And then we hear about the “dignity” of work. You need to work because there’s dignity there, and yet somehow a person whose grandfather owned the steel mill doesn’t need that dignity. Wealthy people who don’t work somehow are outside of this moral conversation.

BC: Yeah, and we’re talking about imposing work requirements on SNAP and Medicaid, which is what Republicans say they want to do, in the service of tax cuts for the wealthy. Essentially, they are literally paying for tax cuts for the wealthy, to return more money to the rich, by cutting programs for the poor. And those rich people, many of them do not work, or these tax breaks help them to avoid work—the inheritance tax, for example. So that moral obligation to work does not apply.

New York Times (5/14/25)

JJ: The New York Times column recently, from four Trump officials—I don’t remember the headline, but it was something like, “If You Can Work, You Must.” They didn’t marshal any evidence. They didn’t have data, just vibes. Those are some racist, racist vibes, aren’t they?

BC: Yes. That is an important point, that all of this cannot be separated out from racism.

I mean, the conversation over welfare and TANF in the 1990s, that was all race. It was about white Americans feeling like Black Americans were getting the dole, and were too lazy to work and had to be forced to work. The numbers at the time did not bear that out. More white Americans were getting cash assistance than Black ones.

But it’s a really deep-seated belief among Americans, and I think when you see, as in that op-ed, for example, or other places where Republicans are trying to call these other programs “welfare,” it’s barely even just a dog whistle. It is pretty blatant that they are trying to paint other programs as things that help Black people who are too lazy to work.

It’s all caught up in that idea, even though, again, the numbers do not bear this out. White people are more likely to be on these programs. We see equal employment rates among both populations. This is not actually a problem to solve for, but it is one I think a lot of Americans, unfortunately, really believe.

The Nation (6/8/23)

JJ: I’m going to ask you about media in another second. I just wanted to pull up another point about the racism, which is that it’s not just the mythologizing and the “welfare queen,” that those of us who are old enough will remember. But you wrote about how states with larger Black populations have stricter rules, and how when states were asked for exemptions on pushing these work requirements, they exempted majority white counties. So it’s not just the racism in the rationale, the racism in how it plays out is there too?

BC: Absolutely. I mean, these policies hit Black people more heavily. They are more stringently applied in Southern states that have higher Black populations, that are more hostile to their Black populations. And like you said, in the first Trump administration, when states were seeking exemptions, it was more majority white populations who got them. This is just really a fundamental racist myth we have in this country that’s proven very hard to shake, that Black people are lazy and rely on the government to get by and must be forced to work, when just nothing about the actual numbers and data bears that out.

JJ: I sometimes feel like reporters, even if they’re well-intentioned and trying to make it personal, they can kind of make it a thought experiment for folks who are better off. If you were struggling, wouldn’t you take the time to fill out a form? It’s just paperwork. Couldn’t you go across town to the office and fill out that form? And it just represents a total disconnect, experiential disconnect between anyone who has ever had to deal with this and those who have no idea about it at all and just kind of parachute in and say, Oh wow, filling out a form. What’s the big deal?

Bryce Covert: “This is not about, in fact, helping people to work. This is, instead, about kicking people off the program.” 

BC: Yeah, I think most well-off Americans have no idea how hard it is to apply for these programs, to stay on these programs, the paperwork that’s involved, the time that’s involved. And also when we’ve seen work requirements in Medicaid, for example, they are set up in a very complex way. Arkansas’s website was only available during the working day, and then it would shut down, and you couldn’t log your work requirement hours at night. I think that belies the fact that this is not about, in fact, helping people to work. This is, instead, about kicking people off the program.

You can see that in the fact that the reason Republicans are talking about work requirements right now is because they need to find spending savings to pay for the tax cuts. If this were not about kicking people off and spending less on benefits, then this wouldn’t be part of this current conversation about their “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” So these are huge administrative burdens, and it’s also a big burden for something that is a deep necessity. I think the mental impact, the emotional impact of being made to jump through these huge hoops for something as basic as food, it’s really extreme.

For example, I recently had to go to the DMV to get my Real ID. I had to go to the office in person. I had to wait for hours. I had to bring all the right paperwork. It was a huge burden, but this was for something that would just make it a little easier to travel on an airplane.

Think about going through the same process, having to show up somewhere in person, waiting for hours, making sure you have all the right documentation, and if you don’t, then you don’t get the thing that you’re seeking, but what we’re talking about is whether or not you get healthcare. What we’re talking about is whether you get food stamps. I think it’s an experience that’s hard for people who haven’t gone through it to grasp.

New York Times (5/13/25)

JJ: To bring it back to today, May 21, some coverage that I’m reading straight up says some 8.6 million people are going to find themselves uninsured. Other stories matter-of-factly describe work requirements, and some Republicans’ anger that they’re not going to kick in sooner, as about “offsetting” the tax cuts for the wealthy, as though we’re just kind of recalibrating, and this is going to balance things in a natural way.

I guess I would say I’m not getting the energy that there are 14 million children who rely on both Medicaid and SNAP, and there’s children who could lose healthcare and food at the same time, and that includes 20% of all children under the age of five. From news media, I’m getting Republicans versus Democrats; I’m not so much getting children versus hunger.

BC: Yeah, I think, unfortunately, these kinds of political debates tend to be covered like they are just political back and forth. Democrats think this, Republicans think that. It is legitimately harder to explain to people what this will mean in real life. I have reported on the impact of work requirements. For example, I went to Arkansas when they were in effect. It’s hard to report on. The people who are impacted are vulnerable. They have chaotic lives. They may not even know that they are subject to it.

Unfortunately, I think it’s likely that if this passes and these cuts are implemented, we will see more stories about what happens, because it will be a little easier to say concretely, “This kid right here doesn’t get food or healthcare anymore.” But it would be nice to have that conveyed ahead of time, so the public understood what was happening before it went into effect.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with independent reporter Bryce Covert. You can find her work online at BryceCovert.com. Bryce Covert, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

BC: Yeah, thank you for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

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Last April, West Virginia awarded a nearly $10 million contract to a company called Student First Technologies to manage the state’s Hope Scholarship program, which gives families about $4,900 per child to spend on private-school tuition and homeschooling expenses. The company’s founder, Mark Duran, reacted with delight. “We are very excited to serve your great State,” he wrote.

But problems soon emerged, as reflected in emails obtained by a ProPublica public-information request. Some private schools were so late in receiving their voucher payments from families that they were having trouble meeting payroll. In late August, a state official wrote to Duran with a list of invoices that needed to be paid promptly, including three from a school, Beth Haven Christian in Chauncey, that had “called and indicated they are experiencing significant cash flow issues.” The email continued, “We need to make sure they have their funds early in the day if at all possible.”

The school eventually got its funds. But the episode highlights the challenge that states are facing with their rapidly expanding school-choice programs: making sure the taxpayer money they are allowing families to spend on behalf of their kids is being processed efficiently and properly. To do so, they are relying on a small group of fledgling companies that have seized the opportunity to serve as middlemen for this fast-growing market. The work can be lucrative, but it has also proven so daunting that in several states, the companies that carry it out have ended up losing contracts to their rivals — sometimes less than a year after winning them — as questions arise and audits and lawsuits pile up.

An idea sold on the basis of its simplicity — give parents money to spend on their kids’ education as they see fit — has turned out to be anything but simple in practice. And this complexity comes at a cost: paying companies to run the programs.

There are now a dozen states in the country that offer universal private-school vouchers, making them available to families of any income level. The largest of those programs, in Florida, is now costing taxpayers nearly $3 billion a year, with the programs in Arizona and Ohio each drawing around $1 billion a year from taxpayer funds.

In some of the states, the money comes to parents in the form of “education savings accounts,” which can be used on education-related expenses other than tuition. These programs are especially complex to implement, since some form of oversight is needed to make sure families are spending the money in ways that comply with the rules.

Angling for the task of managing this spending are four companies. The largest is ClassWallet, which is based in Hollywood, Florida. Its founder, Jamie Rosenberg, initially offered its online procurement technology to teachers and administrators to reduce the amount of paperwork involved in school expenditures. But the company has shifted to capitalize on the school-choice market. With backers including Lazard Family Office Partners, a global investment firm, ClassWallet has more than 200 employees and contracts in more than 10 states, among them Florida and Arizona, the latter of which has faced headlines about some parents using state education aid for questionable purchases as the cost of its program has swelled far beyond projections.

The smallest is Student First, based in Bloomington, Indiana, with 14 full-time employees. Both its founder, Duran, and its chief technology officer were educated in alternative settings, including homeschooling and so-called learning pods — kids from multiple families clustered together — and say they view the company as part of the larger cause of promoting school choice. Duran, 30, previously worked for his family’s homebuilding company in northern Michigan, served as lifestyle assistant and boat captain for an executive couple and their family, and helped deliver a yacht on a 4,000-mile journey from northern Michigan to Key Largo, Florida, via Nova Scotia, Canada, and Nantucket, Massachusetts.

The other two companies fall in between in scale. Odyssey, based in lower Manhattan, was founded by Joseph Connor, 37, a former teacher and lawyer who had previously created a company called SchoolHouse, which connected teachers with the learning pods that sprouted up during the pandemic. Odyssey, with about 40 employees, has received investor funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Tusk Venture Partners, among others. It works with Iowa and Wyoming and recently won contracts for the newly expanding voucher programs in Georgia and Louisiana.

The fourth, Merit International, is based in Silicon Valley, and it likewise has considerable venture-capital backing, including from Andreessen Horowitz; its contracts include programs in Ohio and Kansas. The 100-person company also manages payments for government programs outside of education. One of its co-founders, Jacob Orrin, said in an interview that he, too, was drawn to the school-choice business by his background: He struggled in school when he was young, and he says he would have greatly benefited from having had more educational options. “We’re mission-driven — but we make a profit,” he said.

Competition among the companies often gets fierce as they face off in state after state. They dispatch lobbyists to cast aspersions on their rivals with legislators and state officials. They try to influence the legislation creating the voucher programs to tailor them to their company’s offerings. They feed whisper campaigns among parents about problems arising in states where their rivals are in charge.

In Iowa, after Odyssey won that state’s contract in 2023, Student First and an Iowa organization it was partnering with brought a legal challenge, alleging “substantial material misrepresentations” by Odyssey; an administrative judge dismissed the suit.

In Arkansas, the state had selected ClassWallet in 2023 to manage its Education Freedom Accounts, which give families about $7,000 per student. But last spring, the state considered switching to Student First to save money. A lobbyist for ClassWallet paid visits to state legislators, warning them that this was a bad idea. “They sent someone to talk to me,” recalled state Sen. Bart Hester, a Republican from Cave Spring. The lobbyist for ClassWallet explained that the company has three times the number of employees as Student First. “‘There’s no way they can do it,’” the lobbyist said, according to Hester.

Student First won the contract, worth about $15 million over seven years. But by October, state officials had decided to switch back to ClassWallet, saying that Student First had missed deadlines to set up the program, was late in processing payments, and owed the state $563,000 in fees as a result of the delays. “Student First Technologies is proud of our work to empower Arkansas families,” Duran wrote in a response to questions from ProPublica. (Of Student First’s experience in West Virginia, he said the company has been making “month-on-month improvements, and this will never stop.”)

ClassWallet previously became embroiled in difficulties one state over, in Oklahoma. A 2022 investigation by The Frontier and Oklahoma Watch found widespread questionable spending under a program in which Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, provided $18 million in federal pandemic-relief funds for families to use for private-school vouchers or educational materials, to be overseen by ClassWallet. Some used the state aid to buy Christmas trees, gaming consoles, electric fireplaces, outdoor grills, dishwashers, pressure washers, car stereo equipment, coffee makers, exercise gear, smartwatches and at least 548 TVs.

The 2022 article quoted Rosenberg, the ClassWallet CEO, praising the program at a 2020 panel discussion: “They were literally able to deploy $18 million without having to engage any human capital from the government agency, and for it to be almost hands-free and incredibly, incredibly streamlined.” But a subsequent federal audit reported that ClassWallet had blamed Oklahoma for the abuses, saying that the company had offered to limit purchases to items preapproved by the state, but that a teacher who helped arrange the contract — Ryan Walters, now Oklahoma’s education secretary — had declined this option. (Walters did not respond to a request for comment.)

The problems with the program sparked an odd three-way legal fight, with Stitt attempting to sue ClassWallet and Oklahoma’s own attorney general opposing the governor and blaming problems on poor state oversight. (The Stitt administration is still pursuing the case, now using outside lawyers. ClassWallet has said the claims are “wholly without merit.”) The company declined to respond to specific questions, but spokesperson Jason Hart provided a statement saying “ClassWallet is the country’s most trusted citizen digital wallet technology platform.”

In Idaho, ClassWallet had the contract to administer an early-pandemic initiative that evolved into what is now called Empowering Parents, a $30 million state program that gives families up to $3,000 each for supplemental educational expenses. The current system could be a possible prelude to a full voucher program, which is up for debate now in the Legislature. Odyssey won the contract in 2022, for $1.5 million per year. A year later, the state ordered an audit after receiving reports of spending on clothes, TVs, smartwatches and other noneducational items. The audit found that only a tiny sliver of purchases were inappropriate, but it ordered Odyssey to pay back the state for $478,656.22 in interest it had collected from unspent federal funding for the program.

Meanwhile, parents and business owners were reporting other issues with the program under Odyssey’s oversight, as reflected in emails obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request filed by ProPublica. Last February, Tina Stevens, the owner of a music store and academy in Coeur d’Alene that is one of the program’s biggest vendors, wrote to her state senator saying that she had lost $10,000 because families were unable to access their funds to pay for music classes. She also wrote that Odyssey’s requirement to ship all purchases to families was wasting money. “The Odyssey system is rife with more fraud than we ever saw last year and super easy to cheat,” she wrote. Stevens elaborated in an interview, saying that in one instance, she was required to ship a digital piano via a freight truck, at a cost of $423, even though the family it went to had come in person to select it. And it took her 1,000 hours, she said, to build the separate website that Odyssey required vendors to have for the program.

Still, she said, the difficulties had not undermined her support for the program. “Parents and kids need musical products and a lot of kids can’t afford it,” she said. “I’ve had mothers coming in the door crying, saying ‘I never thought I could get a musical instrument, and now my kid can have something I never thought they could have.’”

In September, the director of the Idaho State Board of Education, Joshua Whitworth, wrote to Odyssey’s CEO, Connor, listing problems, including “ongoing customer service concerns,” sales taxes charged in error, and vendors being owed payments since January 2024. Connor replied with a lengthy email defending the company, saying that the company had an above-average customer satisfaction rating in Idaho and paid out the “vast majority” of orders within a week. But days later, Idaho said it was switching back to ClassWallet.

Emails show ClassWallet executives and lobbyists celebrating their victory and collaborating with state officials over how to word the announcement. “The tone of this one was markedly more vicious,” said one of the participants in the Idaho competition, describing the latest round. “It’s like two heavyweights exchanging blows.”

In response to questions about the loss of the Idaho contract and the problems that preceded it, a company spokesperson said, “Odyssey’s bid was undercut on price and the decision to rebid had nothing to do with performance.”

In an interview, Orrin, the Merit co-founder, said the programs’ problems were due partly to states coming under pressure to limit costs and expecting companies to operate them at thin margins. “At a certain level, as states continue to squeeze on these budgets, it will be hard for anyone to deliver successfully,” he said. Some companies were contributing to this by making unrealistically low bids and were then having trouble delivering. “Some of the companies in this space are trying hard to chase the dragon,” he said.

Vanessa Grossl, who worked for ClassWallet before being elected last fall as a Republican state representative in Kentucky, calls the new mode of spending “Venmo government” and predicts it will improve with time. The novelty of the programs has “gotten some of them in trouble,” she said. “But you have to uncover those bugs in any new system. It’s worth the price of innovation and discovery for working through the bugs.”

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This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Alec MacGillis.

Voting in the U.S. presidential election between Democrat Kamala Harris, the vice president, and Republican Donald Trump, the former president, ends on Nov. 5. A winner has been projected in some U.S. elections within hours; others have taken days or weeks to reach a result.

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As voters across the United States head to the polls, we speak with New York Times writer Jim Rutenberg about how Donald Trump may try to preemptively declare victory and challenge election results. The former president has ramped up claims Democrats are “a bunch of cheats” and preemptively cast doubt on a win by Vice President Kamala Harris, following a similar playbook as 2020 when he baselessly claimed the election was stolen. Rutenberg spoke to pro-Trump election officials in battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and Pennsylvania who say they are ready to refuse to certify local election results as part of a wide-ranging effort to throw the system into disarray. Rutenberg says after the failed insurrection of January 6, 2021, many in Trump’s orbit had a clear goal for 2024: “We have to go local.” He also discusses the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 that makes it harder to stop the final certification of results.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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In an ornate room in Georgia’s Capitol, Julie Adams — a member both of the election board serving the state’s most populous county and of a right-wing organization sowing skepticism about American elections — got the news she was waiting for. And she couldn’t wait to share it.

With pink manicured nails that matched her trim pink blazer, she tapped out a message on her phone to a top election lawyer for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. “Got it passed,” she wrote to Gineen Bresso, photographs reviewed by ProPublica show.

What had passed that September afternoon in Atlanta was a state rule, championed by Adams, that would allow poll watchers like those she’d trained to gain greater access to sensitive areas in counting centers where votes were being tallied. The rule was a priority for supporters of former President Donald Trump who are looking to pave the way to challenge election results if their candidate loses this week’s vote.

The win was one in a string of them for Adams, who quickly ascended from a little-known, financially troubled conservative activist to a surprise appointee to the Fulton County board of elections. Her note to Bresso signaled not just this particular victory but the extent to which the 61-year-old has used her new perch to carry out the efforts of national players seeking to tilt the election in Trump’s favor.

Fulton itself is significant in state and national politics for a host of reasons: its sheer concentration of Democratic voters (380,000 in 2020, more than any other Georgia county), the scrutiny it received from national election skeptics after Trump lost the state by fewer than 12,000 votes — and, now, its newest election board member’s outsize role in trying to influence Georgia’s election processes.

Her actions in her nine months on the Fulton County board have been prodigious. She secretly helped push another, arguably higher-stakes rule through the state election board that vastly expanded the authority of county board members to refuse to certify votes they deem suspicious. She herself refused to certify the results of the presidential primary in March (though the board’s Democratic majority overruled her), and then she sued her board and election director, asserting local officials should be allowed to refuse to certify vote totals if there are discrepancies, which experts say are almost always innocuous. Some of her lawyers in that case work for the America First Policy Institute, an advocacy group staffed with former Trump officials.

So far, Adams’ efforts have mostly failed. Two judges have invalidated rules that Adams backed, with one calling them “illegal, unconstitutional and void.” But other efforts are still underway. The month after joining the Fulton County election board, Adams became regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network, the group founded by lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who joined Trump on a call when he asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” him enough votes to overturn the 2020 election results there.

In that role, Adams runs weekly calls for Republican activists who have described Georgia’s voting as rigged, and she has pulled conservative members of local election boards into a loose coalition, many of whom have challenged results in their counties, too. And prominent conservative election lawyers, writers and national groups have used Adams’ push against certification in Georgia as the basis for a national argument.

Adams did not respond to numerous requests for comment or a detailed list of questions. Nor did representatives for the Election Integrity Network.

The Georgia-based group that hired Adams in 2022, Tea Party Patriots Action, has received millions of dollars from organizations closely tied to conservative legal activist and fundraiser Leonard Leo and billionaire Richard Uihlein, tax records show. Uihlein-backed groups launched unsubstantiated attacks on the legitimacy of voter rolls in at least a dozen states after the 2020 election.

A representative for Uihlein did not respond to questions. A representative for Leo would not elaborate on his contributions to organizations that supported Tea Party Patriots.

The true test of Adams’ effectiveness will come on Election Day — and, if the results in Georgia are anywhere near as close and consequential as they were in 2020, in the days and weeks beyond.

“She’s trying to help Trump win or trying to create chaos in the administration of the election in order to cast aspersions on it if he doesn’t win,” said Patrise Perkins-Hooker, who served as chair of the county election board when Adams joined. Perkins-Hooker described Adams’ work as centered on carrying out the agenda of right-wing activists and not making “the elections run smoothly or transparently.”

In response to ProPublica’s questions, the Republican National Committee provided a statement that said: “The Georgia state election board passed commonsense safeguards to secure Georgia's elections. The Trump-Vance Campaign and RNC supported these rules to bring transparency and accountability to the election process.” It also said, “The RNC defended these rules in court against attacks from Kamala and the DNC and will continue to fight against Democrat election interference.”

Back in 2020, Mitchell and others challenging the results across the country had to rely on disorganized groups of Trump supporters who came together at the last minute and were mostly unfamiliar with election systems. Experts now warn about the more pronounced impact that election deniers like Adams will have, given that they have come to occupy positions of power in local election administration. As Trump said at an October rally in North Carolina: “The vote counter is far more important than the candidate.”

“It was universal support for Julie,” said Earl Ferguson, a vice chair of the Fulton County Republicans, who has also filed challenges to voters’ eligibility and repeated debunked conspiracy theories about the reliability of voting machines at election board meetings. (Ferguson does not agree that the points he made about the machines were not valid.) “She is honest and very capable, and very pleasant.”

After Trump lost the 2020 election, Adams and a small group of conservative activists became regular attendees at election board meetings. On a few occasions, she addressed the board during the public comment period, questioning the integrity of the county’s elections and its certification process. But she was much less outspoken than other activists in the group.

“When Adams was appointed, little was known about her connections to election deniers to justify opposition,” said Max Flugrath, spokesperson for Fair Fight, the Georgia-based voting advocacy organization. “Voting rights groups instead focused on opposing candidates with documented anti-voter records.”

Adams had worked in human resources and executive recruiting. Records show she also had experienced major financial setbacks. She’d filed for bankruptcy in 2005, and her mortgage company had auctioned her Cobb County home on the courthouse steps in 2010. A landlord later sued her, and she agreed to pay more than $13,000 in back rent, according to a 2021 consent agreement.

That same year, she trained 32 poll watchers to monitor the 2021 municipal elections. And she told county commissioners that she believed some tally sheets from an audit of the 2020 election had been “falsified.”

In 2022, Tea Party Patriots Action, the politically active arm of one of the largest national Tea Party groups, hired Adams as a field director, paying her about $124,000 a year according to tax filings.

Her hire came at a time when the group was pulling in cash and intensifying its focus on election issues. Groups funded by Leo, who is seen as the architect behind the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, provided the Tea Party group and a related foundation at least $1.1 million between 2020 and 2022, records show, including a 2021 grant related to election integrity. The group also hired Leo’s firm as consultants.

In 2022, Tea Party Patriots Action more than doubled its annual revenue, thanks in part to a $2.5 million grant from Restoration of America — which is backed by Uihlein, the billionaire owner of the packing supplies company Uline. That year, former Trump campaign official Gina Swoboda was a Restoration for America executive director. Restoration has spent the years since Trump lost in 2020 pushing the unfounded idea that discrepancies in voter roll data between the number of votes and the number of ballots cast are evidence of fraud, despite insistence by elected officials from both parties that the claims are baseless.

That year, the Tea Party group added a program to bring in poll watchers and workers in Georgia, records show. And it had Adams in place.

Representatives for the Tea Party group and Restoration of America did not respond to requests for comment. Swoboda did not respond to questions.

Adams has run scores of poll watcher and worker online trainings, with some drawing dozens of people, records reviewed by ProPublica show. In a May training, Adams listed over 10 things that she wants trainees to report, from the serial numbers on voting machines to the names of poll managers. “There’s no such thing as too much documentation,” she said in a recording of a May training. “If something doesn’t feel right to you, you need to write it out.”

At an October training, she told the roughly three dozen attendees, including those joining from out of state, to first report discrepancies to their state GOP and RNC hotlines and then to VoterGA, an organization whose leader has cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 election. The Republican Party and right-wing organizations plan to use the poll watchers’ reports in post-election litigation, ProPublica has reported.

“VoterGA has an 18-year proven track record of nonpartisan activity,” said co-founder Garland Favorito. “Republicans and Democrats are told to call their own party hotlines for election issues. We have no plans or resources to file any type of speculative litigation in any matter.”

While working for the Tea Party, Adams also led weekly meetings frequented by prominent state activists, RNC officials, GOP county heads, conservative election board members and voter registration challengers, according to records including emails obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and shared with ProPublica.

Agendas included subjects such as “Voter Integrity concerns for 2024 Elections” and warnings like “New York Times Reporter traveling to several counties in Georgia.”

In 2022, Adams had appeared at the Election Integrity Network’s Georgia chapter launch and was described the following year as its state liaison in social media posts by other activists.

But much of her work was done behind the scenes. So when the county GOP nominated her to join the election board in the heavily Democratic Fulton County, commissioners approved the choice 6-0.

After Adams joined the board in February, it did not take long for fellow members to begin worrying about her intentions. The board is made up of four political appointees, two by each party, led by a chair chosen by the Democratic-majority county commission. Traditionally, the board’s primary goal has been to make Fulton elections run smoothly, past and present board members said.

However, Perkins-Hooker, the chair when Adams joined, said that during meetings, she could see Adams receiving text messages from a Republican activist “telling her what to say, and what to do.” After Perkins-Hooker stepped down in April, the new chair banned board members from using phones during meetings.

“She came with a mission to try and paint our elections as being fraught with fraud and incompetency,” said Perkins-Hooker, an opinion echoed by other board members.

Adams had been on the board for just a few weeks when, in March, she was elevated to regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network, the organization that Mitchell, Trump’s lawyer, had launched. The new position put her near the top of the leadership’s organizational chart.

Adams quickly began pushing conservative priorities at election board meetings. She wanted poll watchers to have more access to vote tallies from election machines. And she was very concerned about the mechanics of certifying elections. Though a century of case law says that certification is a mandatory duty for officials like her — whom experts compare to scorekeepers, not referees — Adams began questioning if she had to do it. She demanded reams of information she said that she needed to be certain of the results before certifying.

At Adams’ third meeting, in March, she and the other Republican board member shocked Democratic board members by voting against the certification of the presidential primary election — though the Democratic majority overruled them.

Adams’ push to have power over certification of election results couldn’t succeed under the state’s current rules, so she set out to change them.

To do so, she lobbied to remake the body that determined them, the State Election Board, which at the time was composed of two moderate Republican members, two MAGA-aligned members and a Democrat. She activated the coalition she had been building with the support of national Republicans, inviting them to a March meeting where the goal was to ensure that the moderate Republican on the State Election Board was replaced. “The Georgia House of Representatives needs to take action immediately!!!!” the meeting invitation read, providing the phone number of the speaker of the house.

Not long afterward, the speaker replaced that board member with a conservative media personality whom Trump would soon praise by name at a rally.

The new Trump-backed majority quickly began passing rules that the prior board had criticized as illegal, including one, originally pushed by Adams, expanding the power of county board members to refuse to certify votes they found suspicious. It was passed by the new board along with another rule potentially allowing county board members to delay certification.

A national outcry ensued, with The New York Times calling it “The Republican Plan to Challenge a Harris Victory.”

Three of the nation’s leading conservative election lawyers backed the new rules. A conservative group ran ads targeting swing state election officials that echoed the lawyers’ arguments. And the certification rule Adams pushed became a talking point for conservative media outlets. One article in The Federalist argued that it “could stop leftists from bullying election officials into certifying results without completing their duties.” Lawyers for the Republican National Committee and a Trump-aligned conservative think tank also defended the certification rules in Georgia superior court, testing arguments that certifying election results was optional.

Adams’ arguments that certification is not mandatory inspired David Hancock, a GOP member of Gwinnett County’s election board, to vote against certifying the same presidential primary as Adams. (He described several minor inconsistencies as sufficient reason for him not to certify.) “It was, like, a big deal,” Hancock said of Adams’ decision to vote against certifying.

Because two judges in October invalidated the new rules passed by the State Election Board, the mechanics of the election this week will be the same as before Adams’ pushes to empower poll watchers and county election board members.

But at a combative Fulton County board meeting the week before the election, Adams made clear that she wasn’t going to let the judge’s rulings stop her from continuing her campaign. Despite the county’s lawyer telling her that the certification rule she had pushed had been stayed, she argued that it had actually not been, citing her lawyers. “I’ve learned how the system works — or at least how it was supposed to work,” Adams said. “I’ve learned how sometimes it doesn’t work as the law requires, right here in Fulton County.”

Mollie Simon contributed research and Andy Kroll contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Doug Bock Clark and Heather Vogell.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Wisconsin Watch. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Earlier this month, subscribers to the Wisconsin Law Journal received an email with an urgent subject: “Upholding Election Integrity — A Call to Action for Attorneys.”

The letter began by talking about fairness and following the law in elections. But it then suggested that election officials do something that courts have found to be illegal for over a century: treat the certification of election results as an option, not an obligation.

The large logo at the top of the email gave the impression that it was an official correspondence from the respected legal newspaper, though smaller print said it was sent on behalf of a public relations company. The missive was an advertisement from a new group with deep ties to activists who have challenged the legitimacy of recent American elections.

The group, Follow the Law, has placed ads in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin news outlets serving attorneys, judges and election administrators — individuals who could be involved in election disputes. In Georgia, it ran ads supporting the State Election Board as its majority, backed by former President Donald Trump, passed a rule that experts warned could have allowed county board members to exclude enough Democratic votes to impact the presidential election. (A judge later struck down the rule as “illegal, unconstitutional and void.”)

In making its arguments about certification, Follow the Law has mischaracterized election rules and directed readers to a website providing an incomplete and inaccurate description of how certification works and what the laws and rules are in various states, election experts and state officials said.

“Anyone relying on that website is being deceived, and whoever is responsible for its content is being dishonest,” said Mike Hassinger, public information officer for Georgia’s secretary of state.

Certification is the mandatory administrative process that officials undertake after they finish counting and adjudicating ballots. Official results need to be certified by tight deadlines, so they can be aggregated and certified at the state and federal levels. Other procedures like lawsuits and recounts exist to check or challenge election outcomes, but those typically cannot commence until certification occurs. If officials fail to meet those deadlines or exclude a subset of votes, courts could order them to certify, as they have done in the past. But experts have warned that, in a worst-case scenario, the transition of power could be thrown into chaos.

“These ads make it seem as if there's only one way for election officials to show that they're on the ball, and that is to delay or refuse to certify an election. And just simply put, that is not their role,” said Sarah Gonski, an Arizona elections attorney and senior policy adviser for the Institute for Responsive Government, a think tank working on election issues. “What this is, is political propaganda that’s dressed up in a fancy legal costume.”

The activities of Follow the Law, which have not been previously reported, represent a broader push by those aligned with Trump to leverage the mechanics of elections to their advantage. The combination of those strategies, including recruiting poll workers and removing people from voting rolls, could matter in an election that might be determined by a small number of votes.

Since Trump lost the 2020 election, at least 35 election board members in various states, who have been overwhelmingly Republican, have unsuccessfully tried to refuse to certify election results before being compelled to certify by courts or being outvoted by Democratic members. Last week, a county supervisor in Arizona pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for failing to perform election duties when she voted to delay certifying the 2022 election. And last month, the American Civil Liberties Union sued an election board member in Michigan after he said he might not certify the 2024 results. He ultimately signed an affidavit acknowledging his legal obligation to certify, and the ACLU dismissed its case. Experts have warned that more could refuse to certify the 2024 election if Trump loses.

Follow the Law bills itself as a “group of lawyers committed to ensuring elections are free, fair and represent the true votes of all American citizens.” It’s led by Melody Clarke, a longtime conservative activist with stints at Heritage Action, a conservative advocacy organization, and the Election Integrity Network, headed by a lawyer who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.

This summer, Clarke left a leadership position at EIN to join the Election Transparency Initiative, a group headed by Ken Cuccinelli, a former Trump administration official. The two groups work together, according to Cuccinelli and EIN’s 2024 handbook.

The banner ads that appeared in Georgia and Wisconsin outlets disclosed they were paid for by the American Principles Project Foundation. ETI is a subsidiary of a related nonprofit, the American Principles Project. Financial reports show that packaging magnate Richard Uihlein has contributed millions of dollars to the American Principles Project this year through a political action committee. Uihlein has funneled his fortune into supporting far-right candidates and election deniers, as ProPublica has reported.

Cuccinelli, Clarke and a lawyer for Uihlein did not respond to requests for comment or detailed lists of questions. Cuccinelli previously defended to ProPublica the legality of election officials exercising their discretion in certifying results. “The proposed rule will protect the foundational, one person-one vote principle underpinning our democratic elections and guard against certification of inaccurate or erroneous results,” Cuccinelli wrote in a letter to Georgia’s State Election Board.

The most recent ads appear to be an extension of a monthslong effort that started in Georgia to expand the discretion of county election officials ahead of the November contest.

In August and September, Follow the Law bought ads as Georgia’s election board passed controversial rules, including one that empowered county election board members to not certify votes they found suspicious. As ProPublica has reported, the rule was secretly pushed by the EIN, where Clarke worked as deputy director.

Certification “is not a ministerial function,” Cuccinelli said at the election board’s August meeting. The law, he argued, “clearly implies that that board is intended and expected to use its judgment to determine, on very short time frames, what is the most proper outcome of the vote count.”

However, a state judge made clear in an October ruling the dangers of giving county board members the power to conduct investigations and decide which votes are valid. If board members, who are often political appointees, were “free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge” and refuse to certify election results, “Georgia voters would be silenced,” he wrote, finding that this would be unconstitutional. The case is on appeal and will be heard after the election.

Despite that ruling, and another from a different judge also finding both certification rules unconstitutional, Follow the Law’s website section for Georgia still asserts that a State Election Board rule “makes crystal clear” that county board members’ duty is “more than a simple ministerial task” without mentioning either ruling. The state Republican party has appealed the second ruling.

In a Telegram channel created by a Fulton County, Georgia, commissioner, someone shared what they called a “dream checklist” for election officials this week that contains extensive “suggestions” for how they should fulfill their statutory duties. The unsigned 15-page document, which bears the same three icons that appear on Follow the Law’s website, concludes, “Resolve all discrepancies prior to certification.”

On the same day the Georgia judge ruled that county board members can’t refuse to certify votes, Follow the Law began running ads in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin legal publications. The communications argued that certification is a discretionary step officials should take only after performing an investigation to ensure an election’s accuracy, largely continuing the line of argument that Cuccinelli pushed to Georgia’s election board and that the lawyers took before the judge. “Uphold your oath to only certify an accurate election,” said banner ads that ran in WisPolitics, a political news outlet. Another read: “No rubber stamps!” WisPolitics did not respond to requests for comment.

In Pennsylvania, the ad claimed that “simply put, the role of election officials is not ‘ministerial’” and that election officials are by law “required to ensure (and investigate if necessary) that elections are free from ‘fraud, deceit, or abuse’ and that the results are accurate prior to certification.”

Follow the Law has also directly contacted at least one county official in Eureka County, Nevada, pointing him to the group’s website, according to a letter obtained by ProPublica and Wisconsin Watch.

Follow the Law’s ads and website overstate officials’ roles beyond what statutes allow, state officials in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin said.

The group’s Wisconsin page reads: “Canvassers must first ensure that all votes are legally cast and can only certify results after verifying this.” But officials tasked with certifying elections are scorekeepers, not referees, said Edgar Lin, Wisconsin policy strategist and attorney for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that works to protect the integrity of American elections. Lin and other experts said officials ensure the accuracy of an election’s basic arithmetic, for example, by checking that the number of ballots matches the number of voters, but they are not empowered to undertake deeper investigations.

Gonski said that in addition to overstating certifiers’ responsibilities, Follow the Law’s messaging underplays the protections that already exist. “Our election system is chock-full of checks and balances,” Gonski said. “Thousands of individuals have roles to play, and all of them seamlessly work together using well-established procedures to ensure a safe, accurate and secure election. No single individual has unchecked power over any piece of the process."

Ads in the Wisconsin Law Journal and the Legal Intelligencer in Pennsylvania also presented the findings of a poll that Follow the Law said was conducted by Rasmussen Reports, a company whose credibility the ad emphasizes. But Rasmussen Reports did not conduct the poll. It was conducted by Scott Rasmussen, who founded the polling company but has not worked there in over a decade.

Both the company and pollster confirmed the misattribution but did not comment further. The Wisconsin Law Journal and ALM, which owns the Legal Intelligencer, declined to comment.

Sam Liebert, a former election clerk and the Wisconsin director for All Voting is Local, said he wants the state’s attorney general to issue an unequivocal directive reminding election officials of their legal duty to certify.

“Certifying elections is a mandatory, democratic duty of our election officials,” he said. “Each refusal to certify threatens to validate the broader election denier movement, while sowing disorder in our election administration processes.”

Do you have any information about Follow the Law or other groups’ efforts to challenge election certification that we should know? Have you seen Follow the Law ads or outreach elsewhere? If so, please make a record of the ad and reach out to us. Phoebe Petrovic can be reached by email at ppetrovic@wisconsinwatch.org and by Signal at 608-571-3748. Doug Bock Clark can be reached at 678-243-0784 and doug.clark@propublica.org.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Phoebe Petrovic, Wisconsin Watch, and Doug Bock Clark, ProPublica.

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A Georgia judge ruled this week that county election board members cannot block the certification of votes based on suspicions of fraud or error.

The ruling, if it stands, puts to rest the question of whether local election officials would be allowed to throw out individual precincts from county vote totals if they suspect fraud or error. A new rule adopted by the State Election Board appeared to allow such exclusions.

If county election board members were “free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so — because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud — refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in the ruling. “Our Constitution and our Election Code do not allow for that to happen.”

The ruling stems from a lawsuit brought by Julie Adams, a Republican member of Fulton County’s election board who is also part of a right-wing group that has raised doubts about the integrity of U.S. elections. Adams’ lawyer argued in court that the new election rule empowered county board members to refuse to certify votes they suspected of being tainted by fraud or error. This power, the lawyer argued, extended all the way to excluding entire precincts’ votes if they found something they considered suspicious in the returns.

A ProPublica examination found that if Adams’ interpretation of the rule had stood, election officials in just a handful of rural counties could have excluded enough votes to impact the outcome of the presidential race. After former President Donald Trump lost his reelection bid in 2020, Republican legislators in Georgia launched efforts to overhaul county election boards one at a time, sometimes unseating Democrats and stacking the boards with Trump backers. Election boards in Spalding, Troup and Ware counties, for instance, are now led by election skeptics, including one man who called President Joe Biden a “pedophile” and made sexually degrading comments about Vice President Kamala Harris. If the judge had accepted Adams’ argument, these county boards would have had the power to exclude the ballots of Democratic precincts that had provided roughly 8,000 more votes for Biden than Trump in 2020.

The chairman of Spalding County’s election board declined comment to ProPublica this month. The chair of Ware County’s board did not respond to requests for comment. William Stump, chair of Troup County’s board, said he doesn’t think anyone on the board is overtly partisan. “Everybody’s concern is to get the numbers right and get them out on time,” Stump said.

McBurney’s ruling made clear that excluding Democratic precincts’ votes would not be allowed. “If in the course of her canvassing, counting, and investigating,” a board member “should discover what appears to her to be fraud or systemic error, she still must count all votes,” McBurney wrote. The correct way forward is for the board member to “report her concerns about fraud or error ‘to the appropriate district attorney,’” as stated in Georgia law, not do the work of professional investigators herself.

If interested parties want to dispute the result, the long-standing pathway is by contesting the election in court. “Importantly, election contests occur in open court, under the watchful eye of a judge and the public,” McBurney wrote. “The claims of fraud from one side are tested by the opposing side in that open court — rather than being silently ‘adjudicated’ by” county board members “outside the public space, resulting in votes being excluded from the final count without due process being afforded those electors.”

The ruling is the latest development in a legal battle about whether county election board members have the power to delay or block the certification of election results — a power experts warned could affect the outcome of the presidential election in November. Many of those experts emphasize, however, that certification has long been interpreted as a nondiscretionary duty for election board members.

Much of that legal battle was driven by Adams, the Fulton County board member and the regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network, a right-wing organization led by a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. Going against over a century of legal precedent, Adams voted against certifying the March presidential primary election, saying she needed more information to investigate the results, but was outvoted by the Democratic majority. She then sued the board and the county’s election director, asking for the court to find that her certification duties, among others responsibilities, “are, in fact, discretionary, not ministerial.”

Then, behind the scenes, Adams began working to change the rules for certifying elections in Georgia, pushing activists to bring forward a rule for the State Election Board to adopt that would vastly expand the power of county board members to not certify votes they deemed suspicious, as ProPublica reported. When that rule was first brought before the State Election Board, members voted it down as illegal. However, in August, after one moderate Republican member was forced off the board and replaced, the new majority, each of whom Trump praised by name at a rally, passed a version of the rule almost identical to the one that the previous majority had found to be illegal.

In back-to-back bench trials at the beginning of October, McBurney heard Adams’ case, along with a similar one that pitted the Democratic and Republican national committees against each other over whether the certification of election results was mandatory. McBurney’s ruling only directly addressed Adams’ lawsuit.

Adams had also asked in her lawsuit for the court to grant her greater access to election-related documents and information before certifying the vote. McBurney ruled that this information should be granted to her, but that tardiness in receiving it did not allow her to refuse to certify election results.

“This suit was brought to ensure Ms. Adams had access to all the election material she needs in order to ensure Fulton County elections are free from irregularities, and to have the ability to challenge irregularities in election results,” said Richard Lawson, a lawyer for Adams and the Center for Litigation at the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-allied think tank. “This order preserves her rights in both regards.”

The ruling makes clear that the avenues that county board members can use to challenge election results they deem suspicious are the same ones as before the lawsuit and do not include delaying certification.

“It is my belief that having access to the entire election process will allow every board member to know and have confidence in the true and accurate results before the time for certification,” Adams said in a statement provided by Lawson.

Kristin Nabers, the Georgia state director for All Voting is Local, a voting rights advocacy organization, said in a statement, “Georgia voters won today against a shameless attempt from a prominent election denier who tried to turn the long-standing, routine duty of certification into a discretionary decision for election officials when they don’t like the election results.”

Experts expect the ruling to be appealed, which means a final determination could come much closer to the election.

Neither Adams nor Lawson answered questions via email about whether they planned to appeal.

McBurney did not issue a ruling in the second case he heard alongside Adams’ about another new rule that experts have warned could be used to disrupt the election by dragging an ill-defined “reasonable inquiry” past tight certification deadlines. However, McBurney wrote that a county board member “‘shall’ certify her jurisdiction’s election returns” by the state deadline.

The legal battles around the State Election Board rules are continuing. On Tuesday, McBurney heard arguments in a different case from Cobb County’s election board asserting that multiple other new rules exceed the state board’s authority. That night, he issued an order blocking the implementation of a rule requiring election workers to hand-count ballots, warning it could lead to “administrative chaos.” On Wednesday, another judge heard a similar Republican-led lawsuit against the State Election Board over the new rules. The board has faced at least seven lawsuits over its recent changes to rules and related actions.

McBurney in his ruling signaled an impatience with the efforts to change election rules, writing that “key participants in the State’s election management system have increasingly sought to impose their own rules and approaches that are either inconsistent with or flatly contrary to the letter of these laws.”

Heather Vogell contributed reporting.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Doug Bock Clark.

Contrary to a false report in the NY Times, the plane was not “owned by Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro”. It is owned by the Venezuelan government and used for travel by various Venezuelan officials in addition to the president.

The NYT article claims, “The Biden administration is trying to put more pressure on Mr. Maduro because of his attempts to undermine the results of the recent presidential election.” This is another inversion of reality. The US government is trying to undermine the results determined by the Venezuelan National Election Council (CNE) and ratified by their Supreme Court.

Contrary to Western claims, the Supreme Court and Election Council are not synonymous with the government. They are approved by Venezuela’s elected national assembly. While one opposition member of the Election Council criticized the results, he did not attend the count or meetings.  He does not ordinarily live in Venezuela and has returned to his home in the USA. Meanwhile, another opposition member of the Election Council, Aime Nogal, participated and approved the council’s decision.

Before the election, polls showed vastly different predictions. The US-funded polling company, Edison Research, showed the Gonzalez/ Machado opposition winning. Other polls showed the opposite. Polls are notoriously unreliable, especially when the poll is funded by an interested party. A better indication was the street demonstrations where the crowd in support of the coalition led by Maduro was near one million people. In contrast, the crowd for Gonzalez was a small fraction of that.

Increasingly, countries throughout the Global South are rejecting and criticizing Washington’s intervention in other nations’ internal affairs. On August 28, the president of Honduras, Xiomara Castro Zelaya, terminated the long standing extradition treaty with the United States and denounced US meddling after the US Ambassador commented negatively on Honduran – Venezuelan discussions.  Along with many other Latin American countries but the dismay of the U.S., Honduras  recognized the results of the Venezuelan election.

For over twenty years, the US has been trying to overturn the Bolivarian revolution. In 2002, the US government and elite media supported a coup attempt against President Hugo Chavez. To their chagrin, the attempt collapsed due to popular outrage. Since then, there have been repeated efforts with the US supporting street violence, assassination attempts, and invasions. Under Obama, Venezuela was absurdly declared to be a “threat to US national security”. This was the bogus rationale for the economic warfare which the US has waged ever since. Multiple reports confirm that tens of thousands of Venezuelans have died as a result of  hunger and sickness due to US strangulation of the economy. Again, the truth is the opposite of what Washington claims: the US is a threat to Venezuela’s national security.

Unknown to most U.S. residents, in December 2020 the U.N. General Assembly declared US unilateral coercive measures (sanctions) are “contrary to international law, international humanitarian law, the Charter of the United Nations and the norms and principles governing peaceful relations among States.”

Illegal U.S. measures were used to justify the kidnapping and imprisonment of Venezuelan diplomat, Alex Saab. They have now been used to justify the theft of a et plane needed by Venezuelan officials.

Previously, sanctions were used to justify the seizure of Venezuela’s CITGO gas stations and freezing gold reserves in London. It comes after the U.S. and allies pretended for several years that an almost unknown politician, Juan Guaido, was the president of Venezuela.

The reasons for Washington’s repeated efforts to overturn the Bolivarian revolution are clear: Venezuela has huge oil reserves and insists on its sovereignty. Under Chavez and Maduro, the Bolivarian revolution has sought to benefit the vast majority of Venezuela’s people instead of a small elite of Venezuelans and foreigners. Washington cannot tolerate the idea that those resources are used to benefit the Venezuelan people instead of billionaires like the Rockefeller clan, which made much of its wealth from Venezuela.

Under the Bolivarian revolution, Venezuela insists on having its own foreign policy. In 2006, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez denounced the U.S. invasion of Iraq and compared U.S. President Bush to the devil. In May this year, Venezuelan President Maduro denounced Israel’s genocide in Gaza and accused the West of being “accomplices.”

The cost of seizing Venezuela’s plane on foreign soil was probably greater than the $13 million value of the plane. So why did the Biden administration do this now? Perhaps it is to garner the votes of right-wing Cubans and Venezuelans in Florida. Perhaps it is to distract from their foreign policy failures in Gaza and Ukraine.

Whatever the reason, the theft of the Venezuelan jet plane is an example of U.S. foreign policy based on self-serving “rules” in violation of international law. It shows who is the rogue state.

President Xiomara Castro of Honduras is representative of the wave of disgust with US interference, crimes, and arrogance. In the past, Honduras was called a “banana republic” and known as “USS Honduras”.  Now its president says, “The interference and interventionism of the United States … is intolerable. They attack, disregard and violate with impunity the principles and practices of international law, which promote respect for the sovereignty and self-determination of peoples, non-intervention and universal peace. Enough.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Rick Sterling.

New voting rules in key battleground states could impact the 2024 election results. In Georgia, Democrats are suing to halt a set of Trump-backed election rules which Democrats say could be used to block certification of election results if they win in November. “It appears that Georgia Republicans are laying the groundwork not to certify the presidential election if Kamala Harris wins,” explains Ari Berman, who is the voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones magazine. Berman also discusses Tim Walz and JD Vance’s voting rights records and a recent voting rights law out of Arizona that requires new voters to prove their U.S. citizenship.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Georgia’s GOP-controlled State Election Board is poised to adopt a rule on Monday that would give county election board members an additional avenue to delay certification of election results, potentially allowing them to throw the state’s vote count into chaos this fall.

A former Fulton County election official who submitted an initial draft of the rule told ProPublica that she had done so at the behest of a regional leader of a right-wing organization involved in challenging the legitimacy of American election systems. That organization, the Election Integrity Network, is led by Cleta Mitchell, who helped orchestrate attempts to overturn the 2020 election and spoke on the call in which former President Donald Trump demanded that Georgia’s secretary of state “find” him 11,780 votes to undo Joe Biden’s victory.

The Election Integrity Network’s role in bringing forward the proposed rule has not been previously reported.

The State Election Board’s Monday meeting comes on the heels of a vote less than two weeks before that empowered county election board members to conduct “reasonable inquiry” into allegations of voting irregularities. That rule did not set deadlines for how long such inquiries might last or describe what they might entail, and critics worried that this omission could cause Georgia to miss the Dec. 11 deadline for sending its certified presidential election results to the federal government.

The new rule is even more concerning, election experts said, because it requires county boards to investigate discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of people who voted in a precinct, no matter how minor. It bars counties from certifying the election tallies until officials can review an investigation of every precinct with inconsistent totals. Such inconsistencies are commonplace, not evidence of malfeasance, and only in extremely rare circumstances affect the outcome of elections. The requirement to explain every one of them and litigation around investigations into them could take far longer than the time allowed by law to certify.

Do you have any information that we should know about Georgia’s State Election Board or attempts to affect the outcome of the presidential election? Contact reporter Doug Bock Clark by email at doug.clark@propublica.org and by phone or Signal at 678-243-0784. If you’re concerned about confidentiality, check out our advice on the most secure ways to share tips.

“If this rule is adopted, any claims of fraud, any claims of discrepancies, could be the basis for a county board member — acting in bad faith — to say, ‘I’m not confident in the results,’ and hold up certification under the flimsiest of pretexts,” said Ben Berwick, who leads the election law and litigation team of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that works to protect the integrity of American elections.

“The bottom line here,” Berwick said, is that “election deniers are intentionally creating a failure point in the process where they can interfere if they don’t like the results of an election.”

Until 2020, the certification of elections was a noncontroversial part of running them. After Trump made “stop the steal” a rallying cry in his attempt to overturn his loss to Biden, an increasing number of conservative election board members, especially at the county level, have attempted to block certification of subsequent elections. ProPublica has previously reported how these disruptions revealed weaknesses in the nation’s electoral system.

Among those who would have the ability to slow down the count in the fall is Julie Adams, who is a Republican member of the Fulton County elections board and a regional coordinator with Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. She was sworn in to the Fulton board in February, and one of her first official acts was to vote against the certification of the March presidential primary election, saying she needed more information to investigate discrepancies. She was overruled by her colleagues. She then sued the board and the county’s election director, asking for the court to find that her duties, such as certification, “are, in fact, discretionary, not ministerial.” The suit is ongoing.

The State Election Board received the proposed rule in April from Vernetta Nuriddin, a former member of the Fulton County elections board. In an interview on Friday, Nuriddin acknowledged that Adams “brought that particular concern” to her and was “instrumental” in bringing that rule and several others to the board.

In Nuriddin’s packet of paperwork asking for consideration of the rule, a cover letter said that the “Election Research Institute respectfully submits this petition for adoption.”

The Election Research Institute is led by Heather Honey, a conservative activist who also played a role in attempts to discredit the 2020 election results and has worked to advance election system overhauls supported by Mitchell, the head of the Election Integrity Network. Another organization Honey co-founded, Verity Vote, is listed as working on “joint projects and events” with the Election Integrity Network in its handbook. Mitchell has praised Honey as a “wonderful person” on her podcast.

Honey told ProPublica that her institute did not submit the proposed rule. “The Election Research Institute, like many, you know, nonprofits out there, have folks that have expertise in elections,” Honey said in a brief interview. “And so it is not uncommon for folks to seek our advice.” When asked about the language identifying the institute as submitting it, she said she would only answer further questions over email and then hung up. Honey did not respond to an emailed list of detailed questions.

Mitchell did not respond to requests for comment or a detailed list of questions.

Neither did Adams. In comments supporting the rule during a public meeting, Adams did not disclose her role originating it but explained that “it’s very hard to certify when you’re not following the law in knowing who voted, where they voted and how many ballots were cast.” She said that the purpose of the rule was to catch “problems beforehand” and that its goal was not “about throwing out precincts.”

Nuriddin eventually withdrew her submission. She would not say why.

An almost identical submission was provided to the board at about the same time by Bridget Thorne, a Fulton County commissioner and election denier. The primary difference was that Thorne’s version did not mention the Election Research Institute and said she was submitting it herself.

Thorne’s proposal was considered by the election board in its May meeting. “My hope is to reel in the blatant Fulton County not running their elections correctly,” Thorne told the board. She acknowledged that she had worked with Nuriddin on the rule, and that Nuriddin had withdrawn her name because “she wanted some tweaking of the language, last minute.”

In an interview, Thorne said she was encouraged to submit the rule by Honey, Adams and others.

She said that she did not know where all of the language in it came from because she had consulted with many lawyers and election experts while putting it together, but that some of it had come from herself and Honey. She said that Adams was not a writer but an organizer of the rule.

Thorne denied the rule was meant to be able to affect the outcome of the election. “The whole rule is to safeguard everybody’s vote,” she said, and to make sure that “nobody’s vote gets watered down by inadvertently double-scanning ballots.”

In a 45-minute discussion of the rule, a Republican member of the State Election Board warned that it ran “counter to both the federal and the state law” because it suggested counties could ignore the existing legal deadlines. The Republican chair of the board said that “this rule needs a little bit more work on it to make sure that it fully follows the statute” and that it was “not yet ready for prime time.” The board’s only Democratic member emphasized that it “is a criminal act to refuse to certify valid votes.”

Speaking alongside other conservative elections officials supportive of Thorne, Adams said that if an investigation was able to “find out why the numbers were wrong, a county might be late in certifying but they’d be a whole lot closer in returning accurate results.”

The five-person board, which has four Republicans on it, voted the proposal down unanimously, while offering to have two members work with supporters to refine the rule for future consideration.

That wasn’t the end of the proposal. In a matter of days, the Republican House speaker made a new appointment to the State Election Board, replacing a Republican lawyer who practices election law and who had said the rule was illegal and voted against it. In his place, the speaker appointed Janelle King. King is a conservative podcaster and panelist on a Georgia politics TV show, co-chairs a conservative political action committee, has no experience administering elections and has questioned the results of the 2020 election.

In June, a conservative activist resubmitted the rule with only minor updates, retaining a misspelling in its most important sentence.

In early August, during a rally in Atlanta, Trump praised by name the three members of the board’s new majority who are aligned with him, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory” and saying they were “doing a great job.”

Days later, the State Election Board adopted a rule by a 3-2 vote that allowed for county board members to delay certification of election results to conduct a “reasonable inquiry” into them. The Republican chair sided with the lone Democratic appointee in opposition. Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger harshly criticized that rule in a statement that called it “new activist rulemaking.”

“Quick reporting of results and certification is paramount to voter confidence,” Raffensperger said. “Misguided attempts by the State Election Board will delay election results and undermine chain of custody safeguards. Georgia voters reject this 11th hour chaos, and so should the unelected members of the State Election Board.”

ProPublica interviewed six election experts about the potential impact of the rule that is scheduled to be considered by the election board on Monday. Five said it seemed more likely to affect urban Democratic counties than rural Republican ones because the former are more populated and have more ballots and voters.

“The statistical probability of a discrepancy is more likely to occur in counties with many voters,” said Paul Gronke, a professor at Reed College and the director of the Elections and Voting Information Center. “What’s unusual” about the proposed rule “is saying that any discrepancy is enough to refuse to certify a whole precinct’s worth of votes,” without considering the magnitude of the discrepancy or the votes it might disenfranchise.

The six experts listed off numerous scenarios in which small discrepancies that do not impact the outcome of the election regularly occur, including: ballots getting stuck in scanners and overlooked, citizens checking in to vote and then discontinuing the process before finalizing their vote, memory sticks failing to upload, election systems being slow to update that a provisional ballot has been corrected and so on.

According to the experts, election laws across America do not allow minor discrepancies to halt the certification process because legally mandated deadlines are tight. There are later opportunities to resolve the discrepancies, such as mandatory audits, investigations and litigation.

“There’s a process for investigating problems” with vote tallies in the courts, “and so if a candidate feels there’s something wrongly done, they can go to the courts,” said Gowri Ramachandran the director of elections and security in the Brennan Center’s Elections & Government program.

If the proposed rule were used to delay certification, the battle would shift to the courts, according to the experts. Georgia law is explicit that certification is mandatory and that attempts by county board members not to certify votes would prompt interested parties to seek a writ of mandamus, a type of court order forcing government officials to properly fulfill their official duties. This prescribed remedy goes all the way back to an 1899 decision by the state Supreme Court, arising from a situation in which a county board was overruled when it tried to refuse to certify a precinct to give victory to their preferred candidates.

What would happen after that is less clear. Numerous outside groups would likely attempt to join the litigation, including the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee. On appeal, cases could end up at Georgia’s Supreme Court. Or they could get moved to federal court. The closest precedent is the recount of the 2000 election in Florida, which only ended after the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the count and awarded the presidency to Republican George W. Bush by a 5-4 vote.

“The 100% definitive answer is that no one knows how such a crisis would play out,” said Marisa Pyle, the senior democracy defense manager for Georgia with All Voting is Local Action, a voting rights advocacy organization. “No one wants to find out.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Doug Bock Clark.

French Pacific results for the first round of French national snap elections yesterday showed a firm radicalisation, especially in the case of New Caledonia.

In both of New Caledonia’s constituencies, the second round will look like a showdown between pro-independence and pro-France contestants.

The French Pacific entity has been gripped by ongoing riots, arson and destruction since mid-May 2024.

Local outcomes of the national polls have confirmed a block-to-block, confrontational logic, between the most radical components of the opposing camps, the pro-independence and the pro-France (loyalists).

Pro-France leader Nicolas Metzdorf, who is a staunch advocate of the still-unimplemented controversial constitutional reform that is perceived to marginalise indigenous Kanaks’ vote and therefore sparked the current unrest in the French Pacific territory, obtained 39.81 percent of the votes in New Caledonia’s 1st constituency.

In the capital Nouméa, which has been suffering massive damage from the riots, he even received the support of 53.64 percent of the voters.

Also vying for the seat in the French National Assembly, the other candidate qualifying for the second round of vote (on Sunday 7 July) is pro-independence Omayra Naisseline, who belongs to Union Calédonienne, perceived as a hard-line component of the pro-independence platform FLNKS.

She obtained 36.34 percent of the votes.

Outgoing MP Philippe Dunoyer, a moderate pro-France politician, is now out of the race after collecting only 10.33 percent of the votes.

For New Caledonia’s second constituency, pro-independence Emmanuel Tjibaou topped the poll with an impressive 44.06 percent of the votes.

Tjibaou is the son of emblematic Kanak pro-independence leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou, a dominant figure who signed the Matignon-Oudinot Accord in 1988 with pro-France leader Jacques Lafleur, ending half a decade of civil war over the Kanak pro-independence cause.

In 1989, Tjibaou was assassinated by a hard-line member of his own movement.

Second to Tjibaou is Alcide Ponga, also an indigenous Kanak who was recently elected president of the pro-France Rassemblement-Les républicains party (36.18 percent).

Another candidate from the Eveil Océanien (mostly supported by the Wallisian community in New Caledonia), Milakulo Tukumuli, came third with 11.92 percent but does not qualify to contest in the second round.

In New Caledonia, polling on Sunday took place under heavy security and at least one incident was reported in Houaïlou, where car wrecks were placed in front of the polling stations, barring access to voters.

However, participation was very high on Sunday: 60.02 percent of the registered voters turned out, which is almost twice as much as the recorded rate at the previous general elections in 2022 (32.51 percent).

New Caledonia’s four remaining contestants for the run-off round of French snap elections next Sunday, July 7 are Nicolas Metzdorf (clockwise from top left), Emmanuel Tjibaou, Omayra Naisseline and Alcide Ponga. Image: NC la 1ère TV

French Polynesia
In French Polynesia (three constituencies), the stakes were quite different — all three sitting MPs were pro-independence after the previous French general elections in 2022.

Candidates for the ruling Tavini Huiraatira, for this first round of polls, managed to make it to the second round, like Steve Chailloux (second constituency, 41.61 percent) or Mereana Reid-Arbelot (third constituency, 42.71 percent) who will still have to fight in the second round to retain her seat in the French National Assembly against pro-autonomy Pascale Haiti (41.08 percent), who is the wife of long-time pro-France former president Gaston Flosse).

Chailloux, however, did not fare so well as his direct opponent, pro-autonomy platform and A Here ia Porinetia leader Nicole Sanquer, who collected 49.62 percent of the votes.

But those parties opposing independence, locally known as the “pro-autonomy”, had fielded their candidates under a common platform.

This is the case for Moerani Frébault, from the Marquesas Islands, who managed to secure 53.90 percent of the votes and is therefore declared winner without having to contest the second round.

His victory ejected the pro-independence outgoing MP Tematai Le Gayic (Tavini party, 1st constituency), even though he had collected 36.3 percent of the votes.

Wallis and Futuna
Incumbent MP Mikaele Seo (Renaissance, French President Macron’s party) breezes through against the other three contestants and obtained 61 percent of the votes and therefore is directly elected as a result of the first round for the seat at the Paris National Assembly.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The soldiers beat three of the arrested residents from Byain Phyu village in Rakhine State on Wednesday until they were rushed to the hospital, two eventually dying from their injuries, said one resident, declining to be named for security reasons. 

“More than 40 people were sent to Sittwe Prison from the [junta’s] military interrogation yesterday. Three of them were close to death,” he said. “The three of them were sent to Sittwe Hospital. Two died yesterday, and the other one is seriously injured.”

The bodies were covered in bruises and long cuts, he added.

A family member who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals told RFA that those who were sent to prison also had serious injuries.

“The [junta] said residents from the village will be jailed. The villagers were severely tortured when we went to see them,” he said. “My uncle is also among the people who were sent to prison.”

Junta authorities stationed in the area filed a case against the detained residents under Section 17(1) of the Unlawful Association Act and Section 188 of the Penal Code for disobeying an order, said another resident. The charges allege that villagers were connected to the anti-junta Arakan Army.

Junta’s move came as clashes intensify between the Arakan Army and junta forces, with the rebel group advancing closer to the state capital, which made Myanmar military ramp up its raids and interrogations in the surrounding areas. 

On May 29, junta troops arrested residents of Byain Phyu village and killed over 70 people. The arrested villagers were interrogated about connections to insurgent armies, according to locals. Nearly 200 junta soldiers surrounded the village and detained a large but undisclosed number of men. 

Women and children under 15 involved in the arrest were released on May 31, but the remaining 40 men were transferred from an interrogation center in Byain Phyu, Rakhine State, to a prison in Sittwe on Tuesday, residents reported.

Separately, junta troops threatened residents from five villages near the state’s capital of Sittwe that they must evacuate by Friday.

According to an Arakan Army statement, Byain Phyu’s death toll following the arrests reached 76 as of June 4. 

RFA phoned Rakhine state’s junta spokesperson Hla Thein to confirm the two additional deaths reported on Wednesday, but he did not respond by the time of publication. 

Junta spokesperson Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun denied the mass arrests and killings through military-controlled media on June 4. 

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Kiana Duncan and Taejun Kang. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

More than 60 percent of the national results of the Solomon Islands election are now in.

So far, two female MPs have been elected and three former prime ministers may be in the running for the top job.

Counting is still progressing at a snail’s pace — partly because it took so long to transport ballot boxes from remote communities to counting centres, but also because the country is conducting its first joint election of provincial and national candidates.

• READ MORE: Other Solomon Islands elections reports

As of Monday morning, Our Party, the largest single grouping in the last coalition government, was in the lead having won 32 percent of counted votes, followed closely by independent MPs on 31 percent.

Then came the Development Party on just under 17 percent, with the United Party rounding out the top four on 6.1 percent.

Chief Electoral Officer Jasper Anisi said that more than half of all national ballots had been counted.

“For parliamentary elections 68 percent — that is what they have already declared. Provincial assembly 86 and HCC [Honiara City Council] 82 percent.”

Seeking ‘good government’
RNZ Pacific spoke with some voters who asked to remain anonymous about their expectations.

“I want a good government, a good leader for us so that we can see some good,” one said.

“Like when there is a good government, our kids will have jobs. I won’t have to come to market all the time until I grow old.”

Another said: “I want a new prime minister for our economy so that it is good. Because the last prime minister or government, our economy is not good.”

But it is still early days as far as coalition negotiations.

In terms of potential leaders, there are several former prime ministers already among those returning to the house, including incumbent Manasseh Sogavare, Rick Hou and potentially Gordon Darcy Lilo, who is leading the count by a large margin in his electorate.

Meanwhile, incumbent MP Freda Soria Comua and independent candidate Choylin Douglas are the first two women candidates to officially make it through in this election, while another independent candidate, Cathy Nori, has been mentioned in provisional results.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

A Solomon Islands politician ousted as premier of the Pacific island country’s most populous province after opposing diplomatic recognition of China has been reelected to its provincial assembly, according to preliminary election results released Friday.

The results from Malaita province are among the first to be made public since the voting in national, provincial and capital city elections took place Wednesday. Electoral Commission officials have said they hope that many results will be known by the middle of next week.

Daniel Suidani won the most votes in his provincial constituency, an Electoral Commission spokesman Ednal Palmer told RFA-affiliated news organization BenarNews. Martin Fini, the politician who replaced Suidani as premier following his ouster in a no confidence vote in February last year, was not reelected, according to a separately announced vote count for his constituency.

The election in the Pacific island country of 700,000 people was the first since its combative, pro-Beijing prime minister Manasseh Sogavare switched diplomatic recognition to China from Taiwan in 2019 and signed a secretive security pact with the Asian superpower.

Under Suidani, Malaita’s provincial assembly opposed the diplomatic switch to Beijing and issued its Auki Communiqué banning China-funded projects in Malaita despite the island’s crumbling roads, rickety bridges and threadbare health system.

Suidani touted benefits from a United States development aid project in the province, but it was slow to produce tangible results. He remained popular and attracted large crowds to his campaign rallies in Malaita.

The central government’s ineffectiveness in providing basic services and the struggle to earn enough money to survive was preoccupying many voters when they headed to the polls on Wednesday. Whether Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare will stay in power is also keenly watched by governments from China to Australia and the U.S. 

Once vote counting is completed, members of Parliament decide the prime minister so leadership of the Solomon Islands may not be known until May.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Stephen Wright for BenarNews.

Photograph Source: Liam Enea – CC BY-SA 2.0

The New Hampshire primary has confirmed that the United States is on the way to a disastrous fall election. Unless a health crisis forces withdrawal from the presidential race, either Donald Trump or Joe Biden is headed for a second term. The electoral outlook is now dystopian.

President Biden’s role as party boss worked out well for him in New Hampshire. No doubt mindful that he finished fifth in the state’s 2020 primary with a dismal 8 percent of the vote, Biden directed the Democratic National Committee to decertify New Hampshire’s historic first-in-the-nation primary, and he kept his name off the 2024 ballot. Yet pro-Biden forces ran a write-in campaign that got him nearly two-thirds of the vote on Tuesday.

The story might have been quite different if a credible progressive candidate for president had stepped forward to give Biden a run for his money. But the closest competitor, Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips — whose overall record is to the right of Biden — finished with 20 percent of the New Hampshire primary vote. Progressive candidate Marianne Williamson, who has never held elective office or led a social-justice movement, received just 5 percent.

Faced with such meager opposition, Biden romped to victory in New Hampshire. Now, with most polls showing him appreciably behind Trump, including in swing states, the Democratic Party is on track to nominate a notably weak candidate at a time when epitomizing the status quo is apt to be a losing proposition. Polling shows that fully three-quarters of the public believe the country is moving in the wrong direction.

The factors that got us to this abysmal situation are numerous, but any meaningful list should include the conformity of so many elected officials and activist groups known as progressive. For many, the temptation to publicly make excuses for Biden and unduly praise him has been too powerful to resist. Meanwhile, actual concerns have tended to stay private — even after it became clear that Biden’s presidency was in grim grooves such as “all of the above” energy policies accompanied by climate doubletalk, anemic responses to systemic racism, a belligerent foreign policy with scant regard for human rights, and rampant militarism.

As the Biden presidency deteriorated, an imperative was to generate sustained pressure from the left to counter ominous trends. Yet, by the end of 2021, the leadership of the Congressional Progressive Caucus had begun what became a pattern of unwisely deferring to the man in the Oval Office.

A turning point came in late 2021 when CPC leaders jettisoned their crucial pledge that the pending infrastructure bill would get through Congress only in tandem with the Build Back Better package — which, as my RootsAction colleague Sam Rosenthal wrote, “contained far more progressive priorities than did the infrastructure bill.” The power struggle “failed catastrophically for progressives, as mounting pressure from the White House and moderate Democrats drove the CPC to relent and vote independently on the infrastructure bill. Build Back Better ultimately failed to secure enough support from Senate Democrats to pass.”

The tragic Build Back Better episode foreshadowed further cave-ins, including premature endorsements of Biden for renomination. CPC Chair Pramila Jayapal endorsed him 14 months ago, less than halfway through his term, declaring: “He was not my first or second choice for president, but I am a convert. I never thought I would say this, but I believe he should run for another term and finish this agenda we laid out.”

Many others followed suit, thus reducing the chances that a progressive Democrat would launch a credible primary challenge to Biden. Even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who’d been among the Squad members admirably voting against the move that sank Build Back Better (“This is bullshit,” she said at the time) — endorsed Biden for renomination last July.

The pressures on Democrats in Congress to do that kind of thing are enormous. Countervailing pressure from progressive grassroots activists and organizations is vital — and all too often lacking. As a result, elected officials who ostensibly represent the progressive base to the establishment are more likely to end up serving as representatives of the establishment to the progressive base.

Biden’s all-things-to-all-Democrats act has worn thin to utter transparency, and he has the polling numbers to prove it. The president is currently 16 percent underwater in the approval-disapproval ratio among voters overall. Among key mainstays of his 2020 election victory over Trump — people of color and especially the young — support for Biden has plunged, reaching new depths since October due to his active complicity in Israel’s ongoing mass murder of Palestinian civilians.

On the same day as his victory in New Hampshire, Biden again encountered protesters who disrupted his speech with cries for an end to the U.S.-backed carnage in Gaza. As soon as his speech began at a campaign event in the swing state of Virginia, he was interrupted with the shout “How many kids have been killed?”

At the rally, there was no letup to the outcries about Gaza, which included “Israel kills two mothers every hour” and “Stop funding genocide.” The Hill reported that “chants from the crowd” interrupted Biden’s speech “nearly a dozen times.”

Biden has stressed his ties to organized labor. But several major unions have formally called for a ceasefire in Gaza, including the United Auto Workers, the American Postal Workers Union, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) that represents almost 2 million workers. Organizers among members of the nation’s largest union, the National Education Association, are now pushing for the NEA to also take a formal position urging a ceasefire.

Such direct challenges to Biden’s support for continuation of the bloodshed in Gaza are yet more indicators of how badly he is out of touch with voters he needs.

Now, among progressives, thoughtful dialogue on what to do about Biden is essential. Valuable ideas include focusing on local and state races as well as giving priority to support for the most progressive members of Congress as they undergo big-money assaults from AIPAC and its reactionary allies.

In any event, candor will be necessary about Joe Biden’s betrayals of key 2020 campaign promises and his complicity with ongoing mass murder by Israel in Gaza. And candor will also be crucial about the very real threat of fascism from Trump forces intent on seizing full control of the U.S. government — with foreseeably catastrophic impacts on civil liberties, reproductive rights, racial justice, climate, the environment, voting rights, what remains of democracy, and so much more. Make no mistake about it: Trump and his top collaborators would like to bring fascism to the United States.

The post New Hampshire Results Leave Progressives Up Against the Wall appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Norman Solomon.

In a declaration released yesterday, the eight nations that are home to the rainforest agreed to take “urgent action to avoid the point of no return in the Amazon,” combat organized crime, and bolster regional cooperation. But the accord did not resolve tensions over some of the thorniest issues affecting the region, such as a unified approach to deforestation and whether to limit fossil fuel extraction in the delicate ecosystem. 

“We would have been super happy to have specific goals and mechanisms,” Vanessa Pérez-Cirera, the director of the global economic center at the World Resources Institute, told Grist. “This is a good first step.”

The Amazon is the world’s largest tropical rainforest, covering some 2.5 million square miles — an area roughly twice the size of India. It’s a critical carbon sink for planet-warming emissions and home to a fifth of the world’s fresh water. But deforestation and human-caused climate change are degrading the Amazon and its ability to sop up carbon from the atmosphere. Experts have long called for immediate and drastic actions to protect the rainforest and the hundreds of Indigenous groups that inhabit and care for it. 

“We’re going to be crossing tipping points for the global climate. They are points of no return, [and] the Amazon is absolutely central to that,” said Philip Fearnside, an ecologist at the National Institute for Research in Amazonia. But what was discussed at the conference, he added, were “the easy things.” 

The nearly 10,000-word summit declaration recognized the scientific imperative to avoid tipping points in the Amazon and pledged to renew regional cooperation to avoid that end. It also acknowledged the central role that Indigenous communities play in conservation efforts and called on developed countries to fulfill their promises of financial support. 

“The forest unites us. It is time to look at the heart of our continent and consolidate, once and for all, our Amazon identity,” said Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “In an international system that was not built by us, we were historically relegated to a subordinate place as a supplier of raw materials. A just ecological transition will allow us to change this.”

The majority of the Amazon is in Brazil, and Lula has made its protection a hallmark of his presidency. Deforestation has already dropped since he took office this year, which is a major shift from the environmental devastation that proliferated under his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro. This summit was another attempt to reverse that trend. 

“It’s completely a break from the Bolsanaro era. It’s important that that happened,” said Fearnside. Still, he was disappointed that the group didn’t adopt a ban on oil development in the Amazon, a step that leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro championed but other countries were less reluctant to embrace. 

“Brazil has a big plan for oil and gas in the western part of the state of Amazonas,” Fearnside said, which would be “disastrous.” 

Leaders also failed to find common ground on deforestation, which has already claimed nearly a fifth of Amazon and is on track to degrade even more of the rainforest. “The planet is melting, we are breaking temperature records every day. It is not possible that, in a scenario like this, eight Amazonian countries are unable to put in a statement — in large letters — that deforestation needs to be zero,” Marcio Astrini of environmental lobby group Climate Observatory told Reuters. 

Answers to those difficult questions are being pushed to another time, perhaps even the next gathering of the treaty organization — which experts hope won’t take another 14 years. Pérez-Cirera is optimistic and sees this summit as a catalyst for future action.

“It is a historic moment for the Amazon,” she said. “And more needs to come.” 

The conference concludes today, as leaders from the Amazon nations meet with representatives of other countries with large rainforests, such as Indonesia, Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The aim is to plan for COP28, the global United Nations climate summit in November. 

“We want to prepare for the first time a joint document of all forest countries to arrive united at COP28,” Lula said last week. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Summit to save the Amazon from ‘the point of no return’ yields mixed results on Aug 9, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tik Root.

Celebration at an Indonesian based IT Co, @Anabatic_India Technologies in Bengaluru!
We have to share this until it reaches their Co HR and if they can take action. pic.twitter.com/zkQ4106cPm

— Madridista (@DalviNameet) May 17, 2023

Twitter Blue subscriber @RajeswariAiyer tweeted the clip and claimed that employees of Anabatic were celebrating Congress’ win. (Archive)

MNC tech co employees in Bengaluru (Anabatic technologies) owned by some Japs celebrating BJP defeat in Karnataka…
Company name/logo visible at 1:02 time of the video. pic.twitter.com/eE8rhobsyn

— RajeIyer (@RajeswariAiyer) May 22, 2023

Several other users also shared the clip with the same claim, including verified user @trunicle. (Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4)

The clip is viral with the same claim on Facebook as well.

Fact Check

We found that the social media coordinator for Indian Overseas Congress had tweeted the viral clip on the day of the results of the election with the caption “Celebrations will continue like this for some time & who else can celebrate more than the war room guys ??? It’s your day guys enjoy”.

Celebrations will continue like this for some time & who else can celebrate more than the war room guys ??? It’s your day guys enjoy #KarnatakaElectionResults pic.twitter.com/7JotEDAvFF

— Vijay Thottathil (@vijaythottathil) May 13, 2023

Paul Koshy, who was part of Congress’s state-level election war room, also tweeted several videos and images in a thread documenting the functioning of the war room. The Anabatic Technologies nameplate can be seen in the videos that Koshy tweeted.

And the team danced in the War Room pic.twitter.com/A5ASZauZZw

— Paul Koshy (@Paul_Koshy) May 13, 2023

In one of his tweets, he was seen posing with Sasikanth Senthil who was appointed the chairman of the War Room for Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee. Senthil can also be seen in the viral video.

Working with #ShashikanthSenthil @s_kanth ,ex IAS , now Head of the War room was one of the most enriching experiences pic.twitter.com/3ZNgxo8B8e

— Paul Koshy (@Paul_Koshy) May 13, 2023

Sasikanth Senthil, too, tweeted images from the War Room on May 13. The people celebrating in the viral video are also seen in Senthil’s tweet.

In a statement refuting the viral claims, Sasikanth Senthil told Alt News, “It is the Congress War Room. It is a rental space which was earlier used by the said company. Anabatic Inc has nothing to do with the celebrations”.

We noticed that India Today also had visited the War Room on the morning of May 13. The people seen in the viral video are also visible in India Today’s coverage. “We have a dispersed model because we have very clear-cut functional distribution. We work in these functional areas in different centres and this (the War Room) is where we coordinate everything, this is where we come for end-of-the-day coordination and all the sections feed into this particular space” Senthil told India Today journalist Preeti Choudhry.

We also looked up Anabatic Technologies India’s profile on Zauba Corp and noticed that the company was currently under liquidation.

Thus, a viral video of workers in the Congress War Room celebrating Congress’ win in the Karnataka elections is viral with the claim that employees of IT company Anabatic Technologies India are celebrating the win. In reality, the office space used as Congress’s War Room was earlier used by the company, which is currently under liquidation.

The post Congress war room video viral as IT firm staff celebrating Karnataka poll results appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Shinjinee Majumder.

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Georgia Gee.

The post Urban Bias in Weather Forecasting Results in Disaster for Rural Kentucky appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Vins.

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The courtroom was packed when the North Carolina State Board of Elections convened on Tuesday to consider removing two members of the Surry County Board of Elections from their posts. At the Surry County GOP convention not long before, one board member, Tim DeHaan, had appealed for people to attend the meeting at the county courthouse. And now, dozens of supporters, one with “We the People” tattooed on his forearm and another with cowboy boots stamped with American flags, whispered tensely among themselves.

DeHaan and Jerry Forestieri were facing the state elections board because, at a November meeting to certify the county’s 2022 general election results, they had presented a co-signed letter declaring “I don’t view election law per NCSBE as legitimate or Constitutional.” Then Forestieri refused to certify the election, while DeHaan only agreed to certify it on a technicality.

This month, both Forestieri and DeHaan refused to certify a redo of a November 2022 municipal election. The new contest had been called after a poll worker allegedly made a mistake in telling voters that one of the four candidates had died, which could have swung a race decided by eight votes. (The results of the second race were the same as the first.)

Both elections were ultimately certified by the board’s three Democrats. But DeHaan’s and Forestieri’s refusals to certify, along with similar actions by conservative county election officials in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and Pennsylvania, exposed a weakness in the nation’s electoral system. If local officials failed to certify, the disruption could cascade and cast into dispute state and federal election outcomes, potentially allowing partisan actors to inappropriately influence them, according to election law experts. A ProPublica review of 10 such cases found that most officials have not faced formal consequences for their refusal to certify. DeHaan’s and Forestieri’s hearing was to be the first completed disciplinary process for such officials nationwide after the 2022 election.

At the trial-like state elections board meeting, Bob Hall, the former executive director of the watchdog group Democracy North Carolina whose complaint had launched the disciplinary process, argued that DeHaan and Forestieri could not be trusted to supervise elections because of their refusal to follow the law. Forestieri and DeHaan told the board that they could not be certain of the identities of voters or the validity of their ballots because they disagreed with a federal judge striking down a voter ID law for discriminating against minorities. Forestieri defended their actions as a “free speech issue.”

The lone Republican board member present, Stacy Eggers, made two motions to remove the men from office, and each motion passed unanimously, 4-0. “We cannot substitute our own opinions,” Eggers said, for “what the law actually is.”

As the motions passed, one woman exclaimed in the quiet courtroom: “The law is perverted! The law is perverted!”

Afterward, in the hall outside the courtroom, DeHaan and Forestieri were sought out by local supporters and election deniers who’d traveled to the hearing from outside the county. Talk swirled of appealing the decision in court, though Forestieri said a final decision about an appeal would be made at a later date.

“We took a stand for lawful, credible elections appropriate for the owners of this republic, we the people,” said Forestieri at the courthouse. “I cannot apologize for that.” Forestieri later wrote to ProPublica that he disagreed with his removal from office, and that the “NCSBE proved itself unwilling to recognize clear law in General Statutes” by striking down his and DeHaan’s arguments.

DeHaan declined to comment and did not respond to written questions.

Michella Huff, the elections director for Surry County, had watched the proceedings stoically. It was a year to the day since Huff had blocked the chairman of the county Republican Party from illegally accessing her voting machines to further a conspiracy theory, after which he launched a pressure campaign that included attempts to reduce her pay and raucous protests featuring nationally prominent election deniers, as ProPublica has previously reported. (The county chairman told ProPublica that he did not seek to cut her pay, though text messages and emails obtained via public records requests showed otherwise.)

As a result of the year’s travails, Angie Harrison, Huff’s deputy director, has said she will retire in June. “Here in Surry County and across the entire nation, people want to put more scrutiny on the election process, which is a good thing to help voters understand the law — our philosophy is to educate,” she said. But “we take it personally when people start attacking the job that we have been so proud to deliver accurately and without bias.”

In early 2022, a national survey from the Brennan Center for Justice found that a fifth of local elections officials reported they were unlikely to stay in their jobs for the 2024 election. “We’re in the middle of an exodus of election workers,” said Larry Norden, the senior director of the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program. An Arizona election official, whose county supervisors refused to certify November 2022 results until ordered to do so by a court, also recently left to “protect her health and safety” after working conditions became “intolerable,” as her lawyer wrote in a letter to the county.

Huff, however, is staying in her post. Last fall, after the state’s attorney general, Josh Stein, read ProPublica’s story about Huff, his office gave her an award for her “incredible commitment to democracy” as “she refused to buckle to those who lie about stolen elections,” Stein wrote in a statement. A year ago, she had felt overwhelmed by the new and unprecedented challenges inundating election officials, but now she felt more capable to confront them. “Not saying that it’s going to be easy” in 2024, she said, “but I’m a little more prepared now for the what-ifs.”

The election deniers departed the courthouse boisterously, talking about going out for lunch. Huff got in a van with another election worker and was driven past cornfields to her office. The November 2022 election was finally done, four and a half months late, and now it was time to get ready for the next one.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Doug Bock Clark.

If you grew up in America, then you almost definitely have heard some variation of the refrain: “America is the greatest country in the world.”

It’s an idea that’s so commonplace that it’s more or less taken for granted. We boast of inventions like the airplane, the light bulb, the internet, and even the humble chocolate chip cookie. We are home to some of the best universities in the world and most of the largest corporations.

But when we look more closely at other metrics, America’s position as the top country in the world is called into question. There are many such metrics, but perhaps none more important than life expectancy.

According to a report released last year by the National Center for Health Statistics, the average American can now expect to live 76.4 years. Life expectancy in the US has dropped off in recent years; as life expectancy in other wealthy countries rebounded after the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it continued to decline in the US. All in all, the US now ranks 53rd among 200 countries in life expectancy. Citizens of all developed countries suffer from things like heart disease, cancer, and liver disease, but Americans suffer more and, as a result, live shorter lives.

Countries where life expectancy is the highest ( > 82 years) include places like Japan, Australia, Switzerland, South Korea, Norway, Sweden, and Canada. What are these countries doing differently than the US, you may ask? Why are their citizens living longer?

It all comes down to one word: inequality. The US is not poorer than any of these countries – year after year, we have the highest GDP in the world. And on a per-capita basis, we’re consistently in the top 10, far from 53rd in the world. But the difference between the US and other developed countries is that we do a much poorer job sharing wealth (and all the benefits that come with it) among our citizens. Among developed countries, the US has one of the highest rates of inequality, both in terms of wealth and income – and we can, unfortunately, see that disparity in health and life expectancy as well.

Just because the average American life expectancy is 76.4 years doesn’t mean that all Americans can expect to live that long. It’s sad, but in America how long you live has a lot to do with how much money you have. People with high incomes can live 10 to 20 years longer than people with low incomes, even if they live just miles apart in the same metro area. For example, rich residents in Columbus, Ohio can expect to live close to 85 years while poor residents in the very same city typically live just 60 years.

This trend applies to a host of other social outcomes besides life expectancy. Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson made this case in their 2009 book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. They found that countries with low inequality consistently outperformed those with high inequality not only in life expectancy but in literacy rates, homicides, imprisonment, teenage births, levels of trust, obesity, mental illness, and social mobility. (With high inequality, the US was among the lowest performers in all of these metrics.) It was not GDP or overall levels of wealth that mattered for these social outcomes; it was instead how wealth was distributed that made the difference.

Inequality is not just an abstract concept or a set of numbers – it’s a real-world phenomenon that has tangible effects on the way that ordinary people live (or don’t live) their lives. And we are clearly not doing very well in the US on this front compared to the rest of the world. Americans shouldn’t go around boasting about living in the greatest country on Earth when our citizens are quite literally not living as long as their neighbors.

But all hope is not lost. Our situation in the US is not in any way an inevitability. Inequality is a choice. We certainly can’t bring about change overnight, but, if we keep at it, we can bring about change.

What can be done to turn the tide? It’s simple: follow the example of our neighbors with less inequality and orient our economic policy around reducing the gap between those at the top and everyone else. We can do that by raising taxes on rich people like us, just as President Biden proposed in his latest budget, to limit extreme wealth. We can also lift up the bottom by raising the minimum wage, strengthening unions, and investing in a strong social safety net that keeps all Americans afloat.

The policy possibilities are limitless. Our only limit is a lack of political will. We truly believe that the United States can and should be the greatest country in the world – after all, we’re not called “Patriotic” Millionaires for nothing. But the American Dream that was once a shining light for all is fading. If we want to revive it, we need to start fighting against the inequality that is holding us back.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Emily McCloskey.

If you grew up in America, then you almost definitely have heard some variation of the refrain: “America is the greatest country in the world.”

It’s an idea that’s so commonplace that it’s more or less taken for granted. We boast of inventions like the airplane, the light bulb, the internet, and even the humble chocolate chip cookie. We are home to some of the best universities in the world and most of the largest corporations.

But when we look more closely at other metrics, America’s position as the top country in the world is called into question. There are many such metrics, but perhaps none more important than life expectancy.

According to a report released last year by the National Center for Health Statistics, the average American can now expect to live 76.4 years. Life expectancy in the US has dropped off in recent years; as life expectancy in other wealthy countries rebounded after the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it continued to decline in the US. All in all, the US now ranks 53rd among 200 countries in life expectancy. Citizens of all developed countries suffer from things like heart disease, cancer, and liver disease, but Americans suffer more and, as a result, live shorter lives.

Countries where life expectancy is the highest ( > 82 years) include places like Japan, Australia, Switzerland, South Korea, Norway, Sweden, and Canada. What are these countries doing differently than the US, you may ask? Why are their citizens living longer?

It all comes down to one word: inequality. The US is not poorer than any of these countries – year after year, we have the highest GDP in the world. And on a per-capita basis, we’re consistently in the top 10, far from 53rd in the world. But the difference between the US and other developed countries is that we do a much poorer job sharing wealth (and all the benefits that come with it) among our citizens. Among developed countries, the US has one of the highest rates of inequality, both in terms of wealth and income – and we can, unfortunately, see that disparity in health and life expectancy as well.

Just because the average American life expectancy is 76.4 years doesn’t mean that all Americans can expect to live that long. It’s sad, but in America how long you live has a lot to do with how much money you have. People with high incomes can live 10 to 20 years longer than people with low incomes, even if they live just miles apart in the same metro area. For example, rich residents in Columbus, Ohio can expect to live close to 85 years while poor residents in the very same city typically live just 60 years.

This trend applies to a host of other social outcomes besides life expectancy. Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson made this case in their 2009 book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. They found that countries with low inequality consistently outperformed those with high inequality not only in life expectancy but in literacy rates, homicides, imprisonment, teenage births, levels of trust, obesity, mental illness, and social mobility. (With high inequality, the US was among the lowest performers in all of these metrics.) It was not GDP or overall levels of wealth that mattered for these social outcomes; it was instead how wealth was distributed that made the difference.

Inequality is not just an abstract concept or a set of numbers – it’s a real-world phenomenon that has tangible effects on the way that ordinary people live (or don’t live) their lives. And we are clearly not doing very well in the US on this front compared to the rest of the world. Americans shouldn’t go around boasting about living in the greatest country on Earth when our citizens are quite literally not living as long as their neighbors.

But all hope is not lost. Our situation in the US is not in any way an inevitability. Inequality is a choice. We certainly can’t bring about change overnight, but, if we keep at it, we can bring about change.

What can be done to turn the tide? It’s simple: follow the example of our neighbors with less inequality and orient our economic policy around reducing the gap between those at the top and everyone else. We can do that by raising taxes on rich people like us, just as President Biden proposed in his latest budget, to limit extreme wealth. We can also lift up the bottom by raising the minimum wage, strengthening unions, and investing in a strong social safety net that keeps all Americans afloat.

The policy possibilities are limitless. Our only limit is a lack of political will. We truly believe that the United States can and should be the greatest country in the world – after all, we’re not called “Patriotic” Millionaires for nothing. But the American Dream that was once a shining light for all is fading. If we want to revive it, we need to start fighting against the inequality that is holding us back.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Emily McCloskey.

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A week and a half after last November’s vote, members of the Board of Elections in Surry County, North Carolina, gathered in a windowless room to certify the results. It was supposed to be a routine task, marking the end of a controversial season during which election deniers harassed and retaliated against the county’s elections director. Not long into the meeting, however, a staffer distributed a letter from two board members stating that they were refusing to certify.

According to the letter, the two members had decided — “with regard for the sacred blood shed of both my Redeemer and His servants” and “past Patriots who made the ultimate sacrifice”— that they “must not call these election results credible and bow to the perversion of truth.”

In their view, a federal judge who’d struck down a North Carolina voter ID law for discriminating against minorities had transformed the state’s election laws into “a grotesque and perverse sham.” Tim DeHaan, one of the two board members who signed the letter, explained at the meeting, “We feel the election was held according to the law that we have, but that the law is not right.”

This argument failed to win over the three Democratic board members, according to a recording of the meeting. DeHaan eventually agreed to join the three on a technicality, and the board certified the election with a 4-1 vote. Jerry Forestieri, the Republican board secretary who also signed the letter, held out.

DeHaan and Forestieri declined to comment and did not respond to written questions.

Before 2020, local election officials seldom voted against certifying results. But in 2022, conservative officials in North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and New Mexico refused to do so. Some admitted to refusing to certify for political reasons. In all the 2022 cases, the election results eventually were certified, sometimes under a court order.

Election law experts say that these disruptions reveal a weakness in the American electoral system, which relies on thousands of local officials to certify the totals in their counties and municipalities before their results can be aggregated and tallied for state and federal elections.

Local elections officials “could create chaos” all the way up the chain by refusing to certify, said Alice Clapman, a senior counsel in election law at the Brennan Center for Justice. “And in that chaos you have more room for political interference.” Five legal experts described to ProPublica scenarios in which legislatures, courts, secretaries of state or governors could use a failure to certify at the local level to exert partisan influence.

Clapman said that even if refusals to certify don’t affect election outcomes, they can violate state laws and can amplify and validate harmful misinformation that feeds election denialism because of the imprimatur of the officials’ offices.

A ProPublica review of 10 instances of local officials refusing to certify 2022 results in four states found that, for the majority of them, the state election authority did not ultimately pursue official consequences. Two of them have been referred for criminal prosecution, but the attorney general in that state would not comment on whether there is an open investigation. And two — the ones in Surry County — are facing potential removal from their posts by the State Board of Elections.

“There needs to be some sanction when there is lawlessness,” said Richard L. Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project. “If you allow these things to take place without any sanction, then you invite more serious rule-breaking in the future.”

After the DeHaan and Forestieri letter, Bob Hall, the former executive director of the watchdog group Democracy North Carolina, submitted a complaint to the State Board of Elections to start a disciplinary process, as permitted by North Carolina law if board members commit an alleged breach of duty. An attorney for Hall argued in a subsequent document that “if left unchecked, Forestieri and DeHaan may be the first of many board members throughout the state and across the political spectrum who cannot be trusted to faithfully certify election results.”

That led the state board to summon Forestieri and DeHaan to its headquarters in the capital, a roughly three-hour drive from their rural home, for a hearing last month.

At the beginning of the proceeding, DeHaan argued that the hearing itself was “illegal” because it was supposed to be held in the county the board members are from. The Democratic board chairman agreed and voted with a Republican colleague to move the hearing to Surry County. A date has not yet been set. “The relocation to Surry County shows that this isn’t normal,” said Christopher A. Cooper, a professor specializing in North Carolina politics at Western Carolina University. “There isn’t a long history of examples of this sort of thing to lean on.”

Experts point out that efforts to hold local officials accountable for not certifying their elections have been of a patchwork nature across the nation. “I think states are trying to figure out what to do and are approaching it differently, like a prosecutor making a judgment on a case-by-case basis whether to bring a case or not,” said Derek T. Muller, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law who has researched legal options for ensuring that local officials certify elections. “States need to figure out how to bring these cases in a fair, consistent and lawful way.”

In Cochise County, a rural part of Arizona on the Mexican border, a pair of county supervisors refused to certify their November 2022 results despite state officials warning them multiple times that doing so would be illegal under state law. In early December, a court ordered them to certify, but one supervisor, Tom Crosby, still skipped the vote.

The next day, the state elections director, at the urging of a former Republican Arizona attorney general, sent a letter to the state attorney general referring the supervisors for criminal investigation, arguing that they had committed “potential violations of Arizona law.” The letter concluded, “This blatant act of defying Arizona’s election laws risks establishing a dangerous precedent that we must discourage” by taking “all necessary action to hold these public officers accountable.” A spokesperson for the Arizona Attorney General’s Office wrote that they “cannot confirm or deny any potential investigation” that may have resulted from the letter.

In January, a group of Cochise County voters launched a petition to recall Crosby. As of late February, it had approximately a quarter of the 6,000 signatures it would need by early May to result in a new election, according to Eric Suchodolski, the chairperson of a committee leading the effort. “It’s our best recourse as citizens,” he said. “I didn’t think the authorities would ultimately do something, and even if they did, it can take awhile.”

In response to a request for comment, Crosby said: “If I get into defending myself it will never end. I’ve already answered all this stuff.” In the past, he has disputed the validity of the certification of the county’s voting machines, despite assurances from the state.

While in North Carolina and Arizona there are ongoing efforts to hold accountable local officials who didn’t certify their elections, Nevada and New Mexico decided not to pursue such efforts.

In Nevada, one Republican commissioner in Washoe County and another in Nye County refused to certify, though in both cases the other four commissioners outvoted them. A spokesperson for the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office said that “our office is not aware of any legal consequences for that action” by the commissioners.

In Otero County, New Mexico, the county’s three commissioners initially voted unanimously against certifying the June 2022 primary elections. This followed months of disputes about election security driven by conservative activists who also fueled protests in Surry County.

New Mexico law requires commissioners to approve election results unless they can point to specific problems. The Otero commissioners only raised debunked concerns about hacked voting machines, with one of the officials, Couy Griffin, referencing his “gut feeling.” The New Mexico secretary of state subsequently asked the state’s Supreme Court to step in, and it ordered the commissioners to certify. The secretary of state also sent a letter to the state’s attorney general notifying him of “multiple unlawful actions by the Otero County Commission” and asked for “a prompt investigation.” Faced with this, two of the commissioners switched their votes, certifying the election. Griffin did not. (In Sandoval County, on the other side of the state, one commissioner voted against certification, though the four others on the panel outvoted him.)

Griffin did not respond to a request for comment.

The New Mexico Secretary of State’s Office decided not to further pursue “punitive action” against the officials who did not certify, according to Alex Curtas, its communications director, because “our concern was getting the election certified, so that’s where that ended.”

“Once it became clear that we had that state Supreme Court precedent and this wasn’t really a widespread thing, just two hard-right commissioners, we felt comfortable that this wouldn’t be a major problem in the general election,” he said, “and in our perspective it became a bit of a moot point.”

Griffin eventually was subsequently removed from public office and banned from holding it by a judge’s order as part of sentencing for participating in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Part of the challenge for states seeking to crack down on officials who refuse to certify elections is that many of the laws that provide recourse were written more than a century ago. “We’re dealing with modern issues with very old statutes,” said Quinn Yeargain, a professor at the Widener University Commonwealth Law School in Pennsylvania.

Some states recently enacted new regulations. Last year, Colorado legislators passed the Election Security Act, which mandates that the secretary of state certify a county’s results if it misses the deadline to do so. In Michigan, voters passed a wide-ranging voter-protection ballot proposal in November that made certification a “ministerial, clerical, nondiscretionary duty.” This clause was in response to conservative members of a county canvassing board for Detroit refusing to certify the 2020 presidential election for a few hours, momentarily threatening to throw its certification into chaos.

Election legal experts note that holding local election officials accountable for voting against certifying elections will continue to be complicated. Muller, the Iowa law professor, favors what he calls the “least invasive process,” one that would allow courts to replace local officials who refuse to certify elections with other officials who would do their duty.

But he said any process that results in an official being forcibly replaced is likely to carry political risks, including the potential to abuse the system to disempower political opponents.

“We haven’t seen fallout from local election officials being removed yet, because these processes are just beginning,” Muller said. “But we could see that soon.”

Help ProPublica Investigate Threats to U.S. Democracy

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Doug Bock Clark.

Opposition parties are disputing the results of Saturday’s presidential election in Nigeria, where the country’s Independent National Electoral Commission has declared the winner to be Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress party. The former governor of Lagos played a key role in helping outgoing Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari win two terms in office and campaigned using the slogan “It’s my turn.” Tinubu received about 36% of the vote, and turnout was under 30%. Several of Tinubu’s challengers have disputed the results, alleging fraud, while election observers and voters have cited delays, closures and violence at voting sites. For more on how the election could play out in Africa’s most populous nation, we speak with Aderonke Ige in Lagos. She is a human rights activist and lawyer who works with Corporate Accountability and Public Participation Africa, or CAPPA.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Ma Xingrui, Communist Party Secretary of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, said during a Jan. 4 video conference that health officials and hospitals must take advantage of traditional Chinese and Uyghur treatments as well as Western drugs to fight the coronavirus, which has spread after authorities relaxed stringent anti-viral restrictions after nationwide protests in late November.

Using plant-based ingredients, traditional Uyghur medicine has been used to treat a wide variety of ailments, including skin disease, urogenital disease, rheumatism, digestive problems and respiratory infections in the form of pills, tablets, tinctures, granules, syrups and liniments.

Traditional Uyghur medicines specifically used to combat coronavirus symptoms include Zukam Jewhiri, a cold remedy, and Sherbiti Zufa, a syrup whose main ingredient is hyssop, an aromatic, semi-evergreen,shrubby perennial belonging to the mint family.

Health workers are reporting positive results.

“Ethnic medicine in Xinjiang has been showing its advantage [by] contributing to controlling COVID and to the treatment of COVID patients,” said a physician at Aksu City Hospital who did not give her name because she was not authorized to speak to the media.

“We treated severely ill COVID patients by continuously giving them Uyghur medicine for three days, which lowered their fevers,” the doctor said. “There are cases in which patients recovered from COVID because of Uyghur medicine.”  

Ma’s comments were made the same day that China’s National Health Commission issued a paper on developing and promoting the advantages of traditional Chinese medicine against the COVID-19 virus and its variants, although it made no specific mention of traditional Uyghur medicine.

“This measure aims to reduce the deterioration of the patient situation,” China’s official Xinhua news agency reported. “Local organizations employ Chinese medicine and prepare recipes and treat the new COVID patients, reduce the patient’s hospital visit and wait times, and increase consultation efficiency.”

Pharmaceutical industry

Xinjiang is home to more than 60 pharmaceutical companies, which generated revenue of 8.8 billion yuan, or about U.S.$1.3 million, in 2021, a 10.5% increase from the same period the previous year, according to a report by Tengritagh News Network in January 2022. 

Many of the companies’ products are based on traditional Uyghur medicine, which has been incorporated into traditional Chinese medicine, though China doesn’t acknowledge it, Uyghur sources say.

After the coronavirus broke out in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019, many drug companies in Xinjiang operated at full capacity to produce traditional Uyghur pills and syrups to treat COVID patients, China Daily reported in February 2020.

The government’s strategy to deploy traditional medicine, which incorporates Uyghur medicine, shows that Uyghur treatments are an invaluable medical asset, said Uyghur medical professional Mutellip Emchi. 

“The recent attention the Chinese government has given to investing in and developing traditional medicine is due to being unable to find a cure,” he said, referring to the coronavirus. 

“China and the international community realized and acknowledged the effectiveness of Uyghur traditional medicine against the COVID virus,” he said.

Rising numbers

Hospitals in Xinjiang have seen a surge in the number of COVID patients operated by the government or by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a state-owned economic and paramilitary organization, said a Chinese nurse at one of the hospitals in Aksu prefecture.

The nurse, who did not provide her name because she was not authorized to speak to the press, said she could not disclose the number of hospital’s coronavirus patient numbers.

But she did say that using locally produced Uyghur medicine for COVID patients helped prevent their deterioration and reduced fever and coughing.  

However, the government’s instructions to incorporate the use of traditional Uyghur medicine has raised concern among traditional Uyghur medicine experts.

Mutellip Emchi, chair of the Uyghur Medicine Professionals Association, who has been living in Turkey since 2016, said the Chinese have plundered Uyghur medical resources and industrialized them for their own interests. 

Flu pills and powders

For example, the Chinese manufacture flu-curing pills and powders based on traditional Uyghur recipes, though they have not made any progress in the field, Emchi said.

“With the spread of the coronavirus, pharmaceutical companies that manufacture flu pills in Urumqi, Kashgar and Hotan could not make enough of them,” he said. “We knew it by reading news on social media.”

These medicines have been used to treat lung infections, respiratory diseases, asthma, and lung and heart diseases, he added. 

“Because the coronavirus attacks patients’ lungs, the hospitals use these Uyghur medicines to treat COVID patients,” Emchi said. “When there was a shortage of medicine in the hospitals, our Uyghur medicine effectively treated COVID patients of all ethnic origins.”

Uyghur medical professionals in Turkey, who have formed formed a volunteer group and developed a unique recipe for treating COVID patients using ingredients sourced locally, say they have seen positive results in patients treated with traditional Uyghur recipes, he said. 

“We produced medicine and distributed it among Uyghurs in Turkey, Central Asia and other parts of the world, and local Turkish people and Arab people who have heard about our medicine started using it,” he said.

“With news of our medicine’s effectiveness spread by word of mouth, many more people are coming to us for these medicines,” Emchi added.

Meanwhile, medical staff at hospitals in Urumqi said the COVID situation is getting worse in Xinjiang, with more infected patients and not enough beds.

A Uyghur based in the United States, who declined to be named so as to not jeopardize relatives still living in Xinjiang, told RFA that the number of deaths from COVID has increased. His younger sister and her daughter have been infected, he said.

“The number of deaths among the infected people in our homeland is severe,” he said, “and everyone has been infected, including children in the kindergarten.”

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gulchehra Hoja and Mehriban for RFA Uyghur.

Ma Xingrui, Communist Party Secretary of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, said during a Jan. 4 video conference that health officials and hospitals must take advantage of traditional Chinese and Uyghur treatments as well as Western drugs to fight the coronavirus, which has spread after authorities relaxed stringent anti-viral restrictions after nationwide protests in late November.

Using plant-based ingredients, traditional Uyghur medicine has been used to treat a wide variety of ailments, including skin disease, urogenital disease, rheumatism, digestive problems and respiratory infections in the form of pills, tablets, tinctures, granules, syrups and liniments.

Traditional Uyghur medicines specifically used to combat coronavirus symptoms include Zukam Jewhiri, a cold remedy, and Sherbiti Zufa, a syrup whose main ingredient is hyssop, an aromatic, semi-evergreen,shrubby perennial belonging to the mint family.

Health workers are reporting positive results.

“Ethnic medicine in Xinjiang has been showing its advantage [by] contributing to controlling COVID and to the treatment of COVID patients,” said a physician at Aksu City Hospital who did not give her name because she was not authorized to speak to the media.

“We treated severely ill COVID patients by continuously giving them Uyghur medicine for three days, which lowered their fevers,” the doctor said. “There are cases in which patients recovered from COVID because of Uyghur medicine.”  

Ma’s comments were made the same day that China’s National Health Commission issued a paper on developing and promoting the advantages of traditional Chinese medicine against the COVID-19 virus and its variants, although it made no specific mention of traditional Uyghur medicine.

“This measure aims to reduce the deterioration of the patient situation,” China’s official Xinhua news agency reported. “Local organizations employ Chinese medicine and prepare recipes and treat the new COVID patients, reduce the patient’s hospital visit and wait times, and increase consultation efficiency.”

Pharmaceutical industry

Xinjiang is home to more than 60 pharmaceutical companies, which generated revenue of 8.8 billion yuan, or about U.S.$1.3 million, in 2021, a 10.5% increase from the same period the previous year, according to a report by Tengritagh News Network in January 2022. 

Many of the companies’ products are based on traditional Uyghur medicine, which has been incorporated into traditional Chinese medicine, though China doesn’t acknowledge it, Uyghur sources say.

After the coronavirus broke out in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019, many drug companies in Xinjiang operated at full capacity to produce traditional Uyghur pills and syrups to treat COVID patients, China Daily reported in February 2020.

The government’s strategy to deploy traditional medicine, which incorporates Uyghur medicine, shows that Uyghur treatments are an invaluable medical asset, said Uyghur medical professional Mutellip Emchi. 

“The recent attention the Chinese government has given to investing in and developing traditional medicine is due to being unable to find a cure,” he said, referring to the coronavirus. 

“China and the international community realized and acknowledged the effectiveness of Uyghur traditional medicine against the COVID virus,” he said.

Rising numbers

Hospitals in Xinjiang have seen a surge in the number of COVID patients operated by the government or by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a state-owned economic and paramilitary organization, said a Chinese nurse at one of the hospitals in Aksu prefecture.

The nurse, who did not provide her name because she was not authorized to speak to the press, said she could not disclose the number of hospital’s coronavirus patient numbers.

But she did say that using locally produced Uyghur medicine for COVID patients helped prevent their deterioration and reduced fever and coughing.  

However, the government’s instructions to incorporate the use of traditional Uyghur medicine has raised concern among traditional Uyghur medicine experts.

Mutellip Emchi, chair of the Uyghur Medicine Professionals Association, who has been living in Turkey since 2016, said the Chinese have plundered Uyghur medical resources and industrialized them for their own interests. 

Flu pills and powders

For example, the Chinese manufacture flu-curing pills and powders based on traditional Uyghur recipes, though they have not made any progress in the field, Emchi said.

“With the spread of the coronavirus, pharmaceutical companies that manufacture flu pills in Urumqi, Kashgar and Hotan could not make enough of them,” he said. “We knew it by reading news on social media.”

These medicines have been used to treat lung infections, respiratory diseases, asthma, and lung and heart diseases, he added. 

“Because the coronavirus attacks patients’ lungs, the hospitals use these Uyghur medicines to treat COVID patients,” Emchi said. “When there was a shortage of medicine in the hospitals, our Uyghur medicine effectively treated COVID patients of all ethnic origins.”

Uyghur medical professionals in Turkey, who have formed formed a volunteer group and developed a unique recipe for treating COVID patients using ingredients sourced locally, say they have seen positive results in patients treated with traditional Uyghur recipes, he said. 

“We produced medicine and distributed it among Uyghurs in Turkey, Central Asia and other parts of the world, and local Turkish people and Arab people who have heard about our medicine started using it,” he said.

“With news of our medicine’s effectiveness spread by word of mouth, many more people are coming to us for these medicines,” Emchi added.

Meanwhile, medical staff at hospitals in Urumqi said the COVID situation is getting worse in Xinjiang, with more infected patients and not enough beds.

A Uyghur based in the United States, who declined to be named so as to not jeopardize relatives still living in Xinjiang, told RFA that the number of deaths from COVID has increased. His younger sister and her daughter have been infected, he said.

“The number of deaths among the infected people in our homeland is severe,” he said, “and everyone has been infected, including children in the kindergarten.”

Translated by RFA Uyghur. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gulchehra Hoja and Mehriban for RFA Uyghur.

The People’s Alliance Leader, Sitiveni Rabuka, will be writing to key Fiji general election figures expressing their dissatisfaction with the provisional results that followed the surprising technical glitch last night on the Fijian Elections Office app.

At 10.51pm on election day, the FEO released a statement on social media platform Facebook advising the public that provisional results were “temporarily on hold”. The post generated significant interest online.

Around 2.50am today, the FEO App was back online. However, the outcome that followed its resumption resulted in significant changes to the provisional results for contesting parties and candidates.

• READ MORE: Provisional results in Fiji election show ruling FijiFirst party in the lead
• Other Fiji election reports

“It is something that is not within our control but we can engage activities that will allow us redress of what the situation is,” the statement said.

“We will convey our feelings to the Supervisor of Elections (SOE) to say that we are not satisfied with the outcome after the break, the glitch, last night.

“Before that [glitch], we were ahead in the count. When the system came back on, there was a big change not in our favour. It is only natural for people to expect the so-called offended parties to have the right to redress.”

Supervisor Of Elections Mohammed Saneem revealed that the FEO found anomalies in its system when uploading data to the FEO results mobile app.

Mismatch of numbers
While the issue has now been fixed, Saneem said the technical glitch resulted in a mismatch of candidate numbers led to a misallocation of votes.

“What happened last night caught us by surprise. It shouldn’t have happened. We had to take the app and results platform down because when we published the last results with 507 polling stations, we detected an anomaly in which we noted certain candidates had results that were 28,000 and 14,000 on the app,” Saneem said.

“To cure this, the FEO had to review the entire mechanism through which we were pushing out results.”

He said the results management system was an offline system and a staging laptop was used to transmit the results to the app and website.

Saneem explained that an interruption in the process midway through the transference of data from the stating laptop to FEO results app caused a mismatch of the identification of the candidate on the FEO app to the staging laptop, hence vote numbers changed for certain candidates who received a lot of votes on the app.

“We had to delete the data that had been published and then reupload data on the FEO app.”

At 7am, Saneem officially announced the closure of provisional results for the 2022 general election.

Data entry stage
He said they were now in the data entry stage of the final results, which would be available on Sunday.

“The database has been flushed. We will now enter fresh results. This is not the provisional results database, this is a separate database completely for final results,” he said.

“The provisional results will remain. Data entry will be done from the beginning.

“The number will be lesser [than] the provisional results but this only means that the results will be re-entered from zero.”

Meanwhile, Rabuka called for Fijians to remain calm as they continued to explore avenues for redress.

Published in collaboration with the University of the South Pacific journalism programme’s Wansolwara News.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Wansolwara.

The official count for the 2022 Fiji general election is now underway and there are early signs incumbent Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama could lead his FijiFirst Party to form a government for a record third term.

That is unless the numbers shift significantly towards its major rivals, the People’s Alliance Party, the National Federation Party and Sodelpa when the final results start to trickle in.

At 7am today, the Fijian Elections Office (FEO) office released its final set of provisional results — that counted 59 percent of the total vote — which shows Bainimarama’s FFP collected 162,084 votes or 45.9 percent of the total votes cast across 1238 out of 2071 polling stations on election day.

• READ MORE:  Fiji elections: Poll data app back online after late night glitch
• Fiji elections: Polls close and early results favour People’s Alliance
• Voters share ‘integrity and truth’ vision of a strong Fijian democracy
• Fijians brave the heat as numbers swell – but elections chief calls for voters
• Voters turn up in numbers as Fiji’s 2022 election gets underway
• Fijians heading to the polls today for third post-coup election
• Other Fiji elections reports
• Wansolwara elections coverage

The People’s Alliance, which is led by former prime minister Sitiveni Rabuka, has 115,358 votes (32.7 percent), while the NFP amassed 32,809 ballots (9.3 percent). Social Democratic Liberal Party (Sodelpa), which was the major opposition in Parliament after the past two elections, received 16,202 votes (4.6 percent) which would not be enough to enter Parliament.

For other smaller parties, including the Fiji Labour Party, Unity Fiji, We Unite Fiji Party, New Generation Party, All Peoples Party, and two independent candidates, it is looking unlikely they will reach the five percent threshold needed to get into Parliament.

The final results are expected to be released on Sunday.

Glitch in the system
Provisional figures indicate turnout could have been as low as 60 percent and this became a key concern at the close of polls.

The counting process has also become a talking point as it suffered a scare late last night when the elections office found a glitch in the provisional count on the FEO Results App.

“The anomaly caused at least two candidates to receive a high number of disproportionate votes, which forced the FEO to pause the provisional count,” said Fijian Elections Office Supervisor Mohammed Saneem.

“We had to take the app and results platform down because when we published the last results with 507 polling stations we detected an anomaly in which we noted certain candidates had results that were like 28,000 and 14,000 on the app,” Saneem told media.

“To cure this, the FEO had to review the entire mechanism through which we were pushing our results,” he said.

Saneem said the result management system is an offline system and a staging laptop is used to try to transmit the results to the app and the website.

Data mismatch
“We have to see how the results change and we noted that it was in the process where we were transferring the data from the staging laptop to the app. In one instance, the upload had been interrupted midway and this caused the mismatch of the ID of the candidate in the app to the staging laptop,” he said.

This caused the vote numbers for certain candidates to change. They suddenly got a lot of those votes in the app. As a result, the elections body had to discard the data already published, reupload the data on the app, and republish it, as a result.

RNZ Pacific’s regional correspondent Kelvin Anthony asked the elections chief in Suva if the results app could malfunction again as political parties would be raising their concerns about the glitch and seeking answers.

“Don’t worry about the results app. The results management system is the data tool. We’re giving you results from the result’s management system, printouts, and you can go through it yourself,” Saneem said.

Rabuka suggests tally could have been ‘doctored’
PAP leader Sitiveni Rabuka has criticised the provisional vote count. Talking to the media today, he said the tally could have been “doctored” during a glitch which occurred during the 12-hour provisional vote count reporting period.

Rabuka has said he would be writing to Saneem and the Fiji president about his concerns.

The NFP has also raised the following issues and election irregularities with the Fijian Elections Office:

• Elections official influencing voters
• FijiFirst campaign materials being displayed during the blackout period
• Facebook campaigning for FijiFirst
• Protocols at a count centre were unclear
• Confusion over bus companies providing free transport to polling stations
• Transport monitoring officers not being present on buses providing free transport to polling stations.

Saneem has told RNZ Pacific they are looking into the claims.

At 1.45pm local time the official results were starting to show on the results app.

The first results with 28 of 2071 polling stations counted showed PAP leading with 654 votes followed by FijiFirst on 257 and Sodelpa on 104.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Polls have now closed in the Fiji general election and results are flowing in.

Voreqe Bainimarama of the FijiFirst party, and his main rival, Sitiveni Rabuka of the People’s Alliance, cast their votes at their local polling stations.

Questioned by media, they both said they were confident of victory.

Bainimarama became embroiled in a tense standoff with an Australian journalist.

Bainimarama growls at an Australian reporter.     Video: RNZ Pacific

On being asked if he would respect the outcome of the vote if it did not go in his favour, he responded that he would.

He then asked the reporter where she came from and whether Australia had “more intelligent reporters” to send to Fiji.

Soon after election day, the Multinational Observer Group is set to release an interim statement outlining its initial observations.

• READ MORE:  Voters share ‘integrity and truth’ vision of a strong Fijian democracy
• Fijians brave the heat as numbers swell – but elections chief calls for voters
• Voters turn up in numbers as Fiji’s 2022 election gets underway
• Fijians heading to the polls today for third post-coup election
• Other Fiji elections reports
• Wansolwara elections coverage
• RNZ Pacific’s live elections blog

The group said a final report would be completed as soon as practical after election day, which would include more detailed observations, an assessment of the electoral processes observed, and any recommendations as appropriate.

• As of 9.45pm (Fiji local time), Rabuka’s People’s Alliance Party had a strong lead with 4450 votes (46.04 percent) in early provisional party votes. Prime Minister Bainimarama’s FijiFirst Party had 2780 votes (28.76 percent). Professor Biman Prasad’s National Federation Party count was 1032 votes (10.68 percent). However, Bainimarama was ahead in the candidate results, leading by 1228 votes (18.75 percent) ahead of Rabuka who held 1714 votes (17.73 percent).

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by George Goehl.

There is evidence that points to the vaccinated being more likely to visit health care facilities.
“International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research” — “Taking account of the complexities of healthcare-seeking with measured covariates and outcomes, especially adverse health events, suggests that vaccination may be driving the increased need for non-routine office visits for specific health complaints.”
 
“Tim Robbins Apologizes to Unvaccinated for Being Wrong on Covid Policy.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Fast Company, a business and technology magazine based in New York City, shut down its website after a cyberattack led to “obscene and racist” posts and Apple News push notifications.

In a tweeted statement, Fast Company said the attack on its content management system appeared to be related to a Sept. 25, 2022, hack of FastCompany.com in which similar language was posted on the site. The first incident forced the website offline for two hours while the company restored the page.

Two days later, following the unauthorized Apple News alerts, the organization said it would disable its website and Apple News feed during its investigation into the attacks.

“The messages are vile and are not in line with the content and ethos of Fast Company,” the company tweeted. “We are investigating the situation and have shut down FastCompany.com until the situation has been resolved.”

Immediately after the Sept. 27 attack, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker confirmed that accessing the magazine’s website resulted in a “404 Not Found” message. When accessed on Sept. 29, FastCompany.com redirected to a statement mirroring those published on Twitter.

According to the statement, Fast Company is continuing to publish its news and analysis across the magazine’s social media platforms. It is unclear how long the website will be unavailable, or who was responsible for the attack.

Before it was removed from the site, a post about the attack shared that the hackers got access through a password that was shared across many accounts, The Verge reported.

Fast Company did not respond to a request for comment from the Tracker, but it tweeted that a “global incident response and cybersecurity firm” would lead an investigation.

This content originally appeared on U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database and was authored by U.S. Press Freedom Tracker: Incident Database.

Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

• Hurricane Ian batters Florida as near Cat 5 storm with extreme winds and record storm surge
• U.S. to send $1.1 billion more to Ukraine, including advance rocket systems
• Climate scientists warn Nord Stream pipeline leaks will pump dangerous levels of global warming gas methane into atmosphere
• Early results indicate effectiveness of monkeypox vaccine

Image: NOAA, National Weather Service

The post Record storm surge, extreme winds batter Florida as Hurricane Ian comes ashore; $1.1 billion dollars more headed for Ukraine; CDC says early results confirm monkeypox vaccine effectiveness:The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – September 28, 2022 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

One of the most horrific legacies of Trump is the unwillingness of Republican candidates to commit to being bound by election results.

The same poison has now spread to senatorial and gubernatorial candidates who refuse to commit to November's election results.

Senate candidates who have refused to commit to accepting the results are Republicans Ted Budd in North Carolina, Blake Masters in Arizona, Kelly Tshibaka in Alaska, and J.D. Vance in Ohio, according to news reports.

Two candidates for governor have also refused to be bound: Tudor Dixon, the Republican nominee for the governor of Michigan, and Geoff Diehl, the Republican nominee for governor of Massachusetts.

It's one thing to reserve the right to call for recounts if elections are close and irregularities are evident and to appeal the results through the courts.

But that was not Trump's circumstance in the 2020 presidential election. Recounts were taken but showed the same results; Trump's appeals through the courts were rejected.

And that's not what these Republican candidates are asserting now, in Trump's shameful wake.

But tell me: If these Republican candidates are not bound by the election results, what are they bound to? These candidates are in effect issuing open invitations to their supporters to contest electoral losses in the streets.

American democracy is based on our commitments to be bound by the outcomes of elections. These are commitments we make to democracy over any specific outcomes we may want. The peaceful transition of power depends on these commitments.

Before Trump, these commitments were assumed. And at least since the Civil War they have been honored.

When losing candidates congratulate winners and deliver gracious concession speeches, they demonstrate their commitment to democracy over the electoral victory they sought.

And that demonstration is itself a means of reasserting and reestablishing civility. It sends an unambiguous message to all the candidate's supporters that the process can be trusted.

Think of Al Gore's concession speech to George W. Bush in 2000, after five weeks of a bitterly contested election and just one day after the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of Bush:

"I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of the country …. Neither he nor I anticipated this long and difficult road. Certainly neither of us wanted it to happen. Yet it came, and now it has ended resolved, through the honored institutions of our democracy. Now the Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it. … And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession."

Gore made the same moral choice made by his predecessors who lost elections, and for the same reason: The democratic process (even one that included the judgements of Supreme Court justices) was more important than winning a specific election.

This all changed in September 2020 when Trump refused to commit to be bound to the results of the upcoming 2020 presidential election.

"Well, we're going to have to see what happens," he said when asked whether he'd commit to a peaceful transition of power. "You know that I've been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster," Trump added, presumably referring to mail-in ballots -- which he baselessly claimed would lead to voter fraud.

This is when his poison began seeping directly into the bedrock of American democracy.

That poison spread deeper and faster after he lost the election, when he refused to concede—claiming, again without any basis in fact, that it had been "stolen" from him.

The poison came to the surface on January 6, 2021, when a group of his supporters—wielding weapons of war—invaded the U.S. Capitol and threatened the lives of members of Congress. Five people were killed.

The same poison has now spread to senatorial and gubernatorial candidates who refuse to commit to November's election results.

The commitment to be bound by the results of an election is the most important commitment in a democracy. It is also the most important qualification for public office. It is the equivalent of an oath to uphold the Constitution.

Candidates who refuse to commit to being bound by the results of elections should be presumed disqualified to hold public office.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Robert Reich.

Despite total borrowings reaching $11.1 billion, the Auckland Council Group’s latest results show it has managed to weather the worst of the storm created by the covid pandemic.

But the super city’s statement to the NZX shows it will face some tough times ahead as it seeks to balance its next budget.

In June the council with New Zealand’s largest Pacific population — almost 250,000, more than 15 percent of the city’s total of 1.7 million — agreed to defer $230 million in capital works over the next three years to address a $150 million per annum shortfall in its operating costs.

• READ MORE: Other reports on Auckland’s covid recovery

South Auckland projects affected included a new Flat Bush multi-use centre, the upgrade of the Papakura park and ride and the Ōpaheke Park sports fields.

Auckland Council finance and performance committee chairperson Desley Simpson said a number of projects were impacted on by the cutbacks, but increases in revenue and operational savings meant it was now in a stronger position.

“The key point we considered when preparing our Recovery Budget last year was to provide significant support to the economic recovery of Auckland,” Simpson said.

“This proved to be crucial, with our ongoing capital investment programmes helping to counterbalance some of the anticipated economic pressures in Auckland, as well as supporting future infrastructure growth needs for the region.”

Council’s results ‘positive’
The council’s debt increased $757 million to $11.1 billion in the 12 months to June 30, while its revenue grew by $361 million to $5.7 billion.

Manurewa-Papakura ward councillor Angela Dalton said the council’s latest results were positive.

“I think considering the last few years we’ve had, they are pretty good,” she said.

“But I think the future budgets are going to be really tough for us and we are looking at some challenging times ahead.”

Dalton said the results need to be looked at in the context of the Auckland Council Group’s total asset base, which grew by $9.7 billion to $70.4 billion in the past year.

“Considering the huge drop in revenue we’ve faced we’ve still been able to build our city and work on capital projects like the Central Interceptor and City Rail Link. They are the big game changers for Auckland.”

Some council projects were delayed, but it still spent $2.3b on capital works, including over $1b on transport-related assets, $815m on water, wastewater and stormwater and $384 million on other assets.

Climate change funding juggle
Simpson said whoever won Auckland’s mayoral race would have to juggle funding for climate change initiatives, infrastructure and transport spending, community facilities and parks and reserves.

She said while some projects that were deferred might be brought back from the brink, some may be consigned to political history.

“We’ve come through the worst period any Auckland Council has had to deal with. But it’s not going to get any easier.”

Auckland mayor Phil Goff’s final budget was announced in June and included $600 million for new bus services, funding for electric ferries and buses and completion of key links in the city’s cycling network.

The budget’s climate change package will be funded by a targeted rate, generating $574m over 10 years, with plans to seek a further $482m in funding from the government and other sources.

• The political campaign for mayor is being keenly contested with a Pacific candidate, Fa’anānā Efeso Collins, narrowly leading opinion polls for the October local body elections.

Local Democracy Reporting is Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ on Air. Asia Pacific Report is an LDR partner.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Those are just some of the startling findings of a new model developed by the nonprofit research group First Street Foundation that examines how climate change will exacerbate heat extremes across the United States in the coming decades. According to the model, roughly 8 million Americans currently live in parts of the country that experience heat index temperatures above 125 degrees F at least one day a year, a threshold the National Weather Service considers “Extreme Danger.” The group’s peer-reviewed model projects that that figure will increase 13-fold to about 107 million in 30 years. The increases in temperature are expected to be concentrated in the middle of the country, in a region the nonprofit has named the “Extreme Heat Belt” — an area running from Texas and Louisiana up to Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa. 

“We need to be prepared for the inevitable, that a quarter of the country will soon fall inside the Extreme Heat Belt with temperatures exceeding 125 degrees F and the results will be dire,” Matthew Eby, founder and CEO of First Street Foundation, said in a press release.

First Street was founded in 2016 to develop ways of analyzing climate risk and to help homeowners better understand the threats their properties face. The organization has similar tools to assess the risk of flooding and wildfire to properties, which have been incorporated by real estate companies such as Redfin and Realtor.com. The group’s peer-reviewed heat risk model assigns each property in the United States a score from one to 10 reflecting its exposure to minimal to extreme heat over the life of a 30-year mortgage.

Aside from dangerous heat blanketing the Midwest and parts of the South, the model found that “virtually the entire country is subject to increasing perils associated with heat exposure,” the report concludes. The West Coast is most likely to experience increases in the number of consecutive days of high heat, while the Gulf and southeastern Atlantic states are most likely to face the longest duration of days with heat index temperatures above 100 degrees.

Such temperature increases are associated with serious public health risks. For communities that are not used to warmer weather, such as those in the Midwest, temperature increases and prolonged stretches of extreme heat can be dangerous. Hotter days have been tied to heat fatigue, stroke, and death. A 2021 Los Angeles Times series found that about 3,900 people had likely died in California in the past decade due to extreme heat — a figure six times the state’s official count. Low-income communities and communities of color were hit hardest. Access to air conditioning and the amount of paved surfaces and tree cover determined the effect of higher temperatures on people, the investigation found.   

First Street also concluded that a lack of cooling infrastructure is set to exacerbate the consequences of higher temperatures. To make matters worse, cooling costs for those who do have air conditioning are also likely to rise. According to the group’s analysis, Texas and California, the largest consumers of energy for cooling purposes, are set to face a 9- and 15-percent increase in cooling costs statewide by 2053, respectively. These increases in cooling needs are also tied to an increase in carbon dioxide emissions. The top five states with the most cooling-related carbon emissions are Texas, Florida, Ohio, California, and Missouri. The report warned that increasing cooling needs in these states could jeopardize their ability to meet various climate and emission reduction goals. 

The report comes amid a summer of record-breaking heat across the country. Last month was among the hottest Julys ever recorded. The scorching temperatures have strained electric grids in Texas, the West and the Midwest. With volatile gas prices, coal plants shuttering, declining hydropower, and extreme heat, the U.S. electric grid has struggled to meet demand. First Street’s new report signals there’s not much relief in sight.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline “The results will be dire”: Extreme heat to impact a quarter of US by midcentury on Aug 16, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Naveena Sadasivam.

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Baltimore County police are starting to get back test results from a long-delayed project to process the oldest known collection of DNA evidence from rape cases.

Last year, ProPublica wrote about the trove of evidence and the prescient doctor who began assembling it in the 1970s, long before preserving forensic evidence was common police practice. Police have processed DNA from 49 of about 1,800 remaining cases as of the first quarter of this year, according to a department memo obtained through a public information request and follow-up communications with a sergeant in charge of the cold case unit. Ten of the 49 cases yielded actionable DNA profiles, according to the sergeant. The results, even from such a small batch, are at once promising and alarming:

• The DNA profiles of unidentified suspects in three “stranger rape” cases have been uploaded into a federal DNA database. Sgt. Moe Greenberg wrote in an email that there are no results in those cases yet.
• Police identified a suspect in a 1979 case. The prosecutor’s office initially decided not to move forward with charges, but Baltimore County Deputy State’s Attorney John Cox said his office is now reevaluating and looking at what options are available.
• A suspect was identified in a 1978 case, but the answers came too late: The suspect died in October, and the victim died years ago.
• Police connected a fourth victim to a serial rapist whose identity has eluded them since 1978; they have his DNA profile, but it doesn’t match anyone in the FBI database. That could mean the person was never arrested for a crime that would result in his DNA profile being uploaded into the database or that his profile remains in a backlog somewhere. According to the memo, police have sent the case to a private lab, Bode Technology, for forensic genealogy testing, which will try to identify a suspect by looking for possible relatives in publicly accessible DNA databases.

“It’s frightening but also heartening to think there are more serial rapists who may be caught with this testing,” said Wendell Carter, whose sister Alicia was killed in 1983 on the Goucher College campus by a serial predator who terrorized women across the Baltimore region between 1978 and 2000.

Police developed DNA profiles from testing 100 cases between 2005 and 2014, which eventually exposed Alicia’s killer, Alphonso W. Hill, as the worst known serial rapist in the state. Those cases placed him in the same spot on Goucher College campus where two other students were raped in the years before Alicia was killed. He has admitted to those rapes. He has since been linked to 25 rapes around the region, mostly thanks to forensic clues provided by this database. Hill confessed to killing Alicia last year after our investigation.

Though the evidence has delivered some promising results so far, ProPublica’s investigation exposed how much more must have been lost when some hospitals and police departments destroyed evidence and when police delayed testing.

Dr. Rudiger Breitenecker saved glass microscope slides and tubes containing samples from 2,252 sexual assault examinations conducted in his hospital between 1975 and 1997. He was the founder and director of the Rape Care Center at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, and he started saving the samples years before rape kits were standardized and DNA testing technology was invented. His forensic pathologist background led him to believe it was better to save than to destroy, as others were doing at the time.

The doctor’s evidence collection went largely ignored until retired Sgt. Rose Brady heard about it in 2004 and began the first systematic effort to process and test Breitenecker’s savings. Investigators focused on stranger rape cases that had a high probability of being solved, and they ultimately arrested nearly 20 suspected serial rapists. The project stopped in 2014 due to lack of funds. Before Brady got involved, the hospital had destroyed some of the oldest slides in the collection in accordance with its retention policy. Today, about 1,800 cases’ worth of evidence remains untested.

Following scandals over police using questionable investigative practices and destroying evidence from sexual assault cases more recently, Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. announced reforms and a new testing effort in 2019 thanks to a grant from the private Hackerman Foundation. Shelly Hettleman, a state senator from Baltimore County, requested funding from the foundation after sponsoring a law that mandated the testing of newer rape kits. The law does not cover the older evidence.

Hettleman said it is too soon to conclude much from the early results, but she expressed frustration that the testing has been so delayed. She and other officials say the pandemic and restricted lab capacities have slowed the new effort down. At the current rate, processing the rest of the evidence could take another half a century.

Advocates say such a delay is unacceptable, especially considering that many sex offenders assault more than one person. Recent research also documents how these predators can become one-man crime waves who also wind up charged with burglaries and murders. “How can we value women so little that we allow this to continue?” asked Jane Manning, a former prosecutor who now leads the Women’s Equal Justice Project, which helps survivors navigate the criminal justice system.

Special victims units typically work with relatively anemic resources given their daunting case loads. Baltimore County’s SVU team added 19 new cases in a recent stretch of 11 days.

Cold case squads frequently have even fewer resources. Police leadership had not devoted a single full-time detective to investigating the doctor’s evidence before the 2019 effort began, despite earlier pleas from the SVU team after they began to discover how many serial criminals were hidden in the untested slides. The dynamic is exacerbated when the media focus on newer cases, putting the pressure on officials with limited funds to deprioritize cold cases.

Now, Baltimore County’s SVU squad actually has a cold case group with one sergeant, two full-time detectives and three assistants. Despite this boost in resources, the workload is nevertheless tremendous considering the 1,800 cases from Breitenecker’s collection that are still waiting to be gone through, in addition to other cold cases. When investigating decades-old crimes, it’s often a challenge just to locate victims and witnesses. But the effort can be worth it.

Martha Southworth said it was very difficult not knowing who had attacked her at the edge of Goucher College campus in 1979. She thought her case would never be solved. But after police began testing the hospital slides in the mid-2000s, the slides from her case exposed Hill as a serial predator and provided a major clue that was vital to solving two other cases on the campus: Julie Wood’s rape in 1980 and Alicia Carter’s murder in 1983. Southworth said that going to court and seeing Hill sentenced to 30 years “was such a freeing experience for me. I didn't have to be afraid anymore.”

That is one reason, Manning said, that it is so important to pursue these cold cases. The ex-prosecutor also said that those frustrated with investigations have other avenues they can use to pursue justice. They can reach out to elected officials to push for new city and state laws that would enable survivors to file lawsuits against law enforcement for failure to protect, as people can do in New York City. They can also reach out to the Department of Justice, which investigates police departments, and ask it to look into the way local law enforcement is handling sex crimes. The federal government investigated the Baltimore city police in 2016 and found indications of gender bias and a general failure to sufficiently process sexual assault evidence and pursue what looked to be suspected serial offenders. The city police have since undergone reform efforts. The Justice Department is also investigating the University of Maryland, Baltimore County for its response to sexual misconduct, according to The Baltimore Sun.

Most importantly, Manning said, survivors can organize politically around the issue to “let public officials know that there will be a price to pay if you continue to allow impunity for rape.”

Baltimore County police wrote in the memo that the pace of testing should pick up now that they have expanded staffing and added another private DNA lab to help process the evidence. Greenberg said in an email that in addition to this first batch of test results, 75 more slide cases have been outsourced for testing. Testing has been completed on 17 of those cases so far, and the results are still under review.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Catherine Rentz.

As fossil fuel giants this week reported record profits for the second quarter, an analysis out Friday highlighted how eight oil companies have raked in nearly $52 billion over the past three months "while Americans continue to struggle at the pump."

The review by the watchdog group Accountable.US revealed that from April through June, Chevron, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Hess Corp, Phillips 66, Shell, and TechnipFMC "saw their profits skyrocket from the same time period last year, with income shooting up 235%."

The analysis also pointed out that leaders at Equinor, Halliburton, Hess Corp, and TechnipFMC have boasted "about excellent quarters while dismissing high prices for consumers."

Jordan Schreiber of Accountable.US called the companies' collective profit boost "eye-popping" but also unsurprising "after spending the past three months price gouging consumers by raising gas prices to unprecedentedly high levels."

"Make no mistake; these profits mark a large transfer of wealth from working- and middle-class people to wealthy oil executives and shareholders," she said. "While many consumers were feeling the heavy burden of a life necessity suddenly doubling in price, oil executives were keeping prices high to maximize their profits."

The Q2 profits of U.S. energy giants Chevron and Exxon—$11.62 billion and $17.85 billion, respectively—along with that of Europe's largest oil company, Shell—$11.47 billion—drew widespread criticism along with calls for action by lawmakers and President Joe Biden.

"Big Oil companies are making a killing and pouring fuel on the climate fire while communities pay for more and deadlier climate disasters. It's outrageous," said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, in a statement Friday.

"Exxon and other oil and gas corporations lobbied and lied for decades to keep the world addicted to fossil fuels, making billions while hardworking families pay for higher gas prices and costlier heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, and floods," he continued. "Now Exxon is once again using its record profits to line the pockets of executives and shareholders."

Wiles asserted that "elected officials cannot remain silent in the face of this injustice. Whether it's taxing these companies' record profits, or taking them to court to make polluters pay for climate damages they knowingly caused, it's time to stand up to Big Oil."

Public Citizen president Robert Weissman declared that "Big Oil is laughing all the way to the bank—and the joke's on us."

"We don't have to be suckers," he argued. "A windfall profits tax with rebates to taxpayers would offset the pain at the pump and end Big Oil's profiteering. Banning U.S. oil exports would actually lower prices for American consumers."

According to Weissman, "It's time for Congress and the Biden administration to stop complaining about Big Oil's rip-off and start doing something about it."

Some lawmakers agree. While Republicans "will continue to play politics and blame Biden for gas prices," Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) said of the fossil fuel giants' quarterly profits, "we need to crack down on Big Oil."

Sen. Bernie Sanders concurred, tweeting that "it's time for a windfall profits tax."

While some of his colleagues have introduced legislation focused on Big Oil, Sanders has put forth a broader tax proposal that would target price gouging by a range of companies.

Amid rising fears of recession in recent weeks, calls have been mounting for federal lawmakers to more forcefully take on corporate greed. The Inflation Reduction Act unveiled Wednesday features some related policies, but climate activists have also sounded the alarm about its energy provisions. The bill—negotiated with fossil fuel ally Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)—contains major handouts that are reportedly "delighting" the oil and gas industry.

The fossil fuel industry has not only used its record profits to enrich shareholders; it's also dumped money into influencing officials on Capitol Hill. As Common Dreams reported exclusively on Thursday, an analysis from Climate Power shows that since last year, the sector has poured over $200 million into sabotaging climate action.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Notes:
Michael McCray and Marcel Reid are the co-founders of the International Association of Whistleblowers and co-organizers of the Whistleblower Summit and Film Festival. McCray is also General Counsel for the Federally Employed Women Legal Education Fund. Reid is a former member of the Pacifica Radio National Board. Marsha Warfield is a nationally-known, comedian and actress, and will be hosting some events at the Whistleblower Summit. Gimena Sanchez is a staff member at the Washington Office on Latin America.

Image by German Rojas from Pixabay

The post Whistleblower Summit and the Recent Election Results in Colombia appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

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This article is co-published with The Atlantic.

On Dec. 31, 2020, a 40-year-old man named Leon Casiquito walked into Kelly Liquors on Route 66 in Albuquerque and tried to shoplift a bottle of tequila. When one of the owners, Danny Choi, tried to stop him, Casiquito flashed a small pocketknife. Choi told police he knocked the bottle out of Casiquito’s hand with a stick and Casiquito left the store.

Choi locked the door, but Casiquito hung around in the parking lot, shouting that he was going to beat up the store’s employees. One of them called the police, and soon four officers arrived and wrestled Casiquito to the ground. He was charged with armed robbery and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon — despite not actually attacking anyone with the pocketknife — and held without bail at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Albuquerque.

Casiquito had had similar run-ins with law enforcement before, mostly related to his troubles with alcohol and drugs. Those problems, his family believes, may have started with the pills he was prescribed in his teens after he was hit by a car while riding a four-wheeler and thrown 30 feet, putting him into a coma for a few days. At 30, he suffered another accident: a car hit him while he was out walking, breaking both his legs and requiring more pain medication. By the time of his 2020 arrest, his family thought that a brief sojourn in jail — which is what someone in Casiquito’s situation could expect under normal circumstances — might help him get himself clean.

But these were not normal circumstances. Like many states, New Mexico had drastically curtailed the operation of its courts in response to the pandemic. Some civil trials and preliminary hearings for criminal matters moved online, but actual criminal trials needed to be conducted in person in front of juries. Bernalillo County, which includes Albuquerque, suspended such trials for much of 2020 and 2021. Meanwhile, new cases kept pouring in, partly as a result of the surge in violent crime that accompanied the pandemic. The nation’s homicide rate rose by nearly 30% in 2020 and another 5% in 2021, essentially erasing two decades’ worth of declines in deadly violence.

Criminologists have offered several explanations for the increase, including the rise in gun sales early in the pandemic, changes in police behavior following the protests over the murder of George Floyd, and the social disruptions caused by closures of schools and interruptions in social services. But many people who work in criminal justice are zeroing in on another possible factor: the extended shutdown of so much of the court system, the institution at the heart of public order.

This could have led to more violence in a number of ways. Prosecutors confronted with a growing volume of cases decided not to take action against certain suspects, who went on to commit other crimes. Victims or witnesses became less willing to testify as time passed and their memories of events grew foggy, weakening cases against perpetrators. Suspects were denied substance-abuse treatment or other services that they would normally have accessed through the criminal justice system, with dangerous consequences.

Above all, experts say, the shutdowns undermined the promise that crimes would be promptly punished. The theory that “swift, certain and fair” consequences deter crimes is credited to the late criminologist Mark Kleiman. The idea is that it’s the speed of repercussions, rather than their severity, that matters most. By putting the justice system on hold for so long, many jurisdictions weakened that effect. In some cases, people were left to seek street justice in the absence of institutional justice. As Reygan Cunningham, a senior partner at the California Partnership for Safe Communities, put it, closing courts sent “a message that there are no consequences, and there is no help.”

Many courts around the country still aren’t operating at full capacity, and law-and-order types aren’t the only ones concerned. Defense attorneys and members of the progressive prosecutor movement are worried too. The Sixth Amendment guarantees defendants a speedy trial, but many have been sitting in jail for months on end. “A lot of the Constitution has been kind of glossed over,” Doug Wilber, a public defender in Albuquerque, told me.

The link between any one instance of violence and courtroom delays can be hard to prove. But sometimes it couldn’t be more obvious.

Leon Casiquito’s case had been categorized as “track one,” meaning it was supposed to be heard within six months. But by the time that deadline rolled around in spring of 2021, Bernalillo County had fallen far behind schedule. The Second Judicial District Court had held 86 criminal jury trials in 2019. In 2020, that tally plunged to 18.

Casiquito had spent almost six months in jail when, on June 29, 2021, a district judge issued an order postponing his case indefinitely. During daily calls to his mother, he described how jail conditions were worsening. The inmate population was growing and the jail was short on staff. Inmates were frequently placed on lockdown — confined to their cells for virtually the entire day.

Casiquito was spending all that time locked in with his cellmate, Telea Lui, who had schizophrenia and had been charged with aggravated battery after attacking his mother with a 20-pound dumbbell. On the evening of Oct. 25, Lui flew into a rage, punching and kicking Casiquito for such a long time — more than 20 minutes — that, as Lui later told officers, he had to pause to catch his breath and get a drink of water. Inmates in nearby cells called for help, but no guards were nearby. By the time corrections officers finally entered the cell, Casiquito was not breathing and had “severe trauma” to the head. They pronounced him dead shortly afterward.

(Lui’s lawyer would later state that Lui was defending himself against Casiquito, who he said “hitting him in the legs in a nagging manner.” Lui has since been found dangerous and incompetent to stand trial and has been referred to a state psychiatric hospital.)

It had been nearly 10 months since Casiquito was arrested for trying to steal a bottle of tequila with a pocketknife. His death was one of 116 homicides in Albuquerque in 2021, by far the most the city had ever recorded in a single year.

Six hundred miles east of Albuquerque, in Wichita, Kansas, authorities had worried from early in the pandemic about the effect of closing courtrooms. They decided to do something about it.

Violence had surged in the spring and early summer of 2020, as it had in so many other cities. Wichita police saw a sharp rise in drive-by shootings. And officials noticed something else, said then-police chief Gordon Ramsay: Many suspects arrested in the shootings were defiant, suggesting that nothing would come of the charges against them because the pandemic had shut down most of the court system. Defendants were, as a result, disinclined to take a plea deal. Why plead guilty to avoid a trial when there were no trials happening anyway?

Ramsay contacted the Sedgwick County district attorney and others about the need to get the system back on track as soon as possible. He found allies in the county’s chief judge, Jeffrey Goering, and in Kevin O’Connor, the presiding judge of the court’s criminal department.

“The option of just having cases pile up in high-volume dockets was not an option at all,” Goering told me. “If that meant thinking outside the box, that’s what it meant.”

After consultations with the county health director, the county courthouse resumed jury trials in July 2020, just four months after having suspended them. It got creative. It spent more than $30,000 to outfit its two largest courtrooms with plexiglass dividers and set up a big tent outside. At first, it called only less serious cases, because lawyers got fewer peremptory strikes to use in jury selection for those cases, which meant that juries could be selected from smaller candidate pools.

Wichita judges were adamant that the move to reopen was not intended as some sort of political statement — prioritizing prosecutions over public health. Goering himself hardly fits the red-state law-and-order stereotype: He studied philosophy in college and has decorated his chambers with homages to Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. With his beard and shaggy hair, he bears an uncanny resemblance to his cinematic hero, The Dude from “The Big Lebowski.” Getting trials going again was a pure civic reflex, he told me. “I took the opinion that the cost to society was greater from the consequences of not moving these cases and keeping the courtroom locked down too long than from an outbreak of COVID,” he said.

Goering and O’Connor tried to make the restart as palatable as possible. Judges with health concerns were exempted from jury trials. Citizens called for jury duty were told they could opt out if they had concerns about catching the coronavirus. O’Connor gave a local hospital administrator his cellphone number in case any hospital staff were called as potential jurors, saying that he would make sure to waive them.

These steps raised a different concern among some defense lawyers, that the jurors would be pandemic-dismissing hang-’em-high types. But that turned out not to be the case. The initial batch of cases resulted in an unusually high rate of acquittals. “I don’t have any problem with any of these juries,” a defense lawyer, Bradley Sylvester, who worked on some of those cases, told me. “I had a lot of faith in the jury system.”

There were wrinkles to iron out. Some lawyers asked for and received exceptions to the courtroom mask mandate during jury selection, so they could see potential jurors’ faces as they answered questions. The plexiglass could be tricky to see through if the light hit it at certain angles. One juror had to be replaced after he tested positive for COVID-19. But the judges said they knew of no serious illnesses traced to the court.

By the end of 2020, homicides were up sharply in Wichita, as elsewhere, thanks in large part to the early-summer shooting spike that had motivated the court reopening. But the court was ready to process those cases. In January 2021 it expanded its list of jury trials to include murder cases and other major felonies. Overall, it managed to hold 32 criminal jury trials in 2020, compared with 75 in 2019 — a much smaller drop than the ones in Albuquerque and other cities. “It’s important for the community to see the courts functioning,” said O’Connor. And in Wichita, they did.

Albuquerque had struggled with court backlogs and jail overcrowding long before the pandemic. In the mid-1990s, inmates at the city’s Metropolitan Detention Center filed a federal class-action lawsuit over the crowded conditions, and it remained in litigation for two decades before being settled.

In 2019, the district attorney’s office had put out a glossy report that stressed the importance of accelerating the workings of the criminal-justice system. “Speed is the best deterrent,” the report stated. “Through continually improved processes to swiftly intervene by initiating cases quickly, we are seeing a sustained drop in crime.” Accompanying this was a graph showing a sharp decline in overall crime since 2017.

But then came the pandemic and the courthouse closures. The New Mexico Supreme Court suspended jury trials from March to July 2020, restarted them with strict limits that summer, then shut them down again from November 2020 to February 2021. Instead of grand juries, the district attorney’s office had to rely on preliminary hearings, held largely online, to initiate cases. This complicated matters, because New Mexico’s stricter evidentiary rules for such hearings meant that lawyers had to get defendants and witnesses to show up, almost like a mini trial. In many instances they didn’t, making it impossible to move forward. The number of new cases fell dramatically. In 2019, the county initiated about 4,300 cases; in 2020 and 2021, the number plunged to about 2,700 and 2,600, respectively. And very few of these made it to trial. Last year, the resumption of court operations happened so haltingly that the county held only 29 criminal jury trials — two-thirds less than in 2019.

For Adolfo Mendez, the chief of policy and planning for the district attorney’s office, the consequence of this falloff was plain. A person charged with a crime, he told me, “doesn’t see any consequence of it. They’re released back into the community.”

In Albuquerque, as elsewhere, the new constraints worried defense lawyers too. Wilber, the public defender, was concerned about the “dehumanizing” effect of defendants having to appear remotely, over Zoom, for their preliminary examinations or detention hearings. When defendants appeared on a video feed from jail, he feared, judges were more inclined to keep them there. “It’s human nature: It’s easy to remain with the default,” he told me. “They’re already sitting in jail, so why not just stay there?”

Wilber also worried about how COVID-19 restrictions limited defendants’ access to their lawyers, and that the backlogs were giving judges and prosecutors an excuse to push past due-process protections once cases finally did get to the front of the line, to keep things moving as fast as possible. “At first, it was about safety and public health,” he said of the backlog, “but from our angle, it started to feel like an excuse, an easy way to do away with a lot of protections.”

Meanwhile, defense lawyers were hearing from their clients about the worsening conditions at the jail. Reporting by the Albuquerque Journal revealed just how dire things had become. By late 2021, the jail was short about 150 officers, a vacancy rate of more than 30%. (The jail's then-chief told the Journal that the administration was taking various steps to improve officer morale and recruiting.) At the time of Casiquito’s death, the corrections officer on that pod was overseeing 64 cells, double the normal purview. “It’s like a medieval Turkish prison,” Wilber told me.

As the nationwide homicide rate continued to increase in 2021, Wichita managed to buck the trend: Homicides there declined that year, to 54, a drop of 9% from the year before. Countless factors probably contributed, but local officials are convinced that their ability to get the courts running played a role.

In addition to resuming jury trials, the county has taken other steps to reduce its backlog. Last October, it summoned back a quartet of retired judges to head up what it called the “ARPA Court,” because the judges were paid for by funds from the federal American Rescue Plan Act. With their help, the county held 54 criminal jury trials last year, only 28% less than in 2019. This year, it’s roughly on track to return to its pre-pandemic pace.

On one recent weekday, the Wichita courthouse was buzzing. In O’Connor’s courtroom, the plexiglass dividers were stacked in a pile, awaiting removal. The judge was presiding over a sentencing hearing for a man convicted of murder in the July 2019 shooting of a 20-year-old Air Force member outside a party. The victim’s family had come from South Carolina and his father gave a wrenching testimonial about the loss of his son.

Afterward, in his chambers, O’Connor said this was another reason to get court operations moving again: to provide grieving family members with some closure. “You see just how important it is for family members to come to court,” he told me.

In another courtroom, a jury trial was underway for a 2021 domestic-violence-assault charge. Goering, sitting nearby in his chambers under the Hendrix and Joplin posters, said he was relieved to see just how close to normally the court was functioning. “We were going to have a backlog no matter what,” he said. “But I was just determined that it was going to be as small as possible.”

Over the past few months, I’ve visited a few cities where the courts underwent some of the country’s longest suspensions, and I found a very different scene. In Oakland, California, where jury trials started resuming only in the spring of 2021, the Alameda County Superior Courthouse still seemed frozen at the peak of the pandemic, with signs ordering visitors to take staircases only in certain directions and jurors and courtroom personnel still in mandatory masks.

In an interview in late April, the district attorney, Nancy O’Malley, told me that the county had about 4,700 felony cases and 6,000 misdemeanor cases pending with a future court date, up by a third from before the pandemic began. “The court is still not fully operational,” she said. She wasn’t sure if the county could have done differently, given California’s strict edicts on social distancing. “With rules for 6 feet apart, there was no way you could have people sitting in a box made for 12 people,” she said. “I don’t know how you do it while keeping people healthy.”

But she had little doubt that the court constraints had played a role in the rise in crime in Oakland, which last year saw homicides jump to 134, its highest tally since 2006. The absence or delay of consequences for many offenders created the perception of a “lawless society,” she told me.

In Seattle, the backlog of felony cases in the King County Superior Court stood at 4,800 in May, about 50% above pre-pandemic averages, after the court repeatedly suspended jury trials, including early this year, during the spread of the omicron variant. Seattle has also experienced a sharp rise in violent crime. The number of shootings last year, both fatal and nonfatal, was up 78% over 2019.

While I was there, I spoke with the director of the county’s Department of Public Defense, Anita Khandelwal, who offered a contrary view: She said that the solution to the backlogs was not simply to try to push through as many cases as quickly as possible. Prosecutors, she said, should rethink whether it was really necessary to bring so many cases in the first place, and should divert more people accused of nonviolent crimes into alternative, community-based resolution programs.

Back in Albuquerque, Mendez, in the district attorney’s office, said he could see the case for such a rethinking, but legislators would have to take that on. For his office, the immediate challenge remained working through a backlog that now had prosecutors facing a typical caseload of 80 felonies each, up from 50 pre-pandemic.

When I visited the Bernalillo County Courthouse and the nearby Metropolitan Court in April, many proceedings remained online, and the buildings were eerily still. One would not have guessed that the county was groaning under a pile of untried cases. The costs of the delays were not hard to discern, though. In one trial, on charges of criminal sexual penetration of a minor in 2014, the defendant’s father struggled to recall his responses to attorneys’ questions in 2018. It had, after all, been four years.

Still, the state and local courts defend the approach they took. “In developing public health safeguards and operating procedures for courthouses during the pandemic, members of the Supreme Court monitored COVID conditions in New Mexico, consulted with state health officials and regularly convened virtual meetings of chief judges across the state,” wrote Barry Massey, a spokesperson for the state’s Supreme Court, in a statement. And a spokesperson for the county court system said it was simply following the Supreme Court’s protocols.

Leon Casiquito’s family has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against both the county and the company that provides the jail’s medical services. (The defendants have denied most of the allegations and moved to have the case dismissed.) The law firm handling the suit is well acquainted with the costs of the extended court hiatus; two of its other clients were found not guilty in murder cases, both on claims of self-defense, but had to sit in jail for a year longer than typical before their trials. The Casiquitos’ case is still in the discovery phase, but the family’s lawyers expect the trial will be delayed.

Casiquito’s older half-brother, Erik Fisher, who helped raise him, visits Casiquito’s grave almost every day and calls his mother to console her. “Leon was her baby,” he said. “They were very close. She took it really, really hard.”

Out on Route 66, the man who chased Casiquito out of Kelly’s Liquors, Danny Choi, was unaware of what exactly had become of him. Choi had gotten a call from the district attorney’s office telling him only that the case had been closed.

“I asked the prosecutor what happened, and he said he died,” Choi said. “He didn’t tell me how.”

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This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Alec MacGillis.

The 1970s were a pivotal decade, and not just because it saw the end of the Vietnam War, the resignation of Nixon, and the death of both the psychedelic hippie movement and the very political (and sometimes violent) SDS.  Most consequentially, the 1970s were when the modern-day Republican Party was birthed.

We're over it, Republicans. A new America is being birthed from the ashes of the Reagan Revolution and you can't stop it much longer.

Prior to that, the nation had hummed along for 40 years on a top income tax bracket of 91% and a corporate income tax that topped out around 50%. Business leaders ran their companies, which were growing faster than at any time in the history of America, and avoided participating in politics.

Democrat Franklin Roosevelt and Republican Dwight Eisenhower renewed America with modern, state-of-the-art public labs, schools, and public hospitals across the nation; nearly free college, trade school, and research support; healthy small and family businesses; unions protecting a third of America's workers so two-thirds had a living wage and benefits; and an interstate highway system, rail system, and network of new airports that transformed the nation's commerce.

When we handed America over to Ronald Reagan in 1981 it was a brand, gleaming new country with a prosperous and thriving middle class.

The seeds of today's American crisis were planted just ten years earlier, in 1971, when Lewis Powell, then a lawyer for the tobacco industry, wrote his infamous "Powell Memo." It became a blueprint for the morbidly rich and big corporations to take over the weakened remnants of Nixon's Republican Party and then America.

They then moved on to infiltrate our universities, seize our media, pack our courts, integrate themselves into a large religious movement to add millions of votes, and turn upside down our tax, labor, and gun laws.

That effort burst onto the American scene with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.

By 1982 America was agog at the "new ideas" this newly-invented GOP was putting forward. They included radical tax cuts, pollution deregulation, destroying unions, and slashing the support services the New Deal and Great Society once offered people (because, Republicans said, feeding, educating, or providing healthcare to people made them dependent).

Their sales pitch was effective, and we've now had 42 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution.

It's time to simply say out loud that it hasn't worked:

Republicans told us if we just cut the top tax rate on the morbidly rich from the 74% it was at in 1980 down to 27% it would "trickle down" benefits to everybody else as, they said, the "job creators" would be unleashed on our economy.

Instead of a more general prosperity, we've now ended up with the greatest wealth and income inequality in the world, as over $50 trillion was transferred over 40 years from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, where it remains to this day. The middle class has gone from over 60% of us to fewer than half of us. It now takes 2 full-time wage earners to sustain the same lifestyle one could in 1980.

Republicans told us if we just deregulated guns and let anybody buy and carry as many as they wanted wherever they wanted it would clean up our crime problem and put the fear of God into our politicians.

"An armed society is a polite society" was the bumper sticker back during Reagan's time, the NRA relentlessly promoting the lie that the Founders and Framers put the 2nd Amendment into the Constitution so "patriots" could kill politicians. Five Republicans on the Supreme Court even got into the act by twisting the law and lying about history to make guns more widely available.

Instead of a "polite" society or politicians who listened better to their constituents, we ended up with school shootings and a daily rate of gun carnage unmatched anywhere else in the developed world.

Republicans told us that if we just ended sex education in our schools and outlawed abortion, we'd return to "the good old days" when, they argued, every child was wanted and every marriage was happy.

Instead of helping young Americans, we've ended up with epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and—now that abortion is illegal in state after state—a return to deadly back-alley abortions.

Republicans told us that if we just killed off Civics and History classes in our schools, we'd "liberate" our young people to focus instead on science and math.

Instead, we've raised two generations of Americans that can't even name the three branches of government, much less understand the meaning of the Constitution's reference to the "General Welfare."

Republicans told us that if we cut state and federal aid to higher education—which in 1980 paid for about 80% of a student's tuition—so that students would have what they told us was "skin in the game," we'd see students take their studies more seriously and produce a new generation of engineers and scientists to prepare us for the 21st century.

Instead of happy students, since we cut that 80% government support down to around 20% (with the 80% now covered by student's tuition), our nation is groaning under a $2 trillion dollar student debt burden, preventing young people from buying homes, starting businesses, or beginning families. While students are underwater, banksters who donate to Republican politicians are making billions in profits every single week of the year from these bizarrely non-negotiable loans .

Republicans told us that if we just stopped enforcing the anti-monopoly and anti-trust laws that had protected small businesses for nearly 100 years, there would be an explosion of innovation and opportunity as companies got bigger and better.

Instead, we've seen every industry in America become so consolidated that competition is dead, price gouging and profiteering reign, and it's impossible to start or find small family-owned businesses anymore in downtowns, malls, and the suburbs. It's all giant chains, many now owed by hedge funds or private equity. Few family or local businesses can compete against such giants.

Republicans told us that if we just changed the laws to let corporations pay their senior executives with stock (in addition to cash) they'd be "more invested" in the fate and future of the company and business would generally become healthier.

Instead, nearly every time a corporation initiates a stock buyback program, millions and often billions of dollars flow directly into the pockets of the main shareholders and executives—while workers, the company, and society suffer the loss.

Republicans told us that if we just let a handful of individual companies and billionaires buy most of our media, a thousand flowers would grow and we'd have the most diverse media landscape in the world. At first, as the internet was opening in the 90s, they even giddily claimed it was happening.

Now a small group of often-rightwing companies own our major media/internet companies, radio and TV stations, as well as local newspapers across the country. In such a landscape, progressive voices, as you can imagine, are generally absent.

Republicans told us we should hand all our healthcare decisions not to our doctors but to bureaucratic insurance industry middlemen who would decide which of our doctor's suggestions they'd approve and which they'd reject. They said this will "lower costs and increase choice."

In all of the entire developed world—all the OECD countries on 4 continents—there are only 500,000 medical bankruptcies a year. Every single one of them is here in America.

Republicans told us if we just got rid of our unions, then our bosses and the companies that employ them would give us better pay, more benefits, and real job security.

As everybody can see, they lied. And are working as hard as they can to prevent America from returning to the levels of unionization we had before Reagan's Great Republican Experiment.

Republicans told us if we went with the trade agreement the GHW Bush administration had negotiated—NAFTA—and then signed off on the WTO, that we'd see an explosion of jobs.

There was an explosion; lots of them, in fact, as over 60,000 American factories were torn down or left vacant because their products were moved to China or elsewhere. Over 10 million good-paying jobs went overseas along with those 60,000 factories.

Republicans told us global warming was a hoax: they're still telling us that, in fact. And therefore, they say, we shouldn't do anything to interfere with the profits of their friends in the American fossil fuel industry and the Middle East.

The hoax, it turns out, was the lie that there was no global warming—a lie that the industry spent hundreds of millions over decades to pull off. They succeeded in delaying action on global warming by at least three decades and maybe as many as five. That lie produced trillions in profits and brought us the climate crisis that is today killing millions and threatens all life on Earth.

And then, of course, there's the biggest GOP lie of them all: "Money is the same thing as Free Speech."

Five Republicans on the Supreme Court told us that if we threw out around 1000 anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws at both the state and federal level so politicians and political PACs could take unaccountable billions, even from foreign powers, it would "strengthen and diversify" the range of voices heard in America.

It's diversified it, for sure. We're now regularly hearing from racists and open Nazis, many of them elected Republican officials, who would have been driven out of decent society before the Reagan Revolution. American political discourse hasn't been this filled with conflict and violence since the Civil War, and much of it can be traced straight back to the power and influence of dark money unleashed by five Republicans on the Supreme Court.

The bottom line is that we—as a nation, voluntarily or involuntarily—have now had the full Republican experience.

And now that we know what it is, we're no longer listening to the Republican politicians who are continuing to try to sell us this bullshit.

We don't want to hear Republicans sermonizing about deficits (that they themselves caused).

Or welfare (that they damaged and then exploited).

Or even whatever they're calling "faith" these days, be it the death penalty, forcing raped women to give birth at the barrel of a gun, or burning books.

We're over it, Republicans. A new America is being birthed from the ashes of the Reagan Revolution and you can't stop it much longer.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Thom Hartmann.

“Yoon Suk Yeol, a candidate of the conservative opposition ‘People Power Party’, won by a narrow margin in the 20th ‘presidential election’ held in south Korea on March 9,” the state-run Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) reported Friday on the English-language version of its website.

A Korean version similarly emphasized the name of the party and the word “president.”

The brief report did not mention Yoon’s 0.8 percent margin of victory or his opponent, Lee Jae-myung of the ruling Democratic Party.

The website of the Rodong Sinmun newspaper carried the same Korean-language report.

The citizens did not expect to see news in their local media so soon after the election, a resident of the northwestern province of North Pyongan told RFA’s Korean Service Friday.

“Authorities are usually reluctant to publicize information about South Korea’s democratic, free election system,” said the source, who requested anonymity for security reasons.

“Usually when a conservative party candidate is elected, the name of the winner is not mentioned, or it is reported late. That is why today’s Rodong Sinmun report… is regarded as unusual,” she said.

While some residents in the northeastern province of North Hamgyong reacted to the news with indifference, others were jealous, a resident there, who requested anonymity to speak freely, told RFA.

“They could not hide their envy at the democratic system in South Korea in which the Supreme Leader is directly elected by the people,” said the second source, using the term by which North Koreans call their generational, dynastic leaders.

“Retired officials and college students who confirmed the results of the 20th presidential election in South Korea had a bitter look on their faces. We also have elections here in North Korea. However, there is only one candidate, pre-selected by the party, and we have to vote for the only candidate.”

Yoon will be sworn in as the South Korean president on May 10, 2022. Analysts predict that his North Korea strategy will be more hawkish than his predecessor Moon Jae-in, who prioritized engagement with the North.

Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jieun Kim.

• Pennsylvania appeals court rejects President Trump’s latest challenge to the state’s election results.
• Amazon workers strike in 15 nations calling for hazard pay and sick leave.
• Californians pledge to boycott Amazon this holiday season.
• Los Angeles imposes a shut down amidst spiking coronavirus infections.
• Native Americans hold a National Day of Mourning.

Photo from Public Services International.

The post Pennsylvania appeals court rejects President Trump’s latest legal challenge to the state’s election results; Amazon workers strike in 15 nations calling for hazard pay and sick leave appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

The post Election Results from Super Tuesday – March 4, 2020 appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.