No Labels is still working to find its dream third-party presidential ticket for 2024 — but there’s a hitch: It keeps getting turned down.
The deep-pocketed centrist group once envisioned a vigorous public competition to join its ticket, which it planned to put on the ballot in all 50 states. Instead, it has been spurned by at least a dozen prominent figures from across the ideological spectrum and secured ballot access in just 17 states so far, despite having said it hoped to be on 27 state ballots by the end of last year.
Among the Republicans who have said no after approaches from the group: former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, according to public statements and sources familiar with their responses. The group was still trying to lure Sununu to the ticket within the last two weeks as Sununu, an avowed critic of former President Donald Trump, fell in line behind Trump, the GOP’s presumptive nominee.
No Labels had also openly suggested that it was interested in former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who shut down any openness to running on a third-party ticket in an interview early this month.
On the Democratic side, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick declined No Labels’ entreaties, as did Democratic-turned-independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. The group also engaged with former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Well-known non-politicians like businessman Mark Cuban and retired Navy Adm. William McRaven did not reciprocate interest from No Labels, either. No Labels’ search has gone far and wide — it even tried to make overtures to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
The latest rejection, on Monday, came from former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, an anti-Trump Republican who had been reported to be under consideration to lead the No Labels ticket. But Duncan told The Atlanta Journal Constitution that he withdrew himself from consideration to instead focus on “healing and improving the Republican Party.”…
“Trump is making the Jan. 6 attack a cornerstone of his bid for the White House”
Republican Donald Trump has launched his general election campaign not merely rewriting the history of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, but positioning the violent siege and its failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election as a cornerstone of his bid to return to the White House.
At a weekend rally in Ohio, his first as the presumed Republican Party presidential nominee, Trump stood onstage, his hand raised in salute to the brim of his red MAGA hat, as a recorded chorus of prisoners in jail for their roles in the Jan. 6 attack sang the national anthem.
An announcer asked the crowd to please rise “for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6th hostages.” And people did, and sang along.
“They were unbelievable patriots,” Trump said as the recording ended.
Having previously vowed to pardon the rioters, he promised to help them “the first day we get into office.”
Initially relegated to a fringe theory on the edges of the Republican Party, the revisionist history of Jan. 6, which Trump amplified during the early days of the GOP primary campaign to rouse his most devoted voters, remains a rally centerpiece even as he must appeal more broadly to a general election audience.
In heaping praise on the rioters, Trump is shifting blame for his own role in the run-up to the bloody mob siege and asking voters to absolve hundreds of them — and himself — over the deadliest attack on a seat of American power in 200 years.
At the same time, Trump’s allies are installing 2020 election-deniers to the Republican National Committee, further institutionalizing the lies that spurred the violence. That raises red flags about next year, when Congress will again be called upon to certify the vote….
The former president and presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee has put the devoted supporters charged with January 6 crimes at the heart of his campaign. He began his first major campaign rally last March firing up the Waco, Texas crowd by playing “Justice for All,” a song he helped produce with the “J6 Prison Choir.” It has since become a staple of his events. On Truth Social last week, Trump wrote that one of his “first acts as your next President” would be to “Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned.”
The story of Trump’s shift — from reluctant denunciations to direct support for those charged in connection with the day’s events — offers a glimpse into the workings of his mind, and of his political operation. The change began gradually, soon after he left office and weathered impeachment proceedings. Two months after he resumed civilian life at Mar-a-Lago, the president described the crowd to two visiting Washington Post reporters as “loving,” and offered a defense of their behavior: Capitol Police had “ushered” them into the building, he said, and were “hugging and kissing” them — a view belied by video footage and widely rejected by the courts. Aides to Trump point to remarks from this period as evidence he always cared about the cause of January 6th defendants.
A detailed examination of his public statements and ten interviews with people now involved in the movement to support January 6 defendants show a gradual path from Trump’s instinctive support for some of the most hardcore members of his own MAGA movement to a semi-formal alliance with an organization founded by the family member of a January 6 convict.
That path was smoothed in part by a handful of women — from the high-profile Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to lesser-known figures like Trump campaign staffer Joanna Miller Wischer and Cynthia Hughes, who founded the Patriot Freedom Project. They made the case to him that at least some of his devoted followers charged in the riot were jailed unjustly, and were being treated poorly.
Another crucial factor in Trump’s growing support for the cause may have been his own confrontation with American law enforcement, including over charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which has become a centerpiece of his campaign for president.
“Supreme Court Voices Skepticism Over Social-Media Censorship Claims Against Government”
The Supreme Court seemed likely Monday to reject a bid by GOP-led states to restrict the federal government from urging social-media companies to remove allegedly misleading posts or disinformation on their platforms, unless there is a threat of official retribution.
The Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, along with several individuals who complained that online platforms such as
Facebook suppressed their views against vaccines and lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic at the government’s demand, filed the First Amendment suit in 2022. Lower courts have largely sided with the plaintiffs, finding that Biden administration officials’ content requests amounted to government coercion, but the high court during oral arguments on Monday voiced more sympathy with the administration’s defense.
The social-media companies themselves aren’t involved in the case, and liberal justices questioned whether any plaintiffs suffered harms that gave them a right to sue. And justices across the spectrum expressed skepticism that the government’s interactions with the platforms, even if heated, amounted to official restraint.
For one, said Chief Justice John Roberts, “the government is not monolithic.” Different individuals, agencies and branches of government can have different views, he said, and the media has contacts with a variety of official sources. “That has to dilute the concept of coercion,” he said.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh offered a national-security analogy to the government’s campaign against disinformation—something that conservative critics contend has targeted their opinions.
“It’s probably not uncommon for government officials to protest an upcoming story on surveillance or detention policy and say, ‘If you run that, it’s going to harm the war effort and put Americans at risk,’ ” said Kavanaugh, who served in the George W. Bush White House when surveillance and detention policies were front-page news.
Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher, representing the Biden administration, quickly agreed. “That’s an example of a valuable sort of interchange as long as it stays on the persuasion side of the line,” he said. Threatening a tech company with retribution for failure to comply, like an antitrust investigation, would be a different story, he said.
Schedule for Wash U. Election Law Conference
This looks great and so sorry I wasn’t able to make it:
Friday, March 22
1:30 to 2:45: Election Law and Race
The Riddle of Race-Based Redistricting
Travis Crum
Reconstruction’s Last Monument
Maureen Edobor
Senior Discussant: Josh Sellers
3:00 to 4:15: Election Law after the 2020 Election
Incitement as Coordination
Nicholas Almendares
Second-Guessing State Courts in Election Cases
Michael Weingartner
Senior Discussant: Carolyn Shapiro
4:30 to 5:45: Keynote Panel
Democracy Unmoored: Populism and the Corruption of Popular Sovereignty
Samuel Issacharoff
Free to Judge: The Power of Campaign Money in Judicial Elections
Michael Kang & Joanna Shepherd
Moderator: Travis Crum
Saturday, March 23
9:30 to 10:45: Election Law and Quantitative Methods
The Still Secret Ballot: The Limited Privacy Cost of Transparent Election Results
Michael Morse
Reconstruction and Representation
Michael Olson
Senior Discussant: Abby Wood
11:15 to 12:30: Election Law and Democratic Theory
Reconsidering the Legacy of Disjunctive Legal Change: Lessons of Baker v. Carr
Jacob Eisler
The Democratic Value of “Foreign Interference” in Campaign Finance
John J. Martin
Senior Discussant: Lisa Marshall Manheim
“Suggested Principles for State Statutes Regarding Ballot Marking and Vote Tabulation”
This letter, signed by 20 election cybersecurity experts, was addressed to the Pennsylvania State Senate Committee on Government in response to a request for policy advice, but it applies in any state — especially those that use Ballot Marking Devices for all in-person voters: Georgia and South Carolina; most counties in Arkansas, New Jersey, and West Virginia; some counties in Texas, Tennessee, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Nevada, and California.
Executive Summary
We believe that the goal of laws, regulations and directives relating to elections must be focused on fairness, security, transparency, and accessibility. Each state should strive to approach the gold standard in every category, so that no reasonable candidate or party may have grounds to object that the process was unfair, insecure, or compromised. The process must be transparent, so the public may be assured the winners won and the losers lost.
We believe that no system is perfect, with each having trade-offs. Hand-marked and hand-counted ballots remove the uncertainty introduced by use of electronic machinery and the ability of bad actors to exploit electronic vulnerabilities to remotely alter the results. However, some portion of voters mistakenly mark paper ballots in a manner that will not be counted in the way the voter intended, or which even voids the ballot. Hand-counts delay timely reporting of results, and introduce the possibility for human error, bias, or misinterpretation.
Technology introduces the means of efficient tabulation, but also introduces a manifold increase in complexity and sophistication of the process. This places the understanding of the process beyond the average person’s understanding, which can foster distrust. It also opens the door to human or machine error, as well as exploitation by sophisticated and malicious actors.
Rather than assert that each component of the process can be made perfectly secure on its own, we believe the goal of each component of the elections process is to validate every other component.
Consequently, we believe that the hallmarks of a reliable and optimal election process are hand-marked paper ballots, which are optically scanned, separately and securely stored, and rigorously audited after the election but before certification. We recommend state legislators adopt policies consistent with these guiding principles, which are further developed below….
“LWV Files Federal Lawsuit Against AI-Generated Robocalls Sent on the Eve of the New Hampshire Presidential Primary”
Today, the League of Women Voters of New Hampshire, the League of Women Voters of the United States, and individual New Hampshire voters filed a federal lawsuit against Steve Kramer, Lingo Telecom, LLC, and Life Corporation for voter intimidation, coercion, and deception ahead of the 2024 New Hampshire presidential primary. The defendants used illegal AI-generated robocalls to discourage voters from participating in the primary. The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire, seeks to order the defendants to cease engaging in illegal, dishonest, and deceptive tactics nationwide.
Two days before the New Hampshire presidential primary, the defendants sent robocalls to New Hampshire voters with a “deepfake” simulated voice of President Joe Biden to discourage them from participating in that primary. The New Hampshire robocalls urged recipients not to vote in the primary and to “save” their vote for the November 2024 US Presidential Election.