Defend Our Democracy States Roundup for May 3, 2023

🗽A well informed citizenry is the best defense against tyranny. - Thomas Jefferson

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🗽A well informed citizenry is the best defense against tyranny. - Thomas Jefferson

Shout out to Defend Democracy Project for providing this update.

This past week, lawyers for former president Donald Trump failed to convince a federal appeals court “to stop former Vice President Mike Pence from testifying in front of a grand jury investigating” Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Pence “spent more than five hours behind closed doors” testifying in the case. 

That same day, Trump “embraced a Jan. 6 defendant” during a campaign stop, “calling the woman, who served prison time for her actions during the Capitol attack… ‘terrific.’” The woman said in a subsequent media interview last Friday that “Pence and ‘every single’ member of Congress who certified the 2020 election should be executed.”

It was reported that a software company hired by Trump’s campaign “to study election fraud claims in the weeks after the 2020 election” was subpoenaed earlier this year by the Justice Department. The founder of the firm said it “studied more than a dozen voter fraud theories and allegations for Trump’s campaign” and “found they were ‘all false.’”  

In Arizona, expelled state Rep. Liz Harris took to far-right media to call on supporters to push for her reinstatement, leading some supporters to show up at a “Maricopa County Board of Supervisors meeting to throw barbs at the board,” with “one of them even falsely accusing a Phoenix city councilman of opening the board meeting with a prayer to the devil.” 

In Florida, voting rights advocates filed a federal lawsuit arguing that the state’s “voter registration application does not properly inform voters about eligibility requirements,” specifically related to felons who have served their sentences. The lawsuit comes after Gov. Ron DeSantis’ draconian “election police” launched “a crackdown against felons who’d allegedly broken the law by casting a ballot” last year.  

Meanwhile, the Florida Senate “approved a sweeping elections bill aimed at continuing Republican leaders’ efforts to crack down on voter registration groups” that “also would shorten the time for voters to request mail-in ballots.” Opponents of the bill, which would increase rules and penalties for third-party voter registration groups, argue that it could negatively affect voter turnout. 

Also this week, “federal appeals court upheld a Florida election law… that a lower court had ruled was aimed at suppressing Black voters.” That law tightened “rules on mailed ballots, drop boxes and other popular election methods.” 

The North Carolina Supreme Court, “with a new Republican majority elected last year,” overturned its “previous ruling that found electoral maps drawn by Republican lawmakers were illegal because they were too partisan.” The decision was criticized for clearing the “way for partisan gerrymandering.”

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