Elections Initiative Headed to Court
The initiative would require open primaries and ranked choice voting. Also, updates from Arizona and Georgia and the Wall Street Journal criticizes 2000 Mules movie.
A court case over the title and description for a ballot initiative requiring open primaries and ranked choice voting will have a hearing on August 7th. The Attorney General’s office is responsible for providing the title and description, however, the group sponsoring the initiative, ‘Idahoans for Open Primaries’, claim the title and description provided by the AG are misleading.
Idahoans for Open Primaries sued the Attorney General’s office over the matter and says AG Labrador should recuse himself due to a statement he had made opposing the measure.
Labrador may also sue to prohibit the initiative due to it violating state statute in that it includes more than one issue. The title and full text of the initiative can be found here. Idaho Capital Sun (photo credit) story here.
AZ: Maricopa Report Released on Nov22 Election Failures: In response to lawsuits and other criticism of the November 2022 election, the Maricopa County Board of Directors commissioned a report to study the issue. The report was released this past week pointing primarily to problems with OKI printers using 100lb paper in a high-volume printing scenario as the primary reason for tabulation failures during election day voting. Further, the County claimed it had no way to know that could happen and prior elections had not seen the problem. However, there is some push back on that perspective including statements from OKI. The report can be read here and this article from Votebeat provides some additional details.
GA: Spalding County Votes to Hand Count: The Board of Elections for the County decided to perform hand-counts in addition to the existing machine counts. If the two do not match, they would not certify the election.
Wall Street Journal Criticizes ‘2000 Mules’: True the Vote’s effort to collect drop box ballot video and ‘geo-fencing’ data was the basis of Dinesh D’Souza’s ‘2000 Mules’ movie that debuted last May. While the timing of the WSJ op-ed is curious, they nevertheless make assertions that True the Vote has not cooperated with various law enforcement agencies as they claim and points to a defamation lawsuit they are up against for false allegations in the movie. True the Vote principles Catherine Englebrecht and Gregg Phillips appeared on a live stream shortly after the article came out and not only disputed the WSJ claims but stated they have extensive documentation of their interactions with law enforcement, including the FBI. The WSJ article can be read here.