Reclaim Democracy!

Jail Is a Death Sentence for a Growing Number of Americans

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By Shaila Dewan
First published November 22, 2022 in the NY Times

Matthew Shelton was contending with diabetes and periodic substance abuse when he moved in with his sister outside Houston in order to get his life together.

Three months later, facing an old criminal charge of driving while intoxicated, he turned himself in to the Harris County Jail one day in March with a supply of the insulin he relied on to stay alive.

After two days, he told his family that no one was allowing him access to the insulin: He was trying to manage his illness by discarding the bread from the sandwiches he was served. He was alone, frightened and cold, he said.

His mother, frantic, tried repeatedly to phone the jail but could not reach anyone. “We sent money for him to buy socks and ChapStick, and he never bought them,” she said.

Three days later, Mr. Shelton, 28, was found dead in his cell, after having slipped into a diabetic coma.

He was one of 24 people who have died this year in the jail, located in Houston, a far higher death rate than what is reflected in the most recent statistics for jails around the country.

Houston, whose jail has reached its highest population count in over a decade, is far from the only city where jails have become more fatal. Deaths have spiked in cities across the country, including New York, Oklahoma City, Seattle, Pittsburgh and Louisville, Ky. California, Texas and Georgia have also recorded statewide increases in deaths. Covid-19 accounts for only part of the rising toll — suicides and fatal overdoses have also increased in some places.

Jail officials blame a host of factors, including crowding, staff shortages, mental health issues exacerbated by the pandemic and the repurposing of beds in solitary confinement, once available to isolate violent detainees, that now must be used for quarantining the ill.

But jails have also in many cases violated minimum safety standards or failed to provide adequate medical and mental health care for their inmates, about two-thirds of whom are awaiting trial and presumed innocent.

The Houston facility was cited by the state in September for holding new arrestees in its crowded Joint Processing Center for as long as 99 hours before moving them to a permanent cell. The limit is 48 hours.

In Los Angeles, a federal judge granted an emergency order in September after the American Civil Liberties Union provided evidence that people with mental illness were being chained to furniture for days or left to sleep on concrete floors without access to toilets.

In Louisville, a woman killed herself in jail after being held for 18 hours in an attorney interview booth with no mattress, toilet or running water.

Much of the recent attention on jails has been focused on Rikers Island in New York, which is under threat of a federal takeover after suicides and frequent reports of uncontrolled violence.

But there are indications of a much wider crisis whose dimensions are not yet fully understood. The Justice Department has failed to fulfill a 2013 congressional mandate to conduct a comprehensive count of all deaths in custody, at one point acknowledging that its new system had recorded only 39 percent of deaths in local jails.

The most recent national figures available, from 2019, show that jail deaths were rising even before the pandemic. From 2000 to 2019, jail deaths per capita increased by 11 percent, to 167 per 100,000. In 2019, suicide was the leading cause of death. The number of drug- and alcohol-related deaths was the highest ever recorded.

The nation’s jails have little broad oversight but instead are local facilities, most commonly controlled by elected sheriffs. They held about 650,000 people last year, according to Jacob Kang-Brown of the Vera Institute for Justice, a group promoting prison reform. The jail population declined substantially at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic but has since begun to rebound, he said.

In Houston, there was another death Tuesday morning, when a 45-year-old man succumbed to injuries sustained in an assault by other jail inmates. That followed the death of a 27-year-old man who was found hanging in his cell last week. Two of the other deaths this year were suicides, including a man who was moved to a padded cell after a suicide attempt, then rammed his head repeatedly against the walls, the door and a metal grate, causing fatal injuries.

Jason Spencer, the chief of staff for Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, whose department runs the jail, said that the death rate, currently at more than 200 per 100,000 inmates, can vary widely from year to year.

At least a dozen of those who died this year were in their 20s, 30s or 40s. More than half had a history of mental illness or had been declared incompetent, according to Sarah V. Wood, the general counsel for the public defender’s office.

While an autopsy attributed Mr. Shelton’s death to a natural cause, diabetic ketoacidosis, his family insists that it was entirely preventable, a result of the jail’s failure to provide him with insulin.

“This is something that didn’t need to happen,” his mother, Marianna Thomson, said. “This is just carelessness. They didn’t care.”Marianna Thomson holding a locket containing the ashes of her late son, Matthew Shelton.Credit…Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

Mr. Spencer said the death occurred not long after the county’s public health care provider, Harris Health, took over the responsibility of providing medical care at the jail and referred questions there.

Bryan McLeod, a spokesman for Harris Health, declined to comment because Mr. Shelton’s family plans to sue. He also declined to discuss whether the jail’s medical providers were adequately staffed.

The deaths this year in Houston come amid a host of complaints about dangerous conditions in the jail. In a lawsuit, several dozen detention officers describe staffing shortages so severe that drug use and assaults were rampant, nurses were unable to administer medicine and officers, often denied meals and bathroom breaks, sometimes urinated into plastic bags.

“The jail is in disastrous shape right now,” said David Batton, the legal counsel for the union that represents jail employees. He faulted the county for failing to adequately fund jail operations. The lawsuit was dismissed last week.

Mr. Spencer said the county had approved a staffing increase of 100 detention officers, but that more than 100 positions remained unfilled. He said the problem was much larger than Houston; the jail’s death rate, he said, was in line with that of the state’s other large jails.

Many jails have seen overcrowding in part because of court backlogs stemming from the pandemic, which slowed or halted hearings and trials. But Houston’s backlog dates back to Hurricane Harvey in 2017, when the courthouse was damaged. The local courts now have more than 41,000 pending felony cases.

Even if no new cases came in, it would take more than a year to clear the old ones, according to a 2020 analysis by the Justice Management Institute, a research and training group. The institute recommended dismissing all nonviolent felony cases more than nine months old, pointing out that most of the accused would not have been sentenced to time behind bars.

But Kim Ogg, the Harris County district attorney, has declined to dismiss cases in bulk, saying that each should be considered individually. “We can’t neglect our prosecutorial duty, and we’re not going to tell victims that their crime doesn’t count,” said Dane Schiller, a spokesman for Ms. Ogg.

Advocates for better jail conditions also blame the overcrowding on a pandemic-era executive order from Gov. Greg Abbott, which later became state law, aimed at blocking the release of detainees on cashless bail.

The law, S.B. 6, prevents the release of any inmate with a previous conviction for violence or threatening violence, no matter how old, without requiring them to pay some bail money.

It has worked against a parallel effort to funnel people with serious mental illness into treatment instead of jail, without requiring them to pay for release, said Krish Gundu, co-founder and executive director of the Texas Jail Project, a watchdog group. She said that S.B. 6 undermines the Sandra Bland Act, named for a woman who could not afford the $500 needed to post bond after a traffic stop and hanged herself in a Texas jail.Twenty inmates have died this year in Harris County Jail in Houston.Credit…Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

Because many acts associated with mental illness, such as spitting on a police officer, are categorized as violent, hundreds of poor defendants who need treatment must now remain in jail while they are on the long waiting list for a community psychiatric bed, Ms. Gundu said.

In Harris County, four out of five detainees have a mental health indicator such as a diagnosis of major mental illness or previous treatment with psychiatric drugs, according to the jail’s dashboard, putting an intense strain on the system.

One woman who had no prior convictions was arrested in January 2020 on charges of possessing less than a gram of meth, almost certainly not enough to earn a prison sentence.

The woman was repeatedly referred to the jail’s mental health unit when guards witnessed her doing things like walking naked, drinking out of toilets and assaulting or being assaulted by others. But each time, she was swiftly returned to the general population. She spent more than two years moving in and out of jail, diversion programs and mental health treatment.

At some point, jail officials became aware that she was pregnant. In May, she gave birth in her cell without medical assistance. How that happened is unclear: Mr. Spencer said she had been checked on once every hour, as required.

When the newborn was discovered, baby and mother were taken to the hospital, where the mother remained under the supervision of two jail guards. A judge at that time declared her incompetent to stand trial and “suffering severe and abnormal mental health, emotional or physical distress.”

Despite her condition, she was permitted at the hospital to interact with her infant daughter and is now charged with stomping, kicking and striking her, though the baby survived.

Advocates for better jail conditions said the jail had failed to treat her severe mental illness, failed to adequately monitor her pregnancy and failed to protect the baby.

The woman’s lawyer, Staci Biggar, did not respond to requests for comment.

This year’s death toll comes on the heels of several notorious cases last year. In one, Jaquaree Simmons, 23, was beaten to death by guards who then failed to document their use of force, according to a subsequent investigation. The jail fired 10 guards, and the case will soon be presented to a grand jury.Fred Harris after his high school graduation in Stafford, Texas, in 2020.Credit…Mr. Harris in the hospital after being beaten and stabbed in Harris County Jail, which ultimately led to his death in 2021.Credit…

In another, Fred Harris, a 19-year-old, cognitively disabled inmate who weighed only 98 pounds, was placed in a holding tank with a 240-pound detainee who was known to be violent and was required to have an escort when outside his cell, according to a lawsuit filed by Mr. Harris’s family. Mr. Harris was stabbed and beaten to death, and his cellmate has been charged with murder.

Asked if the jail bore any responsibility, Mr. Spencer said, “That’s hard to say. I mean, those kinds of things, you know, sadly, have always happened in jails and prisons.”

But Mr. Harris’s mother, Dallas Garcia, said jail officials had failed to provide basic protections for her son. “I don’t want anyone else to experience that,” she said. “I don’t want there to be a lack of human decency in these places.”

 ⓒ 2022 New York Times

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Citizen Lawmaking Under Assault

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Many GOP State Legislators Are Sabotaging the Ballot Initiative Process

By Jeff Milchen
February 19, 2023

American voters often waver from one election to the next between electing majorities of Republicans or Democrats to Congress or their state legislatures, yet the results of ballot initiatives remain remarkably predictable. Last November’s outcomes results again showed a majority of voters — even those in deep-red states — favoring progressive policies when voting on individual issues rather than voicing their party identity.

But instead of accepting those outcomes as guidance to better represent their constituents, many Republican legislatures are trying to obstruct or neuter citizen lawmaking.

Last year, pro-abortion-rights voters won in all six states with questions on the ballot (the most ever on the topic), including the GOP strongholds of Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana. That success has advocates exploring ballot measures to amend state constitutions in a dozen or more states.

In other initiatives, voters abolished involuntary servitude as a punishment (Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont) and raised minimum wages (Nebraska, Nevada, and the District of Columbia). South Dakota became the seventh state (and the sixth under GOP control) to expand Medicaid via citizen initiative. And Michigan voters embedded reproductive rights and voter protection principles in the state constitution.

Two Republican officials on Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers initially blocked both of those initiatives from the ballot. Though supporters gathered a record 735,000 petition signatures for the reproductive-rights measure, the two officials claimed that inadequate spacing in the fine print of ballot petitions was disqualifying and voted to disqualify the voting rights initiative on another technicality. The initiatives’ backers filed lawsuits, and thankfully the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in both cases to prevent the sabotage and enable citizens to vote on the issues. 

Twenty-four states enable proactive initiatives while two additional states enable citizens to nullify laws, but not enact new ones. Around the turn of the century, progressive initiatives began outnumbering conservative ones, and 2022 yielded victories on a wide range of progressive causes. But Republican politicians increasingly deem this an unacceptable intrusion into their powers and push bills to undermine ballot initiatives on three different fronts: erecting barriers to initiatives reaching the ballot, making passage more difficult and corrupting voters’ intent post-passage. 

Last year, Ballotpedia counted a record 232 state bills impacting ballot measure processes, of which 23 passed. The Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC), a nonprofit advocate for citizen lawmaking, listed 140 of those bills as impeding citizen initiatives. And the attacks are unrelenting: Missouri Republicans introduced a dozen such bills this January alone.

Ohio Republicans, meanwhile, proposed legislation to radically increase signature-gathering costs and require a 60 percent supermajority vote for constitutional initiatives. The author of the latter bill openly declared his intent: to block a forthcoming citizen initiative expanding reproductive choice. Also motivating the attack is an initiative to create an independent redistricting commission, which would neutralize gerrymanders that effectively ensure a Republican majority in the legislature. (In an unusual plot twist, a leading advocate for the initiative is Maureen O’Connor, a Republican and former Ohio Supreme Court chief justice.)

Roadblocks to citizen lawmaking may be making their intended impacts, as just 30 initiatives made state ballots in 2022 — the fewest this century. In Utah, for example, an out-of-state group with anonymous funding called the Foundation for Government Accountability helped pass a 2021 law banning paying signature gatherers per valid signature, which is currently standard practice. By nixing a key incentive for workers to gather more signatures than they would if paid only an hourly wage, the law will hike both the cost and duration of campaigns to qualify a ballot measure. “Qualification challenges, courts blocking measures, and onerous restrictions” all contributed to the decrease, says Chris Figueredo, executive director of BISC.

total number of annual state citizen initiatives 201-2022
Graphic courtesy of Ballotpedia

Unlike direct voter-disenfranchisement tactics, the escalating assaults on direct democracy have generated few headlines. But regardless of our policy preferences, ballot initiatives provide a vital safety valve, giving citizens a tool to bypass unresponsive legislatures that ignore or defy their constituents. This corrective power is especially vital today, as gerrymandering makes dislodging officeholders in safe seats nearly impossible.

Despite the preponderance of progressive ballot victories, direct democracy is a nonpartisan, pro-democracy tool popular with citizens across the political spectrum. Two-thirds of the 24 states with proactive citizen initiatives typically have had trifecta Republican control of state government. In Colorado, which flipped from GOP control of all branches of government in 2004 to a Democratic trifecta today, 65 percent of voters supported a 2022 initiative to cut state income taxes. And when Californians voted for President Joe Biden by a 29-point margin in 2020, conservative positions prevailed on several ballot questions. If more state legislatures flip to Democrats, conservative initiatives undoubtedly will serve as a check on their power as well. 

The election results of 2022 demonstrated that citizen initiatives unite voters with differing party loyalties to advance common interests, often addressing issues where legislators decline to act. The threats to citizen lawmaking should be resisted in favor of protecting one key avenue to ensure frustrated voters a constructive way to engage and progress toward inclusive democracy.

Jeff Milchen is the founder and a board member of Reclaim Democracy! Follow him on Twitter: @JMilchen. A shorter version of this commentary was first published by Governing.

See also: Tactics GOP Legislators Are Using to Undermine Direct Democracy

Securing Votes Without Building Barriers

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By Jeff Milchen
May 4, 2022
First published in the Billings Gazette and Bozeman Chronicle.

Just weeks ago, Yellowstone County Judge Michael Moses blocked four recent Montana voting restriction laws from taking effect for this year’s elections. A full decision on the law’s constitutionality is yet to come, but Republican plans for a special legislative session (largely to promote false “election fraud” claims) collapsed after the preliminary ruling.

Yet Montana does have reason to improve one aspect of securing elections in which we lag behind most states: keeping voter rolls free of duplicate or ineligible registrations.

Unknown to most U.S. residents, a system to keep voter rolls current has operated effectively for a decade. Created in 2012 through collaboration among several states and the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) is a non-profit, non-partisan consortium managed and financed through voluntary membership by 31 (now 27) U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

Participating states regularly upload voter registration and motor vehicle license records through a secure, encrypted process. ERIC amasses the state data, then identifies and reports back any inaccuracies or duplicates, flags who moved, who died, and who is eligible to vote but isn’t registered. It’s a one-stop solution to guarantee highly accurate voter rolls.

ERIC can even identify illegitimate votes. Among the 14.6 million mail ballots cast during the 2016 and 2018 elections, ERIC flagged 372 likely cases of double voting or someone casting a deceased person’s ballot. That’s 0.0025 percent of votes cast. 

Between 2012 and 2018, ERIC identified 10 million registered voters who moved–the most common cause of voter roll inaccuracies–or appeared on more than one voting list. ERIC is the only reliable tool to learn whether any person cast ballots for the same election in different states.

Yet for all the professed Republican concern about voter fraud, Montana is not among the majority of states (split between Republican and Democratic-leaning) participating in ERIC. Why have Montana Republicans not taken this simple step to actually increase election security? And why have you not heard reporters asking politicians that question?

It’s not about cost. Montana’s annual dues to ERIC would be about $25,000 next year–a fraction of the legal costs Republicans imposed on taxpayers by passing election laws certain to be challenged by Indigenous, youth, or disability rights groups whose constituents are targeted. 

ERIC Map
ERIC Map with recent GOP state resignations, as of March 21, 2023

Editor’s note and update: while this op-ed was produced for Montana newspapers, the arguments apply for all states that are not yet part of ERIC. If your state is not among these members, we’d love to help you engage your state officials. Current ERIC members (as of March 17. 2023) are: AK, AZ, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, IL, IA, KY, ME. MA, MD, MI, MN, MO, NV, NM, OR, PA, RI, SC, TX, UT, VT, VA, WA, WV, WI, and Washington, D.C.

With ERIC’s successful track record, no state had ever dropped out until Louisiana’s Secretary of State withdrew in January. Then 2022 Republican candidates for Secretary of State in Ohio and Alabama declared they’d withdraw from ERIC if they gained power. The excuse to sabotage genuine election integrity stems from fabricated and easily disproved allegations about ERIC published by the far-right Gateway Pundit blog.

So what motivates these baseless attacks? ERIC doesn’t just identify eligible unregistered voters–it obliges member states to contact those people and offer them the opportunity to register. It seems many GOP attacks on ERIC are motivated by the opinion that expanding democracy is an unacceptable requirement. Or perhaps eliminating the rare instances of illegal votes is not desirable to some vote suppressors, as that would weaken their justification for promoting more than 50 voter suppression tactics across U.S. states.

Steve Daines, Matt Rosendale, and other Montana GOP members all have been accomplices in undermining faith in our elections and our public servants. Daines’ treachery includes texting his supporters to falsely claim “Dems are stealing the election,” after Trump lost the 2020 election by over seven million votes. They all are culpable for helping incite the violent attack against our republic on January 6 of last year. 

The GOP instilled doubt in election security among followers by spreading unrelenting lies, then used those doubts to justify laws erecting voting barriers for youth, Indigenous Montanans, and others they prefer not vote. Indigenous and youth advocates are among those who successfully sought to block the voter suppression tactics from taking effect. 

In case repeated lies about the 2020 elections are more vivid than the truth, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agencies (then-controlled by Trump appointee Chris Krebs) told us the 2020 election was the most secure in American history and, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” 

Let’s call on Montana officials to stand up for voters reject the escalating assault on democracy. Joining ERIC is an administrative decision, so Montanans should ask Governor Gianforte and Secretary of State, Christi Jacobsen, to take this one simple action to advance their professed desire for more secure elections.

Failure to act would tell us all we need to know about their credibility.

Jeff Milchen (@JMilchen on Twitter) is a board member of the Montana-based Reclaim Democracy!

Along with our web page, you can share this 2-minute video that explains ERIC well. This FAQ (pdf) goes into more depth on ERIC’s operations

How the Senate Filibuster Enables Corporate Rule

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By Jeff Milchen
April, 2022

“Follow the money” is a fundamental principle for political reporters. It means competent journalists look at who funds politicians, provides that information in relevant stories, and examines how politicians’ votes and statements compare to the agenda of their funders. On that criterion, nearly every news report on the recent filibuster of Senate voting rights legislation failed. 

It’s not like the trail is camouflaged. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, perhaps the most powerful lobbying group in America, promoted it’s agenda publicly, decrying the the threat of a responsive democracy and touting the filibuster to prevent it. The Chamber lavished praise and cash upon Krysten Sinema and Joe Manchin, the two Democratic Senators who saved corporate America from the threat of majority rule. Without the filibuster, proposals broadly popular with the public, but anathema to many corporations — like a $15 minimum hourly wage, bans on corporate union-busting, and stronger pollution limits — could likely become law.

Finally, the Chamber warned all Senators that a vote to enable democracy will be punished on its scorecard, which tells who’s been naughty or nice in the eyes of multinational corporations.

When Manchin and Sinema professed their deep concern for bipartisanship or tradition to justify blocking voting rights protections, some reporters showed appropriate skepticism, since both Senators voted to suspend the filibuster just weeks earlier to raise the national debt ceiling. Yet reports on the filibuster vote from the largest media outlets neglected corporate influence entirely. The only reporting I found connecting Manchin and Sinema’s filibuster support to funding by fossil fuel interests, restaurant chains, and many other corporations was The Lever, a reader-supported investigative journalism startup. 

To be clear, the Constitution’s wealthy authors intended the Senate to protect powerful people from rapid populist pressure that could more easily influence the House of Representatives. Yet they couldn’t anticipate the later invention of filibusters turning their speed bump into a full roadblock. Nor could the founders foresee population growth that now gives Californians about 1/68th as much Senate representation as residents of Wyoming, a state created a century after our Constitution.

Meanwhile, the people of Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, who outnumber the residents of several states, have no voting representation in Congress whatsoever. The power imbalances are magnified further by the whiteness and patriarchy prevalent in over-represented Plains and Northern Rockies states.

While many corporations offer feel-good commercials promoting multiculturalism and equality, their political arms (like the Chamber) and political investments perpetuate the dominance of wealth over our elections and the public interest. Those of us who value democracy must remember the quest for voting rights and equality is inseparable from the imperative to revoke the power of corporations and money over our elections and government.

Many of us learned a sterilized history in which the United States progressed steadily from a white, wealthy, male electorate toward inclusive democracy. But in the entire history of our nation, just 11 Black people and 58 women have served as Senators. Hard-fought citizen victories have taken decades and are interspersed with setbacks — like today — at the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Long-term progress has come through rallying with new energy after each defeat to push further toward equality with clear proactive agendas. The recent Senate defeats for democracy should fuel momentum for tackling the problem at its roots by organizing toward a Right to Vote Amendment in our Constitution that transforms voting from a privilege to a right. have our votes count equally.  

Jeff Milchen is a Reclaim Democracy! board member in Bozeman, MT. Share your views with him or follow on Twitter at @JMilchen

Cartoon displayed on social media is by Nick Anderson.

USPS Purchasing Gas Guzzlers Would Be a Disaster for the Climate and Customers

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By Jeff Milchen
January 13, 2022

Transportation generates  29 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, meaning any serious work to mitigate harm from global warming requires changing how we move people and goods. And while our personal transportation choices matter, collective action to drive significant emission reductions at large institutions is essential.

Owning more than 200,000 vehicles, of which 70 percent are 25–32 years old, the U.S. Postal Service will make a global impact—for better or worse—with its choices of fleet vehicles. Local delivery trucks typically travel less than 100 miles daily at lower speeds, making them perfect candidates for electric engines. The situation creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity to increase efficiency, reduce pollution, and advance economies of scale for electric vehicle production.

Just one problem: Postmaster General Louis DeJoy awarded a decade-long, multi-billion-dollar contract for those replacements to Oshkosh Defense Corporation. If that sounds to you like a company focused on making armored war machines rather than street vehicles, you’re correct. The plan calls for 90 percent of new trucks to run on gas and travel about nine miles per gallon, barely improving their predecessors.

While President Biden has called for all federal vehicle purchases to be emission-free by 2035, he lacks the authority to control (or fire) the postmaster directly. Biden has appointed most of the USPS Board of Governors, but his selections seem likely to give DeJoy full autonomy. DeJoy gained notoriety by taking hundreds of mail sorting machines out of service just before the 2020 elections and slowed mail service dramatically. 

In a February 6 statement, DeJoy cited budget deficits he inherited as the obstacle to buying more costly electric vehicles. Though USPS is a public service, it is expected to fund itself without direct federal assistance. Yet Congress imposes onerous requirements on USPS to pre-fund employee retirement benefits far into the future, contributing to its deficit. This week, a bill to relieve that burden is moving through Congress, potentially saving USPS $50 billion over the next decade.

If the bill passes, the opportunity should not be wasted. While the gas-powered trucks are cheaper to purchase initially, lower operating and maintenance costs for electric trucks start saving money immediately, and full fleet electrification could save $4.3 billion (PDF) over a generation of vehicles.

Notably, Biden’s Build Back Better bill, defeated via Senate filibuster, would have fully funded a USPS transition to electric vehicles. 

Upon learning of the USPS procurement plan, the Environmental Protection Agency wrote to USPS urging reconsideration. It claims the decision was based on faulty analysis, including absurd assumptions about battery and gasoline prices. The letter also accused the USPS of illegally awarding $482 million to Oshkosh Inc. before an environmental review.

The dispute also exposed a dangerous EPA rules loophole that incentivizes bigger, more polluting trucks. For example, vehicles classified as light trucks (combined vehicle weight + payload up to 8,500 pounds) must meet significant efficiency requirements from which heavy trucks (exceeding 8,500 pounds) are exempt. In a cynical ploy to evade EPA standards, the Oshkosh /DeJoy agreement calls for vehicles with a combined vehicle weight of 8,501 pounds—nearly double the weight of most current USPS vehicles.

USPS estimates $3.3 billion would cover a complete transition to electric vehicles. For reference, Congress allotted $24 billion more than anyone requested for military spending. Surely we can afford the relatively modest investment to defend against climate calamity the Pentagon cites as a top security threat. 

While we should urge our representatives to enable that crucial step, this conflict should inspire us to look at the procurement choices being made close to home by our schools, local governments, and other institutions we can influence directly. Our individual choices as consumers matter. But only through our actions as citizens can we drive change on the scale our climate crisis demands.

Reclaim Democracy board member Jeff Milchen adapted this commentary from a report he first wrote for UU World.

The Slow-motion Insurrection: Authoritarians Are Gaining Power to Corrupt Elections

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We suspect most of our readers are familiar with many of the attempts to subvert the integrity of local and state election processes by replacing civil servants with partisan loyalists, but this Nicholas Riccardi report offers a thorough analysis documenting the imminent danger with examples from several states. There is no other issue that compares to securing voting rights and election integrity right now. After reading, please see our related report on current voting rights bills in Congress and take action!

By Nicholas Riccardi
First published on apnews.com, December 29, 2021

In the weeks leading up to the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, a handful of Americans — well-known politicians, obscure local bureaucrats — stood up to block then-President Donald Trump’s unprecedented attempt to overturn a free and fair vote of the American people.

In the year since, Trump-aligned Republicans have worked to clear the path for next time.

In battleground states and beyond, Republicans are taking hold of the once-overlooked machinery of elections. While the effort is incomplete and uneven, outside experts on democracy and Democrats are sounding alarms, warning that the United States is witnessing a “slow-motion insurrection” with a better chance of success than Trump’s failed power grab last year.

They point to a mounting list of evidence: Several candidates who deny Trump’s loss are running for offices that could have a key role in the election of the next president in 2024. In Michigan, the Republican Party is restocking members of obscure local boards that could block approval of an election. In Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the GOP-controlled legislatures are backing open-ended “reviews” of the 2020 election, modeled on a deeply flawed look-back in Arizona. The efforts are poised to fuel disinformation and anger about the 2020 results for years to come.

All this comes as the Republican Party has become more aligned behind Trump, who has made denial of the 2020 results a litmus test for his support. Trump has praised the Jan. 6 rioters and backed primaries aimed at purging lawmakers who have crossed him. Sixteen GOP governors have signed laws making it more difficult to vote. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll showed that two-thirds of Republicans do not believe Democrat Joe Biden was legitimately elected as president.
[Editors note: Because many poll respondents are following cues from right-wing conspirators, this oft-repeated statistic is better framed as “claim not to believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected.”]

The result, experts say, is that another baseless challenge to an election has become more likely, not less.

“It’s not clear that the Republican Party is willing to accept defeat anymore,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die.” “The party itself has become an anti-democratic force.”

American democracy has been flawed and manipulated by both parties since its inception. Millions of Americans — Black people, women, Native Americans and others — have been excluded from the process. Both Republicans and Democrats have written laws rigging the rules in their favor.

This time, experts argue, is different: Never in the country’s modern history has a a major party sought to turn the administration of elections into an explicitly partisan act.

Republicans who sound alarms are struggling to be heard by their own party. GOP Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming or Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, members of a House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, are often dismissed as party apostates. Others have cast the election denialism as little more than a distraction.

But some local officials, the people closest to the process and its fragility, are pleading for change. At a recent news conference in Wisconsin, Kathleen Bernier, a GOP state senator and former elections clerk, denounced her party’s efforts to seize control of the election process.

“These made up things that people do to jazz up the base is just despicable and I don’t believe any elected legislator should play that game,” said Bernier.

Bernier’s view is not shared by the majority of the Republicans who control the state Legislature in Wisconsin, one a handful of states that Biden carried but Trump wrongly claims he won. Early in 2021, Wisconsin Republicans ordered their Legislative Audit Bureau to review the 2020 election. That review found no significant fraud. Last month, an investigation by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty came to the same conclusion.

Still, many Republicans are convinced that something went wrong. They point to how the nonpartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission — which the GOP-led Legislature and then-Republican governor created eight years ago to run the state’s elections — changed guidance for local elections officers to make voting easier during the pandemic.

That’s led to a struggle for control of elections between the state Legislature and the commission.

“We feel we need to get this straight for people to believe we have integrity,” said GOP Sen. Alberta Darling, who represents the conservative suburbs north of Milwaukee. “We’re not just trying to change the election with Trump. We’re trying to dig into the next election and change irregularities.”

Republicans are also remaking the way elections are run in other states. In Georgia, an election bill signed this year by the GOP governor gave the Republican-controlled General Assembly new powers over the state board of elections, which controls its local counterparts.

The law is being used to launch a review of operations in solidly-Democratic Fulton County, home to most of Atlanta, which could lead to a state takeover. The legislature also passed measures allowing local officials to remove Democrats from election boards in six other counties.

In Pennsylvania, the GOP-controlled legislature is undertaking a review of the presidential election, subpoenaing voter information that Democrats contend is an unprecedented intrusion into voter privacy. Meanwhile, Trump supporters are signing up for local election jobs in droves. One pastor who attended the Jan. 6 rally in the nation’s capital recently won a race to become an election judge overseeing voting in a rural part of Lancaster County.

In Michigan, the GOP has focused on the state’s county boards of canvassers. The little-known committees’ power was briefly in the spotlight in November of 2020, when Trump urged the two Republican members of the board overseeing Wayne County, home to Democratic-bastion Detroit, to vote to block certification of the election.

After one of the Republican members defied Trump, local Republicans replaced her with Robert Boyd, who told The Detroit Free Press that he would not have certified Biden’s win last year. Boyd did not return a call for comment.

A similar swap — replacing a tradition Republican with one who parroted Trump’s election lies — occurred in Macomb County, the state’s third most populous county.

The Detroit News in October reported that Republicans had replaced their members on boards of canvassers in eight of Michigan’s 11 most populous counties

Michigan officials say that if boards of canvassers don’t certify an election they can be sued and compelled to do so. Still, that process could cause chaos and be used as a rallying cry behind election disputes.

“They’re laying the groundwork for a slow-motion insurrection,” said Mark Brewer, an election lawyer and former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party.

The state’s top election official, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, warned: “The movement to cast doubt on the 2020 election has now turned their eyes … to changing the people who were in positions of authority and protected 2020.”

TRUMP’S RETRIBUTION

That includes Benson.

Multiple Republicans have lined up to challenge her, including Kristina Karamo, a community college professor who alleged fraud in the 2020 elections and contended that the Jan. 6 attackers were actually antifa activists trying to frame Trump supporters.

Trump has been clear about his intentions: He is seeking to oust statewide officials who stood in his way and replace them with allies.

“We have secretary of states that did not do the right thing for the American people,” Trump, who has endorsed Karamo, told The Associated Press this month.

The most prominent Trump push is in Georgia, where the former president is backing U.S. Rep. Jody Hice, who voted against Biden’s Electoral College victory on Jan. 6, in a primary race against the Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperberg. Raffensperger rejected Trump’s pleas to “find” enough votes to declare him the winner.

Trump also encouraged former U.S. Sen. David Perdue to challenge Gov. Brian Kemp in the GOP primary. Kemp turned down Trump’s entreaties to declare him the victor in the 2020 election.

In October, Jason Shepherd stepped down as chair of the Cobb County GOP after the group censured Kemp. “It’s shortsighted. They’re not contemplating the effects of this down the line,” Shepherd said in an interview. “They want their pound of flesh from Brian Kemp because Brian Kemp followed the law.”

In Nevada, multiple lawsuits seeking to overturn Biden’s victory were thrown out by judges — including one filed by Jim Marchant, a former GOP state lawmaker now running to be secretary of state. The current Republican secretary of state, Barbara Cegavske, who is term limited, found there was no significant fraud in the contest.

Marchant said he’s not just seeking to become a Trump enabler, though he was endorsed by Trump in an unsuccessful 2020 bid for Congress. “I’ve been fighting this since before he came along,” Marchant said of Trump. “All we want is fair and transparent elections.”

In Pennsylvania, Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who organized buses of Trump supporters for Trump’s rally near the White House on Jan. 6, has signaled he’s running for governor. In Arizona, state Rep. Mark Finchem’s bid to be secretary of state has unnerved many Republicans, given that he hosted a daylong hearing in November 2000 that featured Trump adviser Rudolph Giuliani. Former news anchor Kari Lake, who repeats Trump’s election falsehoods, is running to succeed Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, who stood up to Trump’s election-year pressure and is barred from another term.

Elsewhere in Arizona, Maricopa County Auditor Stephen Richer, who defended his office against the conspiratorial election review, has started a political committee to provide financial support to Republicans who tell the truth about the election. But he’s realistic about the persistence of the myth of a stolen election within his party’s base.

“Right now,” Richer said, “the incentive structure seems to be strongly in favor of doing the wrong thing.”

HIGH STAKES RACES FOR GOVERNOR

In Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Democratic governors have been a major impediment to the GOP’s effort to overhaul elections. Most significantly, they have vetoed new rules that Democrats argue are aimed at making it harder for people of color to vote.

Governors have a significant role in U.S. elections: They certify the winners in their states, clearing way for the appointment of Electoral College members. That raises fears that Trump-friendly governors could try to certify him — if he were to run in 2024 and be the GOP nominee — as the winner of their state’s electoral votes regardless of the vote count.

Additionally, some Republicans argue that state legislatures can name their own electors regardless of what the vote tally says.

But Democrats have had little success in laying out the stakes in these races. It’s difficult for voters to believe the system could be vulnerable, said Daniel Squadron of The States Project, a Democratic group that tries to win state legislatures.

“The most motivated voters in America today are those who think the 2020 election was stolen,” he said. “Acknowledging this is afoot requires such a leap from any core American value system that any of us have lived through.”

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