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The very first thing the new Republican Senate will do is try to push through Keystone

by KarolynThibodea Posted on December 17, 2014

The very first thing the new Republican Senate will do is try to push through Keystone

By on 17 Dec 2014commentsShare

Once Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) becomes Senate majority leader next month, his first order of business will be to hold a vote on authorizing the Keystone XL pipeline, he said on Tuesday. If it passes, that would force President Obama to either approve or veto the bill, and thus the pipeline, before he is ready to. From CNN:

The President has said he wants the decision left in the hands of the State Department, which is six years into a review of the project and currently holds final authority because the pipeline would cross international borders. …

The House has repeatedly approved a bill that would take the Keystone decision out of the Obama administration’s hands, end the review and give the project the green light.

For months, the Senate’s Democratic leaders ignored that House bill, but then last month they suddenly changed course and allowed a vote on it in a doomed bid to help Senate Energy Chair Mary Landrieu win her runoff election in oil-friendly Louisiana. Approval for Keystone came up one vote short, and Landrieu lost by 12 points.

Next year, when McConnell is in control of the Senate, newly elected Republican senators will give him the votes he needs to pass the Keystone bill. But if the president vetoes the legislation, McConnell probably won’t have enough votes to override him. Republicans will have 54 seats, and a number of Democrats could be expected to vote with them, but it would be a stretch to get to the 67 needed to overturn a veto.

Climate activists reacted to McConnell’s statement exactly the way you’d expect them to.

“This is just the climate denial agenda that the fossil fuel industry paid for,” Sara Shor, tar-sands campaign manager for 350.org, said in a statement. The group is planning more anti-Keystone protests for January. “The fossil fuel industry has all the money, but we’ve got the people. When it comes to politics, intensity often carries the day. We’re going to bring the heat.”

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The very first thing the new Republican Senate will do is try to push through Keystone

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There Is Something Worse Than Torture in the Senate Torture Report

by FilomenaBrother Posted on December 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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There is something more troubling in the Senate intelligence committee’s torture report than the brutal depictions of the extreme (and arguably illegal) interrogation practices employed by CIA officers in the years after the 9/11 attacks: the lying.

More coverage of the CIA torture report.


“Rectal Feeding,” Threats to Children, and More: 16 Awful Abuses From the CIA Torture Report


No, Bin Laden Was Not Found Because of CIA Torture


How the CIA Spent the Last 6 Years Fighting the Release of the Torture Report


Read the Full Torture Report Here


5 Telling Dick Cheney Appearances in the CIA Torture Report


Am I a Torturer?

The accounts of rectal rehydration, long-term sleep deprivation, waterboarding, forced standing (for days), and wrongful detentions are shocking. And the committee’s conclusion that CIA torture yielded little, if any, valuable information (including during the hunt for Osama bin Laden) is a powerful counter to those who still contend that so-called enhanced interrogation techniques are effective. But the report presents a more basic and profound question that the nation still faces in the post-torture era: Can secret government work? In fact, while pundits and politicians are pondering the outrageous details of the executive summary, not many have realized that the report, in a way, presents a constitutional crisis.

The basic debate over torture has been settled. In his first days in office, President Barack Obama signed an executive order outlawing the use of these interrogation methods. Since then, the question has been what to reveal about the CIA’s use of torture during the Bush-Cheney days and whether anyone ought to be prosecuted. But those matters, too, have been mostly resolved. The committee’s report was released after a lengthy struggle between the CIA and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman of the panel; and in his first term, Obama ruled out criminal prosecutions of officials and officers engaged in sketchy counterterrorism actions in the previous administration. But there is a foundational issue that remains: how the US government conducts clandestine operations. The Senate torture report raises the possibility that much-needed checks and balances may not function because of CIA mendacity.

In a system of democratic government, if it is necessary for the military or the intelligence community (which both operate under the authority of the president) to mount covert operations to defend the nation, they are only permitted to do so with oversight from people elected by the voters—that is, members of Congress. The premise is simple: No government agency or employee can engage in clandestine activity, such as secret warfare, without some vetting. The vetters are surrogates for the rest of us. They get to see what’s happening—without telling the public (unless there is a compelling reason to do so)—and they’re supposed to make sure the spies, the spooks, and the secret warriors do not go too far and end up jeopardizing US values and interests.

That can only work if the legislators assigned to that oversight mission actually know what the spies and operatives are doing. And they cannot know what the CIA is doing if the CIA lies to them about it. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA repeatedly lied about its controversial interrogation program.

The Senate torture report offers an appalling narrative of CIA prevarication. In fact, anyone who has read the major congressional reports on intelligence activity and abuses in the four decades since the Church Committee first revealed CIA wrongdoing would find the new report shocking in terms of its depiction of CIA lying (though it does not use the l-word).

The report notes that the CIA misled the White House, the National Security Council, the Justice Department, and Congress about the effectiveness of its extreme interrogation techniques. The CIA did not tell policymakers the truth about the brutality of its interrogations and the confinement conditions for its detainees. The agency repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Justice Department about its detention and interrogation program, and this prevented the Justice Department from supplying solid legal analysis. The CIA was late in telling the Senate Intelligence Committee about its use of torture and did not respond to information requests from the committee. The agency (at the direction of the White House) did not initially brief the secretaries of state and defense about its interrogation methods. It provided inaccurate information about its interrogation program to the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. CIA officials gave inaccurate information about its enhanced interrogation techniques to the agency’s inspector general. The CIA never compiled an accurate list of the individuals it detained or subjected to torture. The CIA also ignored objections and criticisms raised by its own officers about its detention and interrogation program.

This is a tremendous amount of CIA misrepresentation. It is difficult to read these pages and wonder whether a system of accountability can work. Last March, it did seem oversight had completely broken down, when it was revealed that the CIA had spied on Feinstein’s investigators. Oversight can only succeed if there is a degree of trust between the lawmakers who watch and the spies who are watched. And at that point, not only was trust gone, an all-out bureaucratic war was being waged between the agency and the committee. John Brennan, the CIA chief, did insist publicly that his agency had not snooped on DiFi’s flatfoots. Yet that turned out to be false. And now the CIA and its cheerleaders, including former CIA officials who were in charge during the years of torture and obfuscation, are mounting a PR battle against Feinstein and the report, claiming it is 6,600 pages of off-the-wall distortions.

All this prompts the question: Is the oversight system beyond repair? One reasonable reading of the report is that the CIA cannot be relied upon to share accurate information about controversial practices with its overseers in Congress and the executive branch. That would mean effective oversight is not possible. And if a congressional inquiry of CIA practices triggers a full-scale battle between the agency and the committee, that, too, would indicate the CIA might be too tough to monitor. Moreover, if the agency and the lawmakers tasked with scrutinizing CIA actions cannot agree on basic realities, that also does not bode well for oversight.

The torture—as far as we know—is over. But the CIA’s secret war against Al Qaeda, ISIS, and other extremists continues, as does a host of other covert actions conducted by US intelligence agencies and military services. The Senate intelligence committee’s torture report and the conflict surrounding its investigation call into question the basic rules that are supposed to ensure accountability when American spies and soldiers have to toil in the shadows. This is a matter for President Obama and Congress to come to terms with—though there seems to be little appetite for such follow-up to the Senate torture report. The report is not merely an accounting of a dark past that can now be permitted to slip away; it is a warning sign of an alarming and fundamental problem: Secret government is not working—and it might not be workable.

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There Is Something Worse Than Torture in the Senate Torture Report

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Is Obama Trolling Republicans Over Immigration?

by MabelISSrj Posted on November 25, 2014

Mother Jones

Jonah Goldberg is unhappy with President Obama’s immigration order, but he’s not steaming mad about it. And I think this allows him to see some things a little more clearly than his fellow conservatives:

Maybe President Obama is just trolling?

….As Robert Litan of the Brookings Institution notes, Obama “could’ve done all this quietly, without making any announcement whatsoever.” After all, Obama has unilaterally reinterpreted and rewritten the law without nationally televised addresses before. But doing that wouldn’t let him pander to Latinos and, more important, that wouldn’t achieve his real goal: enraging Republicans.

As policy, King Obama’s edict is a mess, which may explain why Latinos are underwhelmed by it, according to the polls. But that’s not the yardstick Obama cares about most. The real goal is twofold: Cement Latinos into the Democratic coalition and force Republicans to overreact. He can’t achieve the first if he doesn’t succeed with the second. It remains to be seen if the Republicans will let themselves be trolled into helping him.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m pretty certain that Obama did what he did because he really believes it’s the right thing to do. Goldberg just isn’t able to acknowledge that and retain his conservative cred. Still, somewhere in the Oval Office there was someone writing down pros and cons on a napkin, and I’ll bet that enraging the GOP caucus and wrecking their legislative agenda made it onto the list of pros. So far, it looks like it’s probably working. But if Republicans are smart, they’ll figure out some way to follow Goldberg’s advice and rein in their worst impulses. If they go nuts, they’re just playing into Obama’s hands.

See original article here – 

Is Obama Trolling Republicans Over Immigration?

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Meet the Fortune 500 Companies Funding the Political Resegregation of America

by HenryKleeman Posted on November 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over the past four to five years, the United States has been resegregated—politically. In states where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans and presidential races can be nail-biters, skillful Republican operatives have mounted racially-minded gerrymandering efforts—the redrawing of congressional and state legislative districts—that have led to congressional delegations stacked with GOP members and yielded Republican majorities in the state legislatures.

In North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, to name just three, GOPers have recast state and congressional districts to consolidate black voters into what the political pros call “majority-minority districts” to diminish the influence of these voters. North Carolina is an especially glaring example: GOP-redistricting after the 2010 elections led to half the state’s black population—1.1 million people—being corralled into one-fifth of the state legislative and congressional districts. “The districts here take us back to a day of segregation that most of us thought we’d moved away from,” State Sen. Dan Blue Jr., who was previously North Carolina’s first black House speaker, told the Nation in 2012.

A major driving force behind this political resegregation is the Republican State Leadership Committee, a deep-pocketed yet under-the-radar group that calls itself the “lead Republican redistricting organization.” The RSLC is funded largely by Fortune 500 corporations, including Reynolds American, Las Vegas Sands, Walmart, Devon Energy, Citigroup, AT&T, Pfizer, Altria Group, Honeywell International, Hewlett-Packard. Other heavyweight donors not on the Fortune 500 list include Koch Industries, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and the US Chamber of Commerce. At the same time these big-name firms underwrite the RSLC’s efforts to dilute the power of black voters, many of them preach the values of diversity and inclusion on their websites and in corporate reports.

As part of its Redistricting Majority Project—which, tellingly, is nicknamed REDMAP—the RSLC, starting in 2010, poured tens of millions of dollars into legislative races around the country to elect new GOP majorities. Next it provided money and expertise to state officials redrawing political boundary lines to favor the Republican Party—and to shrink the clout of blacks, Hispanics, and other traditionally Democratic voters. Unlike its Democratic equivalent, the RSLC has vast sums at its disposal, spending $30 million during the 2010 elections, $40 million in 2012, and $22 million in 2014.

Here is a partial list of RSLC donors—how much they donated to the group in the past four years and what they each have had to say about their own efforts to foster diversity. (All the companies on this list did not respond to requests for comment except for Altria Group, Citigroup, and Reynolds American, which declined to comment.)

Altria Group
$2,682,350
“We foster diversity and inclusion among our workforce, consistent with our leadership responsibilities and core values.” (Source)

AT&T
$922,993
“AT&T’s 134-year history of innovation is a story about people from all walks of life and all kinds of backgrounds coming together to improve the human condition. It is our diversity, coupled with an inclusive culture that welcomes all points of view, which makes us who we are: a great place to work, a desired business partner and a committed member of the communities we serve.” (Source)

Blue Cross/Blue Shield
$4,655,322
“Let’s get there together—with one perspective we can go far, with many perspectives we can move beyond all limits. Join an organization that values diversity.” (Source)

Citigroup
$764,328
“We see diversity as a source of strength.” (Source)

Comcast
$598,053
“We recognize, celebrate, and support diversity and inclusion, which is at the very heart of our culture.” (Source)

Devon Energy
$1,450,000
“Devon believes diversity, the collective mixture of similarities and differences of our employees, is a valued asset.” (Source)

Reynolds American
$3,419,781
“Reynolds American and its operating companies have long recognized, valued and enjoyed the many benefits that diversity brings to both our employees and our businesses. Our commitment to diversity is a strong demonstration of the core values that our companies share.” (Source)

US Chamber of Commerce
$9,077,760
“Diversity and inclusion programs can provide valuable resources to recruit and retain a strong employee base that will generate novel ideas.” (Source)

Walmart
$979,429
“Diversity has been at the core of our culture since Sam Walton opened our doors in 1962…We can only help our associates, customers and partners live better if we really know them. And that means understanding and respecting differences and being inclusive of all people.” (Source)

Continued:

Meet the Fortune 500 Companies Funding the Political Resegregation of America

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Elizabeth Warren Gets a Promotion — Or Does She?

by HopeBungaree Posted on November 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Elizabeth Warren is getting a promotion:

Seeking ideological and regional balance, a chastened Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) expanded his leadership team Thursday, including the addition of liberal icon Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), to beat back internal critics…..Expanding the leadership table — Warren’s position was created specifically for her — is a way to answer the critics who think that Reid’s team became insulated in recent years, according to senior Democratic aides.

I’m curious: Am I the only person who thinks this is probably not a great move for Warren? She’s now officially part of the Democratic leadership, which makes her implicitly responsible for party policy and implicitly loyal to the existing leadership. And what is she getting in return? Unless I’m missing something, a made-up leadership position with no actual authority.

Is this a good trade? I’m not so sure.

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Elizabeth Warren Gets a Promotion — Or Does She?

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The Fight for Abortion Rights Just Got a Whole Lot Harder

by SusieFossey Posted on November 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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The GOP wave didn’t just crash into the US Senate. It flooded state legislatures, as well. By Wednesday evening, Republicans were in control of 67 of the nation’s 99 state legislative chambers—up from 57 before the election. It’s still unclear which party will control two other chambers.

Already, anti-abortion advocates are calling it a big win. Hundreds of the country’s most extreme anti-abortion bills pop up in these statehouses every year, and Tuesday’s results won’t do anything to put a stop to that. But reproductive rights advocates also suffered big setbacks Tuesday in places where they had actually been playing offense. Now, Democratic losses in states like Colorado, Nevada, New York, and Washington could torpedo their efforts to expand reproductive rights.

New York Republicans won a tiny majority in the state Senate, a development that could kill the proposed Women’s Equality Act—an omnibus bill that includes an equal pay measure, protections against pregnancy discrimination, and stronger domestic violence and sexual harassment laws. The bill had previously stalled in the Democratic Senate because of a provision that would give New York women an affirmative right to abortion. But in the waning days of the campaign, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, had pressured legislators to agree to pass the bill in the next session, and the state’s Planned Parenthood affiliates were confident that the election would produce a friendlier Senate.

“We were really hopeful,” says Christina Chang, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood NYC Votes. “But a lot of the folks who won seats have not expressed support for the Women’s Equality Act…After last night’s elections, we have a harder road ahead of us.”

In both Colorado and Washington state, Democrats held majorities in both legislative houses and controlled governor’s mansions going into Tuesday night’s election. By Wednesday night, Republicans appeared on their way to controlling the Colorado Senate and they had captured and outright majority in the Washington Senate.

In recent years, Colorado Democrats have helped reproductive rights advocates check a number of items off their wish list. They increased Medicaid reimbursement rates for family planning services—a move that encourages more providers to offer that type of care—and they passed funding for comprehensive sex education. In 2012, Democrats blocked an effort by anti-abortion forces to pass religious freedom exemptions for health care providers, which abortion rights groups said would jeopardize access to contraception. Last year, Democrats repealed the remnants of a law that criminalized abortion. And this year, Democrats pushed for the Reproductive Health Freedom Act, which would have blocked new abortion restrictions, before backing down in the face of conservative opposition.

That kind of progress will likely come to a halt if Republicans take over the Senate—although reproductive rights advocates again remain hopeful.

“So many of the Republicans in Colorado sent messages to voters about being advocates of women’s health and not wanting to insert government into private decisions,” says Cathy Alderman, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains. “We’re hoping they weren’t just using those issues as political ploys.”

In Washington state, Democrats had been fighting for a bill that would require abortion coverage in most insurance plans sold on the state’s Obamacare exchange. It was a bold measure at a time when many conservative states were banning abortion coverage. The bill stalled in the Senate, where a few renegade Democrats frequently sided with the powerful Republican minority. But additional GOP gains in the Senate would “derail any hope” that the bill will pass, says Elizabeth Nash, a researcher with the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion-rights think tank.

In Nevada, Democrats—who controlled the statehouse before Tuesday—supported a bill to establish comprehensive sex education. The state has some of the highest sexually transmitted infection and teen pregnancy rates in the country, yet schools rarely teach condom use or encourage STI testing. On Tuesday, Republicans won control of the legislature. Republicans roundly opposed the bill the last time it was introduced, and there is little chance that they’ll allow it to pass this year.

“I can’t say that the Republican party has ever been behind Planned Parenthood issues in Nevada, but we do know Nevada is a very pro-choice state,” Alderman says. “We’re optimistic and hopeful that they’ll see comprehensive sex education as smart policy, but we haven’t had their support in the past because of abortion opponents who come out and say that somehow this legislation is about pushing abortion.”

But while turnover in those states is a blow to reproductive rights groups, the 2014 elections didn’t change change the map for abortion rights quite like the 2010 election, when Republicans took over an even larger number of statehouses.

Nash argues that in some other states where Democrats suffered big losses, abortion rights will likely be protected by divided government. In Iowa, Democrats—who, this session, just barely held back an onslaught of anti-abortion bills—hung onto the state Senate. In New Mexico, where Republican Gov. Susana Martinez won reelection, Democrats lost the House but held the Senate. Republicans now control the New Hampshire statehouse, but they failed to unseat Gov. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat who supports abortion rights and will veto most anti-abortion legislation.

In West Virginia, Republicans took control of the House for the first time since 1931 and also won the governor’s mansion. The state Senate, meanwhile, is evenly divided between the parties. But the state was already hostile to abortion rights: Many West Virginia Democrats, including outgoing Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, supported harsh anti-abortion bills when their party controlled the legislature.

So in West Virginia—and many other red states—Republicans didn’t need a wave year for abortion rights to be in jeopardy. The outlook was pretty bleak already.

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The Fight for Abortion Rights Just Got a Whole Lot Harder

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Being a Terrible Candidate Isn’t What Doomed Martha Coakley

by Natisha18R Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Four years after losing a Senate special election to Scott Brown, Massachusetts Democratic attorney general Martha Coakley is on the brink of defeat in another race that was hers to lose. Both Fox News and ABC have called the governor’s race for Republican Charlie Baker, but Coakley has pledged to fight on—at least until Wednesday morning.

The result, if it holds, is a gut-punch for Democrats in the Bay State, where Coakley once led by 29 points. As the race tightened in the campaign’s final month, heavyweight surrogates came to Massachusetts to stump for the nominee. But in the end, not even Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton could save Coakley from another electoral defeat.

The easy takeaway here is that Coakley is a spectacularly bad candidate, woefully out of touch with Massachusetts voters. “You could call her the Bill Buckner of politics, if she even knew who the Red Sox were,” as Politico Magazine‘s Ben Schreckinger put it in October. But if you really know who the Red Sox are, you’d know that Buckner’s famous gaffe came only after the rest of the team had already blown the game. And that’s sort what happened here—the loss stemmed from a confluence of factors, not a singularly flawed candidate.

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Being a Terrible Candidate Isn’t What Doomed Martha Coakley

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Pat Roberts Avoids Being The Only Senate Republican To Lose In 2014

by NelsonIZJE Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) on Tuesday avoided the indignity of becoming the only GOP incumbent senator to lose his seat in the 2014 midterm elections. The Associated Press called the race for Roberts at 11:10 p.m. ET.

Roberts was dogged from the start by evidence that he lived in suburban Virginia and not in the state he represented in Congress. (His listed residence in Kansas was a home that belonged to two supporters.) He overcame a spirited challenge by a tea-party-backed doctor named Milton Wolf in the GOP primary. And then Roberts, who is 78, battled back from a sizable deficit against independent Greg Orman, a businessman who conveyed an anti-Washington message and refused to say which party he’d caucus with if elected.

The Kansas Senate race got even more interesting in September, when the Democrat on the ticket, Chad Taylor, dropped out, leaving only Orman and Roberts in the race. Polls at the time showed Orman with as much as a 10-point lead.

When Roberts’ vulnerability against Orman became apparent earlier this fall, Roberts’ campaign staff was replaced with prominent Republican strategists. Reinforcements in the form of outside money swooped in, painting Orman as a Democrat in disguise and as an Obama ally. (Orman had previously made a brief run for Congress on the Democratic ticket.) The constant attacks on Orman paid off, and Roberts has now secured his fourth term in the US Senate.

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Pat Roberts Avoids Being The Only Senate Republican To Lose In 2014

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What Word Will Obama Use to Describe This Election Tomorrow?

by FTWGenevie Posted on November 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tonight was not a good night to be a Democrat. The Republicans were triumphant in a great many of the races. In 2010, after a similarly awful midterm, Obama described the election as a “shellackin’.” In 2006, Bush referred to the Democratic wave as a “thumpin’.”

This may be a bit of gallow’s humor, but what word will he use tomorrow?

(Wolf Blitzer is pushing hard for shellackin’.)

Thumpin’

Shellackin’

Whoopin’

Drubbin’

Wallopin’

Trouncin’

Whuppin’

Thrashin’

Clobberin’

Lickin’

Routin’

Guttin’

Leave your guess in the comments.

I personally hope he walks into the briefing room, gets up at the microphone, says “Play the video,” a screen comes down, and Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Comp[ares 2 U” begins playing.

More here – 

What Word Will Obama Use to Describe This Election Tomorrow?

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What Happens Today in These Four Races Could Help Determine Our Next President

by JudeStoutds Posted on November 4, 2014

Mother Jones

Jeremy Bird guided Barack Obama to victory in Ohio in 2008, a year, Bird recalls, when “we didn’t see lines and barriers and obstacles” to the ballot box that had so badly marred Ohio’s previous presidential election. But as Obama’s national field director in 2012, Bird watched Ohio with dismay. Voting in Ohio had gotten harder—lines were longer, early voting days pared back, evening hours restricted—but no laws had changed since 2008. So what had happened? Bird says he knows the culprit: Republican Jon Husted, Ohio’s secretary of state. As the state’s chief election officer, Husted has considerable latitude to shape election rules and expand—or limit—access to the ballot box.

On Election Day this year, Bird is again watching secretaries of state. This time around, Bird is the head of iVote, a group that is targeting secretary of state races in four key battleground states—Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, and Ohio. And with good reason: The results of these four races will have serious consequences for voting rights, and they might even help determine the winner of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Each of the four races iVote is targeting, Bird says, features a Democratic candidate seeking to expand voting rights and a Republican pledging—directly or indirectly—to do the opposite. Bird’s group is spending more than $1.25 million on TV advertisements alone, in addition to online ads, grassroots organizing, and direct contributions to candidates where possible under state law.

Perhaps the Democrats’ best shot at winning a key secretary of state race is in Nevada. There’s no daylight in the polls between Democratic state Treasurer Kate Marshall and Republican state Sen. Barbara Cegavske, but there is plenty of space between their positions. Marshall backs same-day voter registration and greater transparency in political spending in state races. Cegavske, for her part, opposes those ideas and instead wants a new voter ID law. In 2011, Cegavske joined several other Nevada lawmakers in proposing a bill eliminating early voting, and she has voted against new campaign finance measures to beef up disclosure of money in politics.

In Colorado, outgoing Secretary of State Scott Gessler has probably garnered more headlines than his five predecessors combined—and not for reasons that a Democrat like Bird would appreciate. Gessler offered to raise money to help pay off fines incurred by the Larimer County Republican Party for not submitting required campaign finance filings. The problem: Gessler’s office issued the fine. (He backed down the fundraising appearance.) A judge struck down Gessler’s directive to county clerks to stop sending 2012 ballots to so-called inactive voters—namely, people who hadn’t voted in the 2010 elections, which included troops stationed overseas. And in 2011, Gessler claimed that 5,000 “noncitizens” had voted in the 2010 elections. Colorado officials later vetted 1,400 of those names and found that 1,200 of those people were in fact eligible voters. (No prosecutions resulted from Gessler’s allegation.)

The race to replace Gessler is close. Democrats are abuzz over the candidacy of Joe Neguse, a rising political star and the son of Eritrean immigrants, who has billed himself as the anti-Gessler. “I’m the guy running to clean up Scott Gessler’s mess,” he said in announcing his candidacy. But Neguse trails Republican Wayne Williams by single digits in polls. Williams, meanwhile, supports the type of voter ID law implemented by conservatives nationwide. Despite efforts by Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper and the Democratic-controlled state legislature to expand voting rights with universal mail-in voting and same-day registration, a Republican secretary of state could throw a wrench in Colorado’s voting system come 2016.

In Iowa, the race between Democrat Brad Anderson and Republican Paul Pate is a dead heat. Anderson, who managed Obama’s Iowa campaign in 2012, has called for mail-in voting, no-excuse absentee voting, and online voter registration. Pate, Anderson’s opponent, toes the GOP line in supporting a voter ID law, a divisive measure that Republicans say protects the integrity of elections and that Democrats say aims to disenfranchise college students and minorities.

Ohio’s secretary of state race is likely to be Democrats’ biggest disappointment of the four campaigns. The Democratic candidate, state Sen. Nina Turner, is probably the best-known of the four iVote-backed candidates: She’s a fixture on MSNBC, which named her one of its “Women Candidates to Watch in 2014,” and her supporters include EMILY’s List, Howard Dean, and talk-show host Jerry Springer. (At a recent debate in Columbus, Turner quoted Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Justin Timberlake—she said she wanted to “bring sexy back” to voting.)

For long stretches, Turner was neck and neck in the polls with Republican Jon Husted, whose restrictions on Ohio voting rights have enraged state and national Democrats. But Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ed FitzGerald’s implosion has dragged down the rest of the party’s ticket, and in its final 2014 poll, the Columbus Dispatch showed Turner trailing by 21 percentage points.

To hear Jeremy Bird tell it, the consequences of these four secretary of state races could mean the difference between smooth, snafu-free elections in November 2016 and the type of debacles seen in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004. iVote, Bird says, is a way of taking the fight to the “voter fraud” crowd seeking to limit the vote. “We need to be on the offensive with voting rights,” he says. “We’ve relied on the courts for too long.

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What Happens Today in These Four Races Could Help Determine Our Next President

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