House Democrats and a panel of elections experts expressed unwavering confidence in state voting systems and dismissed Trump administration claims of widespread fraud and other vulnerabilities during a special \u201cshadow hearing\u201d in Los Angeles on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
They accused President Trump and his Republican allies of pushing sweeping federal reforms \u2014 including stricter voter ID laws and new restrictions on voting by mail \u2014 that would disenfranchise millions of eligible Americans, especially low-income, rural and elderly voters, as well as voters of color and those with disabilities. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey are taking us backward, and not to a good place,\u201d said Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), who helped lead the hearing at the Daniel K. Inouye National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Little Tokyo.<\/p>\n
They also stressed that they and their allies were working hard to prevent such backsliding.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile Republicans are expecting Democrats to just sit idly by as they attempt to steal yet another election, Democrats are getting out in the community, raising the alarm bells about the GOP\u2019s efforts to rig these elections and fighting back in the courts, in Congress and in our communities,\u201d said Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Redlands), chair of the Democratic Caucus. \u201cWe won\u2019t let Republicans get away with their anti-democratic and un-American schemes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Such \u201cshadow hearings\u201d allow Democrats to highlight issues their majority-Republican counterparts won\u2019t schedule for formal hearings in Washington. This week\u2019s discussions \u2014 a second is scheduled Thursday in San Francisco \u2014 follow others in California in recent months, including on Trump\u2019s immigration raids<\/a>.<\/p>\n Pelosi, the former House speaker<\/a>, led the hearing alongside Aguilar and Rep. Joseph Morelle of New York, the ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee, which has oversight of elections. Joining them were fellow Democratic Reps. Nanette Diaz Barrag\u00e1n of San Pedro, Judy Chu of Monterey Park, Gil Cisneros of Covina, Laura Friedman of Glendale, Luz Rivas of North Hollywood, Linda T. S\u00e1nchez of Whittier, Norma Torres of Pomona and Maxine Waters of L.A.<\/p>\n Pelosi noted the setting on the grounds of the Japanese American National Museum, where Japanese Americans were detained before being unconstitutionally stripped of their belongings and taken to internment camps<\/a> during World War II.<\/p>\n \u201cTo be here on a day when the president of the United States has talked about destroying the civilization<\/a> of a country is so appalling. It\u2019s so appalling, and I don\u2019t think we can ignore comments like that, especially in a setting like this,\u201d Pelosi said.<\/p>\n She also said that securing the nation\u2019s elections against Trump\u2019s threats and getting out the Democratic vote was the surest way of restoring order to U.S. relations abroad \u2014 and far more likely than getting Trump\u2019s Cabinet to remove him from office by invoking the 25th Amendment. <\/p>\n \u201cWe have to make sure that the mentality that would obliterate a civilization, undermine a democracy by fighting free and fair elections, just cannot prevail,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n The hearings were designed to challenge a narrative Trump has pushed for years \u2014 that U.S. elections are badly compromised by widespread fraud, that mail ballots<\/a> such as those used in California are a particularly large source of abuse, and that noncitizens are voting in large numbers \u2014 none of which he has supported with evidence.<\/p>\n Trump tried unsuccessfully to challenge his 2020 loss to Joe Biden using similar arguments. When he returned to the White House, he immediately directed his administration to pursue the claims anew, including under executive orders he issued asserting new and sweeping federal authority over elections, which by law are controlled by the states.<\/p>\n The Justice Department in September sued California and other states<\/a> for their voter rolls, which courts rejected<\/a>. The FBI in January raided and seized 2020 voting records<\/a> from an elections office in Fulton County, Ga., where Trump rejected 2020 results. Trump in February said Republicans \u201cought to nationalize the voting<\/a>.\u201d Last week, he issued an executive order<\/a> purporting to give federal agencies control over ballot processing by the U.S. Postal Service, which followed a previous order<\/a> seeking to place new federal requirements on voter identification and proof of citizenship.<\/p>\n Trump has said his efforts are \u201ccommon sense\u201d steps ordinary Americans support to secure elections against noncitizens voting and other threats.<\/p>\n Experts who provided testimony at Tuesday\u2019s hearing roundly rejected that argument, saying the measures address problems that don\u2019t exist and are more geared toward securing wins for Republicans than ensuring election safety. <\/p>\n Jenny Farrell, executive director of the League of Women Voters of California, said that Americans are \u201cmore likely to be struck by lightning\u201d than to commit voter fraud, and that many recent proposals framed around election integrity are really designed to narrow access to voting for certain groups. She also said California\u2019s elections are particularly strong.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re like the Dodgers of elections,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n Darius Kemp, executive director of Common Cause California, said the state\u2019s elections \u201care safe and secure,\u201d and the Trump administration is threatening democratic participation in novel and alarming ways that his organization is watching carefully.<\/p>\n Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor, said Trump is trying to project power over elections \u201cthat he simply does not have,\u201d and if local and state officials, the courts and pro-democracy groups stand their ground, he will fail. <\/p>\n \u201cIf we keep calm and carry on, we can make our voices heard loud and clear,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n Hector Villagra, vice president of policy advocacy and community education at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said that \u201cthe evidence could not be more clear \u2014 noncitizen voting is exceedingly rare,\u201d and that Trump\u2019s proposals would simply \u201craise the cost of lawful voting\u201d for groups already underrepresented at the polls.<\/p>\n \u201cThe question is not whether we can verify eligibility. We already do that,\u201d he said. \u201cThe question is whether we will impose new barriers that will prevent eligible citizens from participating at all.\u201d<\/p>\n Sonni Waknin, senior staff attorney at the UCLA Voting Rights Project, said that \u201cdemocracy is under attack\u201d across the nation, and that the photo ID requirement Trump and other Republicans are pushing would disenfranchise a million eligible voters in California alone.<\/p>\n When Cisneros asked about what could be done to prepare for the inevitable claims of fraud from Trump and other Republicans after the midterms, Levitt said that such claims must be called out for what they are.<\/p>\n \u201cWe call those lies, because they are lies,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n When Waters asked the experts about the effect of federal immigration agents being deployed to polling places, as some in Trump\u2019s orbit have suggested, Villagra said damage was already being done just from the rumors of such action \u2014 whether agents show up or not. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the threat that\u2019s really what\u2019s powerful here,\u201d he said, as people \u2014 especially Latino voters \u2014 are already intimidated, and leaders should do more to reassure voters and offer alternatives to showing up to polls, such as voting by mail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"House Democrats and a panel of elections experts expressed unwavering confidence in state voting systems and dismissed Trump…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":257454,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[7,3622,2575,1751,204,4082,7084,113801,48,52,51,47,50,49,20096,9355,1594,1748,225,1519,79622],"class_list":{"0":"post-257453","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-court","10":"tag-democracy","11":"tag-democrats","12":"tag-election","13":"tag-expert","14":"tag-hearing","15":"tag-l-a-election-shadow-hearing","16":"tag-la","17":"tag-la-headlines","18":"tag-la-news","19":"tag-los-angeles","20":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","21":"tag-los-angeles-news","22":"tag-noncitizen","23":"tag-order","24":"tag-other","25":"tag-republicans","26":"tag-state","27":"tag-trump","28":"tag-voting-system"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}