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21 November 20
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Lindsey Graham's Alleged Attempt to Toss Georgia Ballots Is Felony Election Fraud
Mark Joseph Stern, Slate
Stern writes: "Since narrowly losing Georgia to Joe Biden, President Donald Trump has promoted baseless claims of voter fraud in a desperate effort to overturn the results of the election. So far, however, the only individual credibly accused of a fraudulent effort to steal the election is South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham."
If he weren’t a senator, Graham might be facing years in prison, according to legal experts in Georgia.
On Monday, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—who, like Graham, is a Republican—told the Washington Post that Graham asked him if he could throw out all mail ballots from counties with a high rate of signature mismatch. Raffensperger later clarified that he believed Graham wanted his office to throw out valid, legally cast ballots. The senator has contested this account.
Graham’s alleged request is unseemly and corrupt. But is it criminal? In short, yes, according to multiple Georgia election law experts. If Raffensperger’s account is true, there is virtually no doubt that Graham committed a crime under Georgia law. The more difficult question is whether Graham will suffer any consequences for his alleged offense. Because he is a Republican and a sitting U.S. senator, Graham likely won’t face an investigation, let alone prosecution, for conduct that would get almost anyone else arrested. It might be tempting to dismiss Graham’s alleged interference as unscrupulous strategizing blown out of proportion. But Georgia has a sordid history of prosecuting putative voter fraud involving far more innocent conduct. Graham does not deserve a pass simply because he is a wealthy white senator.
To understand why Graham’s alleged conduct was criminal, we have to look at what, exactly, he asked Raffensperger to do. He says Graham wanted him to toss out thousands of perfectly valid mail ballots, omitting them from the official count, because they were mailed from a county with unusually high rates of signature mismatch. (That means the signature on the ballot envelope doesn’t match the signature on file.) Signature mismatch disproportionately affects racial minorities, who lean Democratic overall, and Georgia is required to let voters cure a mismatched signature under a federal court order.
Had Raffensperger followed through with this request, he would’ve run afoul of several state laws. In Georgia, it is a crime for anyone, including election officials, to destroy a ballot. It is also a crime for anyone to falsify any records or documents used in connection with an election, or to place any false entries in such records. Another law explicitly criminalizes such conduct by elected officials, prohibiting the falsification of any document related to their public office.
Raffensperger did not follow through; instead, he blew the whistle. That doesn’t mean Graham is off the hook. Cathy Cox, the dean of Mercer University’s School of Law who previously served as Georgia’s secretary of state, told me that at least two other state laws encompass the senator’s alleged actions. The first bars “attempts to interfere with” an election official’s “performance of any act or duty.” By allegedly asking Raffensperger to falsify the vote count, Graham plainly sought to interfere with the secretary of state’s truthful certification of the election. The second law targets “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud.” An individual is guilty of this offense when he “solicits, requests, commands, importunes, or otherwise attempts to cause” another person to commit an election-related offense. Destroying ballots and falsifying voting records, Cox noted, both fall into that category. An individual is culpable regardless of whether they succeeded in inducing fraud.
These offenses carry serious consequences. Attempting to interfere with the performance of election duties is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year’s imprisonment. Solicitation of election fraud in the first degree—which Graham allegedly committed by asking Raffensperger to falsify the vote count—is a felony. The minimum sentence is one year in prison; the maximum is three. In sum, Graham could face several years in prison if convicted of these crimes.
But will he be? Charlie Bailey told me he’s skeptical. Bailey served as senior assistant district attorney in Fulton County, the largest in the state, and narrowly lost Georgia’s 2018 attorney general race. He pointed out that Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican, has a legal obligation to safeguard free and fair elections in the state. “At the very least,” Bailey said, Carr “should stand up and say: ‘We’re going to investigate this. This kind of conduct will not be tolerated.’ ” (There is at least one obvious place to start such an investigation to determine if criminal conduct occurred: One of the secretary of state’s top staffers was also on the call and has tried to hedge in the press without contradicting either Graham or his boss.) But Bailey fears that Carr will decline to probe Graham’s conversation with Raffensperger, bowing to political pressure from the president and his party.
Suparna Malempati, a professor at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School, agreed. “A courageous prosecutor would launch an investigation in order to ensure that wrongdoing around elections is not taking place,” Malempati told me, “and to send the message that those types of communications are illegal and unacceptable.” But Malempati doubts any state prosecutor will look into the conversation given the high stakes and political ramifications of investigating a sitting U.S. senator, especially since Graham has disputed Raffensperger’s story.
At most, Malempati said, Graham might be the subject of a congressional investigation. (A federal probe is extremely unlikely given the paucity of evidence, the lack of a federal statute that is clearly on point, and the fact that Raffensperger never actually meddled with the results.) But if the Senate remains in Republican hands, it seems improbable that the GOP would support a serious look at this episode. Aside from Raffensperger, no elected Republicans currently in office have condemned Graham’s alleged behavior. The GOP has spent years spreading false claims of mass voter fraud, and many of its members insisted, without proof, that the 2020 election was also tainted by cheating. Now a Republican secretary of state has accused a sitting GOP senator of seeking to commit felony election fraud—and the rest of the party has decided to look the other way.
Republicans are not always so lenient toward those accused of election-related crimes. In 2012, a GOP district attorney charged Olivia Pearson, a Black woman, with voter fraud after she helped someone use a voting machine. She was acquitted after two trials, avoiding a five-year prison sentence. In October, she was arrested again for trying to help someone else cast their vote. State officials have also launched an ongoing investigation into voter fraud with the intention of prosecuting individuals who made mistakes that did not affect the outcome of any election. Graham’s phone call with Raffensperger might seem like a relatively minor offense. But if he weren’t a white Republican senator, he may well be facing years in prison.
Donald Trump. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Once Out of Office, Trump Faces Significant Legal Jeopardy
Ryan Lucas, NPR
Lucas writes: "Of all the perks of being president, Donald Trump may soon miss most the legal protection that it affords."
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Kyle Rittenhouse, left, walks along Sheridan Road in Kenosha, Wisconsin, with another armed person on Aug. 25. (photo: Adam Rogan/AP)
Accused Kenosha Killer Kyle Rittenhouse Out of Jail After Posting $2 Million Bail
Nelson Oliveira, New York Daily News
Oliveira writes: "The teenage gunman charged with killing two Black Lives Matter protesters in Wisconsin this summer walked out of jail Friday afternoon after posting $2 million bail."
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A migrant family. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Immigrant Children Who Were Denied the Chance to Request Asylum Under an Illegal Rule Are Facing Deportation
Adolfo Flores, BuzzFeed
Flores writes: "Twenty-eight children who have been detained in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility for more than a year could be deported after being denied the opportunity to seek asylum by Trump administration policies that federal courts have since blocked."
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Rep. Deb Haaland, one of the first two Native American women elected to Congress, on the East Front of the Capitol, January 4, 2019. (photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)
Biden Considering Native American Rep. Deb Haaland for Interior
Ellen Knickmeyer and Matthew Daly, Associated Press
Excerpt: "Native Americans are urging President-elect Joe Biden to make history by selecting one of their own to lead the powerful agency that oversees the nation's tribes, setting up one of several looming tests of Biden's pledge to have a Cabinet representative of Americans."
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Protesters in Peru. (photo: Ernesto Benavides/AP)
A New Era of Protest Rocks Peru
Veronica Hurtado Lozada, NACLA
Lozada writes: "A year of escalating tensions between the legislative and executive branches of the Peruvian government came to a breaking point on November 9, when President Martín Vizcarra was impeached on grounds of 'moral incapacity.'"
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The microplastics included polypropylene and nylon used in climbing gear. (photo: Baker Perry/National Geographic)
Microplastics Found Near Everest's Peak, Highest Ever Detected in the World
Freddie Wilkinson, National Geographic
Wilkinson writes: "For adventurers the world over, Mount Everest is an unforgettable sight - a regal plume of snow blows off its summit ridge as ice trails down its flank. But take a closer look at this stunning vista, as one team of climate scientists is doing, and you'll start to notice the telltale signs of human impact from people both near and far."
From thinning glaciers to plastic pollution, a slew of new studies discover alarming signs of our environmental toll.
or adventurers the world over, Mount Everest is an unforgettable sight—a regal plume of snow blows off its summit ridge as ice trails down its flank. But take a closer look at this stunning vista, as one team of climate scientists is doing, and you’ll start to notice the telltale signs of human impact from people both near and far.
Today, the surface of the ice at base camp in Nepal sits more than 150 feet lower than it did 35 years ago, the result of glacial melt from our steadily warming climate. Zones of high-altitude ice once thought safe from warming are now starting to dwindle. Even the snow itself isn’t quite so pristine. At 27,700 feet elevation, it is contaminated with microplastics—the highest yet found on the planet.
This is all according to a slew of new papers published this week in a special edition of the journal One Earth. The studies are part of a growing raft of research to emerge from an ambitious effort to study how climate change and other human actions are affecting Everest and the surrounding region, organized by the National Geographic Society and supported by Rolex as part of its Perpetual Planet Initiative.
Between April and June of last year, an interdisciplinary team of more than thirty scientists fanned out across Nepal’s Khumbu Valley, installing five weather stations and collecting hundreds of samples of rock, water, snow, ice, and more. The results laid out in this special issue underscore humans' toll on the environment even at the planet's highest points.
Although some of the discoveries, like the presence of microplastics, don’t pose an immediate environmental threat, others are much more worrisome. For one, even the world’s highest glaciers are losing ice at an accelerating rate. At risk are not only the local communities and vital mountain tourism industry they rely on, but also the millions downstream who depend on the glaciers for freshwater.
“It’s a real wake up call,” says Paul Mayewski, leader of the expedition and director of the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine. “Despite the fact that the region is very high-elevation, it’s being impacted seriously.”
Dirty snow
On a bright morning in May last year, glaciologist Mariusz Potocki watched a steady stream of recreational climbers march past the Balcony, a flat, airy perch at 27,500 feet, just a few hours climb from the top of Everest. Potocki, a glaciologist at the University of Maine, hoped to drill an ice core from the wind-compacted snow at the mountain's summit. But the gathering crowds led him and his crew to abandon the ascent. (Potocki did eventually succeed in retrieving the world’s highest ice core from 26,500 feet at a point known as the South Col.) Instead, Potocki ambled a few hundred feet up the trail to fill a small stainless steel jar with snow.
Later analysis showed that the sample—and ten others collected between base camp and the Balcony—was rife with thin, curly fibers of microplastic.
“The concentrations on the mountain are surprising," says marine scientist Imogen Napper, who analyzed the snow samples in her lab back at the University of Plymouth, in the United Kingdom. "It is somewhere I still consider to be one of the most remote and pristine areas on Earth."
In truth, perhaps it shouldn't have been such a surprise. Nearly every place researchers have looked, they’ve found microplastics, from the deepest recesses of the ocean to the vast open landscapes. Some of these particles have been carried great distances along with dust in the wind or by ocean currents. But on Everest, Napper found, trekkers and mountaineers are likely most to blame.
Synthetic fabrics constantly shed trace amounts of fibers as they're worn. One study found that a gram of synthetic clothing releases 400 microplastic fibers every 20 minutes of use, which could add up to a billion fibers a year for a coat weighing around two pounds.
The microplastics on Everest are largely made up of polyester, followed by acrylic, nylon, and polypropylene—materials all commonly used in outdoor gear. The plastics were also in greater concentration wherever humans most commonly camp. So even though single-use plastics were recently banned throughout the Khumbu Valley, and the mountaineering community has made progress collecting rubbish from Everest's slopes, microplastics will likely continue to accumulate there. It's also possible winds carry additional microplastic to the mountain, Mayewski says.
Too small to see with the naked eye, microplastics are devilishly difficult to clean up, and often left out of the conversation on waste, which frequently focus on reducing, reusing, and recycling large items. "These actions are necessary and important," Napper says. But "solutions need to expand into deeper technological and novel advances.”
While we frequently come into contact with microplastics on a daily basis, Napper says the high-elevation find is an eye opener. "We have now found it from the bottom of the deep sea, all the way to nearly the summit of the highest mountain on Earth."
The glacial conveyor belt
While Potocki was retrieving snow samples from Everest’s upper slopes, others were toiling at its foot. National Geographic Society geographer Alex Tait led a team that conducted the most accurate survey of base camp and the surrounding Khumbu Glacier. The team used both LIDAR (a type of laser scanning) and photogrammetry (photography from multiple angles) to craft a three-dimensional model that captured every detail down to almost an inch—tents, rocks, and all.
“Scientists are clamoring for this LIDAR data set,” Tait says. “Even though it’s a single snapshot, it provides context for historical understanding.”
One such researcher is glaciologist Owen King, of the University of St. Andrews in the UK, who compared the new images to historical photos from aerial surveys and declassified spy satellites. He then created digital reconstructions of the surface of the Khumbu Glacier, and 78 other glaciers nearby Everest dating back to 1962.
The data not only serve as a baseline to quantify future ice loss across the region, they paint a stark picture of the mountains' situation today. Since 1962, glaciers throughout the Himalaya have been consistently melting. And now, they're dwindling at rates more than 50 percent faster than they were six decades ago. Warming temperatures are likely driving this change, rising by roughly one degree Celsius on the southern Himalaya slopes through the studied period.
Perhaps most concerning, the scientists found, ice is melting at altitudes above 20,000 feet. "That took me back a bit, I have to say," King says. At that elevation, he explains, ice should remain frozen solid all year round, and snow should be accumulating to feed into the glacial system.
King’s research further reveals that Himalayan glaciers aren’t so much receding as they are thinning—losing ice from the top surface down, rather than retreating back up valley. “You can think of a glacier as a conveyor belt,” King says. Snow accumulates in the upper reaches of the glacier and compacts into ice that flows downward to its toe. But as temperatures warm and snow fall declines, the conveyor belt has slowed and the glacier has begun to thin.
Paradoxically, thinning is less pronounced in the lower zones of many large Himalayan glaciers, where temperatures are warmer but the conveyor belt has built up a thick blanket of rocky debris that shields the ice from the sun. Thinning is often most intense in the stretches of glacier at higher elevation where there is less debris cover, which leaves the ice vulnerable to melting in the rising temperatures.
Still, even the rocky cover isn't always enough to protect the glacier's toe. The conveyor belt action also builds up a hill of gravel that surrounds its end, called a terminal moraine. This rocky barrier can capture meltwater, forming a lake that often accelerates glacial melting.
What does the future hold for Everest and the greater Himalayas? The team hopes their work can be a springboard to identify the best routes of action.
One thing is certain, Mayewski says: "Wherever people go, we leave our imprint, and that imprint is not always positive."
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