In their telling, this was no NATO exercise. It was a covert operation by President Trump to liberate Germany from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government — something they applauded.
The mythology and language QAnon uses — from claims of ritual child murder to revenge fantasies against liberal elites — conjure ancient anti-Semitic tropes and putsch fantasies that have long animated Germany’s far-right fringe. Now those groups are seeking to harness the theory’s viral popularity to reach a wider audience.
QAnon is drawing an ideologically incoherent mixture of vaccine opponents, fringe thinkers and ordinary citizens who say the threat of the pandemic is overstated and government restrictions unwarranted.
“QAnon doesn’t openly fly the colors of fascism, it sells it as secret code,” said Stephan Kramer, head of domestic intelligence in the eastern state of Thuringia. “This gives it an access point to broader German society, where everyone thinks of themselves as immune to Nazism because of history.” “It’s very dangerous,” Mr. Kramer added.
The QAnon conspiracy theory emerged in the United States in 2017, when a pseudonymous online poster claiming to hold the highest U.S. security clearance — Q — began dropping cryptic messages on the message board 4Chan. Global elites were kidnapping children and keeping them in underground prisons to extract a life-prolonging substance from their blood, Q hinted. A “storm” was coming, followed by a “great awakening.”
For historians and far-right extremism experts, QAnon is both a very new and a very old phenomenon. Made in modern America, it has powerful echoes of the European anti-Semitism of centuries past, which was at the root of the worst violence the continent has known.
The idea of a bloodsucking, rootless elite that abuses and even eats children is reminiscent of medieval propaganda about Jews drinking the blood of Christian babies, said Miro Dittrich, a far-right extremism expert at the Berlin-based Amadeu Antonio Foundation.
“It’s the 21-century version of blood libel,” Mr. Dittrich said. “The idea of a global conspiracy of elites is deeply anti-Semitic. ‘Globalists’ is code for Jews.”
Some QAnon followers are well-known extremists, like Marko Gross, a former police sniper and the leader of a far-right group that hoarded weapons and ammunition.
“Trump is fighting the deep state,” he told The New York Times in June. Merkel is part of the deep state, he said. “The deep state is global.”
QAnon Is Thriving in Germany. The Extreme Right Is Delighted.
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FOCUS: Whitmer Plot Lays Bare Cooperation Between Law Enforcement and Militias Christopher Mathias, HuffPost Mathias writes: "One of the men charged this week in a militia plot to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan shared the stage earlier this year with an extremist sheriff at an anti-lockdown rally, highlighting the often cozy relationship across America between law enforcement and violent right-wing paramilitary groups."
William Null, 38, was among seven men arrested this week in Michigan on state charges of material support for terrorist acts and possessing firearms in the commission of a felony. ProsecutorsallegeNull is a member of a far-right militia group called the “Wolverine Watchmen” that had teamed up with another militia contingent in a plot to, among other things, kidnap Gov.Gretchen Whitmerand put her on trial for “treason.” Six other men in the plot were alsoarrestedThursday on federal kidnapping charges.
After the arrests, Fox17 reported that the Null was among the armed attendees of a May rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, against Whitman’s lockdown measures to slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus.
Fox17 showed footage of Null appearing onstage at the rally, carrying a long gun and standing alongside Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf as the sheriff lashed out at Whitmer in a speech to the crowd.
In a shocking interview with Fox 17 on Thursday, Leaf said he had no regrets for having appeared at the rally with the recently arrested militiaman. He added that he knew Null — as well as his identical twin, Michael, who was also arrested in the terror plot — and called the brothers “nice” and “respectful.” He also appeared to defend the Nulls’ motive for the alleged kidnapping plot, arguing that there’s a legal argument to be made that Whitmer should be arrested for imposing coronavirus restrictions.
What Leaf did not address in his Fox 17 interview, however, is his membership in the right-wing extremist “constitutional sheriffs” movement — a close ally of America’s armed militias — that has gained a concerning momentum during the era of President Donald Trump.
The CSPOA is the flagship organization of the constitutional sheriff’s movement, which maintains that sheriffs are the ultimate law-enforcement authority in their respective counties, outranking officials from the federal or state government. Constitutional sheriffs are part of the broader antigovernment “patriot” movement in the U.S., which is animated by a multitude of conspiracy theories about immigrants, Muslims, Jews, gun control measures, and a coming “New World Order.”
The CSPOA also has a close working relationship with armed far-right paramilitary groups. Among those who attended the 2019 CSPOA conference with Leaf was Stewart Rhodes, leader of the national militia organization the Oath Keepers.
Leaf did not immediately respond to a HuffPost request for comment on his affiliation with CSPOA on Friday. According to Political Research Associates, the sheriff was also the signee of a 2014 CSPOA resolution. In 2013, a far-right patriot group listed Leaf as an ally.
“One of the things that has been concerning [about] constitutional sheriffs more broadly, is that they have been normalizing a relationship between elected officials and self-proclaimed militias,” Cloee Cooper, a research analyst at Political Research Associates, told HuffPost.
Last month, Cooper published a map showing 401 documented “constitutional sheriffs” across the U.S. since 2013, 161 of whom are currently in office.
One of the goals of these sheriffs, Cooper said, is to legitimize militia groups and turn them into “sheriff’s posses” who can be enlisted to patrol their respective city’s streets.
The danger of law enforcement lending credibility to such groups has come into clear focus over the last four years, as militias have been implicated in violent plots targeting Muslims, leftist and anti-racist protesters, and most recently, the governor of Michigan.
Such groups have also enjoyed the endorsement and encouragement of the Trump administration, which shares militia groups’ bigoted and conspiratorial views about Muslims and immigrants.
Constitutional sheriffs have been a regular fixture of anti-lockdown protests across the U.S, like the one the Null twins attended with Leaf in Grand Rapids.
Organizers of that event — titled “American Patriot Rally-Sheriffs speak out” — encouraged attendees to show up armed. A promotional video for the event included photoshopped images of Whitmer against a backdrop of former communist leaders, comparing her coronavirus restrictions to Stalinism.
The organizers of that rally were also behind an April 30 anti-lockdown protest in Lansing, Michigan, where armed protesters entered the state capitol building, disrupting a legislative session.
Among those spotted in the Capitol were the Null brothers, prosecutors announced on Thursday. They can be seen in a photo posted to Twitter that day by Democratic state Sen. Dana Lynn Polehanki.
“Directly above me, men with rifles yelling at us,” Polehanki wrote. “Some of my colleagues who own bullet proof vests are wearing them. I have never appreciated our Sergeants-at-Arms more than today.”
To say that we need 1% of our long time subscribers to respond during the course of a funding drive is rather laughable. The joke however ends up being on all of us here at RSN and all of you out there getting the newsletters.
Every bit of this is unnecessary. We need 500 donations to finish for October. We get 1,500 visitors every hour.
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RSN: Marc Ash | Biden Will Rise With the Progressive Tide Marc Ash, Reader Supported News Ash writes: "Joe Biden is no Progressive, but that doesn't mean progress under a Biden administration would be impossible or even unlikely. Democratic resistance to Progressive policies is due in large part to the interests of the donors. That's a matter of economic convenience."
Money matters in American politics. The amount of money being spent to affect the outcome of this year’s elections runs well into the billions. Social progress and the political progress on which it depends seek to separate the money from public policy. That would be in and of itself revolutionary. It is, however, by any measure a challenging undertaking.
What has made Bernie Sanders so uniquely effective is that he understands the Democratic Party establishment, their hand-picked figureheads, and how to bring the Progressive revolution to them.
They say that a rising tide lifts all ships. Rather than doing hand-to-hand combat with Democratic leadership, Sanders has created a rising tide of Progressivism that lifts them, carries them along, and makes their participation inevitable.
Attacking Biden is largely pointless and probably counterproductive. Building a powerful Progressive movement from the grassroots up will move the equation far more quickly and effectively.
Donald Trump tried to make the first debate about him, but the policies he ended up talking about were Progressive policies. His hand was forced by the voters who have made it clear that those policies are what they want and what they are voting for.
Biden can probably move Trump out of the Oval Office. It may take a scuffle to accomplish, but in the end Trump will likely leave. If Biden succeeds, that will be progress unto itself, even if it doesn’t qualify him as a Progressive.
Sanders is on the right track. Organize, organize, organize. Create a sustained, rising Progressive tide that will lift all ships.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
A voter fills out a ballot in Baltimore, Maryland in April during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. (photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images)
The Case for Wearing a Mask and Voting Early in Person Steven Hill, In These Times Hill writes: "In normal times, I am a proponent of having a vote by mail option. But these are not normal times. For the November 3 election, it makes much more sense to promote 'early voting' in battleground states rather than vote by mail." READ MORE
William Perry Pendley, acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, has been accused of seeking to sell off public lands to extractive industries. (photo: Chris Dillmann/AP)
Trump's Public Lands Chief Refuses to Leave His Post Despite Judge's Order Cassidy Randall, Guardian UK Randall writes: "A controversial environment chief in the Trump administration has said he has no intention of leaving his post after a US district court judge deemed his tenure and ongoing occupation of the position illegal."
William Perry Pendley says ‘I have the support of the president’ despite court ruling he is serving illegally as head of the Bureau of Land Management
William Perry Pendley, head of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), said this week that the judge’s ruling “has no impact, no impact whatsoever”.
“I have the support of the president,” he told the Wyoming Powell Tribune. “I have the support of the secretary of the interior and my job is to get out and get things done to accomplish what the president wants to do.”
Perry has served as director of the BLM since July 2019, when the interior secretary, David Bernhardt, temporarily authorized him to the post. The BLM manages 248m acres – or 10.5% of all land in the US, the most of any agency, mostly in 11 western states and Alaska. It manages public lands for conservation as well as livestock gazing and resource extraction, and critics say the Trump administration has prioritized the latter.
President Trump formally proposed Pendley for the post in July 2020, but withdrew the nomination after congressional Democrats indicated unanimous opposition to his appointment, and some Republicans seemed unlikely to support him owing to his fringe views. Pendley has never been confirmed by the Senate to serve as BLM director.
After Montana’s Democratic governor, Steve Bullock, brought a case claiming that Pendley’s service was unconstitutional, US district judge Brian Morris ruled two weeks ago that Pendley had “served unlawfully” for the last 424 days, prohibited him from acting as director and suggested that his decisions during his tenure be thrown out or reversed.
The interior department said it would appeal against Judge Morris’s ruling.
In response to Pendley refusing to vacate his post, the Montana senator Jon Tester accused him of a power grab “in service of his long-held goal of selling off our lands and enriching his corporate allies”.
As a former industry attorney and longtime president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF), a litigation organization funded by conservative and industry groups including the Charles Koch Foundation and Exxon Mobil, Pendley boasts a deep background of legal advocacy for extractive resource industries on public lands.
He has made light of killing endangered species. The Guardian obtained a 2017 recording in which he told a group of North Carolina rightwing activists, “This is why out west we say ‘shoot, shovel and shut up’ when it comes to the discovery of endangered species on your property.”
Voters masked against coronavirus line up at Riverside High School for Wisconsin's primary election, April 7, 2020, in Milwaukee. (photo: AP
Postmaster General Donated Nearly $700,000 to Trump's Convention Fredreka Schouten, CNN Schouten writes: "Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who has faced intense scrutiny from Democrats over changes he has made to the US Postal Service, donated more than $685,000 to the host committee that worked to stage the Republican National Convention, new filings show."
ostmaster General Louis DeJoy, who has faced intense scrutiny from Democrats over changes he has made to the US Postal Service, donated more than $685,000 to the host committee that worked to stage the Republican National Convention, new filings show.
DeJoy, a North Carolina businessman and Republican mega-donor, was the lead fundraiser for the convention before he was tapped to lead the USPS. DeJoy's relationship with President Donald Trump, along with the President's repeated false claims that mail-in voting is rife with fraud, has sparked allegations that the administration is using the nation's mail system to sway the election. DeJoy has denied the allegations.
The new filings Friday at the Federal Election Commission from the Charlotte Host Committee show four donations from DeJoy between late December 2018 and late March 2020, totaling $685,230.
DeJoy and the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Convention host committees are nonprofit organizations that rely on donations from corporations and individuals to support the splashy quadrennial events for each political party and highlight the communities in which the conventions are based. The fundraising and planning starts years before the actual events.
But the coronavirus pandemic upended traditional campaigning and conventions this year. Trump pushed to move his convention from Charlotte after battling with the state's Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper over pandemic-related limits on the size of crowds. But in July, in the face of rising coronavirus infection rates in his second-choice state, Trump canceled portions of the convention that were slated to be held in Jacksonville, Florida.
In the end, Trump accepted his party's nomination from the South Lawn of the White House -- bending norms about the use of federal property for politicking.
In all, the Charlotte committee took in more than $44 million and spent more than $38 million.
DeJoy's donations topped those of some corporate interests. The American Petroleum Institute donated $1.5 million. Software maker Oracle gave $500,000. Private prison companies, CoreCivic and Geo Group, each contributed $250,000.
(Last month, Trump announced he had approved a deal among Chinese-owned social media company TikTok, Oracle and Walmart. Trump has argued that TikTok presented a threat to national security and sought to transfer some control of the company to US firms.)
Other large corporate donors included Charlotte-based companies Bank of America at more than $5.2 million and Duke Energy at $4 million. AT&T donated $1 million to the host committee, the filings show. CNN is owned by AT&T through its WarnerMedia arm.
A House committee last month announced it was starting an investigation into DeJoy, following reports that he had reimbursed employees at his former company for donating to GOP candidates.
At the time, a spokesman for DeJoy said he received legal counsel from a former Federal Election Commission official to ensure he and the company were complying with the law.
DeJoy serves at the pleasure of the board of governors, rather than as a direct presidential appointee. The board is currently all Trump appointees. But there are several vacancies, and many of the current members' terms expire in 2021 and 2022.
Rosemary McCoy fought for the passage of a landmark Florida law allowing felons to vote. She registered to vote but won't cast a ballot in this election because she owes restitution from a five-year-old conviction. (photo: Ivy Ceballo/Tampa Bay Times)
In Florida, the Gutting of a Landmark Law Leaves Few Felons Likely to Vote Lawrence Mower and Langston Taylor, Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times Excerpt: "Nearly two years after Florida voters approved a landmark constitutional amendment allowing felons to vote, state officials don't know how many have registered."
State officials don’t know how many felons are registered or eligible to vote. So we did our own analysis and found only a very small percentage of them will be able to cast ballots this election. Some could face prosecution if they do.
They also don’t know how many felons on the voter rolls owe court fees, fines or restitution that would disqualify them from voting under a subsequent state law that limited the amendment’s scope.
Florida officials have not removed any felons from the rolls for owing fines or fees, and they’re unlikely to do so before Election Day, Secretary of State Laurel Lee said in an interview Monday. It’s unclear whether those whom the state fails to prune are entitled to vote after all — or may face prosecution if they do.
With so much in flux, the winner in Florida of the closely watched presidential vote could be decided by the courts for the second time in two decades.
Amid the confusion, the one certainty is that Florida’s Republican governor and Legislature have tamped down the felon vote, according to an analysis of state records by the Tampa Bay Times, Miami Herald and ProPublica. In a presidential election marred by voter suppression tactics, such as misinformation about vote-by-mail fraud, the weakening of Florida’s ballot measure, known as Amendment 4, may constitute the biggest single instance of voter disenfranchisement. Like the poll taxes of the Jim Crow era, the restrictions have especially hit Black Floridians, who make up a disproportionate share of felons and register overwhelmingly as Democrats.
By comparing the Florida Department of Corrections database of roughly 418,000 inmates released since 1997 with the state’s August list of nearly 15 million registered voters, the analysis found that about 31,400 Floridians with felony convictions have registered to vote since Amendment 4 took effect in January 2019. More than twice as many have registered as Democrats than Republicans, and the amendment has had the greatest impact in counties with higher numbers of Black residents. In Gadsden County, the only one in the state where more than half of the residents are Black, felons made up at least 1 in 5 new voters. In seven other counties with sizable Black populations, felons make up at least 1 in every 15 new voters.
Because it excludes felons who didn’t serve time in a Florida prison or were released before 1997, the 31,400 figure is likely an undercount. But it’s not far below a more comprehensive tally by Georgetown University Law professor Neel Sukhatme. Using data he collected on 850,000 felons in Florida, he found that just 45,300 have registered over the same period, he said.
Overall, both the Times/Herald/ProPublica and Georgetown analyses found that fewer than 8% of Florida’s felons have registered to vote since Amendment 4 passed. That’s a much lower rate, though over a shorter time frame, than in other states that have restored their voting rights. When Amendment 4 was adopted with widespread bipartisan support in 2018, some advocates predicted it would restore voting rights to as many as 1.4 million Floridians. They expected that between 10% and 20% of felons, or between 140,000 and 280,000, would register to vote in the 2020 election.
“Clearly it’s not one fell swoop that many Amendment 4 backers hoped for,” University of Florida political science professor Dan Smith said. “But it’s a movement in the right direction, and it has taken every effort, in spite of Republican leadership in Tallahassee, to get every one of those eligible citizens in Florida registered to vote.”
Even fewer are likely to cast ballots in November, however.
Of the 45,300 felons Sukhatme identified on the voter rolls, 78% might owe fees, fines or restitution, he said. Because of the 2019 law requiring felons to pay off those debts before voting, they are legally on the rolls but may be ineligible to vote. “It’s a shame that despite what the people of Florida clearly voted for in the ballot initiative that this high percentage of folks are being prevented from exercising their constitutional rights,” said Sukhatme, who established a free website, FreeOurVote.com, allowing felons to see if they are free of fines and fees.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a staunch ally of President Donald Trump, pushed state lawmakers last year to impose the fees and fines restriction, which disqualified nearly 800,000 felons from voting. DeSantis declined to comment through a spokesman.
Some Republicans have said that a lower turnout would improve Trump’s chances of reelection. In March, Trump criticized proposals for more funding of voting by mail, saying that they would produce “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
State Sen. Jeff Brandes, a St. Petersburg Republican who helped write the law restricting Amendment 4’s impact, said he had hoped that more people would register.
“I think engaged citizens are good for the republic,” he said.
But he defended the law, saying legislators were simply following the language of Amendment 4, which required felons to complete “all terms” of their sentences before voting.
“‘All terms’ includes all terms,” he said.
Changing Numbers
The battle over Amendment 4 has led celebrities and deep-pocketed Democrats, including former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, to donate tens of millions of dollars toward paying off fines and fees to make felons eligible to vote. Bloomberg and his team claim they have identified 32,000 Black and Hispanic voters who are on the rolls but are ineligible to vote because they owe court fees or fines, according to The Washington Post.
Bloomberg’s team has raised $16 million to cover debts for felons who owe less than $1,500. It believes that if the 32,000 felons could vote, they could swing the election, even in a state with nearly 15 million registered voters. So far, however, groups’ efforts to pay fees and fines have not dramatically increased the rolls. Out of 325 people in Hillsborough County who have had their fines and fees paid off by the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, and whose records were made available, only 56 registered to vote, the Times/Herald/ProPublica analysis shows.
The addition of even a few thousand voters could tip the upcoming contest or plunge the state’s results into chaos and the courts.
“If there is a wide swath of felons on the rolls who are ineligible to vote,” Brandes said, “that is likely to be something that is challenged.”
In a swing state that could determine the next president, the uncertainty over felon voting is inexcusable, experts said.
“It’s a tremendous failure,” said Marc Meredith, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied voting trends among felons. “This shouldn’t happen.”
Questions Unanswered
Next month’s election will be a critical test for Amendment 4.
Its passage marked the culmination of an 18-year effort by voting rights groups to eliminate a relic of systemic racism dating back to post-Civil War Florida. But months after voters approved the amendment, the Republican-led Legislature blunted its impact. The law, said Rosemary McCoy, is doing exactly what it was designed to do: prevent people like her from voting.
McCoy, 63, of Jacksonville, was released from prison in 2016 after serving seven months on theft and racketeering convictions. She helped gather enough signatures for Amendment 4 to appear on the ballot. After it passed, she used it to register to vote. But she won’t be casting a ballot Nov. 3 because she owes more than $7,800 in restitution. She is one of 17 felons who sued the state and the governor last year over the restriction.
In May, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle ruled that the new law created an illegal “pay-to-vote” system. He concluded that most felons who owed court costs should be allowed to vote, opening the door for hundreds of thousands to register. About four months later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, led by five Trump-appointed judges, overturned Hinkle’s decision. Their ruling is likely to stand through the Nov. 3 election.
State election officials decided to wait for the litigation to play out before pruning any felons who owe money from the voter rolls, said Lee, a former judge who was appointed secretary of state by DeSantis last year, and who oversees the state Division of Elections. Because the 11th Circuit’s decision came so late, she doesn’t expect to remove any felons before the election, she said.
“The interpretation of what Amendment 4 meant for Florida voters has been altered several times throughout the course of the litigation,” Lee said, “and we did not want to initiate removal proceedings for any voter who could later be determined to be eligible.”
State officials have offered some guidance to county election supervisors and posted guidelines on its website for voting under Amendment 4. But they have done little outreach to the thousands of felons who are on the rolls but ineligible to vote. Lee said she granted the interview Monday, her first in-depth interview on Amendment 4 since the June 2019 lawsuit, to get the word out to felons.
“If a voter knows that they have not completed the terms of their sentence, they absolutely should not vote,” she said.
The situation doesn’t just jeopardize the state’s election results. Felons who owe court fees, fines or restitution run the risk of committing a felony if they cast ballots next month. State law prohibits anyone from voting if they “know” they’re ineligible.
That includes people like Steven Deane of New Port Richey, who registered to vote in June, after the federal judge overturned the Legislature’s law.
Deane, 33, who had been convicted on theft and fraud charges stemming from substance abuse, said regaining his right to vote was a pivotal moment in his life. After receiving his voter registration card in the mail this year, the first thing he did was show it to his mother.
In September, he got his driver’s license back after paying about $3,000 in court fees.
But Deane still owes more than $10,000.
No state or local official notified him that he was ineligible to vote in the November election. He didn’t learn that he couldn’t cast a ballot until last month — when he was contacted by a reporter for this story.
“I should have known better,” Deane said. “This is Florida.”
History of Suppression
Until last year, the only way for felons to regain their right to vote in Florida was to go to Tallahassee and beg for mercy.
Felons had been ineligible to vote since 1868, when lawmakers wrote the rule into the state Constitution. It was part of a slate of actions designed to remove Black voters from the rolls, including literacy tests, poll taxes and a requirement that voters prove their date of birth, an obstacle for freed slaves who usually didn’t have birth certificates.
By 1880, Florida had gone from having a majority of Black voters to almost none at all, said Darryl Paulson, a former University of South Florida professor who has written extensively about the state’s felon voting ban.
“It was like a catch-all net,” Paulson said. “If one of these barriers doesn’t get you, the next will.”
Most of the other barriers were lifted during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. But Florida’s lifetime ban on felon voting persisted, even as other states struck theirs down.
Until Amendment 4, Florida was one of four states — along with Virginia, Iowa and Kentucky — that required all felons to petition the governor to have their rights restored. Those wanting to vote again could make their case to the governor and the elected members of the Florida Cabinet, a sometimes-humiliating process in which felons could be asked intimate and arbitrary questions, such as how many children they had by how many mothers.
In 2007, then-Gov. Charlie Crist — a Republican at the time — changed the clemency rules to restore voting rights to more than 150,000 people. But the state’s constitutional ban on felon voting remained, and in 2011, then-Gov. Rick Scott immediately reverted to the pre-Crist rules. Only about 3,000 people had their rights restored by Scott during his eight years in office.
By 2016, the estimated 1.4 million felons in Florida made up nearly a quarter of all disenfranchised felons in America, according to a report by The Sentencing Project, a nonprofit that advocates for criminal justice reform.
More than 1 in 5 were Black, well above their 17% share of the state’s population.
The following year, a group known as the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition gathered enough signatures to put Amendment 4 on the 2018 ballot. It restored the right to vote to nearly all felons “after they complete all terms of their sentence including parole or probation.”
The amendment, crafted after years of polling, did not restore rights to anyone convicted of murder or sex offenses, and it said nothing about fines or fees. The omission was deliberate, according to Howard Simon, the former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, who helped write the amendment. Simon said its authors believed that such a provision might be unconstitutional, and they also didn’t want to set a precedent by linking voting rights to financial status.
“If we had included it, it would have taken us another 150 years to get that pay-to-vote system out of the Florida Constitution,” he said.
However, during a hearing before the Florida Supreme Court, more than 18 months before Floridians voted on Amendment 4, an attorney for organizers told justices that “all terms” did include all court fees, fines and restitution. Then, after the ballot measure passed, the ACLU repeated the same point in letters to state officials.
Seizing on those statements, Republican lawmakers proposed legislation interpreting “all terms” to include all financial obligations. When backers of Amendment 4 argued that it doesn’t mention fines and fees, and that the Legislature did not need to act, the House sponsor of the bill, then-Rep. Jamie Grant, R-Tampa, accused them of hypocrisy and misleading voters.
When lawmakers warned that the bill would exclude the vast majority of felons, Grant said he didn’t care; he was interpreting Amendment 4 as its creators intended.
“I don’t want to know the impact of this,” Grant told lawmakers, “because it’s irrelevant.” This year, DeSantis appointed Grant to be the state’s chief information officer.
Republicans in the Florida Senate, led by Brandes, pushed for a version of the law that would have permitted felons to vote once a judge converted the debts to civil liens — a common practice once a felon is no longer imprisoned or on probation. That provision would be “fairer to felons,” Brandes said at the time. But Grant and his House counterparts won out, and Senate Republicans, including Brandes, approved the stricter version of the law.
How Many Are Registered? No One Knows
Florida’s Division of Elections, which is responsible for removing ineligible voters from the rolls, can’t say definitively how many registered voters are convicted felons.
Division Director Maria Matthews told a federal judge this year that her office had flagged the names of 85,000 registered voters whose names and birthdates matched those of felons, a figure cited repeatedly by federal judges during the litigation. Overruling Matthews, state officials now say they do not consider that number accurate because it includes too many false matches.
Until her office reviews an individual’s case, Lee said, she can’t say for sure whether that person is a felon. She declined to give a current number of people flagged as felons. She noted that her office has removed 6,000 felons from the rolls who were ineligible to vote because they were convicted of murder or felony sex offenses. About 260 registered sex offenders and 1,200 felons on probation are still on the rolls, even though both groups are prohibited from voting, the Times/Herald/ProPublica analysis shows.
The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition estimates at least 50,000 felons have registered since January 2019, a slightly higher count than Sukhatme’s, but the group has not said how it reached that figure.
Smith, the University of Florida political science professor, has assembled the most comprehensive known database on Florida felons. But his data is owned by the ACLU of Florida, which did not permit him to release it. Smith told the Times/Herald/ProPublica that he did not consider the data completely accurate.
“Anyone who thinks they have a definitive number, including the state of Florida, are probably fooling themselves,” Smith said.
All of the estimates, however, are well below what was anticipated when Amendment 4 passed, experts said.
Meredith, the University of Pennsylvania professor, said the figures seemed “quite low” relative to what he would expect “had the policy been running smoothly.”
“My expectation would be that you would be seeing more than 50,000 or 60,000 voting, much less registering,” he said.
Meredith has looked into similar situations in other states. He found that in Iowa, about 29% of felons registered to vote. The proportions were even higher in Maine and Rhode Island, where 38% and 43% of convicted felons registered to vote, respectively. None of the three states required felons to pay all financial obligations before voting, and they attained these levels of felon participation over longer time periods than the less than two years since Amendment 4 took effect.
A separate study by Harvard University doctoral candidate Michael Morse found that 20% of the roughly 150,000 felons who had their rights restored by Crist from 2007 to 2011 were registered to vote in 2012.
Experts agreed that the law requiring payment before voting — and the confusion surrounding it — are a deterrent to felons who want to vote.
“It’s not astonishing to me that we would see low rates of registration,” said Ariel White, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied voting patterns among felons. “This has been an extremely confusing situation for, it seems, everybody involved.”
Follow the Money
By adopting the strictest interpretation of Amendment 4, lawmakers created an “administrative nightmare,” Hinkle, the federal judge, said during a hearing last year. That’s because Florida has no central database of court fees or fines. Data on felony convictions is scattered across the state’s 67 county clerk’s offices, and much of that information is incomplete or outdated. Nobody tracks restitution paid to victims.
Lee said her office has to request information on felons’ fines and fees from clerks of court, who often have trouble coming up with the correct numbers. During the litigation, an official in the Hillsborough County clerk’s office testified that he and four co-workers spent 12 to 15 hours figuring out how much one felon owed.
“This process is far more complex than our prior process, when we were reviewing simply to see if someone might have a prior felony,” Lee said.
Nearly 80% of Florida’s felons are estimated to owe money to the courts. Some owe criminal fines, which can range from $5,000 for a felony DUI to $500,000 for drug trafficking. The vast majority, however, owe “user fees.” In Florida, there’s a $100 fee for using a public defender, a $50 fee for applying to use a public defender — even a $100 fee to cover the cost of prosecution — all tacked on at the end of the sentence.
“You’re paying the state to prosecute you,” said Lisa Foster, a former judge who is co-director of the Fines and Fees Justice Center, which advocates for the elimination of court fees.
While criminal fines have been around for centuries, user fees are a modern innovation, triggered by the war on drugs of the 1980s and 1990s, in addition to a bipartisan wave of anti-tax sentiment.
With more arrests came a need for more courthouses, judges, prosecutors and public defenders. Instead of raising taxes to fund this expansion of the criminal justice system, however, Florida, like other states, targeted “users” of the system — the people swept up in the nation’s anti-crime wave.
In 1998, Florida voters passed a constitutional amendment allowing courts to charge defendants user fees. Today, those fees add hundreds of dollars to each felony conviction. Some of the fees don’t go to the criminal justice system but are routed into the Legislature’s general revenue fund that pays for services such as parks, roads and schools.
In Florida, about 3 out of every 4 people who face felony charges are too poor to afford their own lawyer. Nearly the same share of felons in Florida owe court fees or fines, according to Smith’s analysis. About 90% of the dollars aren’t expected to be paid, county clerk data shows.
Failing to pay fees brings consequences aside from voting. Nearly 2 million Floridians have their driver’s licenses suspended for failing to pay court fees or fines, according to the Fines and Fees Justice Center, locking them out from the estimated 30% of jobs that require driving. The amounts often go to debt collectors, meaning they could show up on background checks and credit reports, and they can prevent people from receiving occupational licenses.
Marq Mitchell, 30, of Oakland Park in Broward County, lost his right to vote before he turned 18, after he was convicted as an adult of escaping from a juvenile detention facility. When he sought certification as a recovery peer specialist, to help people recover from substance abuse and mental health disorders, he found he couldn’t be certified or pass a company’s background check because of the more than $4,000 in decade-old court fees he couldn’t afford to pay off.
Because he couldn’t be certified, his nonprofit, Chainless Change, can’t qualify for state or local contracts, he said.
“It’s a debtor’s prison,” he said. “If you’re too poor, then you’ll never be able to access a better quality of life.”
Desmond Meade, who leads the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, said he believed a combination of uncertainty and apathy among Florida officials was also responsible for driving down the number of people with felony convictions registering to vote. Meade said the state, for example, did not publicize its process for allowing felons to request advisory opinions about how much they owe in court-ordered costs.
“You would expect the state to do things to encourage civic participation,” Meade said. “The state is just doing the bare minimum.”
Before the Legislature imposed the fees and fines requirement, Meade said, he had anticipated that 250,000 felons would register to vote. Greg James, a Tallahassee pastor who helped push Amendment 4 over the finish line in 2018, said he and other organizers were hoping 140,000 people with felony convictions would register.
“Fear has set into a lot of minds of men and women who were thinking about registering,” James said, noting that some people don’t know if they owe money and worry that casting a ballot could result in new felony charges.
What It Means for the November Election
The addition of even a small number of voters to the rolls could alter the course of the November election in Florida.
Any edge would most likely favor Democrats.
About half of the 31,400 convicted felons on the voting rolls identified by the Times/Herald/ProPublica analysis are Black, and 52% overall registered as Democrats. Another 25% registered with no party affiliation. It’s unclear how many of them have outstanding fines and fees.
Only 22% are registered Republicans, though 52% of white felons registered as Republicans, a greater rate than white Floridians overall (47%).
“These people are registering the way that Black and white registrants register in Florida, except that white individuals with felony convictions are even more likely to register with the Republican Party,” Smith noted.
In raw numbers, about 16,200 of the 31,400 registered felons are Democrats, compared with 6,800 Republicans, a nearly 9,400-vote difference.
The latest polls between Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden show that the race is neck-and-neck. Florida has a history of tight elections. The 2018 race for governor between DeSantis and Democrat Andrew Gillum was decided by about 33,000 votes. Scott defeated Democrat Bill Nelson for U.S. Senate that year by just over 10,000 votes. Most notoriously, Florida’s 2000 presidential election was decided by just 537 votes — and by a 5-4 decision in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Headed for Court?
This time around, the state’s failure to pare ineligible felons from the rolls could similarly throw the presidential race into the courts.
Lee’s office is capable of processing only 57 voter registrations per day, meaning it would take until 2026 to screen the tens of thousands of people flagged as potential felons and remove those who owe fines and fees. Her office still needs funding for more workers to pore through the backlog, she said. She requested more than $1 million from the Legislature this year to hire more people to screen Amendment 4-related voters but did not receive it, her spokesman said.
Six political observers, advocates, lawmakers and lawyers told the Times/Herald/ProPublica either party might exploit voting by ineligible felons to challenge the state’s election results.
“I think people will use everything to cast doubt,” said Tallahassee lawyer Barry Richard, who represented George W. Bush in the contentious 2000 Florida election recount. “We’re going to have lots of lawsuits.”
Lawyers would need to prove there were enough ineligible felons who cast votes to swing the election, Richard said.
Also unclear is how much personal risk felons who owe fines and fees face if they vote.
State law makes it a third-degree felony, with a sentence of up to five years in prison, for anyone to vote “knowing he or she is not a qualified elector.”
How the law would be enforced could depend on who is in charge in each county. Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren said the standard for proof is high — the equivalent of someone “twirling their mustache and hatching a plan to pull a fast one on the State of Florida.”
Brevard County and Seminole County State Attorney Phil Archer, the president of the Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association, said through a spokesman that so far he’s received no guidance on the subject from the state’s Division of Election or state Attorney General Ashley Moody.
Even the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit was split on whether ineligible felons on the rolls can vote. In their September ruling, the six Republican-appointed judges wrote that the 85,000 people flagged as potential felons are “entitled” to vote because the state has yet to screen them.
The four Democratic-appointed judges in the minority noted that registered felons could be prosecuted for voting, and that even eligible felons on the rolls may choose not to vote to avoid being charged with a crime.
“Florida ignores this reality, and the majority is blind to it,” they wrote.
Rejoining Society at the Polls
For Ryan Aderholtz of Tampa, being convicted of a felony brought many unexpected hardships.
“You can’t get hired anywhere. You can’t get an apartment,” said Aderholtz, 36, who was released from prison in 2009 after serving nine months for driving with a suspended license and fleeing a police officer. “It affects your credit, buying houses, everything.”
Aderholtz ultimately started his own business repairing screens on covered porches and verandas. While he considers himself successful, he said it wasn’t until he regained his right to vote that he felt fully reintegrated into society.
“I felt like part of America again,” Aderholtz said.
For countless other felons across Florida, that feeling has remained elusive.
Nancy Abudu, deputy legal director for voting rights at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, said she is advising anyone who is uncertain about whether they owe money to avoid voting next month. She said different prosecutors could handle the state’s ineligible voting law differently, noting that Georgia’s secretary of state vowed to investigate about 1,000 people who allegedly voted twice in elections this year.
“It’s just a very sad state of affairs, one that could have been totally avoided,” she said. “Florida again, in a historic election, will be on the news for probably a total administrative meltdown.”
Sheila Singleton, 58, of Jacksonville, voted in May last year, nine years after a felony conviction sent her to jail for six months. She was unaware that she owed anything on the case until a week after she cast her ballot, when the Duval County clerk notified her she owed nearly $15,000 in restitution and nearly $1,000 in court-ordered fees and fines — amounts she says she has no chance of paying back.
She makes $15 an hour registering and educating voters for New Florida Majority, which works to increase turnout among Floridians of color. Her job is set to end after the election.
“Nobody told me that when I pleaded guilty I wouldn’t be able to vote, I wouldn’t be able to get a job,” she said.
Singleton is disgusted that Republican lawmakers stripped away her ability to vote. Instead of risking prosecution for voting, all she can do now is encourage everyone else to vote, she said.
“It was not fair to us,” she said. “They have to cheat to win.”
Sunday Song: Gillian Welch | Annabelle Gillian Welch, Revival Welch writes: "We lease twenty acres and one Ginny mule from the Alabama trust. For half of the cotton and a third of the corn we get a handful of dust."
We lease twenty acres and one Ginny mule From the Alabama trust For half of the cotton and a third of the corn We get a handful of dust
We cannot have all things to please us No matter how we try Until we've all gone to Jesus We can only wonder why
I had a daughter called her Annabelle She's the apple of my eye Tried to give her something like I never had Didn't want to ever hear her cry
We cannot have all things to please us No matter how we try Until we've all gone to Jesus We can only wonder why
When I'm dead and buried I'll take a hard life of tears From every day I've ever known Anna's in the churchyard she got no life at all She's only got these words on a stone
We cannot have all things to please us No matter how we try Until we've all gone to Jesus We can only wonder why
illian Welch, the Los Angeles-raised musician, whose lyrics and voice conjure Appalachian hollows, Dust Bowl highways, and Nashville morphine dens, released her first album, “Revival,” twenty years ago. Several of the songs sounded as if they might have been written a hundred years earlier. Welch’s alto is rich and tarnished, with a roughness that hints at a tired or heat-baked throat. In “By the Mark,” she promised, “By the sign that shines / Upon His precious skin / I will know my savior / When I come to Him / By the mark where the nails have been.” Welch wrote from the perspective of the type of people the folklorist Alan Lomax had sought out in the nineteen-thirties and forties—poor, usually either exploited or forgotten—whom Lomax and other revivalists saw as carrying organic traditions of sound, feeling, and imagination. In “Annabelle,” a poor sharecropper whose young daughter has died reflects, “Till we’ve all / Gone to Jesus / We can only / Wonder why.” Other songs on “Revival” were first-person laments, confessions, or boasts from moonshiners, migrant fruit pickers, and bootleggers.
Four years earlier, Welch and her musical partner, David Rawlings, had finished their studies at Boston’s Berklee School of Music and moved to Nashville, which at the time was closer to the sequined industry town that Robert Altman sent up than to the spirit of the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe, and other icons whose memory Welch and Rawlings had followed south. None of the singer-songwriters on the Americana scene—Guy Clark, Nanci Griffith, Steve Earle—sounded as old, or as fresh, as Welch. In a 2004 Profile by Alec Wilkinson, Welch and Rawlings described themselves as nocturnal loners in those years, playing music in the silence between the last flight into the nearby airport and the first birds of morning, or just wandering quiet streets in a town that then closed early. They played open-mike nights and attracted the attention of the veteran producer T Bone Burnett, who produced “Revival.”
The Timeswrote that the album “doesn’t strike a false note.” But, from the beginning, enthusiasm for Welch’s music was cut by skepticism about the woman who played it, the adopted child of Hollywood music writers, who had spent part of her early twenties in a psychedelic surf-rock band at U.C. Santa Cruz. The Rolling Stone critic Ann Powers complained about Welch’s “handcrafted simulacrum of rural mysticism.” To Wilkinson, Welch described the first time she heard bluegrass recordings, in college, as a chill-down-the-spine epiphany, “like an electric shock.” All the careful artifice seems an effort to do justice to a feeling that these are the sounds she should make.
In Rolling Stone,_ _Powers judged that “Welch never takes the risk of wondering what her own experience might bring to the tradition.” Welch’s second album, “Hell Among the Yearlings” (1998), mixed ragged, banjo-driven mountain ballads with slow-moving laments in a way that mainly carried forward the out-of-time mood of “Revival.” Then, in 2001, “Time (The Revelator)” squarely answered complaints about Welch’s purer-than-the-originals anachronism. In “Revelator,” emblems of American loss and catastrophe—Elvis’s death and John Henry’s, Lincoln’s assassination, the sinking of the Titanic, the Okies’ flight from the Dust Bowl—are braided with close observation of contemporary derelicts and charismatics. The album’s unity resembles a primitive style of Biblical exegesis, in which the preacher points to a Bible passage, then to something that happened yesterday, and declares, “This is that which was spoken.” Lincoln, John Henry, and a never-launched punk band whose ailing and stoned members Welch meets in a gig parking lot become instances of the same thing—which is never quite named, except as “ruination.” Echoing the prophet Ezekiel, Welch sees “a wheel within a wheel,” hears “a call within a call,” while watching a waitress on a slow-moving morning.
With “Revelator” and later albums, such as the sweetly eclectic “Soul Journey” (2003), folkloric sources became pliant elements in a style. Listening to the music is no longer like dropping in on the past. Welch sets out autobiographical details with seeming documentary candor, including fragments of her time in college bands and her erratic classroom performance in the years when “We were riding high / Till the eighty-nine quake / Hit the Santa Cruz Garden Mall.” With debts and allusions to Gram Parsons, Steve Miller, Neil Young, and Townes van Zandt, and to blues, folk, and gospel, Welch and Rawlings treat all of American music up to the time of their childhoods as a folk culture. They often sing in the “brother music” style of harmony associated with the Stanleys and the Everlys, which creates the illusion of a single voice, with just a glimmer of separateness that leaves the sense of unity flickering and uncanny. Welch’s voice still moves between bell-ringing and husky intimacy, and Rawlings’s guitar is both languid and precise. The sound holds moods the way humid air holds smells. Being lonesome and listless is often both the topic and the feeling, but the songs also carry a pleasure in the achievements of their flat, sometimes bleak exactitude. The two-piece outfit called Gillian Welch may be lost in the world, but it is fascinated by the wrinkles and motes of that experience, and has found the notes for them.
Welch takes from her mountain and Southern sources a set of metaphysical intuitions. We are not made for satisfaction. To be a person is often to feel exiled, alone, and predestined. These axioms of Appalachian Protestantism, which you can hear in songs like the Stanley Brothers’ “Rank Stranger,” are the fixations of Welch’s “The Harrow & The Harvest” (2011), her fourth and most recent album, whose master theme is fatalism. “The way that it goes,” “the way that it ends,” and “the way it will be” are some of the refrains, and the music feels like being caught in a slow-moving but irresistible force, maybe just the temperamental force of what Welch calls being “blessed with a dark turn of mind.” The predestination here is to perennially reckon with unruly and obdurate feeling: people cannot help what moves them, what makes them feel alive. Morphine, “soldier’s joy,” and heroin pop up frequently in Welch’s songwriting, and, like other motifs, feel as much symbolic as literal. The sense of fate in her mature songwriting resembles the feeling of addiction: a blurred line between desires and needs, pleasure and enervation, what feeds you and what consumes you.
Maybe it is unsurprising, in a musician of consummate aesthetic discipline, that Welch sometimes seems drawn to dissolution, a personal “ruination.” Her narrators are often at the end of their roads, going invisible, asking to have their legacies dismantled. “Tear my stillhouse down” is the last instruction of her moonshiner on “Revival,” and in “I’m Not Afraid to Die” and on “Hell Among the Yearlings,” she looks toward a future where “Every work of my own hand / Be broken by and by.” The happiest and most relaxed I’ve seen her onstage was in Boston in 2007: she was touring with Conor Oberst (playing with Bright Eyes), whose band had turned the theatre into a wall of noise from which no identifiable note escaped. Welch held a tambourine and was leaping with ungoverned delight, shaking her instrument in wild sweeps, with no chance at taking responsibility for the sound. It was, for a few clamorous minutes, an end to her labor.
The outbreak was first noticed in Utah in August. Ten thousand mink have now died in Utah fur farms, a spokesperson from the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food (UDAF) told CBS News on Friday.
This week Wisconsin, the largest fur-producing state, became the second state to confirm a Covid-19 outbreak among their mink population, with one farm affected so far.
Two thousand mink in the one farm - which is now under quarantine - have died, the channel reported.
Wisconsin’s Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) said that it had implemented new measures for "carcass disposal, cleaning and disinfecting the animal areas, and protecting human and animal health."
On Wednesday a third state, Michigan, confirmed that mink there had tested positive too.
Scientists believe that humans passed the virus to the animals, and not the other way round.
This week researchers from University College London (UCL) concluded that 26 animals, including farm animals like pigs, horses and sheep, may be vulnerable to infection with coronavirus and could “warrant further investigation and possible monitoring”.
Professor Christine Orengo, from UCL Structural and Molecular Biology and lead author of the study, said: “We wanted to look beyond just the animals that had been studied experimentally, to see which animals might be at risk of infection, and would warrant further investigation and possible monitoring.
“The animals we identified may be at risk of outbreaks that could threaten endangered species or harm the livelihood of farmers.”
She pointed towards cases of coronavirus outbreaks in mink farms that show some animals may act as “reservoirs” of Covid-19, with the potential to re-infect humans.
The scale of the outbreak among mink is unclear, as the fur farms say it is impossible to test every single animal.
The Fur Commission USA, which represents mink farmers, say that there are approximately 275 mink farms in 23 states across the county, producing about three million pelts annually, with a value of more than $300m.
Fur from the dead, infected mink is still being used commercially, and Fur Commission USA told the AP that the fur is processed to eliminate all traces of the virus before it is used for clothing.
As with humans, younger mink are less likely to contract the virus, and most deaths occur among older mink, ages one to four years old.
Difficulty breathing is a common symptom, but the virus progresses extremely quickly, killing most infected mink by the next day.
Researchers have reported that mink are especially susceptible to the virus due to a specific protein in their lungs.
The Netherlands has now moved up its deadline to end mink fur farming by three years to prevent future outbreaks, and killed thousands of animals earlier this year to stop the spread. Spain followed a similar path, and last week Denmark announced a million mink will be killed to stop the outbreak among animals there.
The Humane Society of the United States has called the inaction by the US government "indefensible."
"Fur farms are miserable places for wild animals like mink," Kitty Block, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the US.
"Now, with the coronavirus outbreak killing the animals by the thousands, the suffering has only intensified.
"The only way to end the dual problems of pandemic outbreaks on fur farms and the animal suffering inherent in fur farming is to close down this industry for good."
ostmaster General Louis DeJoy, who has faced intense scrutiny from Democrats over 
illian Welch, the Los Angeles-raised musician, whose lyrics and voice conjure Appalachian hollows, Dust Bowl highways, and Nashville morphine dens, released her first album, “Revival,” twenty years ago. Several of the songs sounded as if they might have been written a hundred years earlier. Welch’s alto is rich and tarnished, with a roughness that hints at a tired or heat-baked throat. In “By the Mark,” she promised, “By the sign that shines / Upon His precious skin / I will know my savior / When I come to Him / By the mark where the nails have been.” Welch wrote from the perspective of the type of people the folklorist Alan Lomax had sought out in the nineteen-thirties and forties—poor, usually either exploited or forgotten—whom Lomax and other revivalists saw as carrying organic traditions of sound, feeling, and imagination. In “Annabelle,” a poor sharecropper whose young daughter has died reflects, “Till we’ve all / Gone to Jesus / We can only / Wonder why.” Other songs on “Revival” were first-person laments, confessions, or boasts from moonshiners, migrant fruit pickers, and bootleggers.
