Tag: democrats

Democrats Scuttle Marijuana Decriminalization Vote Over Fears of Not Being Deferential Enough to Cop Lobbyists

A planned House vote on a bill to decriminalize the possession of marijuana was canceled on Thursday under pressure from law enforcement lobbyists and other pro-prohibition special interests.

The expected floor vote on the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act would have been the biggest accomplishment yet for cannabis reformers, but the effort has been postponed until after Election Day, Politico reports. Democrats have gotten weak-kneed about a bill that they once saw as a major criminal justice reform.

Indeed, it would have been. The MORE Act, sponsored by Rep. Jerry Nadler (D–N.Y.), would remove cannabis from the schedules of the Controlled Substances Act and make that change retroactive, effectively expunging any federal marijuana offenses and convictions. The bill also orders federal courts to lift all sentences for people currently locked up due to a marijuana conviction.

As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum explained when the bill was introduced last year, the MORE Act was in many ways superior to other marijuana legislation, because it “completely deschedules marijuana rather than moving it to a lower schedule or making exceptions to the ban for state-legal conduct, and it seeks to lift the burdens that prohibition has imposed on people caught growing, distributing, or possessing cannabis, a vital project that too often has been treated as an afterthought.”

This year, the bill had collected more than 100 co-sponsorships in the House—it even had support from three Republicans—and appeared on track to pass the lower chamber. Even though the bill was expected to die in the Senate, that House vote would have been historic.

Unfortunately, cop lobbyists seem to have convinced House Democratic leaders that it would also be a liability. A coalition of law enforcement special interests and other proponents of the drug war sent a letter to congressional leaders last week warning about the potential dangers associated with legalizing and “commercializing” marijuana.

That, combined with vague fears about how Republicans might weaponize the legalization vote for negative ads in swing districts, was apparently enough to convince Democrats to scuttle the vote.

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Democrat Michigan Secretary of State Misprints Trump Ticket on Ballots for Troops

The Michigan secretary of state misprinted the Trump line on ballots intended to be mailed to troops serving overseas, the Detroit News reported.

Jocelyn Benson, who has endorsed President Trump’s rival, Joe Biden, and spoke at the recent Democratic National Convention (DNC), made the apparent error. The ballot listed Jeremy Cohen as Trump’s running mate. Cohen is running for vice president on the libertarian ticket with Jo Jorgensen.

The name of the incumbent vice president, Mike Pence, was omitted altogether. Jorgensen’s line lacked a running mate, thus creating three errors on the ballot.

Over 400 incorrect ballots were downloaded from the secretary’s website by local clerks to be sent to voters. It is not clear how many were actually mailed.

The ballots were “meant to be mailed or emailed to Michigan residents living abroad under the Military and Overseas Empowerment (MOVE) Act,” the paper reported.

“Replacement” ballots will be issued to those who may have been mailed incorrect ones, according to the secretary of state’s office.

“If a voter does happen to return the incorrect ballot instead of the correct ballot, it will still count,” Benson spokeswoman Tracy Wimmer said.

“The clerk will be instructed to duplicate a vote for Trump onto a ballot for Trump/Pence.”

The secretary of state has endorsed Biden for president.

During the DNC, Benson pushed voting by mail.

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DARK WEB VOTER DATABASE REPORT CASTS NEW DOUBTS ON RUSSIAN ELECTION HACK NARRATIVE

A new report showing that US state-level voter databases were publicly available calls into question the narrative that Russian intelligence “targeted” US state election-related websites in 2016.

A September 1 report in the Moscow daily Kommersant on a “dark web” site offering a database of personal information on millions of registered American voters undermines one of the central themes of the Russia hysteria pervading US politics.

Democratic politicians and corporate media pundits have long accepted it as fact that Russian intelligence “targeted” US state election-related websites in 2016. But the Kommersant report shows that those state registered voter databases were already available to anyone in the public domain, eliminating any official Russian motive for hacking state websites.

Kommersant reported that a user on a dark web Forum known as Gorka9 offered free access to databases containing the information of 7.6 million Michigan voters, along with the state voter databases of Connecticut, Arkansas, Florida and North Carolina.

There are differences between the Michigan database described by Gorka9 and the one that the State of Michigan releases to the public upon request. Tracy Wimmer, the spokesperson for the Michigan Secretary of State, said in an e-mail to Grayzone that when the Michigan voter registration database is released to the public upon request, the state withholds “date of birth (year of birth is included), driver’s license number, the last four digitals of someone’s social security number, email address and phone number….”  However, Gorka9’s description of the Michigan data includes driver’s license numbers, full dates of birth, social security numbers and emails.

In fact both un-redacted and redacted state voter files are obviously widely available on the dark web as well as elsewhere on the internet. Meduza, a Russian-language news site based in Riga, Latvia, published the Kommersant story along with an “anonFiles” download portal for access to the Michigan voter database and a page from it showing that it is the officially redacted version. The DHS and the FBI both acknowledged in response to the Kommersant story that “a lot of voter registration data is publicly available or easily purchased.” 

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