Judicial Watch Victory: North Carolina
Settles Voter Roll Lawsuit after State Removes over 430,000 Inactive Names
from Rolls
In a big win for us and voters in North Carolina, we settled
our lawsuit against the state and two of its counties after they removed
over 430,000 ineligible names from the voter rolls.
We filed the lawsuit
against the state, Mecklenburg County and Guilford County in April 2020 (Judicial
Watch v. North Carolina and North Carolina State Board of Elections, et al.
(No. 3:20-cv- 211)).
In June 2019, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) had released data
showing that voter registration rates in a significant proportion of North
Carolina’s 100 counties were close to, at or above 100% of their
age-eligible citizenry – statistics considered by the courts to be a
strong indication that a jurisdiction is not taking the steps required by
law to remove ineligible registrants. Our analysis also showed that at the
time of the EAC report the entire State of North Carolina had a
registration rate close to 100% of its age-eligible citizenry.
On December 11, 2019, we sent notice-of-violation
letters to the state and its two counties, warning them that lawsuits
would be filed if timely action were not taken to clean up the voter
rolls.
In our April 2020 complaint,
we argued that North Carolina, Mecklenburg County, and Guilford County
failed to make reasonable efforts to remove ineligible voters from their
registration rolls as required by the federal National Voter Registration
Act of 1993 (NVRA). The lawsuit also claimed that these jurisdictions
violated the NVRA by failing to make available to us public records
concerning efforts to comply with the law.
On August 16, 2021, the EAC released its latest survey
data from the states.
In the settlement, we told the court:
[T]he total number of inactive
registrations reported by North Carolina dropped from about 1.2 million in
2019, to about 765,000 in 2021 (a 36% drop). The statewide percentage of
inactive registrations dropped from 17% in 2019, which the complaint
alleged to be a national outlier, to 10% in 2021, which is close to the
median state inactive rate. The number of registrations removed for failure
to respond to an address confirmation notice and vote in two consecutive
elections has increased, from about 220,000 for the period reported in
2019, to about 590,000 for the period reported in 2021 (a 168%
increase).
With respect to the two North Carolina counties, we told the court:
Data for Mecklenburg County and Guilford
County also showed improvement. From 2019 to 2021, the percentage of
inactive registrations reported in Mecklenburg County dropped from 15.5% to
13%, and in Guilford County from 19% to 11%. The number of registrations
removed for failure to respond to an address confirmation notice and vote
in two elections increased during that same period, from roughly 21,000 to
51,000 in Mecklenburg County, and from 7,000 to 33,000 in Guilford County
(a 142% and 372% increase, respectively). In light of Defendants’
substantial increases in removals of ineligible voters since this suit
commenced, Plaintiff has determined in good faith that this legal action
should not be pursued.
In 2020, we also sued Pennsylvania,
and Colorado
for failing to clean their voter rolls.
This is a win for the voters of North Carolina – because clean voter
rolls help pave the way to cleaner elections. After we filed our federal
lawsuit, North Carolina removed hundreds of thousands of ineligible voters,
people who have died or moved away.
North Carolina follows our voter roll clean-up successes in California,
Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. And we are right now prepping lawsuits against
other states to force them to clean up their rolls.
In November 2021, we sent
letters to election officials in 14 counties and five
states—Arkansas, California, Illinois, New York, and Oregon—notifying
them of evident violations of the NVRA. The letters detail how these
states’ own reported data show that their counties removed an “absurdly
low” or “impossible” number of inactive voter registrations under key
provisions of the NVRA. The letters threaten federal lawsuits unless the
violations are corrected in a timely fashion.
So, in short, North Carolina is just the beginning …
HILLARYGATE: Techs Allegedly Used by Clinton to Spy on Trump Worked
with Defense Agency
We’re adding more fascinating detail to the growing pile of evidence of
Deep State collusion against President Trump.
The latest: Four people mentioned in the indictment of Michael Sussmann by
Special Counsel John Durham were paid for work with the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) from 2016-2021 and appeared to be
interested in targeting Trump campaign adviser Steve Bannon.
We learned this in 127
pages of records of communications among the four that we received from
the Georgia Institute of Technology through an October 13, 2021, Georgia
Open Records Act request. The four individuals are Rodney
Joffe, April
Lorenzen, David
Dagon, and Manos
Antonakakis.
According to The
New York Times:
Mr. Durham used a 27-page
indictment to lay out a far more expansive tale, one in which four
computer scientists who were not charged in the case ‘exploited’ their
access to internet data to develop an explosive theory about
cyberconnections in 2016 between Donald J. Trump’s company and a
Kremlin-linked bank — a theory, he insinuated, they did not really
believe.
***
The indictment’s “Originator-1” is
April Lorenzen, chief data scientist at the information services firm
Zetalytics. Her lawyer, Michael J. Connolly, said she has “dedicated her
life to the critical work of thwarting dangerous cyberattacks on our
country,” adding: “Any suggestion that she engaged in wrongdoing is
unequivocally false.”
The indictment’s “Researcher-1” is
another computer scientist at Georgia Tech, Manos Antonakakis.
“Researcher-2” is Mr. Dagon. And “Tech Executive-1” is Mr. Joffe,
who
in 2013 received the F.B.I. Director’s Award for helping crack a
cybercrime case, and retired this month from Neustar, another information
services company.
The anti-Trump operation used the “assistance of researchers at a
U.S.-based university who were receiving and analyzing large amounts of
Internet data in connection with a pending federal government cybersecurity
research contract.”
Here is some of what the four wrote to each other.
On November 18, 2016, a redacted email
address writes on “behalf of Manos Antonakakis” to two Georgia Tech
officials in an email titled “Signed DARPA Contract:”
Hey Ashley,
Please send to Michael the signed contract for their records.
Thanks,
Manos
On November 21, 2016, Ashley Williams, a Georgia Tech contracting officer,
replies:
Good morning!!
Attached is a copy of the new award for
your records. Please note the contract is subject to publication
restrictions identified in the DD 254. I'm actively working with AFRL
[likely Air Force Research Laboratory] to revise the DD 254 to clarify that
fundamental research is excluded from the publication restrictions.
Although we’ve signed the contract award and I have to defer project
initiation until the publication restrictions are resolved by the AFRL
sponsor.
Let me know if you have any questions.
On August 2, 2016, Antonakakis writes
to Danielle Gambino and Keromytis, Angelos, a DARPA employee:
The subs and I, would like to have the permission to begin spending against
the project from August 15th. This is the date when students needs to be
hired [as graduate research assistants], so we can execute against the
goals we have set in the SOW [statement of work] this year.
UNC, GT and UGA would require an acknowledgment from you (or DARPA) that we
are allowed to do that. I guess, once we are done negotiating the contract
we will have to have as an effective start date the August 15th. If we
cannot do that, it appears that it will complicate things for all three
schools, as we cannot immediately hire the students necessary that will
execute against the set milestones.
Please let me know how you think we should resolve this issue.
At 2:55 p.m. Angelos replies, “I'm ok with that, but I seriously doubt
the contracting officer will agree.”
At 3:16 p.m. Gambino also replies:
As usual, Angelos is correct!
Working with contracting to authorize pre-award work can take a while and
typically is not allowed until closer to contract award. Although I
certainly appreciate your eagerness to start working, we are at the very
start of the contracting process - this is really way too early for this
type of request. (The contract specialists haven't even been assigned
yet.)
Please don't hesitate to reach out to me with any other questions.
On January 9, 2017, a DARPA employee, Kelly McLaughlin, follows up with
Antonakakis. She writes:
Manos,
DARPA put $153,138 on the Georgia Tech Transparent Computing (TC) contract
back in October, 2016 to cover the costs proposed in the attached SOW. The
SOW asked for 0.83 month of your academic salary, salary for one Research
Engineer, David Dagon, and funds for four graduate student research
assistants. Were the proposed grad student costs supposed to cover UNC grad
students or Georgia Tech grad students? The SOW shows them as Georgia Tech
students.
Please let me know if these funds were supposed to cover UNC. If so, the TC
BFM, Laurisa Goergen, will reach out to the TC admin POC for Georgia Tech
to see what, if anything, can be done at this point.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Emails indicate that Neustar
employees may have visited Georgia Tech to collaborate with
Antonakakis. On May 27, 2016, Atreya Mohan from Neustar writes in an email
with the subject line “Introducing Peter Burke:”
Hello Manos
Just wanted to introduce you to Peter (our SVP Engg and Operations).
Peter. We contact Manos on his gmail account for consulting purposes and
his Georgia Tech email address for interactions that relate with the
university (example: sponsorship etc)”
Burke replies:
Hi Manos,
It was great to meet you today – it is very interesting work that you do
and I see great opportunities to collaborate with you.
I would like to try to figure out a time to come and spend more time with
so that you can continue my education :-)
I am guessing you are based in Atlanta?
Antonakakis writes that evening:
Hey Mohan,
Many thanks for the intro. Peter, the pleasure was all mine!
Yes, you should come and visit us. I would suggest sometime in September,
when the semester starts and my students are back from their internships in
the bay area. You are more than welcome to visit sooner, but it will be
just me and my three postdocs.
The Neustar team is always welcome to visit
my lab. Anytime you, Rodney, Brian or anyone else want to visit.
Antonakakis responds to this chain again on July 14, 2016, writing:
Gentlemen,
By now all of you should be aware of the great news from DARPA. We have a 5
year long collaboration ahead of us, so I think it would make sense for the
Neustar team to visit Atlanta and my lab.
How is the week of August 15 looks like for you? Mine is completely open.
Perhaps, we should schedule the visit then?
The emails highlight that the ‘tech’ experts implicated in the Durham
indictment were very much interested in the fake dossier used to smear
President Trump.
In an
email to Antonakakis on January 29, 2017, Dagon writes:
The Russians are killing spies with knowledge of the dossier
materials:
Oh, and Trump purged the National Security Council (removing General
Dunford) and put Steve Bannon (his PR guy) on the NSC:
My guess: The purged NSC will now say that Russia has given us great intel
on ISIS, and that we should lift sanctions now that Russia is helping. (The
public will have no way to judget [sic] this.)
All this to protect Trump from the dossier materials.
Antonakakis replies the same day, “What the [f*ck] is going on? Can you
please explain why GOP is not doing something?”
He then writes again a few minutes later:
Some in the GOP knows what's up (Graham, McCain), but most are all too
happy to have their narrow, specific agendas advanced (e.g., removing
social security, ACA/Obama-care repeal, more tax cuts for companies, etc.)
They put party ahead of country, in short.
In 2018 the Senate (and maybe the House) may flip, and there will then be
real investigations (but again, party will be ahead of country, as
Democrats look into corruption for narrow purposes).
Now that the Russians are killing people with knowledge of the dossier, we
can hope for a defector who gets to a non-US embassy in Moscow.
An August 25, 2016, email
from Joffe to Antonakakis, Dagon and Lorenzen indicates a possible interest
in investigating Steve Bannon. The subject line is “To be added….”
Joffe writes: “They think he may have some baggage... ;-)” A link to a
Washington
Post opinion piece is included.
Was the Defense Department’s DARPA funding and sensitive data misused by
the Clinton campaign to spy on the Trump White House? If so, the
criminal liability for those involved may be significant.
Judicial Watch Sues CIA for Records of Contacts with Indicted
Clinton Campaign Lawyer Michael Sussmann
We’ve been quite interested in the CIA’s role in the Deep State’s
efforts to take out President Trump. As you’ll recall, we sued
in December to find out what the heads of the CIA and Defense Department
were discussing about the president.
Now it’s being reported that the CIA was in contact with a disgraced
Clinton campaign attorney. And so we filed a FOIA suit against the CIA for
records of meetings and phone conversations between any CIA personnel and
former Clinton lawyer Michael Sussmann, who has been charged in Special
Counsel John Durham’s investigation with making a false statement to a
federal agent (Judicial
Watch v. Central Intelligence Agency (No. 1:22-cv-00412)).
We sued after the CIA failed to reply to an October 26, 2021, FOIA request
for:
All records regarding any meetings or telephonic conversations between any
official or employee of the Central Intelligence Agency and Mr. Michael
Sussmann (formerly an attorney with Perkins Coie) between January 1, 2015
and the present. This request includes, but is not limited to, all notes,
transcripts, summaries, or other records created in preparation for,
during, or pursuant to the meetings or conversations.
On February 11, Durham, who is investigating the origins of the
Trump-Russia investigation, filed a motion that focused on potential
conflicts of interest related to the representation of Sussmann, who has
been charged
with making a false statement to a federal agent. Sussmann has pleaded not
guilty.
According to a February 15, 2022, Fox News report,
a spokesperson for the individual labeled in Durham’s latest filing as
“Tech Executive-1” has seemingly identified the CIA as the “second”
federal government agency to which Sussmann provided an “updated set of
allegations” to “establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’”
tying Donald Trump to Russia.
Durham writes in the latest
filing:
[O]n February 9, 2017, [Sussman] provided an updated set of allegations –
including the [Alfa Bank] data and additional allegations relating to Trump
– to a second agency of the U.S. government (“Agency-2”). The
Government’s evidence at trial will establish that these additional
allegations relied, in part, on the purported DNS traffic that Tech
Executive-1 and others had assembled pertaining to Trump Tower, Donald
Trump’s New York City apartment building, the EOP, and the aforementioned
healthcare provider. In his meeting with Agency-2, the defendant provided
data which he claimed reflected purportedly suspicious DNS lookups by these
entities of internet protocol (“IP”) addresses affiliated with a
Russian mobile phone provider (“Russian Phone Provider-1”). The
defendant further claimed that these lookups demonstrated that Trump and/or
his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in
the vicinity of the White House and other locations. The Special
Counsel’s Office has identified no support for these allegations.
The CIA is in cover-up mode about its communications with the lawyer
implicated in a shady spy operation against President Trump. What is the
CIA hiding about its role in this plot against President Trump?
Popper Testifies Before Florida House Congressional Redistricting
Subcommittee
Senior Judicial Watch Attorney Robert Popper testified this week before the
Florida House Congressional Redistricting Subcommittee during consideration
of “PCB CRS 22-01 – Establishing the Congressional Districts of the
State.”
Popper’s testimony focused on how Florida’s proposed 3rd Congressional
District would be subject to legal challenge as a racial gerrymander if
Florida’s state legislature approves the new map.
Popper’s testimony
points out that the Supreme Court has held:
“[R]edistricting legislation that is so extremely irregular on its face
that it rationally can be viewed only as an effort to segregate the races
for purposes of voting, without regard for traditional districting
principles and without sufficiently compelling justification” states a
federal, constitutional claim under the Equal Protection Clause.
Popper notes that District 3 is vulnerable to being legally challenged:
Turning to Congressional District 3 in the proposed plan, I believe it will
be vulnerable to a serious—and probably a winning—Shaw-type claim under
the Fourteenth Amendment. I understand that there will be little dispute
that the district was drawn with its racial characteristics as the
predominant consideration. I also understand that the shape of the district
will be well-explained by the effort to include African-American
populations around Tallahassee and Jacksonville. Moreover, the district
clearly violates traditional districting criteria. Its Popper-Polsby
score is 10%, and its Reock
score is 11%. These are very low compactness scores for any U.S.
congressional district, and in both cases these are the lowest compactness
scores in the State of Florida.
In December 2021, we filed a lawsuit
on behalf of 12 registered Maryland voters who object to Maryland’s 2021
congressional redistricting plan on the grounds that it diminishes their
rights to participate in elections for the U.S. Congress on an equal basis
with other Maryland voters, in violation of the Maryland Constitution.
Robert Popper joined our legal team as a senior attorney in 2013. Popper
specializes in gerrymandering cases. In 1991, with Professor Daniel Polsby,
Popper wrote an article describing a mathematical way to measure the
geographic compactness of congressional districts. This standard is now
known as the “Polsby/Popper”
criterion and is one of the most widely used tests of district compactness.
In 1997, Popper brought a lawsuit that ultimately led to New York’s 12th
Congressional District being enjoined as an unconstitutional racial
gerrymander. In 2005, Popper joined the Voting Section of the Civil Rights
Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked for eight
years. In his time at DOJ, he managed voting rights investigations,
litigations, consent decrees, and settlements in dozens of states.
California on Shaky Ground in Enacting Gender Quotas for Corporate
Boards
It seems that California didn’t rely too heavily on science in deciding
that the state’s corporations needed a quota of women on their boards. As
you know, we sued to stop it.
This week we released 220
pages of trial testimony by our expert witness, Jonathan
Klick, Ph.D., J.D. Klick, an expert in econometrics, statistics and
corporate law, testified during the 27-day trial that the studies on which
California relies to prove its case are deficient and unreliable.
The trial came to a close this week and we await a decision by the
Court.
Our expert’s testimony came on days 15 and 16 of the trial in California
Superior Court challenging the constitutionality of California’s gender
quotas for corporate boards of directors (Robin
Crest et al. v. Alex Padilla (No.19STCV27561)). We filed the lawsuit
in Los Angeles County Superior Court in 2019 on behalf of California
taxpayers Robin Crest, Earl De Vries and Judy De Vries. Closing arguments
were held this week.
Our lawsuit challenges a 2018 law known as Senate Bill 826, which requires
every publicly held corporation headquartered in California to have at
least one director “who self-identifies her gender as a woman” on its
board of directors by December 31, 2019. The law also requires corporations
to have up to three such persons on their boards by December 31, 2021,
depending on the size of the board.
In our lawsuit, we argue
that the quotas for women on corporate boards violate the Equal Protection
Clause of the California Constitution, among other provisions.
At trial, government lawyers defending the quota have alleged that gender
quotas not only remedy discrimination but also improve overall corporate
performance.
Our expert
analysis rejects this: “the evidence offered for each of these points
(underrepresentation of women on boards, discrimination as the cause of
this underrepresentation, and that research shows a differential benefit of
appointing women, as opposed to men, in terms of firm performance) is
deficient and unreliable.”
Klick testified further in trial that:
[M]ost of the results [on corporate performance related to gender
composition of boards], including the one cited in SB-826, don’t involve
even regressions, much less more sophisticated designs. And likewise, as
with the earlier study, the Credit Suisse study, provides no indication of
statistical significance as between the differences.
During the trial, Klick was on the stand for two days and testified
exhaustively about the statistical techniques and types of scientific
investigations that would be required to show a causal relationship between
gender quotas and increased corporate performance. During his testimony,
Klick took the court through the “numerous independent studies” cited
in Senate Bill 826 and an accompanying legislative report that allegedly
demonstrate “publicly held companies perform better when women serve on
their boards of directors.” Klick summarized
for the court the deficiencies and unreliability of most studies:
[T]he general, overall statement I would like to make is the literature
generically on women and boards is relatively unsophisticated. What I mean
by that is the sort of natural experiments that I was talking about, which
again by the late 1990s had become the standard in empirical policy
analysis, empirical inference of this sort is largely absent in the
literature [on women on boards of directors] as a whole.
Beyond generalizations, Klick also provided the court detailed
explanations of why the numerous studies and analyses relied on by the
California legislature were deficient and unreliable. He also pointed out a
plethora of other studies contradicting the presuppositions behind Bill
826, which the legislature simply ignored. In addition, Klick testified
that the conclusions of a comprehensive literature review he performed in
2017, before this case arose, focusing on studies that examined the
relationship between gender quotas, corporate performance and the
beneficial effects of quotas on women in the workplace generally:
Remember that correlation isn’t causation.
But there are things that we can do through regression techniques and
through natural experiments and more sophisticated designs that gets us
more confidence in determining whether or not a given correlation is
causation, and we’ve had those tools for at least 20, 25 years
now.
And they are the tools that modern social scientists and policy analysts,
financial people use every day, and it’s a reasonably strong consensus
about the value of these tools.
If we look at the literature that was used directly in support of 826,
those tools largely seem absent…. seem to have been ignored, or, at
least, unremarked on in the route to 826 and the advocacy for 826. On the
particular results that we think we can draw from the literature … a
representative picture of the literature … is that it draws no definitive
conclusions.
[M]any of the studies lead to a statistically insignificant relationship
between board composition and various outcomes for firms. Of the studies
that don’t find a zero or statistically zero effect, there are, largely
speaking, as many studies that find positive effects as find negative
effects. And that’s even before we put any filters on quality of the
studies and things like that.
That’s what I found for sure in my literature review that I did prior to
this case.
***
I’m not the only one that’s done an academic literature review in this
area. There’s been a handful of them, and they uniformly have come to the
same conclusion.
Perhaps my favorite one, just because of the … source of it is a
literature review written in 2014 in the Delaware Journal of Corporate
Law by Deborah Rhode and Amanda Packel…. [T]he reason this is so
notable is Deborah Rhode, she’s deceased now … was at Yale, and later
when she was at the Stanford Law School, she really was a founding mother
of feminist legal studies and those sorts of things – but she also was a
great academic and a very honest academic. And in her literature review in
2014 she said, you know, as much as people might want there to be a
business case for diversity, the current literature does not support
it.
***
[T]hose are just two, my literature review and Deborah Rhode’s literature
review, and there are others that come to roughly the same conclusion. I
think that’s probably the most fair and honest reading of this
literature.
This historic trial shows a discriminatory gender quota mandate that is
blatantly unlawful and unconstitutional. After weeks of taxpayer money
being used to defend the law, we hope the trial court will strike down
these pernicious gender quotas.
This isn’t our only action in this area.
In September 2020, we also filed a taxpayer lawsuit
to prevent California from enforcing Assembly Bill 979, which requires the
same corporation subject to the gender-based quota also to satisfy racial,
ethnic, sexual preference and transgender status quotas by the end of the
2021 calendar year.
In January 2021, we filed a public
comment with the Securities and Exchange Commission in response to a
proposed rule change requiring race and gender quotas on the boards of
corporations listed on the Nasdaq exchange.
Federal and state constitutional and legal prohibitions banning
discrimination are under assault by the extremist Left and Judicial Watch
is front and center in court and in the public square defending the rule of
law against this pernicious effort.
Until next week...
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