ProPublica

by Byard Duncan and Ryan Gabrielson

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In the spring of 2020, attorneys general from nearly three dozen states announced a landmark legal settlement with the nation’s largest auto lender for risky borrowers.

Santander Consumer USA had for years made high-interest loans to people it knew couldn’t afford them, the officials alleged. When those borrowers got into financial trouble, it allowed them to delay making payments — without disclosing the steep costs of doing so. Because of those extensions, customers ended up owing thousands of dollars in surprise interest charges, and in many cases, they lost their cars.

“Predatory lending practices like this led to the 2008 financial crisis and harmed millions,” Josh Shapiro, then Pennsylvania’s attorney general and now its governor, said in a press release announcing the settlement, which imposed new consumer protections and required clearer disclosure about how loan extensions work.

The multistate effort, he added, “will put a stop to some of Santander’s most outrageous tactics.” The bank did not admit any wrongdoing as part of the settlement, which it said resolved a “legacy underwriting issue.”

But by the time the attorneys general were heralding their crackdown, they were receiving strikingly similar complaints from customers with loans from another lender, Exeter Finance.

The parallels were more than coincidence. The company was being run by former Santander executives who had left that bank amid the investigation. By 2020, most of Exeter’s corporate leadership — including its CEO and its operations chief — was composed of people who had overseen Santander during the period that the state attorneys general said it was “misleading, failing to disclose material information, or otherwise confusing consumers.”

Those elected officials, however, have taken a decidedly different approach with Exeter. In fact, in 12 states that participated in the Santander agreement, officials have taken little or no action in dozens of cases alleging nearly identical behavior, according to a ProPublica investigation.

The news organization reviewed nearly 200 consumer complaints filed with state regulators over the past five years and found they rarely pressed Exeter about its practices. In Washington, they asked Exeter to participate in a voluntary mediation process, then closed the case when the company didn’t respond. In New Jersey, they just forwarded complaints to their counterparts in Texas, where the company is based, and did nothing more. In Kentucky, an office sat on a complaint for months while the borrower’s car was repossessed.

Some attorneys general declined to answer questions for this story, while others — such as those in Pennsylvania, Georgia and California — did not release documents in response to our public records requests. But Prentiss Cox, a University of Minnesota law professor who spent years in charge of consumer protection at the Minnesota attorney general’s office, said attorneys general often have limited staff and money to bring cases against companies, “and you bet players like subprime auto lenders know that.”

At least two states now appear to be scrutinizing Exeter. Georgia has acknowledged investigating the company, and Louisiana recently signaled potential action after ProPublica published the first part of its series last month. In response to questions about Exeter, the state attorney general’s office said it “cannot comment on ongoing investigations.”

Enforcement from attorneys general is particularly significant for auto borrowers, given how little recourse they have for legal action, said Chris Peterson, a law professor at the University of Utah and a former senior official at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Many car loan contracts explicitly limit borrrowers’ right to bring cases in civil courts by forcing them into arbitration. Consumer rights lawyers “often give indirect auto finance companies and car dealers a free pass because it’s so difficult to get them into court anymore,” he said.

That makes state attorneys general one of the few official checks on the country’s trillion-dollar auto lending industry.

Over the past decade, Exeter has grown to become one of the largest players in the business, with more than 500,000 active loans worth $10 billion. As ProPublica reported last month, extensions are fundamental to its business model. The company routinely grants borrowers several extensions, which typically add thousands of dollars in new interest charges to the loan. Dozens of customers told ProPublica that Exeter didn’t clearly disclose the charges, even as the extensions drove them deeper into debt.

The news organization reached out to Exeter’s executives for this story and they either declined to comment or did not return calls. In response to written questions, the company issued a statement defending its extension practice, which it said “has been heavily reviewed by its regulators and is fully compliant with all applicable laws.” It did not answer questions about which regulators had reviewed its practices.

“Extensions are granted to customers who request them so that they can remain in their vehicles and provide for their families,” the company said.

ProPublica’s investigation found these payment deferments can do the opposite though, with borrowers losing their cars even after paying the equivalent of the original loan or more.

New Address, Same Faces, Same Playbook

At the start of 2016, Exeter was headed toward failure. Financial disclosures show it had lost about $50 million over the previous two years. Its turnaround coincided with the arrival of a new leadership team that had a long history in subprime auto loans — and in aggressively granting financially shaky borrowers multiple extensions.

The new CEO, Jason Grubb, had just spent more than a decade at Santander, ultimately becoming its president. Exeter’s operations chief, Brad Martin, had been working for Santander in a similar capacity. The two joined Exeter while their former employer was embroiled in state and federal investigations into allegedly deceptive and unfair lending practices. A slew of other Santander staffers — from the company’s human resources, compliance and executive arms — followed them. Jason Kulas, who was Santander’s CEO until 2017, joined Exeter’s board of directors in 2019 and today is also its chief financial officer.

“We went ahead and kind of got the gang back together again,” said a former executive at Exeter and Santander who asked to not be named for fear of professional repercussions.

There was little stopping them. Neither a federal settlement with Santander in 2018 nor the subsequent one from state attorneys general named the bank’s individual executives. While regulators have the power to do so when they bring legal actions against companies, they rarely use it with major lenders like Santander, said Dalié Jiménez, a professor of consumer law at the University of California, Irvine.

In such cases, the government’s chief aim is getting a settlement that results in fines and reforms for consumers, she said, and the people running those financial institutions “are going to fight really hard” against cases that target them directly.

Exeter’s Texas headquarters are in a suburb just 15 minutes from Santander Tower. Under its new management, Exeter loosened its lending criteria: It began approving borrowers with a debt-to-income ratio of up to 70%, meaning they would spend as much as $7 of every $10 of their paychecks on the car loan and other debts each month. (Consumer advocates and lenders recommend borrowers keep their debt ratio around 35%.)

Exeter also accepted customers with lower credit scores than it had previously, lent them more money than before — as much as $50,000 per loan — and gave them more time to repay it. Some agreed to repayment schedules stretching longer than six years, meaning more costly loans over the course of the term.

Many borrowers had trouble fulfilling the terms. Financial disclosures show the number of Exeter loans with five or more payment extensions soared in the first three years after Grubb and Martin took over. As did the company’s revenue. Exeter went into the black in 2016 and stayed there, claiming $94 million in pretax profit in 2018, according to rating agency reports.

Exeter said in a statement that “extensions are not a profit strategy.” However, ProPublica found the company sometimes made more money on loans that defaulted than on ones in which borrowers paid on time.

Each time the company grants an extension, it resets the clock and reclassifies the delinquent loan as being on schedule. Exeter has done this in some cases as many as 12 times over the course of a 72-month loan, with borrowers continuing to make payments in hopes of catching up.

Some of them turned to their attorneys general for help even before the regulators had finalized their settlement with Santander. The consumers alleged that Exeter had added huge interest charges without clear explanation.

In early 2020, Deborahlyn Wells, a disabled Kentucky woman, sent such a complaint to state Attorney General Daniel Cameron. Wells was trying to prevent Exeter from seizing her 2008 GMC Acadia. She wrote that she’d taken multiple extensions with the understanding that Exeter had moved the payments “to the end of the loan to keep me current.” At the time, Wells had paid the company almost $13,000, but she was nevertheless on the verge of repossession. Nearly all of her payments had gone to interest.

Cameron’s office took months to contact Exeter about Wells’ complaint, records show. Even then, it simply forwarded her letter to the company, which confirmed it had given her five extensions. By that point, Exeter had already repossessed Wells’ car and auctioned it off.

Records obtained by the attorney general’s office show Exeter’s extension notices did not explain that Wells’ payments would first be applied to the interest from extensions, which would delay repayment of the original loan balance. The notices only hinted at the financial consequences, saying “any payments you can make before they are due will help you minimize interest.”

The company has said that it updated its written disclosures in late 2021 — roughly 18 months after the Santander settlement — but declined to provide copies or details about the changes.

Notices from earlier this year, provided to ProPublica by borrowers, clarified how interest charges increase and payments are applied after extensions. However, they did not include the actual dollar amount of what the deferments would cost. If borrowers wanted to know more, the letter directed them to call a toll-free number.

Cameron, who left the attorney general’s office this year after an unsuccessful bid for governor, did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did his successor, Russell Coleman.

Weak Enforcement in the States

The Santander settlement, announced just three months after Wells’ complaint, took aim at the type of disclosure failures that were at the core of her case. It required Santander to explain to customers that an extension will add new interest charges and increase the amount they’ll owe at the end of their loan. (Notably, the deal did not require Santander to tell customers how much additional interest they’ll pay due to extensions. That’s why ProPublica built a tool to provide estimates.)

And while on paper it technically applied to just one company, consumer advocates and legal experts say it should have telegraphed new standards for all lenders, including Exeter.

With such public announcements, regulators “are putting every other company on notice that we will come after you,” said Ira Rheingold, executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates. “If you engage in those practices, we will hold you to account.”

Indeed, some attorneys general pledged to do exactly that. “Lenders and servicers have an obligation to deal fairly with Washington borrowers,” said the state’s attorney general, Bob Ferguson, who had helped craft the Santander settlement. “And when they fail to do so, my office will be there to protect Washingtonians.”

Matthew Hutchinson hoped for that kind of protection when he contacted Ferguson’s office in early 2022. He’d been rear-ended while driving on a highway near Vancouver, Washington, flipping his Nissan Frontier over the center median and into oncoming traffic. His truck was wrecked, but he was sure the insurance payout would easily cover whatever he still owed on his Exeter loan.

Instead, the payout was thousands of dollars short.

Hutchinson had taken five extensions during months when money was tight. He said Exeter told him he would owe some extra interest, but he was given nothing in writing and had assumed the cost would be “reasonable.”

The deferments had actually added about $4,000 in interest to his debt, according to ProPublica’s analysis of Hutchinson’s loan records.

Hutchinson filed a complaint accusing Exeter of charging excessive interest, and Ferguson's office sent a letter to Exeter. In its response, the lender acknowledged it had granted Hutchinson the extensions.

But the attorney general’s staff did not press for more information about whether Exeter had explained how extensions add additional interest charges, one of the requirements of the states’ Santander settlement. Instead, it sent the matter to its voluntary mediation program, designed to help consumers and businesses reach an agreement.

Exeter ignored the request to mediate, regulatory records show, and Ferguson’s office closed the case a month later.

“I was confused and frustrated,” Hutchinson recalled of the swift dismissal. “Because I thought the only thing I could do, legally, was contact the attorney general’s office and see if there was any way they could help me.”

His loan defaulted. He said he’s still being pursued for the charges the extensions created.

Exeter declined to comment on specific cases for this story, but it defended its practices in a statement. “Customers always receive an Extension Agreement,” the company said. “Any assertion that a customer wasn’t provided an Agreement is false.”

Ferguson’s office also declined to discuss Hutchinson’s case but confirmed that it closes complaints if a business does not respond.

Nevertheless, Brionna Aho, the office’s communications director, said that closed complaints “can and do sometimes lead to open investigations and civil enforcement.” She would not comment on whether that had happened in Hutchinson’s case.

In other states, attorneys general didn’t even contact Exeter when they received complaints.

That was the outcome in New Jersey after Sophia Nelson and her husband wrote to state Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal. The couple had struggled to make their monthly car payment to Exeter while caring for their daughter, who has a rare swallowing disorder. They’d taken extensions to avoid default, and they filed a complaint in 2020 saying that, unbeknownst to them, the extensions added $9,000 in interest to their debt.

Grewal declined to investigate and sent the complaint to Attorney General Ken Paxton in Exeter’s home state of Texas.

Paxton’s office told Nelson it could not take direct action on every complaint and would contact her “if we need additional information.”

Nelson said she and her husband never heard anything more. She said they didn’t expect the complaint would help them personally, but they “hoped there would have been some legal action taken or at the minimum an investigation of Exeter’s practices.”

The spokesperson for New Jersey’s attorney general said the office’s action was a “customary” response to consumer complaints. Paxton’s office in Texas did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Cox, the University of Minnesota law professor, said the public pronouncements of attorneys general are often constrained by the fiscal realities of their offices — something that companies are well aware of.

Lenders “should be afraid of the AGs,” he said, “but at the same time they know that there are limits.”

In February of 2023, nearly two years after Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul declared that his settlement “holds Santander accountable and sets an important precedent,” a consumer wrote to him stating that Exeter stood to collect “300% of the original amount financed” thanks in part to extensions. After seeking information about how interest was charged on these deferments, the borrower reported that “Exeter refused to provide me with any relief.”

Raoul’s office had led the multistate coalition against Santander. But when the consumer told Exeter they’d be telling the attorney general about their problems, they said the company “showed no concern.”

April McLaren, a spokesperson for Raoul’s office, told ProPublica the complaint was closed after “an attempted, but unsuccessful mediation.” She wouldn’t provide further details.

Help ProPublica Investigate the World of Subprime Car Loans

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Alaska officials have announced plans to help Anchorage city prosecutors take criminal cases to trial days after the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica reported the municipality has dropped hundreds of cases due to low staffing.

Normally, the city prosecutes misdemeanor crimes that occur within city limits while the state prosecutes felonies. Over the next six months, the two governments plan to work together to stem the wave of dismissals. Deputy Attorney General John Skidmore said Tuesday that his department would provide seven to 10 state attorneys to aid the city government.

Those prosecutors would supplement the 13 the city said it had on staff as of last week.

“Public safety is one of the primary goals of any government,” Skidmore said in a written statement. “The Department of Law is not staffed to take on all misdemeanor prosecutions in Anchorage, but we are working to lend a hand to protect the public as best we can while the municipal prosecutor’s office gets back on its feet.”

“Many of our prosecutors live in Anchorage, so for many of us this is our community too,” he said.

The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica reported that from May 1 through Oct. 2, the Anchorage municipal prosecutor’s office dismissed more than 930 misdemeanor criminal cases because the state’s 120-day deadline to bring defendants to trial had expired or was about to expire. That number has now exceeded 1,000 cases.

The cases included defendants charged with domestic violence, child abuse and driving under the influence.

City officials said employee turnover and resignations had left the municipality without enough attorneys. In an effort to clear out a backlog of cases this year, judges forced prosecutors to regularly examine which cases would be ready for trial within the 120 days, and the prosecutor’s office routinely lacked the staff to move forward in time.

Anchorage Municipal Attorney Eva Gardner previously said the city asked the state for help back in April, during the administration of then-Mayor Dave Bronson, but was rebuffed. Skidmore has said city officials did not explicitly ask for assistance at the April meeting.

Gardner, who began working for the city in July under new Mayor Suzanne LaFrance, said that when she learned of the apparent miscommunication, she called Skidmore, and city and state lawyers met Oct. 8 to discuss potential solutions.

“The state has a willingness to help, and it’s just a matter of figuring out the best way to do it,” she said.

Including dismissals through Oct. 9, the municipality has dropped at least 279 cases of domestic violence assault and 313 drunken driving cases since May 1 because it was not able to meet speedy-trial deadlines, according to the news organizations’ review of court recordings.

Skidmore said the state plans to loan attorneys from the Office of Special Prosecutions and the Anchorage district attorney’s office, along with some former prosecutors working within the Department of Law’s civil division.

The city had already been working to recruit new prosecutors by offering additional pay this year, and city officials have said those efforts are beginning to pay off.

Gardner said that after the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica revealed the mass dismissals on Oct. 13, she also heard from retired prosecutors who expressed an interest in helping the new municipal attorneys take cases to trial. The city is exploring that option as well, she said.

by Doug Bock Clark

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

A Georgia judge ruled this week that county election board members cannot block the certification of votes based on suspicions of fraud or error.

The ruling, if it stands, puts to rest the question of whether local election officials would be allowed to throw out individual precincts from county vote totals if they suspect fraud or error. A new rule adopted by the State Election Board appeared to allow such exclusions.

If county election board members were “free to play investigator, prosecutor, jury, and judge and so — because of a unilateral determination of error or fraud — refuse to certify election results, Georgia voters would be silenced,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in the ruling. “Our Constitution and our Election Code do not allow for that to happen.”

The ruling stems from a lawsuit brought by Julie Adams, a Republican member of Fulton County’s election board who is also part of a right-wing group that has raised doubts about the integrity of U.S. elections. Adams’ lawyer argued in court that the new election rule empowered county board members to refuse to certify votes they suspected of being tainted by fraud or error. This power, the lawyer argued, extended all the way to excluding entire precincts’ votes if they found something they considered suspicious in the returns.

A ProPublica examination found that if Adams’ interpretation of the rule had stood, election officials in just a handful of rural counties could have excluded enough votes to impact the outcome of the presidential race. After former President Donald Trump lost his reelection bid in 2020, Republican legislators in Georgia launched efforts to overhaul county election boards one at a time, sometimes unseating Democrats and stacking the boards with Trump backers. Election boards in Spalding, Troup and Ware counties, for instance, are now led by election skeptics, including one man who called President Joe Biden a “pedophile” and made sexually degrading comments about Vice President Kamala Harris. If the judge had accepted Adams’ argument, these county boards would have had the power to exclude the ballots of Democratic precincts that had provided roughly 8,000 more votes for Biden than Trump in 2020.

The chairman of Spalding County’s election board declined comment to ProPublica this month. The chair of Ware County’s board did not respond to requests for comment. William Stump, chair of Troup County’s board, said he doesn’t think anyone on the board is overtly partisan. “Everybody’s concern is to get the numbers right and get them out on time,” Stump said.

McBurney’s ruling made clear that excluding Democratic precincts’ votes would not be allowed. “If in the course of her canvassing, counting, and investigating,” a board member “should discover what appears to her to be fraud or systemic error, she still must count all votes,” McBurney wrote. The correct way forward is for the board member to “report her concerns about fraud or error ‘to the appropriate district attorney,’” as stated in Georgia law, not do the work of professional investigators herself.

If interested parties want to dispute the result, the long-standing pathway is by contesting the election in court. “Importantly, election contests occur in open court, under the watchful eye of a judge and the public,” McBurney wrote. “The claims of fraud from one side are tested by the opposing side in that open court — rather than being silently ‘adjudicated’ by” county board members “outside the public space, resulting in votes being excluded from the final count without due process being afforded those electors.”

The ruling is the latest development in a legal battle about whether county election board members have the power to delay or block the certification of election results — a power experts warned could affect the outcome of the presidential election in November. Many of those experts emphasize, however, that certification has long been interpreted as a nondiscretionary duty for election board members.

Much of that legal battle was driven by Adams, the Fulton County board member and the regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network, a right-wing organization led by a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. Going against over a century of legal precedent, Adams voted against certifying the March presidential primary election, saying she needed more information to investigate the results, but was outvoted by the Democratic majority. She then sued the board and the county’s election director, asking for the court to find that her certification duties, among others responsibilities, “are, in fact, discretionary, not ministerial.”

Then, behind the scenes, Adams began working to change the rules for certifying elections in Georgia, pushing activists to bring forward a rule for the State Election Board to adopt that would vastly expand the power of county board members to not certify votes they deemed suspicious, as ProPublica reported. When that rule was first brought before the State Election Board, members voted it down as illegal. However, in August, after one moderate Republican member was forced off the board and replaced, the new majority, each of whom Trump praised by name at a rally, passed a version of the rule almost identical to the one that the previous majority had found to be illegal.

In back-to-back bench trials at the beginning of October, McBurney heard Adams’ case, along with a similar one that pitted the Democratic and Republican national committees against each other over whether the certification of election results was mandatory. McBurney’s ruling only directly addressed Adams’ lawsuit.

Adams had also asked in her lawsuit for the court to grant her greater access to election-related documents and information before certifying the vote. McBurney ruled that this information should be granted to her, but that tardiness in receiving it did not allow her to refuse to certify election results.

“This suit was brought to ensure Ms. Adams had access to all the election material she needs in order to ensure Fulton County elections are free from irregularities, and to have the ability to challenge irregularities in election results,” said Richard Lawson, a lawyer for Adams and the Center for Litigation at the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-allied think tank. “This order preserves her rights in both regards.”

The ruling makes clear that the avenues that county board members can use to challenge election results they deem suspicious are the same ones as before the lawsuit and do not include delaying certification.

“It is my belief that having access to the entire election process will allow every board member to know and have confidence in the true and accurate results before the time for certification,” Adams said in a statement provided by Lawson.

Kristin Nabers, the Georgia state director for All Voting is Local, a voting rights advocacy organization, said in a statement, “Georgia voters won today against a shameless attempt from a prominent election denier who tried to turn the long-standing, routine duty of certification into a discretionary decision for election officials when they don’t like the election results.”

Experts expect the ruling to be appealed, which means a final determination could come much closer to the election.

Neither Adams nor Lawson answered questions via email about whether they planned to appeal.

McBurney did not issue a ruling in the second case he heard alongside Adams’ about another new rule that experts have warned could be used to disrupt the election by dragging an ill-defined “reasonable inquiry” past tight certification deadlines. However, McBurney wrote that a county board member “‘shall’ certify her jurisdiction’s election returns” by the state deadline.

The legal battles around the State Election Board rules are continuing. On Tuesday, McBurney heard arguments in a different case from Cobb County’s election board asserting that multiple other new rules exceed the state board’s authority. That night, he issued an order blocking the implementation of a rule requiring election workers to hand-count ballots, warning it could lead to “administrative chaos.” On Wednesday, another judge heard a similar Republican-led lawsuit against the State Election Board over the new rules. The board has faced at least seven lawsuits over its recent changes to rules and related actions.

McBurney in his ruling signaled an impatience with the efforts to change election rules, writing that “key participants in the State’s election management system have increasingly sought to impose their own rules and approaches that are either inconsistent with or flatly contrary to the letter of these laws.”

Heather Vogell contributed reporting.

by Phoebe Petrovic, Wisconsin Watch

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Wisconsin Watch. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Right-wing strategists still talk about what happened in Detroit in 2020, when poll watchers stood outside the absentee ballot counting center, banging on windows and shouting “Stop the count!” Conspiracy theories swirled that those volunteers had been kept out while something corrupt was unfolding inside. In fact, at one point the facility held almost double the number of permitted poll watchers of both parties.

But the theories continue spreading four years later. “They kick people out that are observers, and they put cardboard over the window, and you’re supposed to trust what’s going on behind the cardboard?” Lance Wallnau, a leading Christian right influencer, said at an Arizona tent revival in April.

Ahead of the 2024 election, activists have taken steps to get closer to the action. A coalition of activists on the political right, many of whom have promoted false claims about election fraud, is recruiting poll workers to administer the process themselves rather than watching from the outside. The groups are urging people to work at their local polling stations and to report perceived irregularities to those groups’ external hotlines — something that could risk violating the law.

“Poll watcher is the person where you get kicked out if chicanery happens,” Mercedes Sparks, who works for Wallnau, said at the same tent revival, explaining the recruitment initiative. “If you’re a poll worker, you’re the one doing the chicanery, so you can lock the door. You can kick everybody out.”

Sparks said by email that her remarks were a “lighthearted joke,” and that she and Wallnau “make it clear that everyone must follow election laws.” Wallnau did not respond to multiple calls, emails or a list of detailed questions.

The politicized effort to recruit poll workers is concentrated in at least six swing states. ProPublica and Wisconsin Watch reviewed dozens of hours of trainings and presentations, some closed to the press, in which activists discussed their plans.

Activists, including Wallnau, have told recruits they can be a “spy in the camp” or “Trojan horse” on Election Day. But while elections officials in more than a dozen swing-state counties said safeguards are in place to prevent interference, they and elections experts warned of a bigger threat: delegitimizing the process. If poll workers report their experiences to groups with a history of spreading false claims about election fraud, they may help further distrust in the system and results.

“I would be concerned about a repository of alleged fraud like that being used as fodder for misinformation,” said Jonathan Diaz, director of voting advocacy and partnerships at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “If it’s used to perpetuate conspiracy theories and false narratives about our election system, I think you could end up doing a lot of harm.”

Poll watcher is the person where you get kicked out if chicanery happens. If you’re a poll worker, you’re the one doing the chicanery, so you can lock the door. You can kick everybody out.

—Mercedes Sparks

The Republican and Democratic parties have historically recruited poll workers, and almost every state legally requires some amount of partisan balance. Ahead of 2024, Republicans have accused officials in five Michigan and Wisconsin cities of unfairly overlooking their nominees and overstaffing polling places with Democrats. The challenges in Flint, Michigan, and Madison, Wisconsin, were dismissed (one by a court, the other by the Wisconsin Elections Commission), and Republican applicants in some places have since filed the required paperwork and signed up; other challenges are ongoing.

What’s newer is groups outside the parties making concerted efforts to recruit poll workers themselves. The Election Integrity Network, founded by Cleta Mitchell, a former lawyer for ex-President Donald Trump, began enlisting poll workers during the 2022 midterms. Now, more groups have joined it. These include True the Vote, whose claims formed the basis of the widely debunked and eventually retracted film “2000 Mules,” which claimed to show election fraud, and The Lion of Judah, a group aspiring to be the “Christian version of the NRA” that is traveling to swing states with Wallnau to recruit conservative Christian poll workers.

Late last month, Trump’s vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, lent Wallnau’s efforts credibility by appearing at a tour stop in Pennsylvania.

It is unknown how many poll workers these groups have recruited, in part because they aren’t saying and in part because election offices don’t ask people about their motivation.

“You have a clear admission publicly of what the game is, that they fundamentally assume that our election systems are corrupt, and so they believe that it is their job to corrupt them in their own direction,” Matthew Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, said of Sparks’ remarks.

Taylor, whose new book documents the role of Christian right leaders like Wallnau in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, said the “propaganda value” of having someone inside the voting system, who “presents quote unquote evidence of election fraud that does not stand up in court, that is completely debunked later on,” is still enormous and bad for democracy.

Wallnau talks to attendees at the Pittsburgh-area stop of his Courage Tour in September. (Stephanie Strasburg for ProPublica) First image: At the Courage Tour event in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, Wallnau’s podcast hosted vice presidential candidate JD Vance, left, for a discussion on addiction and homelessness with Pastor Jason Howard. Second image: Attendees worship during the Courage Tour. Manny and Mary Ann King, front, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, drove hours to be there. (Stephanie Strasburg for ProPublica) “Stand Up. We’re Going to Induct You.”

Historically, campaigns, parties and advocacy groups have enlisted volunteer poll watchers to observe the process and flag concerns. In 2020, hundreds swarmed ballot-counting centers in states where the vote was close. On social media and in unsuccessful lawsuits, Trump claimed Republican poll watchers had witnessed fraud or were denied the chance to observe, fueling conspiracy theories that the contest had been stolen from him.

But poll watchers can only look and, in some states, raise challenges. Poll workers, on the other hand, are paid to help to physically administer the election. As temporary government employees, they may register voters, check identification, issue ballots and assist with equipment. In Arizona this year, they’ll also hand-count the envelopes for absentee ballots returned on Election Day. Until this week, they were going to hand-count ballots in Georgia too, but a state court judge blocked the rule.

That direct access to the voting is exactly what the activists are promising. In May, Wallnau brought his Courage Tour to a massive white tent an hour outside Detroit. He moved among the crowd, clasping his arms around believers as they swayed together to worship music. Later that day, he summoned them to their feet as he issued a holy assignment: to serve as poll workers.

“Who here is bothered about the election integrity issue?” Wallnau asked. “Who is interested in obeying God, election integrity and getting paid to do it? All right, stand up. We’re going to induct you.”

Dozens in the crowd stood, heads bowed and arms raised.

“I pray for an anointing. Angels will go with them, and they’ll expose the hidden works of darkness,” Wallnau said. “They’ll be led to discover whatever nefarious things are being done by the darkness.”

Wallnau did similar recruiting in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, directing attendees to Lion of Judah. The organization, which features Trump prominently on its website, offers a free course titled “Fight the Fraud,” with modules detailing poll workers’ basic duties and helping people find their local elections offices so they can apply as well as email templates to streamline the process. It tells students that “election workers matter now more than ever” because the “threat of election fraud is a serious concern” and “what happened in 2020 can never happen again!”

At a Wallnau event outside Pittsburgh last month, Greg Pontinen of Murrysville, Pennsylvania, said he decided to register as a poll worker after speaking with an activist soliciting support for administering elections by hand-counting paper ballots.

“It just seems like there’s a lot of controversy, and there’s a lot of people that have been in a lot of anguish over the last election, of improprieties and rigged elections,” he said. “I think if you have oversight on that, you have less chance of that, and I think that’s a firsthand chance for me to actually watch for that.”

Greg Pontinen, a Pittsburgh-area Courage Tour volunteer, decided to register as a poll worker after talking to an activist soliciting support for administering elections by hand-counting ballots. (Stephanie Strasburg for ProPublica)

Although Lion of Judah’s course notes that poll workers “must be impartial and follow strict guidelines to maintain the integrity of the electoral process,” it also instructs workers who “encounter any type of voter fraud” to email their hotline with “any proof if available.” Joshua Standifer, founder of Lion of Judah, has referred to his strategy as a “Trojan Horse.” On stage in Michigan, he agreed as Wallnau told the crowd: “When they kick everyone else out, you’re the spy in the camp.”

Standifer said in an interview that by “Trojan Horse,” he means his program is a way to place principled Christians where they might not otherwise be. And he described the hotline as a tool to reassure whistleblowers that they’re “safe” and supported, as well as to ensure problems get “dealt with either officially or in the court of public opinion.”

But state laws often detail a strict chain of command poll workers must follow on Election Day, including when they encounter possible issues, and prohibit the sharing of private voter information. By reporting information outside the polling place, elections workers risk violating their oaths of office or even state law, said Lauren Miller Karalunas, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice who has reviewed poll worker statutes in 11 swing states.

“Our objective is to encourage Christians to engage peacefully, ethically, and legally within the system,” Standifer said by email. “Any suggestion that we are encouraging inappropriate behavior is simply false and part of an ongoing effort to discourage Christians from participating in civic processes.”

Like Lion of Judah, True the Vote has established a repository to receive complaints and concerns from poll workers on Election Day: an app called VoteAlert. The platform asks users to submit information and to specify if they are poll workers, because “it helps us to better anticipate a way in which to potentially support or find resources for you, if you’re serving,” founder Catherine Engelbrecht said during a virtual training in September. The app includes a disclaimer that users agree to follow federal and state laws limiting the ability to record in polling places.

She said her team vets every report before posting it on its platform. However, the public feed included a report that a polling place in Delaware held a bake sale enticing people to vote for certain candidates, which would be illegal. The post contained a photograph that a reverse image search revealed was at least seven years old.

Engelbrecht said she would review details about the bake sale report but otherwise declined to comment. The organization said by email the post “was part of our beta testing period” before its app launched. After the ProPublica-Wisconsin Watch inquiry, the group removed the post.

Many of those recruiting poll workers have connections to Trump or his allies. Lion of Judah’s most recent Tennessee annual corporation filing, obtained through a public records request, was submitted by Miles Terry, an attorney whose law firm partner represented Trump in his first impeachment proceeding. Terry did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.

First image: Joshua Standifer, left, founder of The Lion of Judah, on stage with Wallnau at the Pittsburgh-area stop of the Courage Tour. Standifer took the stage to call for Christians to work in positions of influence in government, especially as election workers for the coming presidential election. Second image: A banner for Lion of Judah’s push for Christians to work as poll workers. (Stephanie Strasburg for ProPublica)

Mitchell, who leads Election Integrity Network, served on Trump’s legal team during his attempts to overturn the 2020 election result. Since 2022, EIN has promoted becoming a poll worker, directing people to “become part of the election apparatus” in their communities. EIN affiliates in Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin have made efforts to recruit and train poll workers in 2024. Mitchell and another EIN leader did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.

During a June livestream on the video-sharing platform Rumble, former Trump Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli directed an audience of about 10,000 to EIN’s website to sign up as poll workers. What “can make the most difference without changing the laws,” Cuccinelli said, “is getting more of our folks inside the polling places, not as poll watchers, but as election officials, the ones who actually sign people in in the poll books, the ones who actually count the ballots.” Reached by phone, Cuccinelli said he takes every opportunity to encourage people to become poll workers and often refers them to EIN for training.

His remarks came during regular “election security” livestreams hosted on Rumble by Florida businessman and local Republican Party leader Steve Stern. Stern declined an interview.

In April, Christina Norton, director of election integrity for the Republican National Committee, told the livestream audience that its poll watchers and workers were the “heart of this mission.” When they encounter problems on Election Day, Norton said, they should “immediately report that issue back to the Republican headquarters, back to our war rooms, and then we are able to answer, mitigate or escalate these problems to resolve them in real time.” An RNC spokesperson said Norton meant that only observers should contact the war room but did not respond to requests for clarification and whether the request asked workers to break the law.

An attendee signs in upon entering the Republican National Committee’s Protect the Vote Tour in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, in September. (Joe Timmerman/Wisconsin Watch) The Worry Is Not Disruption but Distrust

Poll worker recruits could try to disrupt the process by challenging voters’ eligibility to cast ballots. There have been isolated instances of more extreme interference. In June, an Arizona election worker was charged with stealing a magnetic security key to a vote-tabulating machine, and, in 2022, a Michigan worker was charged with copying voter information onto a personal flash drive. The Arizona worker is awaiting trial, while the Michigan worker’s case was dismissed, though the dismissal is being appealed.

But elections officials across the country said there are a number of provisions to prevent poll workers from interfering with voting and ballot counting.

Zach Manifold, elections supervisor in Gwinnett County, Georgia, outside Atlanta, explained that poll workers must receive official training and swear an oath of office — procedures statutorily required in most states — and can be dismissed for impropriety at any time.

“I always tell people, if you’re skeptical of the process, you should be a poll official, because — spoiler alert for them — it’s a really tough job, a really long day, and they work really hard, and there’s a lot of safeguards in place,” Manifold said.

Temporary workers, for instance, are often assigned to work on teams of at least two. And there are detailed processes for documenting who touched vote-related material and when. Administrators also try to pair new workers with experienced ones and strive to staff members of both parties at the polls.

“During our training, that is a pretty big point that we hit home is that when you are an election worker, you are nonpartisan,” said George Guthrie of the Washoe County Registrar of Voters in Nevada. “You’re there to essentially do a job, and that job is to make sure people have the opportunity to vote.”

I always tell people, if you’re skeptical of the process, you should be a poll official, because — spoiler alert for them — it’s a really tough job, a really long day, and they work really hard, and there’s a lot of safeguards in place.

—Zach Manifold, elections supervisor in Gwinnett County, Georgia

Some administrators also noted that they and their staff will be vigilant for workers with ulterior motives. “If you’re going there to disrupt, it’s going to be obvious very quickly, and you’re going to be removed, and if it’s something that’s criminal, you’re going to be prosecuted,” said Jerry Holland, supervisor of elections in Duval County, Florida, home to Jacksonville.

Despite Election Day safeguards, some groups also suggest that they could use poll worker testimony in lawsuits challenging the electoral process. United Sovereign Americans, a group that claims to have identified widespread voter fraud, has shared such a plan on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast.

“We’re not saying, like, hey, maybe we’ll file a lawsuit down the road,” founder Marly Hornik said on the show. “We’re saying we already have attorneys writing these lawsuits. What we need is your reports to fill in as those are going to constitute the exhibits.”

In an interview, Hornik said her group is nonpartisan and insisted it is not seeking to disrupt the election. But it is planning to request injunctions stopping the certification of election results in some states.

“We’re not disrupting the election,” she said. “The officials who are supposed to run a legitimate process are refusing to do so.”

Attorneys at the Institute for Responsive Government and the Brennan Center said these efforts will likely fail. The Brennan Center has filed an amicus brief in opposition to a United Sovereign Americans’ lawsuit in Maryland; that suit has been dismissed and the group is appealing.

Beyond the courts, elections administrators and experts point to the broader risks of introducing misconceptions or falsehoods in the court of public opinion.

David Levine, an elections administration consultant, has studied how Trump and others have taken advantage of human errors in service of election fraud narratives, leading to threats and harassment. That warning was borne out both by Special Counsel Jack Smith and a congressional investigation, which have laid the blame for the Capitol violence with the falsehoods spread by Trump and his team.

“Perhaps the most troublesome aspect of this is that when you tell people that there could be fraud around every corner, you certainly can trigger them,” Levine said. “If people who are recruited and receptive to these claims become election workers, and their preferred candidate, or candidates, do not win, they can become very angry, and, as we saw in 2020, take matters into their own hands.”

Update, Oct. 17, 2024: This story has been updated to reflect new court rulings on Georgia’s election rules.

Anna Clark, Mary Hudetz, Andy Kroll, Megan O’Matz and Doug Bock Clark of ProPublica and Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio contributed reporting. Mollie Simon of ProPublica and Ava Menkes of Wisconsin Watch contributed research.

by Brett Murphy

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In one of its most direct and sweeping warnings to date, the Biden administration told Israeli government officials on Sunday that if they did not improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza in the next 30 days, the U.S. could reevaluate its military support, which has flowed largely without pause for more than a year.

In a letter to Israel’s ministers of defense and strategic affairs, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III said they were writing to “underscore the U.S. government’s deep concern over the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza, and seek urgent and sustained actions by your government this month to reverse this trajectory.” The letter was first reported by Israeli media and confirmed Tuesday by the State Department’s top spokesperson.

Last month, ProPublica detailed how the U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance — the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department’s refugees bureau — concluded this past spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza. Those experts determined that weapons sales should be halted under a U.S. law, known as the Foreign Assistance Act, that requires the government to cut off military aid to a country that is blocking humanitarian efforts.

Blinken rejected their findings and, weeks later, told Congress that the State Department had concluded that Israel was not arbitrarily blocking aid. After the U.S. government raised concerns, the Israelis promised to allow more aid to flow.

Those pledges do not appear to have been met. According to Blinken and Austin’s letter, September was the worst month for relief efforts in the past year. The amount of aid has dropped by more than 50% since the spring. Israelis halted imports to Palestinian civilians, denied or impeded 90% of humanitarian movements between northern and southern Gaza last month, and imposed onerous new requirements for trucks carrying critical supplies, the letter says.

Children sift through waste at a landfill in the southern Gaza Strip on Oct. 15, 2024. (Bashar Taleb/AFP/Getty Images)

When asked about ProPublica’s previous reporting in September, Blinken told morning news programs he had evaluated input from several sources and made a decision that the Israelis weren’t deliberately blocking the aid. “We found that Israel needed to do a better job on the humanitarian assistance,” he allowed. “We’ve seen improvements since then. It’s still not sufficient.”

The State Department did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment Tuesday, but in a press conference, agency spokesperson Matthew Miller said that the letter was the latest effort to pressure the Israelis to address the crisis and that their improvements in the spring did not last. “The levels have not been sustained,” Miller said. “We are going to respond to events as they happen.”

“We know that it’s possible to get humanitarian assistance into Gaza,” he added.

Annelle Sheline, a former State Department official who resigned in protest earlier this year, said Sunday’s letter is a “clear acknowledgement that the administration knows” the Foreign Assistance Act is being violated. “This,” she added, “renders Israel ineligible to receive American weapons or security assistance.”

Responding to a similar criticism, Miller said, “We believe it’s appropriate to give them another 30 days to cure the problem.”

The humanitarian crisis has reached a critical stage, experts warn. The United Nations and other aid groups have become increasingly vocal about the deteriorating situation ahead of the winter. And an Al Jazeera documentary released in late September showed how Palestinian children had died of malnutrition.

On Monday, an Israeli military unit said it had allowed 30 trucks through a crossing in northern Gaza. “Israel is not preventing the entry of humanitarian aid, with an emphasis on food, into Gaza,” the unit wrote. “Israel will continue to allow the entry of humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza, while simultaneously destroying Hamas’ military and governance infrastructures.” A spokesperson for the Israeli government did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In the letter, Blinken and Austin make several specific demands of the Israelis, including allowing a minimum of 350 trucks per day through the four border crossings and opening up a fifth. They also warned the Israelis to not force civilians to evacuate from northern Gaza to the south.

“Failure to demonstrate a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining these measures,” they wrote, “may have implications for U.S. policy.”

In addition, they called for a new channel to discuss civilian deaths. “Our engagements to date have not produced the necessary outcomes,” they wrote. At least 42,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli operations since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack last year, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, an agency in the Hamas-controlled government.

by Vianna Davila and Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, James Barragán, The Texas Tribune, and Natalia Contreras, Votebeat

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is produced in collaboration with The Texas Tribune and Votebeat. Sign up for newsletters from The Texas Tribune and from Votebeat.

In late August, with a hotly contested presidential election less than three months away, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott boasted that the state had removed more than 1 million ineligible voters from its rolls, including more than 6,500 noncitizens.

The Republican governor said the Texas secretary of state’s office was turning over nearly 2,000 of those characterized as noncitizens to Attorney General Ken Paxton for investigation because records showed they had a voting history.

“Illegal voting in Texas will never be tolerated,” Abbott said in a press release.

The former registered voters whom Abbott called noncitizens, and the other people removed from the rolls since September 2021, were taken off through a routine practice local election officials conduct that includes culling the names of people who have moved or died. Election experts have urged caution in using the numbers to make definitive statements about registered noncitizens.

But Abbott did just that, initially stating in his news release that thousands of noncitizens had been stripped from the rolls.

His office then edited the press release after publication, softening it by adding the word “potential” before noncitizens.

The news release, put out Aug. 26, initially said “6,500 noncitizens” were removed from the rolls. By Aug. 28, the statement had been updated online to say “6,500 potential noncitizens.” (Highlight added by ProPublica)

Abbott’s claims helped to fan ongoing unsubstantiated Republican allegations that noncitizens plan to cast ballots en masse to sway elections for Democrats, assertions that former President Donald Trump and his party are using to cast doubt on the integrity of the upcoming November election.

An investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and Votebeat, however, found that the governor’s claims about noncitizens on the rolls appear inflated and, in some cases, wrong.

The secretary of state’s office identified 581 people, not 6,500, as noncitizens, according to a report it gave Abbott in late August that the newsrooms obtained through a public information request.

In response to questions about the basis for Abbott’s larger number, the secretary of state’s office told the news organizations that it had “verbally” provided the governor’s office with a separate number of people removed from the rolls who failed to respond to letters alerting them that there were questions about their citizenship.

The governor’s news release combined the two figures.

That means U.S. citizens who simply never received or responded to such letters are almost certainly included in Abbott’s 6,500 number. Abbott did not respond to requests for comment, and Secretary of State Jane Nelson declined to be interviewed.

After attempting to contact more than 70 people across both categories, the news organizations have so far found at least nine U.S. citizens in three Texas counties who were incorrectly labeled as noncitizens or removed from the rolls because they did not respond to the letters about their citizenship. In each case, they showed reporters copies of their birth certificates to confirm their citizenship, or reporters verified their citizenship using state records.

One of them is 21-year-old Jakylah Ockleberry.

Ockleberry, a native Texan who provided the news organizations with a copy of her birth certificate, had only left the state twice in her life, including a recent trip to California.

She had no idea Travis County had mislabeled her as a noncitizen until the news organizations contacted her. “How would something like that happen?”

When the governor’s press release came out, election experts and local officials were worried about cases such as Ockleberry’s, saying the press release implied officials had confirmed the noncitizen status of 6,500 people when they had not.

Five years ago, Texas officials suggested that nearly 100,000 noncitizens were registered to vote and that nearly half of them had cast ballots. Those claims quickly unraveled under scrutiny and spurred a lawsuit and settlement that now governs how Texas can flag someone as a potential noncitizen.

Asked whether the nine people the news organizations identified as U.S. citizens were included in Abbott’s latest figure, the secretary of state’s office said it could not confirm or deny the inclusion of any specific people. Local election officials said they don’t know which voters were included in Abbott’s tally, but emphasized the data originates at the county level.

The discrepancies show the pitfalls inherent in using this data to make assertions about noncitizens.

In Ockleberry’s case, as well as those of four others the newsrooms identified in Travis County, election workers should have selected a code that indicated the voters had moved. Instead, they mistakenly selected a code for noncitizens.

Bruce Elfant, the Travis County tax assessor-collector and voter registrar, acknowledged the errors made by his office. But he also said the numbers suggested that noncitizen voting “is an infinitesimal, small issue.”

Routine maintenance of voter rolls is important, and if noncitizens are registered, they should be removed, said Marc Meredith, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on election administration.

But Meredith said Abbott’s decision to announce without explanation that 6,500 noncitizens were removed from the rolls, and to initially do so without qualifying that these were only potential noncitizens, “reduces trust in the Texas voter registration process in an unnecessary way.”

Routine Maintenance, Political Purpose

Voter rolls are naturally fluid. People move, die, become citizens and turn 18. Election officials across the country are constantly adding and removing people for legitimate reasons.

“So long as we have requirements about keeping lists clean, and so long as we don’t have a police state that has a single database with all of our names in it, like in much of the rest of the world, including democratic nations, we’re going to come across these sorts of problems,” said Charles Stewart III, director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab.

Elfant, for one, said he was frustrated by Abbott’s public promotion of voter removal data. He said the governor’s press release created confusion among residents who feared they might have been wrongly removed and would not be able to cast ballots in the upcoming presidential election.

“It scared a lot of people. We’ve received a lot of phone calls and emails from people who are concerned that they’re not on the voter rolls,” Elfant said.

Any number of things can trigger a question about a voter’s eligibility.

For example, county registrars contact anyone who has marked on a jury summons that they’re not a citizen. The registrars need to confirm if that’s true, because it would mean the person is also ineligible to vote. The secretary of state’s office also gets information weekly from the Texas Department of Public Safety about people who have signed up for licenses and state identification and identified themselves as noncitizens. That information is then sent to counties.

In such cases, county election officials must follow up. They are required by law to notify voters and give them 30 days to respond before they’re removed from the rolls.

But election officials know those safeguards don’t always work.

“The post office messes up. We get a lot of cards back or mail back that says ‘undeliverable’ and the person will be like, ‘I’ve lived at this address for 20 years and I’ve never moved,’” said Trudy Hancock, elections administrator in Republican-leaning Brazos County, home to Texas A&M University. “So you have to consider that there are outside circumstances that can affect our efforts to reach them.”

Failure to respond to a letter questioning someone’s citizenship is not a confirmation that they are not a citizen, election officials said.

The 2019 episode, when the secretary of state’s office announced that it had identified 95,000 registered voters as potential noncitizens and said that more than half of them had previously cast ballots, highlighted failures in the process.

Paxton, the attorney general, immediately turned to social media, posting “VOTER FRAUD ALERT.” Abbott thanked Paxton and the secretary of state’s office on Twitter for “uncovering and investigating this illegal vote registration.” Trump also piled on with a tweet calling the state’s numbers “just the tip of the iceberg.”

Voting rights groups sued, decrying the state’s efforts as deliberate attempts to suppress the votes of actual citizens. Texas’ assertions didn’t hold up. Many of the flagged registered voters turned out to be naturalized citizens whom the state incorrectly identified as ineligible because it was using outdated DPS data from driver’s license and state identification card applications. (DPS did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

The state settled the case and agreed to only flag people with the secretary of state’s office if they identify as noncitizens when applying for a new ID with DPS and if they previously registered to vote.

State officials should be transparent about how they arrived at the latest assertions, said David Becker, executive director and founder of The Center for Election Innovation & Research.

The state appears to have presented a figure without fully explaining its methodology or double-checking the information, said Becker, who is a former senior trial attorney in the voting section of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

If the governor presented this data in a court of law without evidence, Becker believes it wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny.

“Their claims would likely be dismissed until they could come up with something that actually documents how they got to those numbers,” he said.

Labeled Noncitizens

When Justin Comer, 29, heard that the state had removed thousands of noncitizens from the voter rolls, it never occurred to him that he might be one of them. Comer was born in Harris County, the home of Houston, and grew up in conservative Montgomery County just outside the city. He said he’d been registered to vote there since he was 18 and had cast ballots in presidential elections since then.

“I’ve always been interested in especially local politics, and just making sure I stay up to date with that,” Comer said in a phone interview. “I’m always pushing my wife now, I’m like, ‘Hey, we need to stay active in that respect and do our part.’”

It wasn’t until the news organizations contacted him that he made the connection between a peculiar voter registration issue he encountered last year and the Republican leaders’ sweeping noncitizen voting claims.

In 2023, he received a notice from the county elections office that he’d been flagged as a potential noncitizen. He needed to show proof of his citizenship in the next 30 days or his registration would be canceled. The letter Comer received indicated he’d said he wasn’t a citizen in a response to a jury summons. Comer assumes he clicked the wrong button when responding to the notice online; he had meant to reply that he had moved. He’s now registered to vote in Collin County, where he lives.

“I was more just confused,” Comer said. “I’ve lived in Texas my whole life. It was never a question for me.”

In some cases, it’s unclear what happened. Diana Colon spent much of her life in the mountains of Puerto Rico, in the town of Aibonito, but moved to El Paso County on the far western edge of Texas in 2018 to be closer to her daughter.

She was surprised when she learned the county had kicked her off its voter rolls after she apparently failed to respond to a question about her citizenship. Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, and she is an American citizen. She showed a copy of her birth certificate to a reporter.

“That’s crazy,” she said.

Colon does not recall registering to vote, though the county said it received an application from her at some point in which she did not answer a question about her citizenship. Public information the county provided the news organizations indicated she was flagged as a potential noncitizen in DPS data.

Colon has since moved to California but would like to return to the El Paso area and would register to vote, if only to clear up the fact that she can. “I wouldn’t like people saying I’m not a U.S. citizen,” she said in an interview.

There are almost certainly additional U.S. citizens among the thousands of removed voters Abbott characterized as noncitizens. For example, reporters identified Texas birth certificates for another two voters whose registrations in Montgomery County were canceled for not responding to questions about their citizenship. The news organizations could not reach those voters for comment.

Noncitizens have occasionally voted, but experts say these cases are rare and there is no evidence that they affect election outcomes. Noncitizens who vote face criminal penalties, including the loss of their residency status and deportation. In 2017, Rosa Ortega, a U.S. permanent resident living in North Texas, said she believed her green card authorized her to vote and cast five ballots over a decade. A Tarrant County jury convicted her of voter fraud and sentenced her to eight years in prison.

Meredith, the University of Pennsylvania elections expert, said he wouldn’t be surprised if some people removed from the Texas rolls are indeed noncitizens who had cast ballots in a previous election. But that doesn’t mean the problem is widespread. “You shouldn’t use the fact there may be a few as evidence that it happens all the time,” Meredith said.

Reporters also found some noncitizens, including two who said they had inadvertently registered after receiving what they said were unsolicited voter registration applications, an ongoing concern for Republicans who believe this kind of outreach will result in large numbers of noncitizens signing up to cast a ballot. One got the application from a voting advocacy group. But the other got it while filling out other state paperwork.

In both cases, they had truthfully filled out the form and said they were noncitizens. Neither voted. Election workers in the two counties involved, Collin and Travis, said those voter registration applications should not have been processed because the applicants identified themselves as noncitizens and both people were added to the rolls through clerical error.

One of them, Austin resident Son Mai, had no idea he had ever been on the rolls until a reporter contacted him.

The news organizations viewed three voter registration applications from Mai in which he checked a box saying he was not a U.S. citizen. They interviewed Mai, who is originally from Vietnam and speaks limited English, through an interpreter.

Mai, who has been a permanent resident and green card holder for over 40 years, receives Social Security disability benefits and food stamps. Voter registration applications are included with that paperwork, which he believes is how he was mistakenly signed up.

However, Mai always marked that he is not a U.S. citizen on the forms, the county confirmed. As a result, Travis County should have automatically rejected his application, but elections officials said he was accidentally added to the rolls instead. The county confirmed Mai has never voted, though he said he hopes to become a naturalized citizen.

“I told them I couldn’t vote,” he told the reporters. “I never vote.”

Building a Case

With the election less than a month away, claims about noncitizen voting have continued to ratchet up despite numerous elections experts saying such instances are very rare. These efforts can have significant consequences.

The Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit last month in Nevada alleging that nearly 4,000 noncitizens may have cast ballots in the 2020 presidential election and that thousands could vote in the coming election. (Nevada’s former secretary of state, who is Republican, did not find evidence to substantiate the 2020 claims during an investigation at the time).

Last month, the Justice Department filed suit against Alabama after its secretary of state flagged more than 3,000 alleged noncitizens and instructed county officials to remove any noncitizens from their voter rolls, although systemic voter roll cleaning is illegal so close to a federal election. In a statement, the Justice Department said its review found that naturalized and native-born American citizens had been caught up in the effort.

In Texas, both Abbott and Paxton have promoted claims of noncitizens seeking to vote in the November election.

On a single day in August, Paxton said his office would investigate an allegation that nonprofits were setting up booths outside state driver’s license offices and signing up noncitizens to vote, which followed an unfounded claim peddled by a Fox News host, and announced his agency had raided homes in three South Texas counties to investigate allegations of voter fraud. The next day, the attorney general appeared on the radio show of conservative personality Glenn Beck pushing debunked claims that President Joe Biden is allowing immigrants to enter the country illegally so they can vote for Democrats in elections.

In recent weeks, Paxton put out a flurry of news releases, continuing the hunt for noncitizen voters.

Paxton, who did not respond to a request for comment, sent a public letter to Nelson, the secretary of state, last month urging her to demand the federal government’s assistance in identifying potential noncitizens on the rolls.

But Nelson, a Republican and an Abbott appointee, apparently didn’t move aggressively enough for Paxton. In an Oct. 2 news release, the attorney general expressed frustration with Nelson, saying she had not provided the federal government any information about the possible noncitizens. He then asked Nelson’s office to provide him with the list of names so he could send it on to the government himself.

Hours later, Nelson provided Paxton the voter records for anyone who does not have a Texas driver’s license or identification card number on file in its statewide voter registration system. The list was accompanied by an explicit warning.

“The records do not reflect, and are in no way indicative of, a list of potential non-United States citizens on the State’s voter rolls,” Nelson wrote.

Dan Keemahill of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, Alejandra Martinez of The Texas Tribune and Thomas Wilburn of Votebeat contributed data research and reporting.

by Matt Krupnick for ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In the 1970s, Congress committed to funding a higher education system controlled by Indigenous communities. These tribal colleges and universities were intended to serve students who’d been disadvantaged by the nation’s history of violence and racism toward Native Americans, including efforts to eradicate their languages and cultures.

But walking through Little Big Horn College in Montana with Emerson Bull Chief, its dean of academics, showed just how far that idea has to go before becoming a reality. Bull Chief dodged signs warning “Keep out!” as he approached sheets of plastic sealing off the campus day care center. It was late April and the center and nearby cafeteria have been closed since January, when a pipe burst, flooding the building, the oldest at the 44-year-old college. The facilities remained closed into late September.

“Sometimes plants grow along here,” Bull Chief said nonchalantly as he turned down a hallway in the student union building.

Campus Snapshot: Little Big Horn College, Crow Agency, Montana

Little Big Horn College appears to be in better condition than most tribal schools, but expensive issues lurk below the surface. One of the newest buildings, a gym and wellness center, needs $1 million in repairs to its leaky roof. And with the day care center and cafeteria closed, it’s harder to attend classes for students with children and those who live too far away to drive home for meals. Sharon Peregoy, who teaches education and is a member of the Montana House of Representatives, lamented the chronic underfunding of tribal colleges and universities: “This is an atrocity. We’re getting pennies on the dollar.”

First image: Emerson Bull Chief, dean of academics, looks at leaky skylights. Second image: The closed cafeteria and child care center. (Matt Krupnick for ProPublica)

While the school appears to be in better condition than most tribal colleges, its roofs leak, sending rain through skylights in the gym and wellness center, which needs $1 million in repairs. An electronic sign marking the entrance has been sitting dark since a vehicle hit it months ago. College leaders said they have no idea when they will be able to afford repairs.

It’s a reality faced by many of the 37 schools in the system, which spans 14 states. Congress today grants the colleges a quarter-billion dollars per year less than the inflation-adjusted amount they should receive, ProPublica found.

President Joe Biden declared early in his term that tribal schools were a priority. Yet the meager funding increases he signed into law have done little to address decades of financial neglect. Further, the federal Bureau of Indian Education, tasked with requesting funding for the institutions, has never asked lawmakers to fully fund the colleges at levels called for in the law.

The outcome is crimped budgets and crumbling buildings in what the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights once called the “most poorly funded institutions of higher education in the country.” At a time when their enrollment is rising, the schools lack money to update academic programs and hire enough qualified instructors to train nurses, teachers and truck drivers and to prepare students to transfer to other universities. As they expand degree programs, their researchers are trying to conduct high-level work in old forts, warehouses and garages.

The laws that authorized the creation of the tribal colleges also guaranteed funding, which was set at $8,000 annually per student affiliated with a tribe, with adjustments for inflation. But the federal government has never funded schools at the level called for in the statute, and even experts struggle to explain the basis for current funding levels.

Since 2010, per-student funding has been as low as $5,235 and sits at just under $8,700 today, according to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which lobbies on behalf of the colleges in Washington. Had Congress delivered what’s required by statute, tribal colleges and universities would receive about $40,000 per student today.

The Bureau of Indian Education has not asked Congress for major funding increases for the bulk of the tribal colleges in the past three years, according to the agency’s budget documents, and congressional negotiations have done little to increase what they get.

The Bureau of Indian Education said in a written statement that when requesting funding, it follows guidelines set by the Department of the Interior and the White House. A department spokesperson directed ProPublica to the White House budget office for an explanation of the colleges’ funding; a spokesperson for the budget office declined an interview request and directed ProPublica back to the Interior Department.

Biden called the colleges “integral and essential” to their communities in a 2021 executive order that, among other things, established a tribal college initiative to determine systemic causes of education shortcomings and improve tribal schools and colleges. But while it has led to some forums and largely ceremonial events, that initiative has done next to nothing substantive, advocates say.

As funding has fallen behind the need, even the American Indian Higher Education Consortium — the schools’ primary pipeline to Congress and the Bureau of Indian Education — has asked for far less than the law says the colleges are entitled to. Its recent requests have been for around $11,000 per student.

Some people advocating for the tribal colleges have noted a frequent topic of debate: Should the schools ask for what they’re owed and risk angering lawmakers or just accept the meager amount they receive?

Separately, the colleges get very little for maintenance and capital improvements, money that isn’t part of the per-student funding.

Asked why the Bureau of Indian Education doesn’t better understand the facilities needs at tribal colleges, Sharon Pinto, the agency’s deputy director for school operations, said, “We really wouldn’t know that because the buildings located at these tribal colleges are not necessarily federal assets and they’re not in an inventory system.” In a follow-up email, the bureau said it was waiting for the colleges to let it know what their facility needs are.

Several college leaders and researchers said such responses are typical of a federal government that has routinely ignored its promises to Indigenous communities over the past two centuries.

Meredith McCoy, who is of Turtle Mountain Ojibwe descent and taught at the tribe’s college in North Dakota, noted that Native education is guaranteed by federal law and at least 150 treaties. Neglect of tribal colleges reflects a conscious decision by Congress and the federal government to dodge accountability, said McCoy, now an assistant professor at Carleton College who studies federal funding of tribal schools and colleges.

“The patterns of underfunding are so extreme that it’s hard not to see it as a systematic approach to underfunding Native people,” she said. “We’re teaching our children that it’s OK to make a promise and break it.”

An Outdated System

To evaluate the impact of the federal government’s underfunding of tribal colleges’ and universities’ academic mission, ProPublica sent a survey to the 34 fully accredited schools, of which 13 responded, and visited five campuses. Our reporting found classes being held in a former fort constructed more than a century ago; campuses forced to temporarily close because of electrical, structural and plumbing problems; broken pipes that destroyed equipment and disrupted campus life; and academic leaders who lack the resources to adequately address the issues, build new facilities and keep pace with growing enrollment.

The colleges that responded to the survey reported that they commonly have problems with foundations, roofs, electrical systems and water pipes because they couldn’t afford maintenance. One campus put the price tag for repairs at $100 million. Several noted they don’t have money to upgrade technology so students can keep pace with skills required by the job market.

Campus Snapshot: Diné College, Tsaile, Arizona

The country’s oldest tribal college, Diné routinely faces flooding, leaks and electrical outages on its main campus, not far from Canyon de Chelly National Monument. College leaders recently spent $30,000 to locate the source of a leak in the cafeteria, where the floor is criss-crossed with cracks. The school’s rodeo grounds are pocked with prairie dog holes, and roads to the mobile home park and hogans that house employees are mostly unpaved. Classes are sometimes canceled because of electrical outages. “I sleep with my ceiling fan going because I know if that stops, I’ll be getting a call,” said Claude Sandoval, a facilities manager.

First image: Maintenance foreman Wayne O’Daniel is concerned about peeling paint and crumbling concrete. Second image: O’Daniel shows where the floor of the cafeteria was repeatedly torn up. (Matt Krupnick for ProPublica)

The Bureau of Indian Education stated in its 2024 budget request that delays in addressing the problems only makes them more costly to fix. Continuing to ignore them could in some cases create “life-threatening situations for school students, staff, and visitors” and “interrupt educational programs for students, or force closure of the school,” the bureau told Congress.

But that same document did not request enough funding to fix the issues, college leaders say.

In 2021, Congress began providing $15 million per year for maintenance, to be shared by all tribal colleges. That has since increased to $16 million — less than $500,000 per college. The same year, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium estimated it would cost nearly half a billion dollars to catch up on deferred maintenance. Construction of new buildings would cost nearly twice that amount. The organization acknowledged the actual price tag could be far higher.

Tribal colleges are not allowed to raise taxes or use bond measures for basic academic or building costs.

The schools receive no federal funding for any non-Native students who attend. Their budgets were stretched even tighter by the COVID-19 pandemic, when non-Native enrollment rose sharply as classes moved online. It has remained above pre-pandemic levels.

The Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities Assistance Act of 1978, which funded the schools, contributes to confusion over what they should be paid. While it specifies base funding of $8,000 per student, it also notes that colleges will only be given what they need, without explaining how that should be calculated, and only when the government can afford it.

“When we think about the funding, it was set up for something that was needed 40 years ago,” said Ahniwake Rose, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium’s president. “What a school looked like and needed 40 years ago is absolutely not what it looks like and needs now.”

Few Alternatives for Funding

Though colleges and their representatives fault the Bureau of Indian Education, they say primary accountability falls on Congress.

ProPublica contacted 21 members of the U.S. House and Senate who either sit on an appropriations or Indian Affairs committee, or who represent a district or state with a tribal college to ask if they were aware of the condition of the campuses. Only Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a New Mexico Democrat, spoke to ProPublica. The others either didn’t respond or declined to be interviewed.

Leger Fernández, a member of the Indian and Insular Affairs subcommittee of the House Committee on Natural Resources, said she has pushed for the colleges to receive more funding but has been shut down by members of both parties, partly because of a lack of understanding about how they are funded.

Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a New Mexico Democrat, says she has pushed for more funding for tribal schools but got shut down. (Tom Williams/Getty Images)

“Our tribal colleges are part of our federal trust responsibility,” said Leger Fernández, whose district in northern and eastern New Mexico is home to three tribal colleges. “We made a commitment. This is an obligation the federal government has.”

Former U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who chaired the Senate Indian Affairs Committee before retiring in 2005, said the colleges lose out to louder voices in Washington, D.C. “Federal money is always caught in a tug-of-war between needs,” Campbell said. “The needs are always higher than the amount available.”

Yet tribal colleges have fewer alternatives for bolstering their budgets.

Many of the colleges are far from industrial centers and have few wealthy alumni, college leaders say, so private donations are rare and usually small.

Campus Snapshot: Oglala Lakota College, Kyle, South Dakota

The campus on the Pine Ridge reservation is beset by leaks that flood hallways and cause mold to grow on the walls. Employees in the library, housed in an old warehouse, use trash cans to catch rain and safeguard the archives packed with tribal artifacts and documents. The college is proud of its STEM programs, which operate out of another warehouse with bowed ceilings and no insulation, making for brutal winters. A lack of space makes it difficult to use scientific equipment, which often is stored in hallways. “We have good stuff, just a shabby place to put it,” said Misty Brave, whose jobs range from teaching to community outreach. “But we make do. It’s something our ancestors taught us to do.”

First image: A leak in a storage room is one of many on the campus. Second image: Misty Brave points out a broken window in a laboratory. (Matt Krupnick for ProPublica) Krystal Brave Eagle, who works at the Oglala Lakota College historical center, stands in front of the center’s photos of Oglala Lakota chiefs, including Little Wound, from whom she is descended. (Matt Krupnick for ProPublica)

“We don’t have the alumni who can afford to donate,” said Marilyn Pourier, the development director at South Dakota’s Oglala Lakota College, which is perched on a hill on the Pine Ridge reservation. “We get a pretty good response, but it’s not enough.”

The schools’ tuition is among the lowest in the nation, but college leaders are hesitant to raise it because most reservation residents already can’t afford it.

Naomi Miguel, the executive director of the White House tribal college initiative, said she plans to press states to contribute more to tribal colleges and universities. At the moment, most provide little or nothing.

“If the states would support the TCUs, they’d be supporting jobs in their communities,” said Miguel. “It benefits them overall to create this sustainable workforce.”

“A Saving Grace”

Shyler Martin stands in front of a hogan at Navajo Technical University, where she is a senior. (Kayla Jackson, special to ProPublica)

Proof of the value of tribal colleges and universities, advocates say, can be found in what they accomplish despite their meager funding.

Many are the only places teaching their tribes’ languages at a time when nearly all of the 197 Indigenous languages in the United States are endangered.

They are often among the few places in their communities with access to high-speed internet. Nearly 28% of residents of tribal lands lack high-speed internet access, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

And some Native students find that the schools are a more welcoming place to pursue a degree and prepare for a career.

Shyler Martin, who grew up on the Navajo Nation near Navajo Technical University, enrolled there after leaving New Mexico State University during her second year there. Now entering her senior year, Martin said it’s been a relief to learn from instructors who understand the pressures she faces as the oldest child of a Navajo family, with whom she shares responsibility for raising her younger sister.

“They’re culturally sensitive and understanding,” Martin said of Navajo Tech’s staff. “I’m a parent, and they do what they can to help you continue school.”

Yet her time at the college has included winter days when classrooms were so cold that students had to bring blankets and classes that were canceled at the last minute because of a shortage of qualified instructors.

Tribes would be in dire straits without the colleges, said Carmelita Lamb, a professor at the University of Mary in North Dakota who has taught at and studied tribal colleges.

“The tribal college has been a saving grace,” said Lamb, a member of the Lipan Band of Apache. “Had we never had the tribal colleges, I really shudder to think where we’d be now.”

The colleges keep doing the best they can, but some are finding it increasingly difficult.

Campus Snapshot: Chief Dull Knife College, Lame Deer, Montana

Mostly squeezed into a decrepit former rehabilitation center, the 7-acre campus’s infrastructure problems are visible the moment students approach the crumbling concrete stairs at the entrance. Snow pours into hallways through doors that don’t seal and wind whistles through electrical outlets. “When I want to keep my lunch cold, I just put it here,” said Dean of Academic Affairs Bill Briggs, pointing at a plug behind his desk. Chairs roll across a sloped office floor, and the metal-and-wood outer walls of the main building are rusted and rotting. Without money for new classrooms and residence halls, the college has trouble attracting students and maintaining sought-after programs such as nursing.

First image: Dean of Academic Affairs Bill Briggs inspects rotting wood. Second image: Briggs’ office was once a bedroom in a rehabilitation center. (Matt Krupnick for ProPublica) Chief Dull Knife College hasn’t been able to fund a planned $20 million academic building and ceremonial arbor. (Matt Krupnick for ProPublica)

At Chief Dull Knife, college leaders planned three years ago to build a modern structure with classrooms and a ceremonial arbor, but the estimated price — $14 million at the time — was already out of reach even before it ballooned to more than $20 million because of inflation. The plans haven’t been scrapped, but Bill Briggs, the dean of academic affairs, talks about them in the past tense.

“If we’re going to change the course of this country, everyone needs to have an opportunity,” Briggs said. “All we’re asking for is an opportunity to educate our students.”

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

On May 1, a man in Anchorage, Alaska, called 911 to say he had “beat” his wife, according to a court document supporting an assault charge against him. When police stepped through the door of Vernon Booth’s apartment, they found the victim’s face bloody and her eye nearly swollen shut, the prosecution said.

You’re late, the charging document says he told officers. “She could have been dead by now.”

Four months later, prosecutors dropped the charge. It wasn’t because police made a mistake that got evidence tossed or because a jury found the defendant not guilty. Instead: The city said it did not have enough lawyers to take the man to trial. (Booth declined to comment on the case.)

Defendants in at least 930 Anchorage misdemeanor cases have walked free for this reason since May 1, the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica found. These include people accused of crimes ranging from violating a restraining order to driving drunk with children in the backseat.

In one case, prosecutors said a mother told police she’d beaten her 5-year-old daughter with a belt. The prosecution said the girl, who was found with bruises across her back, told police she’d also been struck with a wire and a stick.

Dismissed.

Prosecutors accused one man of animal cruelty after he allegedly punched and choked a dog, while another allegedly raised fighting roosters found tied to barrels.

Dismissed.

More than 270 DUI cases.

Dismissed.

A grand total of three defendants have gone to trial since May, according to the city.

The cascade of failed prosecutions is especially disturbing in a state with the nation’s highest rate of women killed by men. More than 250 of the cases dismissed since May included charges of domestic violence assault, such as men allegedly punching, kicking or threatening to kill their wives or girlfriends. They include charges dropped against a state official accused of elbowing his then-girlfriend in the nose.

Two factors are at work in the mass dismissals. First, Alaska’s overloaded court system has limped along for years by allowing extensive trial delays, defying a state requirement for speedy trials. Second, the Anchorage prosecutor’s office, as in many American cities and states, is struggling to hold onto lawyers.

When a judge this year tried to clear out a backlog of Anchorage misdemeanors by having them brought forward as a group to regularly check which ones were ready for trial, defense attorneys pounced. They began demanding speedy-trial rights for their clients. The city couldn’t keep up. Cases started dying.

City officials say they’re aware of the problem. They have raised prosecutor pay and are hiring attorneys to take more cases to trial, in hopes the prosecutor’s office will be “fully back in action” in three to four months, according to City Attorney Eva Gardner.

Mayor Suzanne LaFrance, who took office July 1, said her transition team knew the lack of prosecutors was a problem, but she was surprised by the number of dropped cases.

“Right now, the prosecutors are frustrated, the police are frustrated. The public is frustrated. Victims are frustrated,” she said in an interview. “We see that. I see that, and this is something that we are working to fix.”

Attorneys use a courtroom jury box for seating as they await their turn during trial calls at the Boney Courthouse in Anchorage. (Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)

Angela Garay, executive director of the state’s Office of Victims’ Rights, told an Anchorage judge in July that the city is doing wrong by people who call the police on abusers.

“This is unacceptable for victims to have cases dismissed because prosecutors can’t do their jobs,” Garay said.

At a hearing in which city prosecutors dropped two dozen cases, she warned that she planned to open an investigation if the mass dismissals continued.

“We’re Not Going to Hold You Accountable”

The widespread failure to prosecute crimes has stayed largely below the public’s radar because the charges are misdemeanors — which in Anchorage, home to 39% of Alaskans, are pursued by city prosecutors rather than the state. Despite the low profile of these cases, they include allegations of serious, sometimes outrageous acts.

At least 70 cases of child neglect or abuse have been dismissed since May.

And, at a time when Anchorage drivers are killing pedestrians at a record pace, the city has dismissed hundreds of drunken driving charges.

A charging document described police finding one woman slumped over the wheel after her SUV crashed into another car. Two whiskey bottles lay on the floorboards, according to the charges. Although prosecutors said that the woman’s blood alcohol level tested at 4.6 times the limit and that she was on probation for a prior DUI when the crash happened, the city dropped the case. The 120-day speedy-trial deadline had expired the day before.

“I would say there’s absolutely no justice right now in our system,” said Anchorage attorney Kara Nyquist, who represents domestic violence victims.

Nyquist has a unique perspective because she was also named as the victim in multiple cases of stalking, trespassing and violating protective orders against a fellow Anchorage attorney.

Jacob Sonneborn and Nyquist had worked on opposing sides of family law cases, and Nyquist filed a request for a restraining order saying Sonneborn’s behavior became threatening. A judge granted the request. Emails that Sonneborn allegedly sent her afterward led prosecutors to charge him with violating the judge’s order, but they dropped the charges on Oct. 2 because of the speedy-trial deadline.

In an email to the Daily News and ProPublica, Sonneborn said two other cases against him were dismissed in August for reasons other than the speedy-trial deadline. He said that he believes he would have been acquitted had any of the charges against him gone to trial and that he never intended to harm Nyquist. “From my perspective, the whole series of charges alleging I violated bail conditions or the protective order were an abuse of the justice system,” he wrote.

The Alaska Supreme Court has temporarily suspended Sonneborn’s law license in connection with Nyquist’s allegations and complaints from other attorneys.

Anchorage attorney Kara Nyquist represents domestic violence victims and was the named victim in a restraining order against a fellow attorney. After he was charged with violating the restraining order — a charge the city ultimately dropped because of its prosecutor shortage — she started keeping a pistol in her drawer for protection. (Bill Roth/Anchorage Daily News)

Nyquist now keeps a .38 Special pistol in her drawer and has armed staff members in her downtown Anchorage law firm with pepper spray and a Taser.

Nyquist said she recently had to tell a client that she couldn’t rely on the city to prosecute a pending domestic violence assault case, something she’s never had to do before in 24 years of practicing law.

“They’re going to cause a situation where it’s going to increase domestic violence,” she said, “because these perpetrators have now been told, ‘We’re not going to hold you accountable.’”

The city prosecutor’s office has said that about half the cases it handles involve domestic violence.

Among the domestic violence cases that have ended without a trial was the assault charge against the superintendent of a state youth detention center. Prosecutors said in charging documents that Darrell Garrison, head of the Mat-Su Youth Facility in Palmer, was recorded on video hitting his romantic partner in the face with his elbow.

The woman said in an interview that she thought he had broken her nose when the incident occurred. “I heard the crack,” she said. ”Three popping sounds.”

A woman who wants to remain anonymous shows her nails with purple on the ring finger, a sign of support for people who have been in violent relationships. She was named as the victim in a domestic violence assault charge against Darrell Garrison, head of the Mat-Su Youth Facility in Palmer, in November. It is among hundreds of criminal cases that the city has since dismissed, citing a lack of prosecutors. An attorney for Garrison, who is a state employee, had called for a trial and said his client was innocent. (Bill Roth/Anchorage Daily News)

Garrison told police the blow was accidental, court documents say. Garrison remains superintendent of Mat-Su Youth Facility in Palmer, part of the state Department of Family and Community Services, where he oversees 14 counselors and 15 juveniles accused or convicted of crimes.

As months passed, Garrison began declaring himself ready to stand trial. His attorney, John Cashion, said that it was because Garrison was innocent and that the video evidence contradicted the claims in the charging document. He also filed papers saying if the case went to trial, he might argue self-defense.

“Look, if you’re falsely accused of a crime, what do you do? You say you’re ready for trial,” Cashion said.

But once the clock ran out for a speedy trial in August, Cashion said, it made sense for his client’s case to come to an end. “Why would anybody take a risk of actually saying, ‘Now let’s do the trial, now that I’m entitled to a dismissal,’” Cashion said.

The woman said she learned the case had been dismissed after looking it up on a public database. No one from the police department or prosecutor’s office called to tell her they were going to drop the charges, she said, despite a state law requiring alleged victims to be notified.

“It’s like they’re just sweeping it under the rug,” she said.

Lead prosecutor Dennis Wheeler, a former city attorney who agreed to return to Anchorage this year with an offer of $12,500 beyond the normal salary cap, said the volume of dismissals has indeed meant the city failed to notify some victims.

“We’ve definitely dropped the ball in some cases,” he said.

“People Have Caught On”

Anchorage is letting people free, in part, because of Alaska state court rules that say prosecutors must bring defendants before a jury within 120 days unless their attorneys grant extensions.

The deadline has proved impossible for the Anchorage prosecutor’s office to hit. The number of prosecutors dwindled from 13 in July 2021 to nine in July of this year. All but three as of July were new hires. Some of the most experienced lawyers on staff left.

The departures took place under the leadership of then-Mayor Dave Bronson, during a chaotic era of employee turnover at City Hall that has threatened other core services. But the city has also said previously it’s hard to compete with other private and public employers that can offer attorneys better pay.

City officials cited the office’s staffing as one of the struggles facing key departments as they transitioned from Bronson’s administration to that of the newly elected LaFrance in July. The police department predicted the consequences.

“Misdemeanor crimes are unlikely to be prosecuted due to low attorney staffing,” the department wrote at the time. “This adds to morale issues as officers see repeat offenders free.”

The ultimate stress test for the office came when judges early this year moved to clear out gridlock in Alaska’s court system.

The city cases took an average of 90 days to resolve before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Jan. 31 order by Anchorage Presiding Judge Thomas Matthews. By the time the judge issued his order, more than 1,500 city misdemeanor cases had sat more than a year on the court calendar.

Pretrial delays lasting years are a long-standing problem in state court, while delays in Anchorage misdemeanor cases appear to be a more recent development.

To speed things up, Matthews ordered judges to end pretrial delays for misdemeanor charges filed before this year “unless the parties provide a good cause basis”; no more than three delays would be allowed in 2024 cases. Another judge started moving cases to weekly sessions known as “trial calls,” where the two sides declare whether they are ready to proceed.

Dozens of cases showed up every Wednesday. If every defense attorney refused further delays for defendants nearing or crossing their 120-day speedy-trial deadlines, the city would have to mount trials in all these cases at once. The attorneys saw an easy way to help their clients. They flooded the city with requests to go to trial.

“Yes, people have caught on, and yes, people are calling their bluffs, that is true,” said Amanda Lancaster, who works for a firm that provides public defender services. “I don’t think people are doing that in terms of like, malpractice. But certainly, people have figured out that trend.”

Matthews put the responsibility on the city in an interview with the Daily News and ProPublica, saying he was shocked to learn the number of domestic violence cases the city had dismissed because of speedy-trial deadlines. “It’s like: ‘Really? You aren’t prioritizing this?’” Matthews said.

“I don’t think it was ever our intention to have the city simply taking cases and throwing them out the window without looking at them,” he said.

Ugly Numbers

City officials say they have been working hard to turn things around.

“The numbers are ugly — both the dismissal numbers and the turnover rate in the office,” said Gardner, the new city attorney hired shortly after LaFrance took office as mayor in July.

Gardner said the prosecutor’s office has prioritized domestic violence and drunken driving cases when enough prosecutors are available to go to trial. But cases that make it to court have been few and far between.

Gardner said work on a fix began under the former mayor. The Anchorage Assembly approved 20% pay increases for prosecutors and other municipal attorneys in 2023.

Boney Courthouse in Anchorage. The city has dropped hundreds of cases since May because the deadline to hold a speedy trial had expired or was about to expire. (Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)

Gardner said that, in addition, her predecessor and the city’s lead prosecutor met with state officials on April 30 to ask for help prosecuting cases but that the state did not provide assistance.

The deputy attorney general in charge of criminal prosecutions for the state, John Skidmore, said the meeting did not involve any ask for help with caseloads.

“On April 30 there was NOT an ask for help from the state with cases, and certainly not help with DV cases,” Skidmore said in an email to the Daily News and ProPublica. “Nor am I aware of any subsequent request for help.”

Gardner said the city has considered hiring prosecutors on contract to avoid dropping cases but ultimately decided it was not practical. Alaska lacks a law school, she said, and the pool of private attorneys with prosecution experience is small. Contract prosecutors would need to receive special training and clearance to handle confidential criminal justice information, a process that takes 30 to 60 days.

The city has focused instead on recruiting permanent, full-time hires and retaining current prosecutors. The office is back up to 12 line prosecutors plus the lead, Wheeler. Five of the attorneys on staff are new to the practice.

In explaining its special $175,000 offer to Wheeler in August, the Anchorage Assembly said the city’s failure to prosecute cases “has had significant impacts on public safety and contributed to a perception that wrongdoers in the Municipality face no consequences.”

LaFrance has asked for an additional $75,000 for raises and higher salaries for new hires in her 2025 budget proposal — an effort to boost retention and recruitment.

Gardner said the recent hiring efforts are starting to pay off, and prosecutors are beginning to schedule more trials.

“Unfortunately, it’s not something that can be fixed overnight,” she said. “Fortunately, we knew this coming in.”

A Frustrating Marathon

Inside the courtroom where Anchorage misdemeanor cases get dropped week after week, measuring time on the speedy-trial clock is a tedious but essential task.

Defendants who showed up in person — many are free on bail — get to go first, followed by attorneys for clients who are absent.

The city prosecutors often don’t know which of their cases are nearing the 120-day deadline, the Daily News and ProPublica found when sitting in on three recent trial call sessions. A defense attorney will claim it’s about to expire, and the judge will make a quick calculation from the bench. In some cases, it turns out the countdown expired weeks earlier. In others, the city only had a day or two left to take the case to trial.

Almost always, the defense asks for a trial. In a defeated tone, the prosecutor asks the judge to toss out the case.

During these marathon case dismissals, defendants sometimes express surprise or delight to learn the charges against them have been tossed out. The voices of victims are almost never heard.

On a day in September, when District Judge David Wallace dismissed 31 cases at the city’s request, veteran city prosecutor Tyler Wright took a moment hours into the process and chatted with the judge about an upcoming trip. Wright said he was quitting the prosecutor’s office to work in private practice.

It’s been a discouraging few months, Wright acknowledged in response to a reporter’s question later on, after the courtroom emptied.

“It’s frustrating for everybody. Everybody involved. Judges, the court clerks, the prosecutors,” Wright said.

Wallace overheard Wright and completed his sentence from the bench: “The victims, the witnesses, police officers.” Wright added to it further. “The entire city,” he said.

Within weeks, the prosecutor was gone, replaced at the Wednesday court hearings by another city attorney.

He carried with him a list of 100 cases to dismiss.

About the Numbers

In order to calculate the minimum number of criminal cases that the city has dismissed because of speedy-trial deadlines, the newsrooms reviewed audio recordings from all weekly trial call hearings between May 1 and Oct. 2. The number of dismissed cases does not include cases that prosecutors dismissed without any discussion of the speedy-trial deadline or cases dropped for other stated reasons, such as the arresting officers moving out of state.

The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica plan to continue reporting on issues with Alaska's court system. Do you have information that we should know? Kyle Hopkins can be reached by email at khopkins@adn.com.

by Eli Hager and Lucas Waldron

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Alma Nuñez, a longtime South Phoenix restaurant cashier with three kids, attended a community event a few years ago at which a speaker gave a presentation about Arizona’s school voucher program. She was intrigued.

Angelica Zavala, a West Phoenix home cleaner and mother of two, first heard of vouchers when former Gov. Doug Ducey was talking about them on the news. He was saying that the state was giving parents money that they could then spend on private school tuition or homeschooling supplies. The goal was to ensure that all students, no matter their socioeconomic background, would have access to whatever kind of education best fit them. Zavala thought: This sounds great. Maybe it will benefit my family.

And Fabiola Velasquez, also a mother of three, was watching TV with her husband last year when she saw one of the many ads for vouchers that have blanketed media outlets across metropolitan Phoenix of late. She turned to him and asked, “Have you heard about this?”

Working-class parents like Nuñez, Zavala and Velasquez have often said in surveys and interviews that they’re at least initially interested in school vouchers, which in Arizona are called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. Many across the Phoenix area told ProPublica that they liked the idea of getting some financial help from the state so that they could send their children to the best, safest private schools — the kind that rich kids get to attend.

Angelica Zavala with her two daughters before school (Ash Ponders, special to ProPublica)

Yet when it comes to lower-income families actually choosing to use vouchers here in the nation’s school choice capital, the numbers tell a very different story. A ProPublica analysis of Arizona Department of Education data for Maricopa County, where Phoenix is located, reveals that the poorer the ZIP code, the less often vouchers are being used. The richer, the more.

In one West Phoenix ZIP code where the median household income is $46,700 a year, for example, ProPublica estimates that only a single voucher is being used per 100 school-age children. There are about 12,000 kids in this ZIP code, with only 150 receiving vouchers.

Conversely, in a Paradise Valley ZIP code with a median household income of $173,000, there are an estimated 28 vouchers being used per 100 school-age children.

Poorer Neighborhoods in Maricopa County Used Fewer Vouchers Note: Includes only ZIP codes with at least 200 school-age children, defined as kids 3 to 18 years old. Population sizes are estimates. Sources: American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates (2018-2022) and Arizona Department of Education Empowerment Scholarship Account Program Quarterly Report (FY 2024 Q2). (Lucas Waldron, ProPublica)

The question is, if there’s interest in school vouchers among lower-income families, why isn’t that translating into use, as conservative advocates have long promised would happen?

In our interviews, several families said that they simply didn’t know about the program. Some mentioned that they didn’t have the social contacts — or the time, given their jobs — to investigate whether vouchers would be a better option for their kids than public school, which is generally simpler to enroll in and navigate.

Alma Nuñez and her family share dinner, a rare moment when the family is together during a busy school day. (Ash Ponders, special to ProPublica)

But others, like Nuñez, Zavala and Velasquez, said that they knew plenty about Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. Still, they had come to understand that the ESA program was not designed for them, not in a day-to-day sense. Logistical obstacles would make using vouchers to attend private school practically impossible for them and their children.

It starts with geography. The high-quality private schools are not near their neighborhoods.

ProPublica compiled a list of more than 200 private schools in the Phoenix metro area using a survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, as well as a Maricopa County listing and other sources. We found that these schools are disproportionately located to the north and east of downtown — in Midtown, Arcadia, Scottsdale, Paradise Valley and the suburbs — rather than to the south and west, the historically segregated areas where Nuñez, Zavala and Velasquez live.

Only six of all of these private schools are in Census tracts where families earn less than 50% of the county’s median income of $87,000.

Zavala talks to her daughters’ school bus driver. (Ash Ponders, special to ProPublica)

So even if lower-income families were able to secure spots at a decent private school and could use vouchers to pay the tuition, they would still have to figure out how to get their children there. After all, while public schools generally provide free transportation via school buses, private schools rarely do.

Would they send their kids on $30-plus Uber rides each way every day? Or on city bus trips that might take up to two hours in each direction, because the routes aren’t designed for students the way that school bus routes are? This might require their little ones to make multiple transfers, on their own, at busy intersections.

Zavala used an app that showed the private schools near her home; there weren’t many, but she did know of one, St. Matthew Catholic School, that served students her daughters’ age and was in the vicinity. It also had sports and a dual-language program, which not many private schools provide.

There Is Only One Private Elementary School Within 3 Miles of Angelica Zavala’s Home

She filled out all the forms to apply for her daughters to attend St. Matthew using vouchers, before deciding that the stress of transportation — there wouldn’t be a school bus — wasn’t worth it. (Zavala also said she realized that the academics wouldn’t necessarily offer an improvement over public school.)

Then there’s tuition. Zavala, as well as Nuñez and Velasquez, learned that a voucher might not even cover the full price of a private school.

A typical voucher from Arizona’s ESA program is worth between $7,000 and $8,000 a year, while private schools in the Phoenix area often charge more than $10,000 annually in tuition and fees, ProPublica found. The price tag at Phoenix Country Day School, one of the best private schools around, ranges from $30,000 to $35,000 depending on the age of the student. (The Hechinger Report has also found that private schools often raise their tuition when parents have vouchers.)

“Just because you gave me a 50%-off coupon at Saks Fifth Avenue doesn’t mean I can afford to shop at Saks Fifth Avenue,” said Curt Cardine, a longtime school superintendent, principal and teacher who is now a fellow at the Grand Canyon Institute, a left-leaning public policy think tank in Phoenix.

Next add the cost of food: breakfast, lunch, afternoon snack. These are provided by public schools to students from lower-income families, but at private schools, parents typically have to pay for them.

And throw in a supply of uniforms with the private school’s logo — hundreds of dollars more.

Plus there is pressure to spend money at auctions, raffles and other fundraisers. (It’s Christian to do so, many religious private school websites say.)

Nuñez (Ash Ponders, special to ProPublica)

Consider the choices available to Nuñez. For 17 years, she was a cashier at a restaurant, working 10 or more hours a day. Now she is raising three children, two of whom have autism. Private schools have some appeal to her in part because they might have smaller class sizes and more support for her son in third grade, whom she describes as “an earthquake.”

This section of the story works best on ProPublica's website.

Alma Nuñez lives in this ZIP code, where 24% of households are in poverty.

Neighborhoods with high poverty also have very low rates of school voucher use. For families like Nuñez’s, private schools just aren’t accessible, even with a voucher.

She considered using a voucher to send her third grader son to a private school for kids with autism. But the closest such school, ProPublica found, is Banner Academy, which is too far away without a school bus.

If she considered all private schools, no matter whether they provide special education, there would still only be four options within 3 miles of her home.

One of those private schools charges about $4,000 more than Arizona’s standard voucher amount would cover, so she probably can’t afford to send her son there.

Alma’s son may qualify for additional funding because of his disability, but she doesn’t know how much more or how to apply for it.

She can only afford a private school if it provides free lunch, as public schools do. That eliminates two more of the nearby schools, leaving St. Catherine of Siena as her only option.

St. Catherine, like most private schools, doesn’t provide free transportation like public schools do. It would be hard for Nuñez to drive her son every day, so her third grader would have to take two public buses on his own to get to school. It would be a 40-minute trip each way.

None of those options seemed practical for Nuñez, so she decided to keep her son enrolled at the public school down the street.

For all of these reasons, Nuñez, Zavala and Velasquez — despite their initial interest — chose not to use Arizona’s voucher program. Instead, they have each decided to start volunteering at the neighborhood public schools that their kids attend and to organize other busy parents to help make those schools better. They meet with their school administrators regularly. They lend a hand at drop-off and pick-up. They’ve organized “cafecitos”: an informal sort of PTA coffee hour.

Velasquez and Nuñez attend a parent meeting run by ALL In Education, a Latino advocacy group that organizes parents to support their public schools. (Ash Ponders, special to ProPublica)

“I’m committed to the idea of public school for my and my neighbors’ children,” Velasquez said. “I have zero regrets about not using ESA.”

This school year, ProPublica is examining Arizona’s first-in-the-nation “universal” school voucher program: available to all families, no matter their income. We are doing so because more than a dozen other states have enacted, or are attempting to enact, voucher initiatives largely or partly modeled after this one.

Arizona’s experience holds lessons for the rest of the country amid an election season in which the future of education is at stake, even as issues like immigration and inflation grab more headlines.

As they were initially conceived, school vouchers were targeted at helping families in lower-income areas. The first such programs, in cities like Milwaukee and Cleveland, provided money specifically to poor parents who had children in struggling, underfunded public schools, to help them pay tuition at a hopefully better private school.

Zavala embraces her daughter, whom she considered sending to a private school. (Ash Ponders, special to ProPublica)

Conservative advocacy groups still say that this is the purpose of vouchers. “School choice provides options for low-income families” by breaking “the arbitrary link between a child’s housing and the school he or she can attend,” the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank with deep ties to former President Donald Trump, said in 2019. “At the core of the school choice movement is the aspiration that every family obtain the freedom to pursue educational excellence for their children — regardless of their geographic location or socioeconomic background,” the Goldwater Institute, the Phoenix-based conservative think tank that pioneered and helped enact Arizona’s ESA law, has asserted.

But now that groups like these have successfully pushed for vouchers to be made universal in several states, the programs are disproportionately being used by middle- and upper-income parents.

“Arizona is the school choice capital of the U.S. — great, but if it’s not quality schools within a reasonable distance, then it’s not meaningful choice for our families,” said Stephanie Parra, CEO of ALL In Education, a pro-public-education Latino advocacy group that Nuñez, Zavala and Velasquez have been working with.

Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a pro-charter-school and school voucher education reform think tank, told ProPublica that Arizona’s version of vouchers “is not well-designed to achieve the goal of providing more choice for low-income and working-class families.” He said that “if you were going to design a program that really wanted to unlock private school choice for those families, you would design it very differently than Arizona did.”

Petrilli said that this would at least include means-testing the program: in other words, making larger vouchers available to lower-income parents, rather than giving the same amount to the very wealthy, who do not need the help. (Some states with near-universal voucher programs, he noted, give priority to lower-income families, unlike Arizona.) This would help poor parents cover the cost of transportation, among other things.

Nuñez waits to pick up her son from third grade at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School. (Ash Ponders, special to ProPublica)

Arizona’s program does allow parents to use their ESA money on transportation costs, but those who’ve already spent their voucher on tuition don’t have anything left for a year’s worth of Uber rides, city bus fares or gas. ESAs can also be used for homeschooling supplies, but most working parents can’t homeschool.

Some private schools provide additional scholarships or financial aid to students from lower-income backgrounds, though the process can be complicated to navigate. In some instances, ProPublica found, private school application systems even require a nonrefundable fee to apply for need-based aid.

Advocates for vouchers argue that many of these inequities already exist and are just as bad in the public school system. They note that poor families are often practically limited to the public schools nearest to them; it’s not as though the government provides transportation if parents want to send their kids to a better public school across town. (At least not since the end of the desegregation-era practice of busing Black children to mostly white schools. Busing helped to desegregate the public schools and improved academic outcomes for Black students, but it was broadly unpopular.)

Michael McShane, director of national research for the pro-voucher advocacy and research organization EdChoice, said that it’s still “early days” for universal programs like Arizona’s, and that “there is an adoption curve anytime any new innovation takes place.”

Asked why these efforts haven’t yet clearly helped lower-income families, McShane said that the “first movers” in a newly reformed system “tend to be more risk-takers, which sort of comes with affluence.” For lower-income parents whose children have long just been assigned to a public school, he said, school choice is “a muscle that has to be learned.”

He acknowledged, though, that more still needs to be done to help students from less-affluent areas access private schools, especially in a sprawling state like Arizona. This could include providing larger vouchers based on students’ socioeconomic circumstances as well as working on the “supply side” of the system — developing new private schools in places where there aren’t many.

But the question remains whether quality private schools, interested in making a profit, will have any reason to build new locations in South or West Phoenix, where most parents can’t pay tuition beyond their $7,000 voucher. So far, in these areas of the city, the free market has mostly just provided strip-mall, storefront private schools as well as what are called microschools, with little on their websites that working parents can use to judge their curricula, quality or cost. (Private schools in Arizona aren’t obligated to make public any information about their performance.)

These schools might not be accredited. Their teachers might not be certified. They might close soon. They are certainly not the large, established, elite private schools of the American imagination.

Velasquez and her son cool off after walking home in the Phoenix heat. (Ash Ponders, special to ProPublica)

While lower-income families are struggling to access or even learn about ways to use vouchers, wealthier parents enjoy a smoother path.

Affluent parents in the Phoenix area whose kids were already attending private school, for example, told ProPublica that they are now being sent webinars and other emailed advice — from the private school administrators to whom they are already paying tuition — on how to apply for vouchers to subsidize that tuition.

Erin Rotheram-Fuller, a mom in South Scottsdale who is sending her daughter to a private school using the ESA program, is also an Arizona State University associate professor of education. She said that the program has largely worked for her family, in part because she lives in an upper-middle-class area and there are quality schools serving her daughter’s needs that are relatively nearby. Moreover, she has been able to rely on word of mouth and help from her social circle, asking other ESA parents for advice about navigating logistical issues, like which documents to submit during the application process.

“As a parent, I’m grateful for it,” Rotheram-Fuller said of the program. “But there are several layers of barriers.”

“Parents near us can make so many more choices than other families who really need it,” she said.

The moms in South Phoenix agree.

Zavala said that another reason that she didn’t ultimately submit those forms to send her daughters to private school using vouchers was that what she could provide materially was less than what she predicted the other kids at the private school would have. She worried that her little girls, if not equipped with the latest cellphone, laptop and other indicators of wealth, would feel left out or be bullied.

Velasquez, meanwhile, wondered if she would be received in the same way at a private school as she is as a public school parent leader.

“Yes, there might be a nicer playground and basketball court, but would I be able to advocate for them?” she asked, referring to her children.

Velasquez walks her son to school. (Ash Ponders, special to ProPublica)

Dani Portillo, superintendent of the Roosevelt School District in South Phoenix, which these three mothers all send their children to, told ProPublica that ultimately “parents will speak by choosing our schools.” She said, “The idea that if they don’t go to a private school, they’re not giving their child the best — no, that’s false.”

These parents made a clear school choice of their own, Nuñez, Zavala and Velasquez said: to say no to vouchers.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Robert Downen, The Texas Tribune, and Jeremy Schwartz, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune

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This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Over the past two decades, Tim O’Hare methodically amassed power in North Texas as he pushed incendiary policies such as banning undocumented immigrants from renting homes and vilifying school curriculum that encouraged students to embrace diversity.

He rode a wave of conservative resentment, leaping from City Council member of Farmers Branch, a suburb north of Dallas, in 2005 to its mayor to the leader of the Tarrant County Republican Party.

Three years ago, O’Hare sought his highest political office yet, running for the top elected position in the nation’s 15th-largest county, which is home to Fort Worth. Backed by influential evangelical churches and money from powerful oil industry billionaires, O’Hare promised voters he would weed out “diversity inclusion nonsense” and accused some Democrats of hating America. His win in November 2022 gave the GOP’s far right new sway over the Tarrant County Commissioners Court, turning a government that once prided itself on bipartisanship into a new front of the culture war.

“I was not looking to do this at all, but they came after our police,” he said in his victory speech on election night. “They came after our schools. They came after our country. They came after our churches.”

In Texas and across the country, far-right candidates have won control of school boards, swiftly banning books, halting diversity efforts and altering curricula that do not align with their beliefs. O’Hare’s election in Tarrant County, however, takes the battle from the schoolhouse to county government, offering a rare look at what happens when hard-liners win the majority and exert their influence over municipal affairs in a closely divided county.

Since he was elected county judge — a position similar to that of mayor in a city — O’Hare has pushed his agenda with an uncompromising approach. He has led efforts to cut funding to nonprofits that work with at-risk children, citing their views on racial inequality and LGBTQ+ rights. And he has pushed election law changes that local Republican leaders said would favor them.

O’Hare’s rise in Tarrant County has come as he and his allies continue to align with once-fringe figures while targeting private citizens with whom they disagree politically. In July, O’Hare had a local pastor removed from a public meeting for speaking eight seconds over his allotted time. Days later, O’Hare appeared onstage at a conference that urged attendees to resist a Democratic campaign to “rid the earth of the white race” and embrace Christian nationalism. The agenda prompted some right-wing Republicans to condemn or pull out of the event.

“We’re seeing a shift of what conservatism looks like, and at the lower levels, they’re testing how extreme it can get,” said Robert Futrell, a sociologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies political extremism. “The goal is to capture local Republican Party infrastructure and positions and own the party, turning it to more extremist goals.”

Frequently, those aims include pushing back against broader LGBTQ+ acceptance, downplaying the nation’s history of racism and the lingering disparities caused by it, stemming immigration, and falsely claiming that America was founded as a Christian nation and that its laws and institutions should thus reflect conservative evangelical beliefs.

O’Hare declined multiple interview requests and did not answer detailed lists of questions emailed to him. His spokesperson instead touted a list of eight accomplishments, including cutting county spending and lowering local property tax rates.

With 2.2 million people, Tarrant County is Texas’ most significant remaining battleground for Democrats and Republicans. When the county voted for Beto O’Rourke for U.S. Senate in 2018 and Joe Biden for president in 2020, many political observers suspected the end was nigh for the era of Republican dominance in the purple county.

Two years later, voters elected the most hard-line Tarrant County leader in decades. After two years under O’Hare’s leadership, voters in November will decide two races between Republican allies of O’Hare and their Democratic opponents. The election of both Democrats would put O’Hare into the minority.

The changes in county leadership have been dramatic, said O’Hare’s Republican predecessor, Glen Whitley, who served as Tarrant County judge from 2007 until retiring in 2022. Whitley said O’Hare has implanted an “us vs. them” ideology that has increasingly been mainstreamed on the right.

“They no longer feel like they have to compromise,” said Whitley, who recently endorsed Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris for president and U.S. Rep. Colin Allred of Texas in the U.S. Senate race. “You either vote with these people 100% of the time, or you’re their enemy.”

Political Rise

In 2005, when O’Hare initially ran unopposed for a seat on the City Council in Farmers Branch, a small town just outside of Tarrant County, his platform included plans to revitalize the public library and bring in new restaurants. In 2006, however, O’Hare began taking positions that were outside of the Republican mainstream at the time. He pushed for the diversifying town to declare English its official language, ban landlords from renting to residents without proof of citizenship, and stop publishing public materials in Spanish.

“The reason I got on the City Council was because I saw our property values declining or increasing at a level that was below the rate of inflation,” O’Hare said at the time. “When that happens, people move out of our neighborhoods, and what I would call less desirable people move into the neighborhoods, people who don’t value education, people who don’t value taking care of their properties.”

Hispanic residents mobilized and sued to block the rental ban’s implementation. O’Hare doubled down: He pushed for Farmers Branch police to partner with immigration enforcement authorities to detain and deport people in the country illegally, and urged residents to oppose a grocer’s plan to open a store that catered to Hispanics, arguing it was “reasonable” to prefer “a grocery store that appeals to higher-end consumers.”

O’Hare was elected as mayor in 2008. Foreshadowing moves he’d make as Tarrant County judge, he abruptly ended a public meeting after cutting off and removing one resident who criticized him. He led opposition to the local high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance and fought against a mentorship program for at-risk high school students that included volunteers from a Hispanic group that opposed his immigration resolution.

Meanwhile, the city continued to defend the immigration ordinance after it was repeatedly struck down by federal judges. As costs for the seven-year legal battle ballooned, Farmers Branch dipped into its reserves, cut nearly two dozen city employees and outsourced services at the library that O’Hare had campaigned on improving during his City Council run. “At the end of the day, this will be money well spent, and it will be a good investment in our community’s future,” O’Hare said after the town laid off staff in 2008.

O’Hare stepped down as mayor in 2011. Three years later, after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the city’s appeal, Farmers Branch stopped defending the ordinance. It was never enforced, but the related lawsuits cost the town $6.6 million, city officials said in 2016.

After leaving office, O’Hare moved his family a few miles away to Tarrant County, where demographic changes have dropped the share of white residents from 62% of the county’s population in 2000 to 43% in 2020.

Home to some of the nation’s most influential evangelical churches and four of former President Donald Trump’s spiritual advisers, the county is an epicenter for ultraconservative movements in Texas, including those that call for Christians to exert dominance over all aspects of society. In 2016, O’Hare was elected chair of the Tarrant County GOP. Under him, the party distributed mailers that listed the primary voting records for local candidates — breaking with the longstanding nonpartisan tradition of county elections.

In 2020, following a series of racist incidents at the mostly white Carroll High School in Southlake — including one viral clip in which white students chanted the N-word — O’Hare co-founded a political action committee that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to oust school board members who supported the Carroll Independent School District’s plans for diversity and inclusion programming. The dispute helped catapult the small Tarrant County suburb into the national spotlight amid Republican panic over critical race theory and “gender ideology,” and created a blueprint for right-wing organizing that was copied in suburbs across America.

In 2021, O’Hare launched his campaign for Tarrant County judge, squaring off in the GOP primary against the more moderate five-term mayor of Fort Worth, whom he painted as a RINO, or “Republican in name only.” O’Hare rode a wave fueled by backlash to COVID-19 mandates, baseless election fraud conspiracy theories and opposition to what he called “diversity inclusion nonsense,” according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. O’Hare’s campaign was condemned by moderate Republicans, including Whitley, the outgoing judge, who accused him of trying to “divide and pit one group against another.” O’Hare won the primary by 23 percentage points.

Whitley and other longtime Republican leaders declined to endorse O’Hare in the 2022 general election. It didn’t matter; by then, he was backed by a coalition of far-right megadonors, pastors and churches. His top campaign donors included a PAC funded by Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. The two west Texas oil billionaires have given tens of millions of dollars to candidates and groups that oppose LGBTQ+ rights, support programs that would use public dollars to pay for private schools, and have led efforts to push moderates out of the Texas GOP.

O’Hare received another $203,000 from the We Can Keep It PAC. The PAC’s treasurer is an elder at Mercy Culture Church in Fort Worth, whose leaders have endorsed multiple GOP candidates, including O’Hare. The church’s pastor has claimed Democrats can’t be Christian and dared critics to complain to the IRS that the church was flouting federal prohibitions on political activity by nonprofits.

Transforming Elections

O’Hare at a Commissioners Court meeting (Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune)

O’Hare took office in early 2023, as Republicans continued to question President Joe Biden’s razor-thin win in Tarrant County two years earlier. A 2022 audit by Texas’ Republican secretary of state found no evidence of widespread fraud and that Tarrant County held “a quality, transparent election.”

Despite that — and while saying he had no proof of malfeasance — O’Hare immediately set out to prevent cheating he claimed was responsible for Democrats’ steady rise in the long-purpling county. Soon after taking office, he helped launch an “election integrity unit” that he’d lead with the county sheriff who had spoken at a “Stop the Steal” rally in the days after the 2020 presidential election.

No Democrats were initially on the unit. Nor was the county’s elections administrator, Heider Garcia, who by then had faced three years of harassment, death threats and accusations of being a secret agent for Venezuela’s socialist government by election fraud conspiracy theorists. Garcia opted for radical transparency — making himself accessible to answer questions about the election process and earning praise from across the political aisle for his patient public service.

But Garcia lasted only a few months under O’Hare: In April 2023, he resigned his position, citing his relationship with O’Hare in his resignation letter. “Judge O’Hare, my formula to ‘administer a quality transparent election’ stands on respect and zero politics; compromising on these values is not an option for me,” Garcia wrote. “You made it clear in our last meeting that your formula is different, thus, my decision is to leave.”

Garcia, now the Dallas County elections administrator, did not respond to an interview request.

One day after Garcia resigned, O’Hare told members of True Texas Project — a group whose leaders have sympathized with a white nationalist mass shooter and endorsed Christian nationalism — that he was encouraged by the potential for low turnout in that year’s upcoming elections, which he said would help Republicans win more local seats. (O’Hare previously served on True Texas Project’s advisory team, according to a 2021 social media post by the group’s CEO, Julie McCarty).

In June 2024, the election integrity unit reported that, over the previous 15 months, it received 82 complaints of voter fraud — or about 0.009% of all votes cast in the 2020 presidential election in Tarrant County — and that none had resulted in criminal charges. Meanwhile, O’Hare has proposed a number of changes to the election system that Tarrant County GOP leaders have said were intended to help Republicans or hurt Democrats.

In February, O’Hare and fellow Republicans cut $10,000 in county funding to provide free bus rides to low-income residents, a program that Tarrant GOP leaders decried as a scheme to “bus Democrats to the polls.”

O'Hare said he opposed the funding on fiscal grounds. “I don’t believe it’s the county government’s responsibility to try to get more people out to the polls,” he said before the vote.

A few months later, commissioners prohibited outside organizations from registering voters inside county buildings after Tarrant County GOP leaders raised concerns about left-leaning organizations holding registration drives. Democrats and voting rights groups assailed the moves as attempts to lower voter turnout.

In September, O’Hare proposed eliminating voting locations on some college campuses that he called a “waste of money and manpower.” But this time, his Republican allies on the Commissioners Court said they could not go along with the vote and joined Democrats to defeat the measure. Tarrant County Republican leaders condemned the recalcitrant commissioners in a public resolution that made it clear they saw the effort to close polls on college campuses as a move that would help them in November. The GOP commissioners, the resolution claimed, “voted with Democrats on a key election vote that undermines the ability of Republicans to win the general election in Tarrant County.”

Manny Ramirez, one of those Republican commissioners, said in an interview he thinks the GOP should try to win college students with their conservative ideas rather than limit on-campus voting.

“We’ve been providing those same exact sites for nearly two decades,” Ramirez said. His role as commissioner, he added, is to provide “equal access to all of our citizens.”

Targeting Youth Programs

Less than a year into his term, O’Hare began targeting long-established nonprofits whose websites and social media accounts contained language the county judge considered politically objectionable on issues of gender and race.

In October 2023, he moved to block a $115,000 state grant to Girls Inc. of Tarrant County, for its Girl Power program offering summer camps and mentoring to help participants focus on stress management, hygiene and self-esteem.

About 90% of the youth served by Girls Inc. of Tarrant County are people of color and come from families making less than $30,000 a year, according to the organization’s website.

Four months earlier, the national Girls Inc. group, which has chapters across the country, had tweeted out its support for abortion rights and LGBTQ+ pride, which conservative media and activists seized upon.

“Girls Inc. is an extremist political indoctrination machine advocating for divisive liberal politics,” Leigh Wambsganss, the chief communications officer of Patriot Mobile, told commissioners. Patriot Mobile is a Christian nationalist cellphone company whose PAC has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in support of far-right candidates across Tarrant County, including O’Hare.

Local leaders of Girls Inc., who did not respond to requests for comment, said at the time their chapter is independent of the national organization. They told commissioners they were reviewing their affiliation with the parent organization.

In denying the funds, O’Hare told the Commissioners Court the government shouldn’t support “an organization that is so deeply ideological and encourages the children that they are teaching to go advocate for social change.”

Commissioners killed the contract on a 3-2 party-line vote.

Six months later, O’Hare raised questions about another local nonprofit, Big Thought. It provides youth in the Tarrant County juvenile detention system with summer and after-school programs aimed at helping them get their lives back on track through music, acting and performance arts. Big Thought has had a contract with the county for the past three years and says on its website that youth who go through its programs reoffend at a lower rate than those who don’t, potentially saving taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in juvenile detention costs.

At an April meeting of the Tarrant County Juvenile Board, O’Hare raised questions about the program’s advocacy for “racial equity” after reading the organization’s website, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. (The board’s meetings are not streamed or recorded).

Asked about O’Hare’s concerns, a Big Thought spokesperson said in an email that the organization focuses on the realities facing at-risk youth in Tarrant County. “Young people in our communities experience challenges like economic inequality, racism, and more, and it is our responsibility to provide a safe place to build the skills they need so they can thrive,” said Evan Cleveland, Big Thought’s senior director of programs.

The county’s juvenile probation director, Bennie Medlin, who has not responded to requests for comment, told board members the program had not had any “negative results” during the partnership, according to minutes of the meeting. Members of the board were not swayed and voted not to renew the program.

Three months later, at the juvenile board’s July meeting, O’Hare and a district judge proposed ending a contract with the Pennsylvania nonprofit Youth Advocate Programs after probing the nonprofit about the position it had taken in briefs to the Supreme Court, its opinion on school choice and police in schools, and whether “they work to eliminate systemic racism,” according to minutes of the meeting.

Board members voted to cut ties with the nonprofit, which had worked with the county for over three decades to provide mentoring, job training and substance abuse counseling as alternatives to detention.

Gary Ivory, the organization’s president, said that a week after the July vote, he met with O’Hare for about a half-hour in O’Hare’s office. He said O’Hare questioned him about his personal views on the LGBTQ+ community and “hot-button cultural war issues." Also during that meeting, O’Hare pulled up Youth Advocate Programs’ website, Ivory said, and asked him why the group takes funding from Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for gun control.

“They are saying if anybody is too woke in Tarrant County, we are going to put them in the dustbin of history and they won’t exist anymore,” Ivory said.

On Oct. 1, Tarrant County commissioners voted to sign a similar contract with another nonprofit. At the meeting, O’Hare denied pushing to kill Youth Advocate Programs’ contract “because of a phrase on a website.” Instead, he claimed Ivory told the juvenile board that 15% of the money Tarrant County gives the program goes to lobbyists and to “law firms to file amicus briefs against many of the things the people in that room that voted disagree with.”

Ivory said that is incorrect. “I said generally 85 cents on a dollar stays in Tarrant County and 15 cents goes to overhead,” he said. “And I made it clear that YAP doesn’t spend any of that 15 cents on the dollar for lobbying.”

Phil Sawyer, a longtime juvenile probation officer in Tarrant County who retired two years ago, said the program was well respected within the department and helped give badly needed services that the department could not provide. “It’s a shocker,” he said of the county’s decision to cut ties with the group. “Without them, it would just be insanity. There are things we can do as probation officers, but it’s not the same.”

Stifling Dissent

O’Hare at a Commissioners Court meeting (Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune)

In recent months, O’Hare has taken aim at private citizens who disagree with him, ordering several political opponents removed from Commissioners Court meetings and calling for the firing of a local college professor.

As Ryon Price’s allotted three minutes of public comment during the July 2 Commissioners Court meeting expired, O’Hare issued a sharp warning to the man, a local Baptist minister who was a frequent antagonist of O’Hare’s at such meetings: “Your time is up.”

It’s not uncommon for residents to go over their allotted time during public comment sessions. But after Price continued criticizing conditions in the Tarrant County Jail for an extra eight seconds, O’Hare ordered sheriff’s deputies to step in: “He’s now held in contempt. Remove him.”

As Price was escorted out of the meeting, someone in the audience booed. “Was that you?” O’Hare snapped. “Well, try me.”

Price said that in the lobby, sheriff’s deputies handed him a trespassing warning that banned him from the premises. “I think it’s symbolic of a broader, more authoritarian shift” in Tarrant County government, Price said of his removal. “And I have to wonder if he really wants to govern this place, a place that splits red and blue evenly, or just please some higher-ups in his own party.”

Price appealed his ban to the Tarrant County sheriff’s department and said the appeal was granted in August, allowing him to resume addressing the court during public comment sessions.

Minutes after Price was escorted from that July meeting, Lon Burnam, a Democrat who served nine terms in the Texas House, approached O’Hare to confront him about his decision to cut off another commissioner who was requesting information about sheriff department policies. Burnam later received a trespass warning from sheriff’s deputies and said he is banned from public meetings until Jan. 1.

At their meeting two weeks later, commissioners amended public speaking rules as O’Hare warned residents that “refusal to abide by the Commissioners Court’s order or my order as the presiding judge or continued disruption of the meeting may result in arrest and prosecution under the laws of the state of Texas.”

O’Hare said the changes were needed to ensure civility in the meeting room. “This is not in any way shape or form attempting to stifle free speech,” he said during the meeting.

Also in August, O’Hare called for the firing of a Texas Christian University professor over social media posts from 2021 that called for police to be abolished. The professor, Alexandra Edwards, drew the ire of local right-wing activists after writing about them and the pro-Christian nationalism conference that O’Hare attended in July. Not long after, a local right-wing website published an article about her “antifa” views in which O’Hare called her a “radical” and said Edwards should be fired.

“The full force of the repression of the Tarrant County GOP and the various right-wing extremists kind of came down upon me,” Edwards said in an interview, adding that she was inundated with threats and harassment.

Such crackdowns are a sign that the local GOP has been taken over by extremists, said Whitley, the county’s Republican former judge.

“They’ve gone so far to the right that most folks who used to be adamant Republicans are not so much anymore,” he said, adding that some in the GOP are too afraid of retaliation by O’Hare to speak out publicly.

O’Hare’s term doesn’t end until 2027. But this year’s elections will decide which party controls the powerful commissioners court and, in some ways, will be a referendum on the first two years of his tenure in county government.

Whitley said he hopes it will be a unifying moment for voters from across the political spectrum. “I want us to be Americans, to be Texans and to not just care about parties,” he said. “I hope people will vote for the best person and not just vote for the party.”

Jodi S. Cohen of ProPublica and Juan Salinas II of The Texas Tribune contributed reporting. Dan Keemahill of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune contributed research.

by Megan O’Matz

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

They are squat, stationary and seemingly innocuous. But ever since the high drama of the 2020 presidential election, humble drop boxes have been more than a receptacle of absentee ballots; they’ve morphed into a vessel for emotion, suspicion and even conspiracy theories.

In the battleground state of Wisconsin, especially, the mere presence of these sidewalk containers has inspired political activists and community leaders to plot against them, to call on people to watch them around the clock and even to hijack them.

They’ve been the subject of two state Supreme Court decisions, as well as legal memos, local council deliberations, press conferences and much hand-wringing.

Wausau Mayor Doug Diny was so leery of the box outside City Hall that he absconded with it on a Sunday in September, isolating it in his office. It had not yet been secured to the ground, he said, and so he wanted to keep it safe. The escapade was met with a backlash but also won the mayor some admirers online before he returned it.

“COURAGE IS CONTAGIOUS! WELL DONE SIR!” one person wrote on the conservative social media site Gettr.

Wausau Mayor Doug Diny removed the ballot box outside City Hall and brought it to his office. (Courtesy of Doug Diny)

As early voting for the November election begins and Wisconsinites receive their absentee ballots, they have choices on how to return them. Mail them. Deliver them in person to the municipal clerk. Or, in some communities, deposit them in a drop box, typically located outside a municipal building, library, community center or fire station.

Though election experts say the choices are designed to make voting a simple act, the use of drop boxes has been anything but uncomplicated since the 2020 election, when receptacles in Wisconsin and around the country became flash points for baseless conspiracy theories of election fraud. A discredited, but popular, documentary — “2000 Mules” — linked them to ballot stuffing, while a backlash grew over nonprofit funding that helped clerks make voting easier through a variety of measures, including drop boxes.

The movie’s distributor, Salem Media Group Inc., removed it from circulation in May and, in response to a lawsuit, issued a public apology to a Georgia voter for falsely depicting him as having voted illegally. A federal judge dismissed Salem Media Group as a defendant, but the litigation is proceeding against the filmmaker and others.

With all that fuss in the background, Wisconsin’s conservative-leaning Supreme Court outlawed the boxes in 2022. But then this summer, with the court now controlled by liberals, justices ruled them lawful, determining that municipal clerks could offer secure drop boxes in their communities if they wished.

In 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court banned absentee ballot drop boxes, after which the city of Madison partnered with New York-based artist Jenny Holzer to post messages on its 14 boxes with information on how to vote and return an absentee ballot. In 2024, the boxes were ruled lawful again. (Scott Bauer/AP Images)

The court’s latest ruling made clear it’s up to each municipal clerk’s discretion whether to offer drop boxes for voters. But the decision has done little to change minds about the boxes or end any confusion about whether they’re a boon to democracy or a tool for chicanery.

This year, four of Wisconsin’s largest cities are using drop boxes — Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay and Racine. But numerous locales that offered drop boxes in 2020, including Kenosha, the fourth-largest city in the state, have determined they will not this year.

Voters have been getting mixed messages from right-wing activists and politicians about whether to use drop boxes, as the GOP continues to sow distrust in elections while, at the same time, urging supporters to vote early — by any means.

“Look, I’m not a fan of drop boxes, as is no great surprise, but if you have to have them, this is not a bad situation,” Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, which has fostered doubt about election integrity and helped inspire “2000 Mules,” said on a video posted to social media on Sept. 30. It showed her giving a brief tour of a drop box in Madison, Wisconsin’s capital and a bastion of Democrats.

With the camera trained on one of the boxes, Engelbrecht extolled that “the slot is really small, so that’s a good thing,” and that “most of these drop boxes appear to be close to fire stations,” which she also declared a good thing. About a week later, she wrote in a newsletter that True the Vote had collected exact drop box locations statewide and was working to arrange livestream video feeds of them.

Unlike in 2020 when Trump warned against the use of absentee ballots, this year he is urging supporters to “swamp the vote.” And the Wisconsin Republican Party is not discouraging voters from using ballot drop boxes if they are available in their community and are secure.

Still, Wisconsin’s GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate, Eric Hovde, has urged citizen surveillance brigades to watch the boxes. “Who’s watching to see how many illegal ballots are being stuffed?” Hovde told supporters in July, according to a recording of his remarks obtained by The Washington Post. “Look, we’re probably going to have to have — make sure that there’s somebody standing by a drop box everywhere.”

Most boxes have security cameras trained on them. Those surveillance tapes could be used as purported evidence in legal cases if Trump loses on Nov. 5.

Already, Engelbrecht has filed a public records request with the Dane County Clerk’s Office for “copies of video recordings from security cameras used to surveil all exterior and interior ballot drop boxes in Dane County for the November 2024 Election.” The county, whose seat is Madison, does not have access to camera footage, which is kept by municipalities, the county clerk told ProPublica.

After this year’s state Supreme Court ruling allowing the drop boxes, the Wisconsin Elections Commission issued guidance to the state’s roughly 1,800 municipal clerks recommending more than a dozen security practices related to the boxes.

The instructions include that they be “affixed to the ground or the side of the building,” “sturdy enough to withstand the elements,” “located in a well-lit area,” “equipped with unique locks or seals” and “emptied often.”

The commission recommended that clerks keep a record of the times and dates of retrieval, number of ballots retrieved and the names of the people doing the retrieving.

It also referred clerks to federal guidelines.

But even with updated guidelines in place and ballot harvesting prohibited in Wisconsin (individuals can only submit their own ballot, unless helping a disabled person), concerns persist.

In August in Dodge County, some 60 miles northwest of Milwaukee, the sheriff, Dale Schmidt, emailed three town clerks, telling them he had “serious concerns” about drop boxes, according to records obtained by the news site WisPolitics. “I strongly encourage you to avoid using a drop box,” he wrote. The sheriff asked the clerks numerous questions about the boxes, explaining that: “Even if set up the best way possible to avoid the potential for fraudulent activity, criminal activity many times finds ways to subvert even the best plans.”

Two of the clerks — from the towns of Ashippun and Beaver Dam — replied to the sheriff that they would not use them and the clerk from Hustisford told Wisconsin Public Radio that, while she received Schmidt’s email, the town board had already decided against using a drop box out of security concerns. In an email to ProPublica, Schmidt said, “No one was intimidated into choosing not to use the boxes and none of them had heartburn over not using them.”

Brittany Vulich, Wisconsin campaign manager for the nonpartisan voting rights group All Voting is Local, is bothered by how mayors, council members and other officials are seeking to influence these decisions. She notes that municipal clerks — the vast majority of whom are women — are the top election officials in each municipality.

“It’s the undermining of their authority. It’s the undermining of their office,” she said. “It’s the undermining of their autonomy to do their job and to make that decision on whether to use drop boxes or not. And that is what is very alarming.”

Other towns have also balked.

In the city of Brookfield, the Common Council took up a resolution Aug. 20 and voted 10-4 not to have a drop box after reviewing a memo by City Attorney Jenna Merten who found the recommended precautions burdensome.

“The guidance states that for unstaffed 24-hour ballot drop boxes, the City would need a video surveillance camera and storage of the video footage, as well as decals, extra keys and security seals,” she wrote. “Removing the ballots from the drop box would require at least two people and the completion of chain of custody logs.”

During the debate, Alderman Gary Mahkorn, an opponent of drop boxes, argued that they served a purpose during the COVID-19 pandemic but then “became a hugely political issue, and that’s what makes me want to, you know, puke in a way.” He worried that “the further we get away from people trusting our elections, the more our democracy is at stake.”

Instead of having drop boxes, the city will have extended voting hours, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., most weekdays during in-person absentee voting for the two weeks prior to the election.

In Wausau, the box that Diny took to his office is back, bolted to the ground and being used for early voting.

At first, Diny resisted pressure from the city clerk and members of the City Council to return it. The clerk, Kaitlyn Bernarde, reported the matter to the Marathon County District Attorney’s Office and the state elections commission. And Diny arranged to have the clerk reclaim it.

The Wisconsin Department of Justice is investigating. There have been no charges. Diny told ProPublica he believes he did nothing wrong, saying: “None of this was done in a nefarious, secret way.”

At a City Council meeting on Tuesday night, Diny attempted to force a vote on allocating additional funds for drop-box security. But the council showed no interest.

During the public comment period, residents both praised and lambasted the mayor. One local resident rose to say, “Arguing about a box is dumb.”

by Lomi Kriel and Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Zach Despart, Terri Langford, Pooja Salhotra and Kayla Guo, The Texas Tribune

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

City officials in Uvalde, Texas, released another trove of videos on Tuesday from officers responding to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting, footage that they had previously failed to divulge as part of a legal settlement with news organizations suing for access.

The new material included at least 10 police body camera videos and nearly 40 dashboard videos that largely affirm prior reporting by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE detailing law enforcement’s failures to engage the teen shooter who killed 19 children and two teachers. Officers only confronted the gunman 77 minutes after he began firing, a delay that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said cost lives.

In one 30-minute video released Tuesday, officers lined up in the school hallway as they prepared to breach a classroom door about an hour after the shooter first entered the building. The footage, while not new, showed a slightly different angle from what had previously been released. In it, victims are completely blurred, but their cries and screams can be heard and blood is visible in the hallway. The video also shows officers performing chest compressions on a victim on the sidewalk.

In another video, an officer wearing a body camera is crying at points, telling someone on the phone: “They’re just kids. It’s fucked up.” He adds, “I just never thought shit like that would happen here.” Another officer asks if he should take his weapon from him and tells him to sit down and “relax.” That seven-minute video after the breach shows medics working on someone in an ambulance.

The news organizations previously reported in an investigation with The Washington Post that officers initially treated teacher Eva Mireles, who was shot in Room 112, on a sidewalk because they did not see any ambulances, although two were parked just past the corner of the building. Mireles, one of three victims who still had a pulse when she was rescued, died in an ambulance that never left the school.

Much of the other body camera footage shows officers waiting around after the breach or clearing classrooms that are empty, offering little revelatory detail. Officers are also seen outside the school responding to questions from bystanders.

Dashboard videos also offered few new details, showing police officers idling in patrol cars outside of Robb Elementary. Some officers paced the parking lot and communicated inaudibly through radios and cellphones. One video shows a television crew arriving at the scene, and others show ambulances and parents waiting as helicopters circle overhead.

In August, as part of the settlement, the city released hundreds of records and videos to media organizations, which similarly largely confirmed prior reporting. But days after releasing those records, city officials acknowledged that an officer with the Uvalde Police Department had informed the agency that some of his body camera footage was missing.

Police Chief Homer Delgado ordered an audit of the department’s servers, which revealed even more videos had not been turned over. He shared those with District Attorney Christina Mitchell, who is overseeing a criminal investigation into the botched response, and ordered his own internal probe into how the lapse occurred.

In an emailed statement late Tuesday, city officials said that the internal investigation uncovered not only “technological issues,” but an “unintentional lack of proper due diligence by the officer who served as custodian” of the police department’s records. City officials said that the officer, whom they did not name, faced disciplinary action and retired from the department. They said the investigation found “no evidence of any intentional effort to withhold information.” They added that the department is working to improve its internal record-keeping procedures and overcome technological hurdles so that “such an oversight does not occur again.”

The Uvalde Leader-News reported last month that former city police Sgt. Donald Page faced disciplinary action related to the withheld footage and subsequently resigned. Page’s attorney declined to answer most questions but wrote in an email to the Tribune and ProPublica that the veteran officer in fact retired. Page oversaw operations including dispatch and evidence technicians, according to his interview with investigators and the city’s report into the shooting, and was in plain clothes that day. It is unclear whether he was wearing his own body camera. It does not seem to be part of any released footage.

Former Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin on Tuesday praised the city police for releasing the material. He called on other law enforcement agencies to follow suit.

“It should have been done from day one,” said McLaughlin, who is currently running for the Texas House. “I was frustrated when I found out we had something we had overlooked, but everybody needs to release their stuff. … It’s the only way these families are going to get some closure.”

It is unclear whether the new footage would alter Mitchell’s investigation. She did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

A grand jury in June indicted former Uvalde school district police Chief Pete Arredondo and school resource officer Adrian Gonzales on felony child endangerment charges. Footage released in August and on Tuesday comes from city police officers, not school district officers, so it does not include any video from Arredondo or Gonzales. None of the school district officers were wearing body cameras that day because the department did not own any, Arredondo later told investigators. He also dropped his school-issued radio as he rushed into the school.

According to the school district’s active shooter plan, Arredondo was supposed to take charge. His indictment alleges in part that he failed to follow his training and gave directions that impeded the response, endangering children. Gonzales, who along with Arredondo was among the first officers on scene, “failed to otherwise act in a way to impede the shooter until after the shooter entered rooms 111 and 112,” according to his indictment.

Experts have said their cases face an uphill battle as no officers in recent history have been found guilty of inaction in mass shootings. Both men pleaded not guilty, and the next hearing is set for December. No Uvalde Police Department officers have been charged.

News organizations, including the Tribune and ProPublica, sued several local and state agencies more than two years ago for records related to the shooting. The city settled with the news organizations, agreeing to provide records requested under the state’s Public Information Act. But three other government agencies — the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District and the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office — continue fighting against any release of their records.

More than two years after the shooting, victims’ relatives have said that they still feel like there has been little accountability or transparency. They said that they feel betrayed and as if government agencies attempted a “cover-up.”

Across the country, the news organizations found, more states require active shooter training for teachers and students than they do for the officers expected to protect them. At least 37 states have laws mandating that schools conduct active shooter-related drills, most of them annually. Texas was the only state to require repeat training for officers as of this year, 16 hours every two years, in a mandate that only came about after the Uvalde massacre.

Experts said repeated training was necessary for these high-pressure responses, and a Justice Department review into the Uvalde response this year recommended at least eight hours of annual active shooter training for every officer in the country.

In all, nearly 400 officers from about two dozen agencies responded to the shooting. Yet despite at least seven investigations launched after the massacre, only about a dozen officers have been fired, suspended or retired.

One of those, Texas Ranger Christopher Ryan Kindell, was reinstated in August after fighting his termination.

by Miranda Green, Floodlight, Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica, and Priyanjana Bengani, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and photography by Sarahbeth Maney, ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. This story was co-published with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

Word tends to spread fast in rural Knox County, Ohio. But misinformation has spread faster.

The first article in the Mount Vernon News last fall about a planned solar farm simply noted that residents were “expressing their concern.” But soon the county’s only newspaper was packed with stories about solar energy that almost uniformly criticized the project and quoted its opponents.

Then a new “grassroots” organization materialized and invited locals to an elaborate event billed as a town hall, with a keynote speaker who denied that humans cause climate change.

Someone sent text messages to residents urging them to “stop the solar invasion” and elect two county commission candidates who opposed the solar farm. And one day this past March, residents received an unfamiliar newspaper that contained only articles attacking Frasier Solar, a large project that would replace hundreds of acres of corn and soybeans with the equivalent of 630 football fields of solar panels.

To many in the deep-red central Ohio community, it seemed that solar had become the focus of news and politics. They were right. Fossil fuel interests were secretly working to shape the conversation in Knox County.

Rural Knox County, Ohio, is home to extensive farmland and has deep ties to the gas industry.

Each cog in the anti-solar machine — the opposition group, the texts, the newspaper, the energy publication — was linked to the others through finances and overlapping agendas, an investigation by Floodlight, ProPublica and The Tow Center for Digital Journalism found.

The campaign against solar power benefited from a confluence of two powerful forces funded by oil and gas interests. A former executive at Ariel Corporation, the county’s largest employer and one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of methane gas compressors, was working behind the scenes. And helping in a more public way is the Mount Vernon News, a newspaper now in the hands of Metric Media, which operates websites that reportedly engage in pay-to-play coverage.

Ariel and the former executive did not respond to requests for comment. Metric Media’s leader did not answer questions for this story; he has previously denied that his news outlets are partisan.

Across the country, the oil and gas industry and power companies have exploited a struggling news industry and a fraught political process to fight the transition to clean energy and maximize profits, Floodlight and its partners have reported. In Florida, two power companies paid a consulting firm to hire newspapers to attack a pro-solar politician. In Alabama, the state’s largest monopoly electric company purchased a historic Black newspaper, then didn’t write about soaring power bills. In California, Chevron launched its own newsroom when other papers shuttered; it doesn’t cover itself critically.

In Mount Vernon, a city of 17,000 where the local university named its new sports complex CH4 after the chemical formula for methane, a variety of tactics have been deployed simultaneously, creating an anti-solar echo chamber.

First image: Mount Vernon Nazarene University’s CH4 Stadium was partially funded by Ariel Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Ariel Corporation, one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of methane gas compressors. Second image: A plaque on the stadium explains that, like the chemical bonds in methane, the bond between the university and Ariel is strong.

Residents are bombarded with dubious claims: Solar panels are toxic. Their construction depletes the soil and floods fields and depresses home values. China is using them to invade. The campaign has stoked their skepticism and ignited their passions. It intensified the debate in a conservative county that prizes its roots in the gas industry.

Bright yellow “No Industrial Solar” yard signs have sprung up everywhere, competing with a smattering of green “Yes Solar” ones. Citizens packed local government meetings. More than 4,000 public comments, both for and against, were filed with the state regulator that will decide if the solar project can be built — triple the number for any previous solar project in Ohio. And all those opinions have drowned out the voices of the nine landowners, mostly farmers, who’ve signed leases with Frasier’s developer and for whom a total of about $60 million is at stake.

“People are so radicalized and they’re not thinking clearly,” said Rich Piar, a third-generation farmer who hopes to secure his financial future by leasing a portion of his 1,650 acres to Open Road Renewables, the Texas-based company developing the Frasier Solar project.

The Yellowbud Solar project in Pickaway County, Ohio, shown in 2022, became operational last year. It is about 90 miles southwest of Knox County. (Dan Gearino/Inside Climate News)

Politicians who didn’t forcefully denounce the solar project were attacked in Mount Vernon News stories. Thom Collier, a long-serving Republican on the county commission who thinks landowners should be able to choose whether to use their property for solar infrastructure, ultimately lost his reelection bid after a barrage of misleading coverage about his stance on solar.

“I pin this on one or two people from Ariel and some close friends that they have,” Collier said of the anti-solar offensive. “They determined it didn’t matter how much money it would take, they were going to fight this and make it ugly, and they have.”

“They Want Everybody to Buy Gas”

Just 20 days after Knox Smart Development was registered as an LLC in Ohio, the anti-solar group hosted a town hall at a historic Georgian revival theater in Mount Vernon with 1,000 red velvet seats. Attendees were offered free food and alcohol.

The November 2023 event centered on a presentation from Steve Goreham, who argues global warming is natural and who is the author of several books, including “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.”

“When I think of a town hall meeting, I think of a meeting where everybody from the community can go, everybody has their say. That’s not how their meeting was,” said Kathy Gamble, who said organizers only reluctantly agreed to let her in. She’s pro-solar and not quiet about it.

The town hall established Knox Smart Development as a leading voice against the Frasier Solar project. The group calls itself a simple grassroots defender of Knox County.

It isn’t.

The man who registered the group as a business — and who is its sole member and spokesperson — was an Ariel Corporation employee two decades ago and remained an acquaintance of a top executive there, Tom Rastin. The group’s website was owned for a time by a woman working as an executive assistant at Ariel.

And one of Knox Smart Development’s larger funders is Rastin, a Republican megadonor and a retired executive vice president at Ariel, according to records and sworn testimony. Rastin’s father-in-law founded Ariel and, until recently, Rastin and his wife, Karen Buchwald Wright, led the company. Wright is still the chairman, and her son operates it now. Rastin and Wright did not respond to questions for this story.

The group’s founder, Jared Yost, said in an email that Rastin has not tried to steer its activism. “As a local resident, I believe he should be allowed to donate to whatever cause he aligns with, regardless of his former employment, and to state otherwise is to suggest Mr. Rastin should be censored,” Yost wrote in an email. He said the group relies on volunteers and “our intentions are genuine.”

He added: “The oil and gas industry is not involved in our fight.”

Ariel Corporation expanded in 2017, adding a training center for employees and customers near its headquarters in Mount Vernon, Ohio.

The town hall event headliner, Goreham, said he appeared as a favor to Rastin and Wright. In 2019, he had dinner with the couple when Goreham and his wife were passing through town from Illinois on a road trip to their second home in Virginia Beach. Goreham said that he and Rastin connected over their mutual feelings on the benefits of gas. He said he was glad to accept the invitation to speak at the anti-Frasier Solar event.

“First off, it’s in his county there. Mount Vernon is his city where he lives and where they are based,” said Goreham. “They’re pretty much opposed to renewables and they want everybody to buy gas. That’s their business.”

Goreham says he wasn’t paid to speak, but Wright bought 200 copies of his latest book, “Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure,” which warns about a net-zero-emissions agenda that will cause energy grids to fail. Local officials were given copies of the book that included a personal note from Wright: “Hello! Given the significant misinformation surrounding solar and wind arrays, I bought you this book that really lays out the facts.” She signed the note “Karen Wright, Chairman — Ariel Corporation.”

Shortly after the group was formed, Knox Smart Development’s “No Solar” ads became a fixture on the Mount Vernon News website and in the paper.

“You Believe People”

The Mount Vernon News had been owned by the same family since 1939, and for decades it chronicled local doings from city council meetings to the county fair.

At its height in the early 2000s, before newspapers started hemorrhaging advertising revenue and readers, the News employed about 15 full-time local reporters. An orange Maine coon cat named Scoop roamed the newsroom.

But by 2020, the News was barely hanging on. Its reporters were still using clunky 20-year-old computers. The back wall of the building was falling down and needed $250,000 in repairs. Kay Culbertson, who owned both the paper and the building, said that she knew it was time to sell. Paying for the repairs would be impossible; even making payroll was a stretch.

First image: The former Mount Vernon News building, home to the paper since 1939, sits empty. Second image: The paper’s new owners opened an office in the Woodward Opera House, a historic downtown building that the Ariel Foundation helped renovate.

An acquaintance of Culberston’s connected her with Metric Media, part of an eight-company network operating more than 1,100 online local news sites. These sites have been described by media researchers and journalists as “pink slime,” named for a filler in processed meat. The final product looks natural, but it’s been tampered with.

A Syracuse University researcher concluded in a journal article published in February that sites like Metric’s “that seem like original news outlets and that appeal to local identity are filling the void” left by the decline of local news. And The Washington Post reported last year that Republican campaigns requested customized news stories that appeared on Metric-owned sites.

Both conservative and liberal pink slime sites exist. But Metric is run by Brian Timpone, an Illinois-based former broadcast reporter who has contributed tens of thousands of dollars to conservative campaigns and causes. Timpone’s ventures have been criticized for using foreign-based writers to produce material. Some also have been accused of plagiarism and fabricating quotes. Timpone has blamed the problems on foreign writers providing content, and he apologized to readers.

Metric Media’s nonprofit arm has received $1.4 million “for general operations” from DonorsTrust, a dark-money group that has received significant funding from Charles and David Koch, who made their billions in oil pipelines and refineries. The eight-company network that Metric is part of also has ties to conservative billionaires, including oil-and-gas-industry titan Tim Dunn, shipping magnate Richard Uihlein and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. (Political groups that organize as nonprofits do not have to disclose donors, which is why they’re called “dark money.”)

DonorsTrust CEO and President Lawson R. Bader said in an email that the organization makes about 4,000 grants a year and that it does not dictate how those donations are spent.

Timpone responded to a request for an interview by writing, “We at the Mount Vernon News are now also working on a story — about Pro Publica and Floodlight’s efforts to promote taxpayer-funded ‘solar energy’ businesses in Central Ohio.” He did not respond to detailed questions.

But in interviews, he has said his business keeps local news alive when many outlets are scaling back or shutting down. Timpone told the Deseret News in Utah that his sites have no political leaning and are “data-driven and fact-centric.”

Research and news investigations have found that Timpone’s publications tend to champion conservative causes and politicians; they often are linked to mysterious newspapers distributed during key elections.

Culbertson and assistant publisher Liz Lutwick said in an interview that they knew little about Metric Media before the sale. But the company’s promises sounded good and, Lutwick said, “You believe people.”

“They were going to keep everything the same for a while. Lo and behold, they didn’t,” Culbertson said.

Metric paid at least $1 million for the Mount Vernon News, the first time it had purchased an established news organization printing a local paper. When the new owners visited the paper after the sale, they told the staff they’d stop printing every day and would no longer provide benefits; instead, employees would become contractors. Half the staff quit on the spot.

“It was awful. You feel like you’ve betrayed people,” Culbertson said.

“We Call It the Solar Times”

Today, the Mount Vernon News only publishes once a week and has no local reporters or photographers.

“It’s obvious when you read the stories, either they’re AI-generated or they’re written by somebody who’s sitting in an office in Chicago who has never been here,” said Bill Davis, a sports editor who said he worked at the paper from 2010 to 2019.

Since Metric took over, only 11% of stories credited the work to authors working for Metric or its sister companies. Most of what it publishes are press releases or content submitted by companies and community groups, according to an analysis by the Tow Center, ProPublica and Floodlight.

After the sale, residents said they could no longer get timely obituaries — people were buried by the time funeral announcements were published — but they could read a lot about endangered farmland and concerns that the sun’s reflection off solar panels could blind nearby pilots.

Even Mount Vernon’s mayor, who was once a sports reporter at the paper, said he stopped reading it. Tanner Salyers, a former Mount Vernon city council member who now oversees public safety for the city, said quality dropped after the sale. “Then Frasier kicked up and they were like, ‘No more news.’ We call it the Solar Times.”

Over the last 12 months, the paper has published at least 52 online news stories on solar energy — 42 of them about the Frasier proposal, the analysis found. Of the 40 print editions published this year, 17 have featured front-page stories about solar. And though the paper has occasionally run a pro-solar letter to the editor, nearly all of the stories slanted anti-solar, according to an analysis of coverage by Floodlight, ProPublica and the Tow Center.

The paper began publishing a weekly opinion column called “Afternoon TEA” — TEA being an acronym for The Empowerment Alliance, a dark-money gas advocacy group Rastin leads.

The columns extolled the superiority of gas as a fuel source.

It isn’t clear if The Empowerment Alliance paid the Mount Vernon News to run the “Afternoon TEA” columns. But tax filings show that since 2020 The Empowerment Alliance has spent at least $6.3 million on a “public education campaign,” which included publishing “Afternoon TEA.” The goal was to promote “the importance of natural gas to the economy and national energy independence.”

One of The Empowerment Alliance’s stated goals is “fighting the nonsense of turning corn fields into solar fields.” It has financed online advertisements attacking President Joe Biden’s energy policies and spearheaded an Ohio bill that defined gas as a “green” fuel source.

Half of the Frasier stories published in the Mount Vernon News over the past year have mentioned Knox Smart Development, the anti-solar group linked to Rastin. Articles often quoted people or cited work from a Koch-backed think tank, The Buckeye Institute, but did not interview Frasier or farmers willing to lease land to it.

The Buckeye Institute is part of the State Policy Network, a group of think tanks that has received millions in funding from organizations connected to the Koch family. Rastin’s wife has served as a director on the State Policy Network board, and in 2019 she gave it $700,000, according to a tax record that typically would’ve been redacted but was posted to a government site.

The Mount Vernon News and pro-gas political groups also were working to influence local elections. The text messages that boosted anti-solar candidates were from a conservative Ohio PAC tied to a group that ran a pro-gas campaign.

And, leading up to the primary, a newspaper called the Ohio Energy Reporter was mailed to Knox County homes. The 8-page paper reprinted several Mount Vernon News stories on solar and featured other articles with headlines including “Ohio’s coming ‘solar trash wave’” and “Could the Texas Power Crisis happen in Ohio?”

A summer issue of the Mount Vernon News on the floor of the paper’s business office, where one local employee now works. There are no local reporters or photographers.

The publication did not disclose its owners. The Floodlight, ProPublica and Tow Center investigation used source code from the website, its IP address and business mailing addresses to confirm that it is a product of the wider Metric Media network.

The stories the Mount Vernon News published began undermining politicians who were seen as insufficiently anti-solar and boosting the profiles of solar power’s outspoken critics.

In one article, the News accused Mount Vernon Mayor Matthew Starr of bowing to “energy activists” and pledging to try to remove natural gas from the city. It was not true. Starr was furious and asked the editors to take down the article, but they would not.

And in nearly a dozen stories that mentioned Collier, the county commissioner who was later ousted, the paper consistently misused a comment he’d given about newly placed solar panels at the county jail to falsely insinuate he supported the Frasier project.

Collier was never interviewed for those stories. Yet the paper ran a story devoted entirely to anti-solar commissioner candidate Drenda Keesee, a megachurch pastor who’d never run for office before; the article said she had “emerged as a vocal opponent of solar projects encroaching on the community.” Keesee, whose property would border a portion of the solar site, was the only source in the story.

She won the primary against Collier and is unopposed in the November general election.

Drenda Keesee, right, is a pastor at Faith Life Church and a candidate for a seat on the Knox County Commission. Keesee, who’s running on an anti-solar platform, attended a Ohio Power Siting Board hearing in Columbus in August. “You Can’t Eat Solar Panels”

For the community, the debate over solar has been passionate and persistent. What it hasn’t always been is civil. Yard signs have been stolen. Insults hurled. Middle fingers extended. Friendships frayed.

“Other than solar, we don’t have any problems with each other,” said Kathy Gamble, who runs the pro-solar group Knox County For Responsible Solar.

Many people in the community say they don’t view the debate through the lens of climate science or fossil fuels; they care about land rights and preserving rural life. Members of Preserve Knox County, an anti-solar group with several members whose land borders the proposed solar arrays, said they worry the solar project will scare off the sandhill cranes and bald eagles that visit their backyards.

Many members are distrustful of Biden’s renewable energy initiatives; they are staunch supporters of former President Donald Trump, who questions the scientific consensus that the climate is undergoing dangerous changes. They also don’t trust the solar developer’s promises to plant enough trees to block the panels from view. And they don’t want to lose the farmland that gives the area its agricultural identity.

“You can’t eat solar panels,” said Jim Boeshart, whose home would be adjacent to solar arrays.

Keith Strait, a farmer who lives not far from Boeshart, agreed: “Let’s face it,” he said, pointing at the ground, “They’re not making any more of this. There will be a time when there won’t be any farm left. Where’re you going to get your food from?”

Keith Strait, a farmer in Knox County, said, “I don’t like it,” of the solar proposal. “They’re taking away a lot of farm ground.” Knox County residents Connie and Jim Boeshart, who live next to property where solar panels would be built if the Frasier Solar project is approved, attend an Ohio Power Siting Board hearing in August. Rich Piar stands near his cornfield in Knox County.

The farmers who want to lease their land feel their voices have been lost in the debate. For them, a 40-year land contract with Frasier Solar would be steady income. One farmer said he could make four times as much money per acre leasing to the solar project as he’d make renting to another farmer.

Rich Piar, the third-generation farmer, is looking to the solar panels as a retirement plan. He said he has no one to take over the operation when he retires, and he doesn’t think anyone should dictate what he does with his land or when he stops farming.

“Most farmers’ exit strategy is their health,” Piar said. “I don’t want to have that kind of predetermined exit strategy.” He went to one of the public meetings about Frasier but said it was so packed he didn’t get to speak until almost midnight.

In August, the Ohio Power Siting Board, which will rule on whether the project can be built, held a final hearing to accept evidence from both sides. One of the attorneys who spoke on behalf of a farmer who is leasing land for the project was from the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. (The Tow Center also is based at Columbia, but its work is separate.)

Frasier lawyers cross-examined Knox Smart Development spokesperson Jared Yost at the hearing, where he testified that Rastin, the retired Ariel executive, was one of the group’s biggest donors. To Open Road Renewables’ vice president of development, Craig Adair, the confirmation pierced the veil.

First image: Jared Yost, founder of Knox Smart Development, testifies in August during an Ohio Power Siting Board hearing about his group’s opposition to the Frasier Solar project. Second image: Craig Adair, vice president of development at Open Road Renewables, the company developing the Frasier project, testifies at the hearing.

Everything changed, Adair said in an interview, “when The Empowerment Alliance decided to use its vast financial resources” to shape the debate in Knox County and in the Mount Vernon News.

The News published two stories on the hearing but did not mention the public admission of Knox Smart Development’s ties to Rastin, the Ariel Corporation and The Empowerment Alliance.

The board’s decision is likely to take months.

In the meantime, construction has started at the old Mount Vernon News building, which is being turned into an academic hub for a local university. The building will be named after Rastin’s stepson, a former president of Ariel Corporation.

by Jacob Orledge, North Dakota Monitor

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the North Dakota Monitor. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

When Republican Kelly Armstrong filed his federal financial disclosure after being elected to Congress in 2018, he revealed his extensive ties to the oil and gas industry in his home state of North Dakota. It detailed his income from hundreds of oil wells and his financial relationship with two of the state’s largest oil producers.

Those ties will matter a great deal if, as is likely, he’s elected as North Dakota’s governor next month. Under North Dakota’s system, he will automatically chair two state bodies that regulate the energy industry, meaning Armstrong would be expected to preside over decisions that directly impact companies in which he has financial or familial ties.

As head of both the North Dakota Industrial Commission and the Land Board, Armstrong would have a nearly unmatched level of control and oversight compared with leaders in other states. The former state senator would help set policy at a time when North Dakota — the No. 3 oil producer in the nation — is entering a new phase of energy development. The Industrial Commission has faced criticism in recent years from landowners and legislators, including for being too supportive of corporate interests.

Armstrong wrote in an email, in response to questions from the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica, that he earns nearly all of his personal income from the oil and gas industry. In 2022, Armstrong received up to $50,000 in royalty income from Hess Corp. — a company that has been the subject of 14 votes by one of those bodies in recent years and is likely to be discussed by the boards in the years to come. Similarly, an oil and gas company run by Armstrong’s father had been part of a yearslong, multicompany dispute with the Land Board, which oversees state-owned lands and minerals. Most entities, including his father’s company, have reached negotiated settlements.

The man Armstrong seeks to succeed, Gov. Doug Burgum, has voted about 20 times on issues related to companies with which he has a financial relationship, according to a review of minutes from the Industrial Commission, which is responsible for energy regulation and oversight of state-owned businesses. That includes Continental Resources, one of the region’s largest producers.

The mechanics of how we’ve done things in North Dakota don’t really make sense from an ethics standpoint.

—Scott Skokos, executive director of Dakota Resource Council

These votes were made under North Dakota’s ethics rules, which are significantly weaker than those in other states. Board members have discretion to decide whether they have a conflict of interest, and the boards are effectively self-policing on this front. The state’s Ethics Commission has created conflict-of-interest rules, but it can only take action if a complaint is filed; it also has not implemented consequences for violating those rules.

Most ethics experts contacted for this article said that royalty owners voting on matters involving companies they receive income from is problematic.

“That’s not just an apparent conflict of interest, that’s a real conflict of interest,” said Dennis Cooley, director of the Northern Plains Ethics Institute at North Dakota State University. “Anything that touches on ‘I’m giving you money for this,’ even with the best intentions, and that’s what I’m assuming these folks have, these representatives have, it’s really hard to separate yourself from folks who pay you.”

Scott Skokos, executive director of the environmental conservation group Dakota Resource Council, agreed. “The mechanics of how we’ve done things in North Dakota don’t really make sense from an ethics standpoint,” said Skokos, whose group has opposed some Industrial Commission decisions. Government, he said, is “supposed to work for the people, and what’s happening is the government is working for corporate interests.”

Armstrong, a lawyer whose father has been involved in the oil industry since 1979, sat for an interview this summer at the GOP’s state headquarters to discuss his connections to one of the state’s largest industries. He said he doesn’t believe his financial ties to oil and gas companies will pose a conflict of interest when he’s asked to vote on matters involving those companies. “I would talk to somebody,” he said in the interview, “but I don’t think so.”

Armstrong said he will not divest his oil and gas interests, nor will he place his holdings in a blind trust. And he said his experience dealing with the industry will be an asset in the governor’s role as “promoter-in-chief” for North Dakota’s energy industry.

“It’s the No. 1 driver of our economy in North Dakota, and I have an incredible knowledge base about what it’s like to grow up in western North Dakota in the oil and gas business,” Armstrong said. “I don’t think that’s a conflict. I think that is a benefit.”

Few Guardrails

Since he was elected governor in 2016, Burgum has cast about 20 votes on the Industrial Commission involving oil and gas companies that lease minerals from a family venture the governor co-owns and at least one vote that benefited a company in which his wife owns stock.

Those votes covered a range of issues including experimental production technology, disputes between companies and research grants.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, center, leads a meeting of the state Industrial Commission on July 2 in Bismarck with state Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring, left, and state Attorney General Drew Wrigley. (Michael Achterling/North Dakota Monitor)

But because of North Dakota’s thin financial disclosure requirements, the public wasn’t informed that Burgum and his family held a financial interest in the companies until he ran for president last year.

That’s when Burgum became subject to more stringent federal requirements; his disclosure report revealed that he receives up to $51,000 annually in mineral royalties combined from Continental Resources and Hess, two of the Bakken oil field’s largest oil producers. The income comes from mineral leases signed through the Burgum Farm Partnership, a family venture co-owned by Burgum and five relatives.

A spokesperson for the governor, Mike Nowatzki, said those leases began long before Burgum took office and have not been the subject of any business that has come before the boards.

Those federal disclosures also revealed that his wife, Kathryn Burgum, held stocks in nine energy companies, more than half of which do business in the state.

One of those, Otter Tail Corp., had business before the Industrial Commision and was the recipient of a $4.4 million grant for grid resiliency approved in a 3-0 vote last December. Burgum voted in favor of the grant.

Burgum’s wife held stock valued between $1,001 and $15,000 in Otter Tail. Multiple emails sent to Nowatzki sought the actual value, as well as comment from Burgum’s wife. The spokesman did not provide either.

Burgum’s 2023 federal financial disclosure showed that his wife held stock in nine energy companies, valued between $70,000 and $241,000, including between $1,001 and $15,000 in Otter Tail stock. The company had business before the Industrial Commission and was the recipient of a $4.4 million grant. (Document obtained by North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica. Screenshot highlighted by ProPublica.)

The exact amount of those holdings matters because the Industrial Commission’s ethics policy prohibits board members from participating in, voting on or attempting to influence any decision on a company they or their spouse owns $5,000 or more equity in if there is a “reasonably foreseeable benefit” to the business from the “matter under consideration.”

Nowatzki asserted that the board’s ethics policy only applies if the governor himself benefited, not the company, and that it’s “absurd” to suggest the grant to Otter Tail “would provide a ‘reasonably foreseeable benefit’ to the governor on a 32-year-old investment valued at under $15,000.”

“The governor has no involvement in management of that account, and it has not factored into any decisions in his official capacity as governor,” Nowatzki wrote in an email.

Richard Briffault, a Columbia University law professor and expert in government ethics, says the stock ownership should have been disclosed prior to any votes. “If a regulator’s spouse has financial interests in one of the entities subject to regulation, that’s as if the regulator himself has a financial interest,” he said.

Had Burgum’s holdings been known, he still might not have been prevented from participating in those votes. The three-member Industrial Commission, which also includes the state attorney general and agriculture commissioner, is one of many entities in North Dakota that uses a version of the “neutral reviewer” process: If a board member discloses a conflict of interest in a matter under consideration, the remaining members vote on whether their conflicted colleague is disqualified. Industrial Commission Executive Director Karen Tyler said the board, which holds open meetings, often does not take a formal vote but has a “discussion and then a consensus whether or not the conflict rises to the level of a disqualifying conflict of interest.”

Three ethics experts told the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica that they’ve rarely, if ever, seen this process used by government boards elsewhere. It is best practice, they said, for officials with a conflict to automatically recuse themselves.

“I find that to be a bizarre system,” said Cooley, who said he had never seen it used until he moved to North Dakota.

Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor who studies government ethics, called the system “flawed.” “There’s going to be a lot of pressure on the other board members to say, ‘No, it’s OK for you to go ahead and vote; I don’t think you’ve got a conflict,’” said Painter, who served as President George W. Bush’s chief ethics attorney.

In fact, the neutral reviewer system was used when another member of the Industrial Commission, Doug Goehring, joined a 3-0 vote in favor of a carbon storage permit for Red Trail Energy, a western North Dakota ethanol plant in which he said in an interview that he had invested $60,000.

At the time, in 2021, Goehring verbally disclosed that he was an investor; the minutes of the meeting show that “the Commission did not have any concerns” with his participation in the vote. In a recent interview, he described the commission’s evaluation of conflicts of interest as “housekeeping stuff.”

Goehring, who is also the state’s longtime agriculture commissioner, in 2018 verbally disclosed a conflict and abstained from a vote giving Red Trail Energy a $500,000 grant; he did that, he said in an interview, because the action was an appropriation of taxpayer dollars. By contrast, he said he voted for the permit in 2021 because “anybody is eligible for a permit” if the “geology is appropriate.”

“To think that that’s not a conflict of interest is to hallucinate, in my opinion,” Skokos said. “For him to vote on it, having a financial stake in that company, is alarming.”

Goehring also never disclosed his stake in Red Trail Energy on state financial disclosure reports filed between 2010 and 2022 and reviewed by the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica. Asked about this, he called the omission an “oversight.”

Red Trail Energy is in the process of being sold for $210 million. Initial investors such as Goehring will see a sizable profit from that sale, according to Jodi Johnson, Red Trail Energy’s CEO.

Armstrong’s Holdings

The state’s guardrails against conflicts of interest will be tested if Armstrong is elected governor. His oil and gas holdings outstrip — and compose a far greater share of his overall wealth than — those of the current governor.

I have an incredible knowledge base about what it’s like to grow up in western North Dakota in the oil and gas business. I don’t think that’s a conflict. I think that is a benefit.

—Kelly Armstrong, gubernatorial candidate and congressman

“Nearly 100% of my non-salary income is from oil and gas,” Armstrong wrote in an email.

As the GOP nominee, Armstrong is the favorite to be North Dakota’s next governor. Democrats last won statewide office in 2012, and the party has been absent from the governor’s mansion since 1992. Democrat Merrill Piepkorn, a state senator from Fargo, and independent candidate Michael Coachman also are running for governor.

Armstrong, the son of oilman Michael Armstrong of Dickinson, owns widespread mineral interests throughout the Bakken. His 2022 income from oil and gas, according to financial disclosures filed by the congressman, was between $426,674 and $2,460,900. He received up to $100,000 from Conoco and up to $50,000 from Hess, two of the largest oil producers in North Dakota. He also owns 11% of The Armstrong Corp., the family’s business that his campaign described as engaging in oil and gas exploration, among other efforts.

Armstrong’s 2023 federal financial disclosure showed that he received up to $50,000 from Hess and up to $100,000 from Conoco. (Document obtained by North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica. Screenshot highlighted by ProPublica.)

Armstrong’s industry interests have grown during his time in Congress. His financial disclosures indicate that the number of wells he earns royalty income from has increased to 475 in 2022, up from 301 in 2018.

He stepped down as vice president of The Armstrong Corp. after being elected to Congress in 2018. He said in an interview he has not made any oil and gas business decisions while serving in Congress.

Armstrong pointed out that states, and not the federal government, have “most of the control over the regulation” of oil and gas production. And he acknowledged the influence he would have if elected in a state where the governor has more sway. By contrast, Texas, the country’s top oil producer, elects members to the body that regulates the industry.

“North Dakota does things very uniquely,” Armstrong said, though he could see benefits to Texas’ approach and would entertain the idea of adjusting his state’s system.

“Ask me after I’ve done it for two years. That’s my answer, we’ll wait and see.”

“Clearly Inadequate Disclosure”

The public only got insight into Burgum’s and Armstrong’s financial positions because of a quirk of political circumstances: In recent years, both had to file federal disclosures.

North Dakota’s disclosure requirements for elected officials call for a fraction of what the federal government or most other states do. The state only requires public officials to file financial disclosure reports when they’re running for elected office, which is every four years for most positions. (Most states require the reports annually.) Officials also are not required to report stock ownership nor the value of their assets. The records are not published online, unlike in most states, and there are no penalties enforced for submitting incomplete or inaccurate statements.

There also is no state authority empowered to monitor such disclosures or offer guidance. The statements of interest are submitted to the North Dakota secretary of state’s office, but Sandy McMerty, deputy secretary of state, said, “There is no requirement for us to check” on the accuracy of those filings.

“That’s clearly inadequate disclosure,” said Painter, the former White House ethics attorney.

Still, Armstrong and Burgum failed to meet North Dakota’s requirements. Armstrong did not list his ownership stake in several family companies in his 2016 disclosure as a state lawmaker. He did include those companies in his 2018 disclosure while running for Congress. Asked why the reports differed, Armstrong said: “I have no idea.”

Oil and gas infrastructure in Williams County, North Dakota (Kyle Martin for North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica)

Burgum, meanwhile, failed to disclose on his 2020 state financial report both his ownership stake in the Burgum Farm Partnership, which owns the mineral leases his family has, and his wife’s brokerage account. He disclosed the family partnership, but not the leases, in his 2016 report. He is not running for reelection.

In response to inquiries by the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica, Burgum filed an amended version of the 2020 report with the secretary of state’s office in September. It now includes the family partnership and the brokerage account, but it does not mention his family’s mineral leases or individual stocks owned by his wife.

Nowatzki said the stocks are managed by Merrill Lynch and the investment account was “inadvertently omitted from previous statements of interest.”

Nowatzki pushed back, however, on any assertion the oil and gas leases should have been disclosed, arguing that that isn’t required of North Dakotans generally. “Tens of thousands of families and mineral owners have similar arrangements,” he said.

Painter said that the leases they held “absolutely” should have been disclosed.

The state’s Ethics Commission was supposed to help mitigate potential conflicts of interest. Created in 2019 as the result of a voter-initiated ballot measure to amend the constitution, three years later the commission instituted conflict-of-interest rules for the legislative and executive branches of government. The rules — which define a conflict of interest and spell out how potential conflicts should be disclosed and evaluated — have proven largely ineffective in part because conflicts are often not disclosed and there are no consequences in the rules for violations.

Rebecca Binstock, executive director of the Ethics Commission, said that body is planning to create new financial disclosure rules and will rectify the lack of what she called “meaningful enforcement.” The commission said last month it’s working with the secretary of state to draft proposed legislation to create a process for enforcing compliance with the state’s financial disclosure requirements.

In 2017, proposed legislation would have required that statements of interest be published online and available to the public for free. (The North Dakota Monitor paid $170 to obtain statements of interest for all candidates on the November ballot.) Ultimately, that effort failed, and the legislature voted only to commission a study of the issue. Armstrong voted against it. He told the North Dakota Monitor that the study was unnecessary because he thought the secretary of state’s office had agreed to publish the disclosures online without a legislative directive. That has not happened.

Armstrong, meanwhile, has campaigned on a promise to “promote and demand transparency.” Still, he said in an interview that he is opposed to increasing the transparency requirements for state legislators.

“Outside the pain in the ass of filing my financial disclosure, I don’t have a problem with doing it at the federal level, but you can’t force that on people here,” Armstrong said. “State legislators would never get it done that way.”

As we report on the energy industry in North Dakota, we want to hear from more of the people who know it best. Do you work for an oil or gas company? Are you a landowner who receives royalty payments? Do you have a personal story to share about deductions from royalty checks? All perspectives matter to us. Please get in touch with reporter Jacob Orledge at jorledge@northdakotamonitor.com.

by Doug Bock Clark and Heather Vogell

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

An examination of a new election rule in Georgia passed by the state’s Republican-controlled election board suggests that local officials in just a handful of rural counties could exclude enough votes to affect the outcome of the presidential race.

The rule was backed by national groups allied with former President Donald Trump. It gives county boards the power to investigate irregularities and exclude entire precincts from the vote totals they certify. Supporters of the rule, most of whom are Republicans, say it’s necessary to root out fraud. Critics, most of whom are Democrats, say it can be used as a tool to disenfranchise select buckets of voters.

An analysis by ProPublica shows that counties wouldn’t have to toss out many precincts to tip the election if it’s as close as it was in 2020, when Trump lost Georgia by less than 12,000 votes. Based on tallies from that year, an advantage of about 8,000 Democratic votes could be at risk in just 12 precincts in three counties under the new rule, the analysis found. There are 159 counties in Georgia.

A judge is expected to decide soon whether the rule will stand.

The three counties — Spalding, Troup and Ware — voted for Trump in 2020. But each has small yet significant concentrations of Democratic votes clustered in specific precincts. All three also have local election boards that have become stacked in recent years with partisans who’ve voiced support for the false claim that Trump won the 2020 election or have cast doubt on the integrity of the election process.

In Spalding, about 40 miles south of Atlanta, a man who is now county election board chair had previously alerted Trump’s attorneys to what police later determined was false evidence of voter fraud. More recently, he has tweeted that President Joe Biden is a “pedophile,” made sexually degrading comments about Vice President Kamala Harris and, this August, accused a top state elections official of “gaslighting” for saying there was no evidence of fraud in 2020.

In Ware County, in the southeast corner of the state, the election board chair is tied to far-right groups and has called democracy “mob rule.” In Troup County, which borders Alabama, the election board chair maintains that debunked “statistical anomalies” in the 2020 vote still haven’t been explained.

The legality of the rule was debated on Oct. 1 during back-to-back bench trials for two lawsuits. One was brought by the Democratic National Committee and others against the State Election Board, seeking to invalidate the rule. The other was brought by a Republican local board member against her county, the Democratic National Committee and others, seeking a judgment that she had the discretion not to certify election results.

During the trial, Judge Robert McBurney said to the lawyer representing the Republican board member, “You have very successfully pulled me down an intriguing rabbit hole about, well, maybe you could certify some of the votes, but not all of the votes.”

The boards’ new power is the culmination of ground-level efforts in Georgia that began the day Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election. After Trump lost — and after Georgia’s Republican secretary of state rebuffed his demand to “find” him the 11,780 votes he would have needed to win — GOP state legislators launched an effort to reshape county election boards, paving the way for removing Democrats and stacking them with Trump backers. Boards are supposed to administer elections in a nonpartisan manner, and some of these changes broke with the norm of having equal numbers of Republican and Democratic members, plus an independent chair to break ties.

The legislature also removed the secretary of state as head of the State Election Board and replaced members of the board — stacking it, too, with Trump partisans. At an August rally in Atlanta, Trump praised three of them by name, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.” The three board members did not respond to requests for comment.

With the addition of its newest member, the state board was able to do in August what the previous iteration of it wouldn’t: Pass rules giving the county boards unprecedented power.

What’s more, the rule allowing county boards to exclude specific votes was secretly pushed by Julie Adams, a leader of a group central to challenging the legitimacy of the American election system. That group’s founder joined Trump on the call in 2020 during which he pressured the secretary of state to hand him victory.

Adams, a Fulton County election board member, was the plaintiff in one of the two lawsuits. She did not respond to requests for comment or a list of detailed questions.

The State Election Board and attorneys representing parties in both lawsuits did not comment.

A lawyer representing the Democratic National Committee referred ProPublica to the Harris-Walz campaign. “For months, MAGA Republicans in Georgia and across the country have been trying to lay the groundwork to challenge the election results when they lose again in November,” deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said in a statement. “A few unelected extremists can’t just decide not to count your vote.”

During one of the bench trials, Richard Lawson, a lawyer for Adams and the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank aligned with Trump, argued that county board members should have the authority to exclude entire precincts’ votes if they find something suspicious.

A lawyer for the Democratic National Committee, Daniel Volchok, warned that board members making “individual determinations about if a ballot is fraudulent or otherwise should not be counted” is “a recipe for chaos.”

“It is also a recipe for denying Georgians their right to vote.”

Spalding County has for years played a prominent role in Trump supporters’ efforts to challenge election results.

In 2020, Trump’s allies trying to overturn the election quickly realized that the weakest points in America’s election system are its thousands of counties, where the day-to-day work of running elections is done. Previously unreported emails and messages show that one of the first places they targeted was Spalding County.

In the days after the election, Ben Johnson, the owner of a tech company who in 2021 would become chair of the Spalding County election board, began tweeting repeatedly at a team of lawyers challenging the election results on behalf of Trump, including Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, a ProPublica review of his deleted but archived tweets found. Johnson also advocated on social media for overturning the election. The Daily Beast reported in 2022 on other Johnson tweets, including one suggesting that Wood investigate claims of election fraud in Spalding County.

About two weeks after the election, a hacker emailed Wood and others to say that that he and another operative were “on ground & ready for orders” near Spalding County, outlining in a series of attachments how they were seeking to acquire voting machine data to prove the election was stolen in Spalding and another Georgia county. (Wood previously told ProPublica, “I do not recall any such email” and that he did not give the hacker any orders, though he did say he recalled the hacker “leaving one night to travel to Georgia.” The hacker did not previously respond to requests for comment.)

Messages obtained by ProPublica show that about an hour later, the operative messaged the hacker: “Woot! We have a county committing to having us image” voting machine data.

The hacker and operative were able to help their allies access voter machine data elsewhere, which became a central pillar in a long-running conspiracy theory that voting machines were hacked. That theory was key to justifying attempts to overturn the 2020 election. In Spalding County, however, their plan fell apart after the secretary of state made clear in a memo that accessing such data would be illegal. “Our contact wants to give us access, but with that memo it makes it impossible,” the operative wrote, without “her getting in a lot of trouble.”

After Trump’s loss, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a massive bill “to comprehensively revise elections” in response to “many electors concerned about allegations of rampant voter fraud.” And Republican state legislators began writing bills to revamp local election boards, one county at a time. Since 2021, the reorganizations of 15 boards have brought a wave of partisan Republicans, ProPublica found.

As a result of the 2021 reorganization in Spalding, the election board lost three Black Democrats. Three new white Republicans became the majority — including Johnson, who became chair.

In 2022, after news outlets reported that Johnson had supported the QAnon conspiracy theory on social media, he tweeted an open letter emphasizing that he “took an oath to serve in the interests of ALL eligible voters of Spalding County” and “There’s no room for politics in the conducting of Elections.”

Since then, Johnson has continued to share social media content questioning the integrity of Georgia’s elections.

Reached by phone, Johnson said, “I don’t want to talk to any liberal media” and “You’re going to spread lies.” He did not respond to a detailed list of questions subsequently sent to him.

The new rule says that if there are discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of people recorded as having voted in a given precinct, “The Board shall investigate the discrepancy and no votes shall be counted from that precinct until the results of the investigation are presented to the Board.” If “any error” or “fraud is discovered, the Board shall determine a method to compute the votes justly.”

Minor discrepancies between the number of voters and ballots are not uncommon. For instance, ballots can become stuck in scanners, voters can begin filling out a ballot and then stop before submitting it, or election systems can be slow to update that a provisional ballot has been corrected.

In counties like Spalding, Ware and Troup — with Republican-leaning boards and at least a few Democratic-heavy precincts — the conservative majority has the power to determine how to “compute the votes justly.” At the trial and in court documents, Democratic lawyers argued this could mean not certifying Democratic votes, with one arguing in a brief that county board members “will attempt to delay, block, or manipulate certification according to their own political preferences” by invoking the rule “to challenge only certain types of ballots or returns from certain precincts as fraudulent.”

Democratic voters in many conservative rural counties are packed into a small number of precincts. In 2020, Spalding had five precincts with Democratic majorities, which provided about 3,300 more votes for Biden than Trump. Troup had five such precincts totaling about 3,000 such votes, and Ware had two such precincts totaling roughly another 1,600 votes.

Troup County removed two Black women and two men — all Democrats, one said — from its elections board when it restructured in 2021, shrinking the board from seven to five members.

“They definitely wanted us off the board,” said former member Lonnie Hollis, who is worried the new board will behave partisanly this election. She said Republican officials in Troup have connections to the state party.

The board’s new chair, William Stump, a local banker, said that he believes Troup got its vote totals right last presidential election but that “there were some fairly significant statistical anomalies” elsewhere in Georgia.

“It didn’t pass the smell test,” he said. Stump recently appeared at a GOP luncheon in LaGrange with State Election Board member Janelle King, whose ascension to the board cemented its MAGA majority and enabled the passage of the rules.

Stump said he was at the luncheon, where the GOP handed out Trump gear, to answer questions about the election process. “We don’t have, I don’t think, outwardly partisan folks on the board,” he said. “Everybody’s concern is to get the numbers right and get them out on time.”

When Ware County reconstituted its election board in 2023, it removed two Black members who were Democrats and installed Republican Danny Bartlett as chair. Bartlett, a retired teacher, served as executive director of the Okefenokee chapter of Citizens Defending Freedom, a Christian nationalist group the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “anti government” and “part of the antidemocratic hard-right movement.”

Bartlett also started a Facebook group in 2022 called Southeast Georgia Conservatives in Action that asks potential members. “Are you ready to take action against the assault upon our country?” Bartlett sought to raise money for the group through a raffle that offered as a grand prize a “Home Defense Package” that included $2,000 worth of guns, gear and a “Patriot Pantry 1-week Food Supply Ammo Can.”

Bartlett did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Carlos Nelson, Ware’s elections supervisor, said he opposed the board’s restructuring but said that Bartlett hasn’t gone along when conservative activists have demanded measures such as hand-counting ballots. “He has been a really good chair,” said Nelson, who is a Democrat. He said he didn’t know about Bartlett’s outside political affiliations but that they were “totally different from his participation on the board.”

Shawn Taylor, one of the Black board members who was removed, said she’s concerned that the new election leaders are too partisan and may try to sway the election results.

“These MAGA Republicans are putting things in place to try to steal the election,” she said, adding she did not think all Republicans supported those attempts. “I believe that it’s going to cause major conflict within a lot of these counties.”

The Ware County commission in July removed a new conservative election board member, Michael Hargrove, who had complained about the “Biden/Harris Crime Syndicate” on social media, after he entered a polling site’s restricted area during spring elections and got into a confrontation with a poll worker. Hargrove said in an email that he “had, as an Elections Board member, EVERY right to be in that location at that time. Any other issue related to that event is juvenile nonsense.”

His replacement, Vernon Chambless, is a local lawyer who told ProPublica that he believes Trump should have been declared the winner in 2020. “We’re going to make sure that everything’s kosher before we certify,” he said.

Alex Mierjeski, Amy Yurkanin, Mollie Simon, Mariam Elba, Kirsten Berg and Doris Burke contributed research.

by Brett Murphy

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In late January, as the death toll in Gaza climbed to 25,000 and droves of Palestinians fled their razed cities in search of safety, Israel’s military asked for 3,000 more bombs from the American government. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew, along with other top diplomats in the Jerusalem embassy, sent a cable to Washington urging State Department leaders to approve the sale, saying there was no potential the Israel Defense Forces would misuse the weapons.

The cable did not mention the Biden administration’s public concerns over the growing civilian casualties, nor did it address well-documented reports that Israel had dropped 2,000-pound bombs on crowded areas of Gaza weeks earlier, collapsing apartment buildings and killing hundreds of Palestinians, many of whom were children. Lew was aware of the issues. Officials say his own staff had repeatedly highlighted attacks where large numbers of civilians died. Homes of the embassy’s own Palestinian employees had been targeted by Israeli airstrikes.

Still, Lew and his senior leadership argued that Israel could be trusted with this new shipment of bombs, known as GBU-39s, which are smaller and more precise. Israel’s air force, they asserted, had a “decades-long proven track record” of avoiding killing civilians when using the American-made bomb and had “demonstrated an ability and willingness to employ it in [a] manner that minimizes collateral damage.”

While that request was pending, the Israelis proved those assertions wrong. In the months that followed, the Israeli military repeatedly dropped GBU-39s it already possessed on shelters and refugee camps that it said were being occupied by Hamas soldiers, killing scores of Palestinians. Then, in early August, the IDF bombed a school and mosque where civilians were sheltering. At least 93 died. Children’s bodies were so mutilated their parents had trouble identifying them.

Weapons analysts identified shrapnel from GBU-39 bombs among the rubble.

In the months before and since, an array of State Department officials urged that Israel be completely or partially cut off from weapons sales under laws that prohibit arming countries with a pattern or clear risk of violations. Top State Department political appointees repeatedly rejected those appeals. Government experts have for years unsuccessfully tried to withhold or place conditions on arms sales to Israel because of credible allegations that the country had violated Palestinians’ human rights using American-made weapons.

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Do you have information about how the U.S. arms foreign countries? Contact Brett Murphy on Signal at 508-523-5195 or by email at brett.murphy@propublica.org.

On Jan. 31, the day after the embassy delivered its assessment, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted an agency-wide town hall at an auditorium at the State Department headquarters where he fielded pointed questions from his subordinates about Gaza. He said the suffering of civilians was “absolutely gut wrenching and heartbreaking,” according to a transcript of the meeting.

“But it is a question of making judgments,” Blinken said of his agency’s efforts to minimize harm. “We started with the premise on October 7 that Israel had the right to defend itself, and more than the right to defend itself, the right to try to ensure that October 7 would never happen again.”

The embassy’s endorsement and Blinken’s statements reflect what many at the State Department have understood to be their mission for nearly a year. As one former official who served at the embassy put it, the unwritten policy was to “protect Israel from scrutiny” and facilitate the arms flow no matter how many human rights abuses are reported. “We can’t admit that’s a problem,” this former official said.

The embassy has even historically resisted accepting funds from the State Department’s Middle East bureau earmarked for investigating human rights issues throughout Israel because embassy leaders didn’t want to insinuate that Israel might have such problems, according to Mike Casey, a former U.S. diplomat in Jerusalem. “In most places our goal is to address human rights violations,” Casey added. “We don’t have that in Jerusalem.”

Last week, ProPublica detailed how the government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance — the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department’s refugees bureau — concluded in the spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza and that weapons sales should be halted. But Blinken rejected those findings as well and, weeks later, told Congress that the State Department had concluded that Israel was not blocking aid.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Evelyn Hockstein/Pool/AFP)

The episodes uncovered by ProPublica, which have not been previously detailed, offer an inside look at how and why the highest ranking policymakers in the U.S. government have continued to approve sales of American weapons to Israel in the face of a mounting civilian death toll and evidence of almost daily human rights abuses. This article draws from a trove of internal cables, email threads, memos, meeting minutes and other State Department records, as well as interviews with current and former officials throughout the agency, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The records and interviews also show that the pressure to keep the arms pipeline moving also comes from the U.S. military contractors who make the weapons. Lobbyists for those companies have routinely pressed lawmakers and State Department officials behind the scenes to approve shipments both to Israel and other controversial allies in the region, including Saudi Arabia. When one company executive pushed his former subordinate at the department for a valuable sale, the government official reminded him that strategizing over the deal might violate federal lobbying laws, emails show.

The Biden administration’s repeated willingness to give the IDF a pass has only emboldened the Israelis, experts told ProPublica. Today, as Israel and Iran trade blows, the risk of a regional war is as great as it has been in decades and the cost of that American failure has become more apparent, critics charge.

“The reaffirmation of impunity has come swiftly and unequivocally,” said Daniel Levy, who served in the Israeli military before holding various prominent positions as a government official and adviser throughout the ’90s. He later became one of the founders of the advocacy group J Street and president of the U.S./Middle East Project.

Levy said there is virtually no threat of accountability for Israel’s conduct in Gaza, only “a certainty of carte blanche.” Or, as another State Department official said, “If there’s never any consequences for doing it, then why stop doing it?”

The war in Gaza has waged for nearly a year without signs of abating. There are at least 41,000 Palestinians dead, by local estimates. Israel says its actions have been legal and legitimate, unlike those of Hamas, which killed more than 1,100 Israelis, mostly civilians, on Oct. 7 and continues to hold dozens of hostages.

The U.S. has been a stalwart ally of Israel for decades, with presidents of both parties praising the country as a beacon of democracy in a dangerous region filled with threats to American interests.

In response to detailed questions from ProPublica, a State Department spokesperson sent a statement saying that arms transfers to any country, including Israel, “are done so in a deliberative manner with appropriate input” from other agencies, State Department bureaus and embassies. “We expect any country that is a recipient of U.S. security articles,” he added, “use them in full compliance with international humanitarian law, and we have several ongoing processes to examine that compliance.”

The spokesperson also said Lew has been at the forefront of ensuring “that every possible measure is taken to minimize impacts on civilians” while working on a cease-fire deal to secure “the release of hostages, alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and bring an end to the conflict.”

Israeli military leaders broadly defend their aerial campaign in Gaza as a “military necessity” to eradicate terrorists hiding among civilians. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also publicly pressured the Biden administration to hasten arms transfers. “Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job a lot faster,” he said in June.

ProPublica sent detailed questions to representatives of the Israeli government as well. A spokesperson said in a statement: “The article is biased and seeks to portray legitimate and routine contacts between Israel and the Embassy in Washington with State Department officials as improper. Its goal appears to be casting doubt on the security cooperation between two friendly nations and close allies.”

Weapons sales are a pillar of American foreign policy in the Middle East. Historically, the U.S. gives more money to Israel for weapons than it does to any other country. Israel spends most of those American tax dollars to buy weapons and equipment made by U.S. arms manufacturers.

While Israel has its own arms industry, the country relies heavily on American jets, bombs and other weapons in Gaza. Since October 2023, the U.S. has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry, which the Israeli military says has been “crucial for sustaining the IDF’s operational capabilities during the ongoing war.” The air defenses that defend Israeli towns and cities — known as the Iron Dome — also depend largely on U.S. support.

There is little sign that either party is prepared to curtail U.S. weapons shipments. Vice President Kamala Harris has called for a cease-fire, lamented the death toll in Gaza and said she supported Palestinians’ right to self-determination as well as President Joe Biden’s decision to pause a shipment of 2,000 bombs in June. She has also echoed a refrain from previous administrations, pledging to “ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.” Harris also said she had no intention of breaking with Biden’s Israel policy.

Republican nominee for president Donald Trump, who has described himself as the “best friend that Israel has ever had,” reportedly told donors that he supports Israel’s “war on terror” and promised to crush pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. Trump was also recently a featured speaker at the Israeli-American Council’s summit, where he cast himself as the most pro-Israel choice in the coming election. “You have a big protector in me,” he told the crowd. “You don’t have a protector on the other side.”

People transport the body of a family member for burial following an Israeli strike on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza City on Aug. 10 that killed more than 90 people. Shrapnel from GBU-39 bombs was identified among the rubble. (Omar al-Qattaa/AFP via Getty Images)

The United States first began selling significant amounts of weapons to Israel in the early 1970s. Until then, Israel had relied on an array of home-grown and international purchases, notably from France, while the Soviet Union armed Israel’s adversaries. Over the past half-century, no country in the world has received more American military assistance than Israel.

The U.S. gives the Israeli government about $3.8 billion every year and much more during wartime to help maintain its military edge in the region. Congress and the executive branch have imposed legal guardrails on how Israel and other countries can use the weapons they buy with U.S. money. The State Department must review and approve most of those large foreign military sales and is required to cut off a country if there is a pattern or clear risk of breaking international humanitarian law, like targeting civilians or blocking shipments of food to refugees. The department is also supposed to withhold U.S.-funded equipment and weapons from individual military units credibly accused of committing flagrant human rights violations, like torture.

Initially, a country makes a request and the local embassy, which is under the State Department’s jurisdiction, writes a cable called a “country team assessment” to judge the fitness of the nation asking for the weapons. This is just the beginning of a complex process, but it’s a crucial step because of the embassies’ local expertise.

Then, the bulk of that review is conducted by the State Department’s arms transfers section, known as the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, with input from other bureaus. For Israel and NATO allies, if the sale is worth at least $100 million for weapons or $25 million for equipment, Congress also gets final approval. If lawmakers try to block a sale, which is rare, the president can sidestep with a veto.

For years, Josh Paul, a career official in the State Department’s arms transfers bureau, reviewed arms sales to Israel and other countries in the Middle East. Over time, he became one of the agency’s most well-versed experts in arms sales.

Even before Israel’s retaliation for Oct. 7, he had been concerned with Israel’s conduct. On multiple occasions, he said, he believed the law required the government to withhold weapons transfers. In May 2021, he refused to approve a sale of fighter jets to the Israeli Air Force. “At a time the IAF are blowing up civilian apartment blocks in Gaza,” Paul wrote in an email, “I cannot clear on this case.” The following February, he wouldn’t sign off on another sale after Amnesty International published a report accusing Israeli authorities of apartheid.

In both cases, Paul later told ProPublica, his immediate superiors signed off on the sales over his objections.

“I have no expectation whatsoever of making any policy gains on this topic during this Administration,” he wrote at the time to a deputy assistant secretary.

During that same time period, Paul circulated a memo to some of the agency’s senior diplomats with recommendations to strengthen the arms sales review process, such as including input from human rights groups. Paul warned that the Biden administration’s new arms transfer policy — which prohibits weapons sales if it’s “more likely than not” the recipient will use them to intentionally attack civilian structures or commit other violations — would be “watered down” in practice.

“There is an inarguable significant risk of civilian harm in the sale of precision-guided munitions to Israel and Saudi Arabia,” the December 2021 memo said. The U.S. government has been historically unable to hold itself to its own standards, he wrote, “in the face of pressure from partners, industry, and perceived policy imperatives emerging from within the government itself.”

It does not appear that recommendations in the memo were implemented either. Paul resigned in protest over arms shipments to Israel last October, less than two weeks after the Hamas attack. It was the Biden administration’s first major public departure since the start of the war. By then, local authorities said Israeli military operations had killed at least 3,300 Palestinians in Gaza.

Internally, other experts began to worry the Israelis were violating human rights almost from the onset of the war as well. Middle East officials delivered at least six dissent memos to senior leaders criticizing the administration’s decision to continue arming Israel, according to those who had a role in drafting some of them. The content of several memos leaked to the media earlier this year. The agency says it welcomes input from the dissent channel and incorporates it into policymaking decisions.

In one previously unreported memo from November, a group of experts across multiple bureaus said they had not been consulted before several policy decisions about arms transfers immediately after Oct. 7 and that there was no effective vetting process in place to evaluate the repercussions of those sales.

That memo, too, seemed to have little impact. In the early stages of the war, State Department staff worked overtime, often after hours and through weekends, to process Israeli requests for more arms. Some in the agency have thought the efforts showed an inappropriate amount of attention on Israel.

The Israelis, however, felt different. In late December, just before Christmas, staff in the arms transfers bureau walked into their Washington, D.C., office and found something unusual waiting for them: cases of wine from a winery in the Negev Desert, along with personalized letters on each bottle.

The gifts were courtesy of the Israeli embassy.

Israeli wine sent to officials in the State Department’s arms transfers bureau in December (Obtained by ProPublica)

The State Department spokesperson said employees are allowed to accept gifts from foreign governments that fall below a certain dollar threshold. “To allege that any of their allegiances to the United States should be questioned is insulting,” he added. “The accusation that the Department of State is placing a disproportionate attention on Israel is inconsistent with the facts.”

The spokesperson for the Israeli government told ProPublica, “The embassy routinely sends individual bottles of wine (not cases) to many of its contacts to cordially mark the end of the year holidays.”

One month later, Lew delivered his endorsement of Israel’s request for the 3,000 precision GBU-39 bombs, which would be paid for with both U.S. and Israeli funds. Lew is a major figure in Democratic circles, having served in various administrations. He was President Barack Obama’s chief of staff and then became his treasury secretary. He has also been a top executive at Citigroup and a major private equity firm.

The U.S. defense attaché to Israel, Rear Adm. Frank Schlereth, signed off on the January cable as well. In addition to its assurances about the IDF, the memo cited the Israeli military’s close ties with the American military: Israeli air crews attend U.S. training schools to learn about collateral damage and use American-made computer systems to plan missions and “predict what effects their munitions will have on intended targets,” the officials wrote.

Portions of the January cable U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew sent to Washington urging the approval of an arms transfer (Obtained by ProPublica)

In the early stages of the war, Israel used American-made unguided “dumb” bombs, some likely weighing as much as 2,000 pounds, which many experts criticized as indiscriminate. But at the time of the embassy’s assessment, Amnesty International had documented evidence that the Israelis had also been dropping the GBU-39s, manufactured by Boeing to have a smaller blast radius, on civilians. Months before Oct. 7, a May 2023 attack left 10 civilians dead. Then, in a strike in early January this year, 18 civilians, including 10 children, were killed. Amnesty International investigators found GBU-39 fragments at both sites. (Boeing declined to comment and referred ProPublica to the government.)

At the time, State Department experts were also cataloging the effect the war has had on American credibility throughout the region. Hala Rharrit, a career diplomat based in the Middle East, was required to send daily reports analyzing Arab media coverage to the agency’s senior leaders. Her emails described the collateral damage from airstrikes in Gaza, often including graphic images of dead and wounded Palestinians alongside U.S. bomb fragments in the rubble.

“Arab media continues to share countless images and videos documenting mass killings and hunger, while affirming that Israel is committing war crimes and genocide and needs to be held accountable,” she reported in one early January email alongside a photograph of a dead toddler. “These images and videos of carnage, particularly of children getting repeatedly injured and killed, are traumatizing and angering the Arab world in unprecedented ways.”

Portions of two email snapshots that senior leaders received early in the war (Obtained, highlighted and pixelated by ProPublica)

Rharrit, who later resigned in protest, told ProPublica those images alone should have prompted U.S. government investigations and factored into arms requests from the Israelis. She said the State Department has “willfully violated the laws” by failing to act on the information she and others had documented. “They can’t say they didn’t know,” Rharrit added.

Rharrit said her superiors eventually told her to stop sending the daily reports. (The State Department spokesperson said the agency is still incorporating perspectives from Arab media in regular internal analyses.)

Lew’s January cable makes no mention of the death toll in Gaza or the incidents of the Israelis dropping GBU-39s on civilians. Eight current and former State Department officials with expertise in human rights, the Middle East or arms transfers said the embassy’s assessment was an inadequate but not a surprising distillation of the administration’s position. “It’s an exercise in checking the boxes,” said Charles Blaha, a former human rights director at the agency.

The State Department declined to comment on the status of that request other than to say the U.S. has provided large amounts of GBU-39s to Israel multiple times in past years.

While the U.S. hoped that the smaller bombs would prevent unnecessary deaths, experts in the laws of war say the size of the bomb doesn't matter if it kills more civilians than the military target justifies. Lt. Col. Rachel E. VanLandingham, a retired officer with the Air Force’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps, said the IDF is legally responsible for doing all it can to know the risk to civilians ahead of any given strike and to avoid indiscriminately bombing densely populated areas like refugee camps and shelters. “It seems extremely plausible that they just disregarded the risk,” VanLandingham added. “It raises serious concerns and indicators of violating the law of war.”

Officials at the embassy in Jerusalem and in Washington said that similar concerns have been repeatedly brought to Lew, but his instincts were to defend Israel. In a separate cable obtained by ProPublica, he told Blinken and other leaders in Washington that “Israel is a trustworthy defense articles recipient” and his country team assessments ahead of past weapons sales have found that Israel’s “human rights record justifies the sale.”

Lew went even further and said the IDF’s system for choosing targets is so “sophisticated and comprehensive” that, by defense attaché Schlereth’s estimation, it “meets and often exceeds our own standard,” according to the cable. Two State Department officials told ProPublica that Lew and Schlereth have made similar statements during internal meetings. (The Navy did not make Schlereth available for an interview or respond to a list of questions.)

Early in the war, diplomats at the embassy also reported that Israel had dropped bombs on the homes of some of the embassy’s own staff, in addition to numerous other incidents involving civilians.

As to why Lew’s cables failed to reflect that kind of information, one official said, “My most charitable explanation is that they may not have had the time or inclination to critically assess the Israelis’ answers.”

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew (Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images)

In Israel’s New York consulate, weapons procurement officers occupy two floors, processing hundreds of sales each year. One former Israeli officer who worked there said he tried to purchase as many weapons as possible while his American counterparts tried just as hard to sell them. "It’s a business,” he said.

Behind the scenes, if government officials take too long to process a sale, lobbyists for powerful corporations have stepped in to apply pressure and move the deal along, ProPublica found.

Some of those lobbyists formerly held powerful positions as regulators in the State Department. In recent years, at least six high-ranking officials in the agency’s arms transfers bureau left their posts and joined lobbying firms and military contractors. Jessica Lewis, the assistant secretary of the bureau, resigned in July and took a job at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. The company is the largest lobbying firm in Washington, by lobbying revenue, and has represented the defense industry and countries including Saudi Arabia. (Lewis and the firm did not respond to requests for comment.)

Paul Kelly, who was the top congressional affairs official at the State Department between 2001 and 2005, during the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, said he regularly “got leaned on” by the private sector to push sales to lawmakers for final approval. “They wouldn’t bribe or threaten me, but they would say … ‘When are you going to sign off on it and get it up to the Hill?’” he told ProPublica.

Three other State Department officials who currently or recently worked on military assistance said little has changed since then and companies that profit from the wars in Gaza and Ukraine frequently call or email. (The agency spokesperson told ProPublica that arms transfers are “not influenced by a particular company.”) The pressure also reaches lawmakers’ offices once they are notified of impending sales. Those measures include frequent phone calls and regular daytime meetings, according to an official familiar with the communications.

In some cases, the efforts appear to have drifted into questionable legal territory. In 2017, the Trump administration signed a $350 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, an extension of Obama’s former policy before he suspended some sales because of humanitarian concerns. For years, the Saudis and their allies used American-made jets and bombs to attack Houthi militant targets in Yemen, killing thousands of civilians in the process.

The following February, the State Department was weighing whether to approve a sale of precision-guided missiles produced by Raytheon to Saudi Arabia. A vice president at the company named Tom Kelly — the former principal deputy assistant secretary of the State Department’s arms transfers bureau — emailed a former subordinate, Josh Paul. Kelly asked to set up a meeting with Paul and a colleague at the company to “talk through strategy” on pushing the sale through, according to an email of the exchange.

Paul wrote back that such a meeting could be illegal. “As you’ll recall from your time here, we’re restricted by the Anti-Lobbying Act from coordinating legislative strategies with outside groups,” he said. “However, I think the potential bumps in the road are relatively obvious.” Those bumps were a reference to recent media articles about mass civilian casualty incidents in Yemen.

“No worries,” Kelly responded. “I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

Kelly and Raytheon did not reply to requests for comment.

The State Department ultimately signed off on the sale.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Rob Davis, ProPublica, and Matthew Kish, The Oregonian/OregonLive

This story was produced in partnership with The Oregonian/OregonLive. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Nike, the world’s largest athletic apparel brand, has moved to hinder public scrutiny of its corporate jets after ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive highlighted executives’ travel destinations. In doing so, it became the latest participant in a cat-and-mouse game of jet owners seeking to cloak their movements around the globe.

A month after the story’s publication, Nike’s two Gulfstream G650ER jets were no longer visible on the flight tracking website FlightAware. Both were added to the Federal Aviation Administration’s Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed list, consisting of planes that sites like FlightAware are not allowed to show. Placement on the list makes it harder — but not impossible — to see where the planes are going.

We reported that Nike’s private jets last year emitted almost 20% more carbon dioxide than they did in 2015, which the company uses as a baseline for its climate goals. The planes are one small reason Nike and its supply chain produced roughly as much carbon dioxide in 2023 as in 2015, despite the company’s voluntary commitment to sharply reduce emissions.

The website LADDlist.com first detected the block on one of the jets on Aug. 27, just two weeks after the article was published and days after flight records show the aircraft returning from a 10-day trip to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where company executive chairperson Mark Parker owns a home. It’s unclear from LADDlist when the other jet was blocked, but it was visible on FlightAware as of Aug. 13.

A spokesperson for the FAA would not confirm the timing for either jet’s placement on the list, and Nike did not respond to questions. The jets are still trackable via a different data source that ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive used in their reporting.

Plane travel has been considered public information because taxpayers help fund the air traffic control system governing the common space, said Chuck Collins of the progressive Institute for Policy Studies.

Collins, who has studied the FAA’s secrecy programs, called Nike’s move an effort to avoid accountability. He said it amounts to Nike saying: “‘We don’t want ProPublica to bother us. We don’t want to show up in the newspaper.’”

A precursor to the LADD list, which contained the names of 1,100 jet owners who wanted their travel hidden, was private until ProPublica fought in court to obtain it from the FAA. After the news organization reported on the program’s participants in 2010, the FAA said it would require plane owners to demonstrate a valid safety concern to block tracking. But, under pressure from Congress and from lobbying groups for pilots and plane owners, the FAA soon dropped the requirement.

The list of blocked tail numbers has since exploded. It now encompasses 52,000 planes, or 24% of all registered aircraft in the nation, according to FAA records obtained in January by the Institute for Policy Studies.

The National Business Aviation Association, which represents corporate jet owners, cited privacy as a key reason for the program’s existence. “People shouldn’t be required to surrender their right to privacy, safety and security from corporate espionage just because they board an aircraft,” association spokesperson Dan Hubbard said.

Passenger manifests are not public.

A variety of celebrities have protested the disclosure of their jet travel by people and groups bringing attention to their carbon emissions. After a college student posted the whereabouts of Elon Musk’s jets on X, the social media platform Musk owns, Musk tried to buy the account, then suspended the student temporarily.

Nike executives’ travel remains visible through other means, thanks to a transponder technology known as automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast, or ADS-B, which was implemented as part of an FAA move to a more precise, next-generation air traffic control system. ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive used transponder records from a site called ADS-B Exchange to track flights by Nike’s jets.

Some of the news organizations’ reporting focused on the travels of CEO John Donahoe, a former Silicon Valley tech executive who maintained a home in the Bay Area after starting at Nike. Airports near his home became a magnet for Nike’s jets during his tenure.

The morning after former Nike executive Elliott Hill was named as Donahoe’s replacement on Sept. 19, a Nike jet’s transponder reported the plane departing from the Portland area, records show.

With a moving van posted outside Donahoe’s downtown Portland condominium building, the jet climbed to a cruising altitude of 41,000 feet, landing in San Jose, California, less than 24 hours after Donahoe’s exit was announced.

by Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Former President Donald Trump’s media company has forced out executives in recent days after internal allegations that its CEO, former Rep. Devin Nunes, is mismanaging the company, according to interviews and records of communications among former employees.

Several people involved with Trump Media believe the ousters are retaliation following what they describe as an anonymous “whistleblower” complaint regarding Nunes that went to the company’s board of directors.

The chief operating officer and chief product officer have left the company, along with at least two lower-level staffers, according to interviews, social media posts and communications between former staffers reviewed by ProPublica. The company, which runs the social media platform Truth Social, disclosed the departure of the chief operating officer in a securities filing Thursday afternoon.

ProPublica has not seen the whistleblower complaint. But several people with knowledge of the company said the concerns revolve around alleged mismanagement by Nunes. One person said they include allegations of misuse of funds, hiring of foreign contractors and interfering with product development.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Trump Media did not answer specific questions but said that ProPublica’s inquiry to the company “utterly fabricates implications of improper and even illegal conduct that have no basis in reality.”

“This story is the fifth consecutive piece in an increasingly absurd campaign by ProPublica, likely at the behest of political interest groups, to damage TMTG based on false and defamatory allegations and vague innuendo,” the statement said, adding that “TMTG strictly adheres to all laws and applicable regulations.”

Trump Media’s board comprises a set of powerful figures in Trump’s world, including his son Donald Trump Jr., former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and the businesswoman Linda McMahon, a major donor and current co-chair of Trump’s transition planning committee.

Nunes was named CEO of the company in 2021, with Trump hailing him as “a fighter and a leader” who “will make an excellent CEO.” As a member of Congress, Nunes was known as one of Trump’s staunchest loyalists.

After the internal allegations about Nunes were made at Trump Media, the company enlisted a lawyer to investigate and interview staffers, according to a person with knowledge of the company.

Then, last week, some employees who were interviewed by the lawyer were notified they were being pushed out, the person said. The employees being pushed out include a human relations director and a product designer, along with Chief Operating Officer Andrew Northwall and Chief Product Officer Sandro De Moraes. The person with knowledge of the company said Trump Media asked the employees to sign an agreement pledging not to make public claims of wrongdoing against the company in exchange for severance.

On Thursday afternoon, Northwall posted on Truth Social announcing he had “decided to resign from my role at Trump Media,” adding that he was “incredibly grateful” to Trump and Nunes “for this opportunity.”

“As I step back, I look forward to focusing more on my family and returning to my entrepreneurial journey,” the statement said.

De Moraes now identifies himself on his Truth Social bio as the “Former Chief Product Officer” of the company.

Some word of the departures became public earlier this week when former Trump Media employee Alex Gleason said in a social media post that “Truth Social in shambles. Many more people fired.”

Trump personally owns nearly 60% of the company. That stake, even after a recent decline in the company’s stock price, is worth nearly $2 billion on paper, a significant chunk of Trump’s fortune. He said last month he was not planning to sell his shares. What role Trump plays, if any, in the day-to-day operations of the company is not clear.

Since it launched in 2021, the company has become a speculation-fueled meme stock, but its actual business has generated virtually no revenue and Truth Social has not emerged as a serious competitor to the major social media platforms.

Among Nunes’ moves as CEO, as ProPublica has reported, was inking a large streaming TV deal with several obscure firms, including one controlled by a major political donor. He also traveled to the Balkans over the summer and met with the prime minister of North Macedonia, a trip whose purpose was never publicly explained by the company.

Trump Media has a formal whistleblower policy, adopted when the company went public in March, that encourages employees to report illegal activity and other “business conduct that damages the Company’s good name” and business interests.

Do you have any information about Trump Media that we should know? Robert Faturechi can be reached by email at robert.faturechi@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 213-271-7217. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

by Alexandra Zayas

More than a dozen ProPublica journalists are working across the country to cover reproductive health in the wake of abortion bans. We hope to hear from medical providers, families and policymakers. We asked Deputy Managing Editor Alexandra Zayas to explain our reporting process and the ethics that guide it.

It’s clear by now that state abortion bans are having a seismic impact on health care. They are, as intended, preventing doctors from terminating pregnancies. But they are also introducing a dangerous new dynamic for anyone who happens to conceive.

If you have a story to share or expertise to volunteer, you can get in touch with the whole team, including editors, by:

• Email
• Voicemail
• Signal

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Doctors have told us they’ve seen their colleagues hesitate to treat deadly conditions like preeclampsia and cancer, worried their attempts to protect their pregnant patients could be interpreted as a crime against the fetus, punishable by prison time.

Defenders of abortion bans insist that those doctors are being misled or confused, and that so-called “life-of-the-mother” exceptions are clear. But even a Republican lawmaker who voted for his state’s ban, a doctor himself, told ProPublica he thinks the language is too vague.

Indeed, the death of Amber Thurman raises critical questions about the role abortion bans are playing in the decisions of doctors in emergency situations. Suffering from a grave infection, the 28-year-old medical assistant and single mother needed a procedure that had been criminalized in Georgia, with few exceptions. As her condition deteriorated in a suburban Atlanta hospital, doctors discussed performing it, but they did not do so until 20 hours after she had arrived; by then, it was too late. A state committee of maternal health experts, including 10 doctors, deemed her death preventable and blamed a delay in care.

The more cases like these we examine, the more we can do to expose the cracks through which women are falling.

ProPublica has a long, successful track record of exploring the causes of maternal harm. Seven years ago, we dedicated a significant portion of our staff to investigating why so many women in the United States were dying from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. We dug past academic research and hospital data to explore individual, preventable deaths. What specific, fixable flaws in the system had cost us Lauren Bloomstein, and Shalon Irving, and Dacheca Fleurimond? What had left their babies motherless?

Each loss was a tragedy. But when the people closest to those mothers shared what they knew, they also unearthed lessons for how to save the next life, illuminating the causes and consequences of maternal mortality in a way nothing else had. ProPublica’s reporting on the “Lost Mothers” had a tremendous impact, including a landmark new law funding the study of maternal deaths and how to prevent them.

Our reporting so far suggests state abortion bans are having unintended, lethal consequences. If there are more cases out there, only the people closest to the families know the most critical details. This is why we’ve again devoted a significant portion of our newsroom to examining preventable maternal deaths — and it’s why we need your help to unearth them, so that those with the power to change systems can learn from them.

If you happen to be aware of a case in which you suspect abortion-related laws played a role, we understand why you may be hesitant to tell us about it. This is why we want to tell you more about our reporting process and the ethics that guide it.

We are nonpartisan.

We are a nonprofit, independent newsroom and have no partisan agenda in exposing these deaths. While we are bringing necessary scrutiny to the Republican state governments that passed these bans, we are also questioning what more the Biden administration can do to assess and mitigate their consequences.

Ahead of a heated election in which abortion is on the ballot in 10 states — and on the lips of presidential candidates — we want voters to know everything they can about the impact state bans are having on the safety of anyone who can conceive.

We rely on and protect anonymous sources.

Only because of the courage of ProPublica’s anonymous sources does the public know the extent of the horror of child separation at the U.S.-Mexico border, and the intertwined interests of billionaire donors and Supreme Court justices, and the preventable nature of the abortion-related deaths we exposed in Georgia.

We have secure ways to speak to us and send us documents. We honor agreements to not name sources in our stories. We do not rely on any single source for reporting; we independently and carefully confirm and corroborate evidence.

We help families find answers.

We can help families get medical records and then consult with experts about them. We take our findings and go to hospitals, clinics and doctors and press them for answers. We work hard to check every fact and to keep families updated on our progress.

We want to know not just about the last moments of a person’s life, but the entirety of it, to help the public understand the magnitude of the loss and how to avoid another. We can travel and meet with families face-to-face, at the time, place and pace that feels most comfortable to them. We recognize the loss of control families already feel and work hard to not add to that.

When reporter Kavitha Surana first began talking with Thurman’s family members, their grief was raw and intense, and they did not feel ready to grapple with their loss. It took a year before they were finally ready to discuss her death.

“Hopefully her death won’t be in vain,” her sister Cjuana Williams told ProPublica.

We value expertise.

Recognizing that every one of these cases involves a unique set of very complex factors, we seek out independent experts to help us interpret and convey all of the details. We never rely on one source, and we subject our final stories to a rigorous editing process by journalists with decades of experience reporting on health care systems.

If you have a story to share or expertise to volunteer, you can get in touch with the whole team, including editors, at reproductivehealth@propublica.org. You can also leave us a voicemail at 917-512-0242.

If your tip is sensitive, consider sending us a secure message on Signal at 917-512-0242.

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by Richard A. Webster, Verite News

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In February, a prosecutor from a rural area outside Baton Rouge asked members of Louisiana’s Senate judiciary committee to imagine a frightening scene: You are home with your wife at 4 a.m. when suddenly a 17-year-old with a gun appears. The teenager won’t hesitate, District Attorney Tony Clayton said. “He will kill you and your wife.”

According to Clayton, teenagers were terrorizing the state without fear of consequences. The only way to stop them was to prosecute all 17-year-olds in adult court, regardless of the offense, and lock them up in prison. Law enforcement officials from around the state made similar arguments. Legislators quickly passed a bill that lowered the age at which the justice system must treat defendants as adults from 18 to 17.

But according to a review of arrests in the five months since the law took effect, most of the 17-year-olds booked in three of the state’s largest parishes have not been accused of violent crimes. Verite News and ProPublica identified 203 17-year-olds who were arrested in Orleans, Jefferson and East Baton Rouge parishes between April and September. A total of 141, or 69%, were arrested for offenses that are not listed as violent crimes in Louisiana law, according to our analysis of jail rosters, court records and district attorney data.

Just 13% of the defendants — a little over two dozen — have been accused of the sort of violent crimes that lawmakers cited when arguing for the legislation, such as rape, armed robbery and murder. Prosecutors were able to move such cases to adult court even before the law was changed.

The larger group of lesser offenses includes damaging property, trespassing, theft under $1,000, disturbing the peace, marijuana possession, illegal carrying of weapons and burglary. They also include offenses that involve the use of force, such as simple battery, but those are not listed in state law as violent crimes either, and they can be prosecuted as misdemeanors depending on the circumstances.

In one case in New Orleans, a boy took a car belonging to his mother’s boyfriend without permission so he could check out flooding during Hurricane Francine last month, according to a police report. When the teen returned the car, the front bumper was damaged. The boyfriend called police and the teen was arrested for unauthorized use of a vehicle. In another case, a boy was charged with battery after he got into a fight with his brother about missing a school bus.

In July, a 17-year-old girl was charged with resisting arrest and interfering with a law enforcement investigation. She had shoved a police officer as he was taking her older sister into custody for a minor charge resulting from a fight with another girl. None of those defendants have had an opportunity to enter a plea so far; convictions could result in jail or prison time of up to two years.

In juvenile court, teenagers facing charges such as these could be sentenced to a detention facility, but the juvenile system is mandated to focus on rehabilitation and sentences are generally shorter than in adult court, juvenile justice advocates said. And in the juvenile system, only arrests for violent crimes and repeat offenses are public record. But because these 17-year-olds are in the adult system, they all have public arrest records that can prevent them from getting jobs or housing.

Rachel Gassert, the former policy director for the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, said there was one word to describe what she felt when Verite News and ProPublica shared their findings: “Despair.”

Eight years ago, Gassert and other criminal justice advocates convinced lawmakers to raise the age for adult prosecution from 17 to 18 years old, pointing to research that shows that the human brain does not fully develop until early adulthood and that youth are more likely to reoffend when they are prosecuted as adults. The law enacted this spring was the culmination of a two-year effort to reverse that.

“The whole push to repeal Raise the Age was entirely political and all about throwing children under the bus,” Gassert said. “And now we are seeing the tire treads on their backs.”

Gov. Jeff Landry’s office, Clayton and state Sen. Heather Cloud, R-Turkey Creek, who sponsored the bill to roll back Raise the Age, did not respond to requests for comment. The Louisiana District Attorneys Association, which supported the bill, declined to comment.

The whole push to repeal Raise the Age was entirely political and all about throwing children under the bus. And now we are seeing the tire treads on their backs.

—Rachel Gassert, former policy director at the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights

Louisiana is the only state to have passed and then fully reversed Raise the Age legislation. It’s one of four states, along with Georgia, Texas and Wisconsin, that automatically prosecute all 17-year-olds as adults. In other states, 17-year-olds can be prosecuted as adults only in special circumstances, such as when they are charged with a serious, violent crime like murder.

Landry and his Republican allies argued that Raise the Age and other liberal policies were responsible for a pandemic-era uptick in violent offenses committed by juveniles in Louisiana. They said juvenile courts, where a sentence can’t extend past a defendant’s 21st birthday, are too lenient.

Juvenile justice advocates argued that the law would cause teenagers to be prosecuted as adults for behaviors that are typical for immature adolescents. These 17-year-olds would face long-lasting consequences, including arrest records and prison time. And the harm would fall largely on Black children. Nearly 9 out of every 10 of the 17-year-olds arrested in Orleans and East Baton Rouge parishes are Black, Verite News and ProPublica found. (A similar figure couldn’t be calculated for Jefferson Parish because some court records weren’t available.)

Opponents of the law also pointed out that the data didn’t show a link between enacting the Raise the Age legislation and a surge in violent crime. In 2022, when then-Attorney General Landry and others first tried to repeal the law, crime data analyst Jeff Asher said in a legislative hearing that Louisiana’s increase in homicides during the pandemic was part of a national trend that began before Raise the Age was passed.

“It happened in red states. It happened in blue states. It happened in big cities, small towns, suburbs, metro parishes,” Asher told lawmakers. Starting in 2023, data has shown a significant drop in homicides in Louisiana and nationwide.

Conservative lawmakers dismissed Asher’s numbers and instead cited horrific crimes committed by teenagers, such as the brutal killing of 73-year-old Linda Frickey amid a surge in carjackings in New Orleans in 2022. In that incident, four teenagers between 15 and 17 years old stole Frickey’s SUV in broad daylight. One of them kicked, punched and pepper-sprayed her as he pulled her out of the vehicle, according to court testimony. Frickey, who had become tangled in her seat belt, was dragged alongside the vehicle. Landry argued that teenagers who commit such heinous crimes must be punished as adults.

Opponents said the Frickey case instead showed why the law wasn’t needed: District attorneys in Louisiana have long had the discretion to move cases involving the most serious crimes out of juvenile court, which is what Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams did. Three girls who took part in the carjacking pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were each sentenced to 20 years in prison; the 17-year-old who attacked Frickey and drove her car was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

After the attempt to repeal the Raise the Age law failed in 2022, lawmakers passed a bill in 2023. It was vetoed by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards. “Housing seventeen year olds with adults is dangerous and reckless,” Edwards said in a written statement at the time. “They often come out as seasoned criminals after being victimized.”

This year, with Landry in lockstep with the Republican supermajority in the Legislature, the law sailed through. For Landry, who was elected on an anti-crime platform, the law’s passage fulfilled a campaign pledge. When the law took effect, he declared, “No more will 17-year-olds who commit home invasions, carjack, and rob the great people of our State be treated as children in court.”

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry speaks before lawmakers in Baton Rouge. (Michael Johnson/The Advocate via AP)

Now these teenagers are treated as adults from arrest to sentencing. In New Orleans, that means that when a 17-year-old is arrested, police no longer alert their parents, a step that department policy requires for juveniles, according to a department spokesperson. It’s not clear if law enforcement agencies elsewhere in the state have made a similar change.

All 17-year-olds arrested in New Orleans are now booked into the Orleans Parish jail, where those charged with crimes not classified as violent have spent up to 15 days before being released pending trial. Though the jail separates teens from adults, it has been under a court-ordered reform plan since 2013 after the Department of Justice found routine use of excessive force by guards and rampant inmate-on-inmate violence. Federal monitors said in May that violence remains a significant problem, although they acknowledged conditions have improved somewhat. The sheriff has agreed with this assessment, blaming understaffing.

Most of the cases involving 17-year-olds in Orleans, Jefferson and East Baton Rouge parishes are pending, according to court records and officials in those offices. Several defendants have pleaded guilty. Prosecutors have declined to file charges in a handful of cases. Many defendants are first-time offenders who should be eligible for diversion programs in which charges will eventually be dropped if they abide by conditions set by the court, according to officials with the Orleans and Jefferson Parish district attorneys.

None of the DAs in Orleans, Jefferson or East Baton Rouge parishes took a position on the law, according to officials in those offices and news reports. Williams, the Orleans Parish DA, responded to Verite News and ProPublica’s findings by saying his office is holding “violent offenders accountable” while providing alternatives to prison for those teenagers “willing to heed discipline and make a real course correction.”

Margaret Hay, first assistant district attorney with Jefferson Parish, declined to comment on Verite and ProPublica’s findings except to say, “We’re constitutionally mandated to uphold and enforce the laws of the state of Louisiana.” East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore declined to comment.

Having a felony arrest or conviction on your record is like wearing a heavy yoke around your neck.

—Aaron Clark-Rizzio, legal director at the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights

Even those who avoid prison face the long-term consequences of going through the adult court system. Background checks can reveal arrests and convictions, which could prevent them from obtaining a job, housing, professional licenses, loans, government assistance such as student aid or food stamps, or custody of their children.

“Having a felony arrest or conviction on your record,” said Aaron Clark-Rizzio, legal director for the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, “is like wearing a heavy yoke around your neck.”

Marsha Levick, chief legal officer with the Juvenile Law Center, a nonprofit law firm based in Philadelphia, said that what’s happening in Louisiana reminds her of the late 1990s, when states toughened punishments for juveniles after a noted criminologist warned of a generation of “super predators.” That theory was eventually debunked — but not before tens of thousands of children had been locked up and saddled with criminal records.

Mariam Elba contributed reporting and Jeff Frankl contributed research.

Do you have a story to share regarding a 17-year-old facing criminal charges in Louisiana? Contact Richard Webster at Rwebster@veritenews.org.