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Canadian parties choose to see, hear no foreign mischief
When about 200 foreign students arrived by bus at the Liberal nomination meeting in the leafy suburban Toronto community of Don Valley North in 2019, Han Dong thought nothing of it.
“I didn’t pay attention to busing international students because … I didn’t understand it as an irregularity,” he testified later.
Dong, who was born in Shanghai but has lived in Canada since he was 13, was seeking the Liberal nomination at the time, and he wanted the support of Chinese students because that was allowed under party rules – and his opponents could be expected to do the same. The prize was worth the trouble: Whoever won the nomination was almost certain to represent the riding in the House of Commons.
Dong later testified that he was unaware that the Chinese consulate threatened the students and arranged the buses, as is now alleged, meaning Beijing got their chosen candidate into the House of Commons, apparently without the candidate knowing.
Reluctant to see the problem
That nomination contest, and Dong’s career in the House, later became controversial when Canadian spies leaked unproven allegations about his connections to Beijing, which led to his exit from the caucus, a lawsuit, and Trudeau reluctantly calling a commission of inquiry into foreign interference in Canadian politics.
In testimony at the inquiry earlier this year, representatives of the Liberals — and other parties — appeared reluctant to acknowledge that there might be problems in their parties. Azam Ishmael, executive director of the party, for instance, testified that he had not read the report that revealed what the Canadian spooks knew about interference in Dong’s nomination race.
It’s not just the Liberals who seem to see no evil, hear no evil ...
Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has been happy to castigate the Liberals for their alleged connections to the Chinese government — which is fair enough since the Chinese seem to have tried to help the Liberals in the last election. But Poilievre has refused to be sworn to secrecy for fear it will restrict what he can say about the facts. That means he can’t read the details, even though Indian foreign interference may have played a role in the leadership race that made him the leader of his party.
Busloads of voters
Both China and India are accused of using proxies to influence their diasporas to support candidates they favor and block those they oppose. This is possible, in part, because the parties leave the door open to them.
Justice Marie-Josée Hogue, who leads the ongoing inquiry, warned that nomination races can be a “gateway” for foreign influence.
Under Canadian electoral law, the parties decide who can vote in their nomination battles. For Liberals, Conservatives, and New Democrats, that includes teenagers and noncitizens, like the Chinese students who seem to have made the difference in Han Dong’s nomination.
Dong was right to point out that it didn’t seem irregular because it was not against the rules. Grassroots organizers routinely bus new Canadians to nomination meetings. Since many ridings are, like Don Valley North, very likely to be won by the incumbent party, that means that in Canada, the real elections are often decided by whoever can get the bigger busloads of new Canadians to a meeting hall when the party picks its candidate.
Bad foreign policy
This has serious implications for Canadian foreign policy since diaspora politics pressures parties to stay on the good side of the mysterious people (read: countries) arranging for busloads of voters to show up.
Trudeau’s government has a terrible relationship with Modi because the Indians are suspicious of the Canadian Sikhs in Trudeau’s coalition, accusing them of sponsoring terrorist attacks in India. They are similarly suspicious of Jagmeet Singh, leader of the NDP. Trudeau has accused Modi of being behind the assassination of a Sikh activist in British Columbia.
This conflict is rooted in the powerful role that Canadian Sikhs play in grassroots political struggles in all the parties. Other diaspora groups also play prominent roles, and those groups end up binding the hands of the people conducting Canadian foreign affairs.
Eurasia Group Senior Analyst Graeme Thompson, formerly a policy analyst with Global Affairs Canada, says Canadian diplomats can’t avoid the political reality of diaspora politics, which makes it hard to develop policy focused on the country’s national interest.
“It’s a huge problem for Canadian foreign policy making to have politicians primarily making policy on the basis of domestic political considerations that are driven by diaspora politics.”
More rules on the way
It seems clear that it should be harder for noncitizens to participate in Canadian nominations, but the parties don’t want to close the gateway Hogue identified. They benefit from the money, energy, and busloads of voters, so they don’t want to bar noncitizens from voting in nomination battles.
“The other parties seem to like the idea of being much loosey goosier about who can vote in a nomination race,” says Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party, which only allows citizens to vote in party races.
She thinks that the other parties should tighten their rules, thus avoiding a complicated and potentially expensive regulatory structure, but those parties benefit from the status quo, so it will likely fall to Hogue to urge them to make changes when she issues her report at the end of the year.
But there is no guarantee that they will do whatever she proposes, and there could be another election before she issues her report, which means India may be tempted to help the Conservatives, and China may again work against them.
It would be better if the Canadian parties could work together to signal that they won’t stand for foreigners interfering in Canadian politics, but in a pre-election atmosphere of deep mutual distrust, that may be too much to hope for.
A woman attends a campaign rally by former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at Crotona Park in the Bronx borough of New York City, on May 23, 2024.
Trump gambles to woo Black voters
This GZERO 2024 election series looks at America’s changing voting patterns, bloc by bloc.
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Donald Trump was trapped in New York City until the jury reached a verdict in his hush money trial last week, but he made the most of his time in his hometown – visiting a bodega in Harlem, dropping by a construction site, hosting a photo op at a local firehouse, and becoming the first Republican candidate to host a campaign rally in New York City since Ronald Reagan.
His choice of rally location – a deep-blue district in the Bronx where 95% of the population is Black or Hispanic and 35% live below the poverty line – was no accident. While Black voters remain the most loyal bloc of the Democratic coalition that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris stitched together four years ago, that support appears to be waning.
Six months before the election, Trump has picked up as much as 18% of the Black vote — up from 8% in 2020 and 6% in 2016. Polls can only tell us so much this far out from the election, but a recent poll conducted by the University of Chicago found that just 33% of young Black people would vote for Biden if the election were held today. While the poll showed significant undecided and third-party sentiment – only 23% said they would support Trump – it's undeniably a plummet from the 80% of young Black voters supporting Biden in 2020.
Trump’s message to Black voters is that Democrats have long taken their vote for granted and that they were better off – in particular from an economic standpoint – under his administration than under Biden’s. With November’s election predicted to be decided by a few thousand votes in a couple of key states, it matters that Trump is trying, and succeeding, to make inroads with voters of color.
At his rally in the Bronx on May 23, Trump cast himself as a better president for Black and Hispanic voters, attacking Biden on the economy and immigration. He insisted “the biggest negative impact” of the flood of migrants to New York is “against our Black population and our Hispanic population who are losing their jobs, losing their housing, losing everything they can lose.” Many in the crowd responded by chanting, “Build the wall,” a reference to Trump’s push as president to build a US-Mexico border barrier.
“I’ve voted for Democrats in the Bronx up and down the ticket for my whole life,” rally attendee Daniella Martinez said. She still identifies as a Democrat but decided to hop on the Trump train because she worried the influx of migrants to the city was straining her daughter’s public school and making their neighborhood less safe. “But look where Democrats have got New York. I’m here because I am ready for a change.”
When pressed about whether Trump could be considered a change, given that he occupied the Oval Office just four years ago, Martinez said: “I didn’t have to work a second job four years ago. Any change from Biden’s economy is a change I am going to vote for.”
Since Trump’s guilty verdict last Thursday, he has compared his legal troubles to the unfairness that Black communities disproportionately face in the justice system. Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, amplified this on CNN on Friday. “The reason we’re seeing so many African Americans come into the Trump campaign — two big things: jobs and justice,” he said. “As an African American born and raised in the Deep South who had concerns about our justice system as it relates to race, I’m now seeing it play out from a partisan perspective.”
Scott, who wants to be Trump’s vice president, has pledged $15 million of PAC money to Black voter outreach, arguing that Black men, in particular, could be key in securing Trump’s win. On Tuesday, Reps. Byron Donalds, of Florida, who is also rumored to be on Trump’s VP short list, and Wesley Hunt, of Texas, ventured into Philadelphia to make their pitch for Trump at an event billed as “Congress, Cognac, and Cigars.”
“We were better off under Republicans than we were Democrats,” Hunt said. “The reason why the Democrats have a hold on the Black community is because our parents’ parents’ parents keep telling us, ‘You got to vote Democrat. It’s up to us in this generation to say, ‘well, why?’”
But according to Eurasia Group’s US analyst Noah Daponte-Smith, what may matter more than Trump’s marginal gains with Black voters is that Biden is hemorrhaging their support.
“Biden is currently running 22 points behind his 2020 performance among Black voters, says Deponte-Smith. “There does seem to be a consensus among analysts and political scientists that the Black vote has steadily moved away from Democrats as we have exited the Obama era.”
But Biden is fighting back. The president has ridiculed Trump’s strategy, saying last week that Trump is “pandering and peddling lies and stereotypes for your vote, so he can win for himself, not for you.”
He and Vice President Kamala Harris also traveled to Philadelphia last Wednesday to launch “Black Voters for Biden-Harris” to bolster outreach efforts and engage Black voters. The campaign is an acknowledgment that Biden knows he needs to fight if he wants to keep the 92% majority of Black voters that were integral to his win in 2020.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) talks to reporters after surviving a vote to remove him from the Speaker’s position, Washington, DC, May 8, 2024. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced a motion to vacate the Speaker’s office, which was defeated by a motion to table the issue immediately afterward.
Vibes-based lawmaking isn’t helping us!
With so many problems in the world right now, it seems odd to spend time trying to solve ones that don’t exist.
But that’s exactly what happened this week when House Speaker Mike Johnson proposed a new law to crack down on non-citizens voting in US federal elections.
The legislation, known as the SAVE Act, would outlaw non-citizen voting – which is already illegal – and require proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.
Now, some people, mostly Republicans, say it’s not unreasonable to expect adults to produce ID before making a decision about who should lead the “free world.” Others, mostly Democrats, point to evidence that voter ID requirements – particularly for passports or birth certificates – tend to suppress eligible voter turnout, particularly for minority voters. There are fair arguments on both sides.
The Supreme Court, for its part, has struck down a state-led requirement for citizenship documents, and a North Carolina court is weighing the issue of voter ID more broadly as we speak.
But leave all that aside for a moment. There’s a more fundamental problem with Johnson’s bill. It’s aimed at ghosts.
Asked about the scale of the problem of non-citizen voting, Johnson said:
“The answer is that it’s unanswerable.”
“We all know intuitively,” he explained, “that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.”
This vibes-based intuition parrots a longstanding talking point of GOP boss Donald Trump, who has complained – falsely – that voter fraud cost him the popular vote in 2016 and the election itself in 2020. With just six months until his rematch with Joe Biden, Trump and his allies are keen to seed the idea that voter fraud – particularly among the rapidly rising undocumented migrant population – will decide the outcome. With 60% of Republicans worried about the credibility of the electoral system, Trump knows his audience.
But the question for Johnson is not unanswerable. The answer is that there is, in fact, no evidence for these claims.
In 2017, for example, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU looked closely at the 2016 election, a contest in which Donald Trump claimed he had lost the popular vote because 3-5 million illegal immigrants had voted for Hillary Clinton.
After reviewing 23 million voter names, in 42 precincts, in 12 states, how many instances of non-citizen voting did the Brennan study find?
Thirty. That’s 0.0001% of the votes.
It turns out non-citizens, in perpetual danger of deportation, aren’t eager to write their names down on a voting register, leaving indelible evidence of a federal crime.
This tracks with other studies of voter fraud, nearly all of which show that it’s exceedingly rare. The state of Georgia, for example, conducted a review of its voter rolls in 2022 and found that of the four million votes cast by Georgians in the midterms of that year, there were 17 instances of voter fraud.
That’s not to say there aren’t real concerns about the election. How might AI distort voter perceptions of the candidates? Will foreign powers try to sway voters’ choices? Will election workers be safe? Nearly 40% of them say they have experienced threats, violence, or harassment, in part by people riled up with false narratives about fraud.
But instead of addressing those serious worries, the Speaker of the House is proposing to Make Illegal Things Illegal Again™, based on information he does not have, about a phenomenon that doesn’t exist.
This kind of vibes-based lawmaking isn’t going to SAVE us from anything.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson speaks during a news conference at the US Capitol on May 7, 2024, in Washington, DC.
Hard Numbers: GOP makes illegal thing illegal, Immigration inquiries overload Ottawa, Westjet makes its flight, US gas demand sputters
0.0001: Republican lawmakers in the US have proposed a new bill that would make it illegal for non-citizens to vote in US elections. As it happens, this is already illegal. House Speaker Mike Johnson explained the measure by arguing that “we all know intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting” but acknowledged that this is “not easily provable.” A 2016 NYU study of more than 20 million votes in 42 jurisdictions found that 0.0001% were cast by non-citizens.
184,600: Canada’s immigration bureaucracies have been overwhelmed by requests for information about stuck or pending cases, with more than 180,000 inquiries over each of the past two years. That’s more than triple the volume from 2018. Three years ago, the government pledged to address the backlogs, but watchdogs say it hasn’t done enough.
9: It’s flight time after all. After nine months of tough negotiations, Westjet reached a tentative agreement with the union representing its maintenance workers, narrowly avoiding a work stoppage this week that would have crippled Canada’s second-largest airline. The company last year agreed to give its pilots a 24% pay raise.
8.63 million: Is America’s economy hitting the brakes? The four-week average demand for gasoline fell to 8.63 million barrels per day, reaching the lowest early May level since the pandemic crushed demand for transportation. Demand for diesel and heating oil was also at post-pandemic lows. Analysts were split about whether the weak demand reflects a slowing economy or the rising use of renewables.A sign at the flagship event of a nationwide march for voting rights on the 58th anniversary of the March on Washington in August, 2021.
15th Amendment as relevant as ever on 154th birthday
Saturday marks 154 years since the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution – Feb. 3, 1870 – which guaranteed Black men the right to vote. Given it’s Black History Month and an election year, this makes it the perfect time to revisit this vital moment in US history.
Though the amendment was part of an effort to set the US on a more equitable path in the post-Civil War era, it didn’t take long after ratification for local governments to institute racist policies – Jim Crow laws – aimed at disenfranchising Black people.
Nearly 100 years after it was ratified, the federal government finally moved to protect the rights enshrined in the 15th Amendment with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which barred racial discrimination in voting and helped dismantle Jim Crow laws.
But legal experts and rights groups in recent years have raised alarm bells about ongoing threats to the Voting Rights Act and court decisions that have weakened it. And despite a June 2023 Supreme Court decision that upheld a key provision of the law, many contend that more must be done to protect voting rights and prevent discriminatory practices.
People of color made up 30% of eligible voters in the US in 2020 but represented just over 22% of all votes cast, according to a new study from the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California. “There’s outright voter-suppression efforts still happening in the US,” says Mindy Romero, the lead author of the report and director of the center.
Research shows people of color continue to face an array of disparities and challenges when it comes to voting, ranging from longer wait times on Election Day than white voters and mass voter roll purges to being disproportionately impacted by strict voter ID laws.
Indeed, more than a century and a half after the 15th Amendment came to be, it seems the US still has a long way to go in the fight to eliminate racial barriers at the ballot box.
FILE PHOTO: Voting booths are set up at the Shawnee County Elections Office
Hard Numbers: The world gets set to vote, Myanmar rebels make gains, Uganda nabs terror boss, Israel’s Cabinet tangles over West Bank taxes, Jury convicts SBF
40: If you love to “get out the vote,” then next year is your time to shine. No fewer than 40 different countries, representing more than 40% of the world’s population and 40% of global GDP, will go to the polls in 2024. Some of the standout elections include those in Taiwan, India, Mexico, Indonesia, Russia, possibly Ukraine, the European Parliament, and the United States.
4: Myanmar’s military junta has lost control of four towns along the Chinese border, including a key trade hub, as ethnic militias in the area ramp up their insurgency against the government. Beijing on Thursday called for a cease-fire in the conflict, which the UN fears has displaced thousands of people.
6: Ugandan forces say they’ve captured the leader of an Islamic State-linked insurgent militia in a raid earlier this week that killed six of his henchmen. The commander is accused of murdering two foreign tourists and their guide in a national park several weeks ago.
30: After a heated Israeli cabinet debate about whether to release tax revenue that it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, the government agreed late Thursday to transfer the funds -- but there's a catch. At least 30% of the money, a portion destined for bureaucrats in the Gaza Strip who are still on the PA payroll, will be withheld. The decision was a compromise between hardliners who wanted to withhold the funds entirely because the PA hasn't explicitly condemned Hamas and pragmatists who thought it unwise to further weaken the PA at a time of rising West Bank unrest.
7: On Thursday, a New York federal jury found crypto exchange FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried guilty of stealing billions of dollars from customers, convicting him of all seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. He now awaits sentencing -- set for March 28, 2024 -- and faces up to 115 years in prison.
Heat map of Canada and US voter registration levels
The Graphic Truth: Canada tops US in voter registration
The United States and Canada are two of the world’s biggest advanced democracies. But when it comes to elections, the Great White North is far better at registering its voters.
Canada makes it easy and even encourages voters to register as late as Election Day. It can do this because it has a centralized voter database shared among the provinces, enabling them to keep up-to-date information about where voters should be voting, which eliminates fears of voter fraud.
In the US – where fears of voter fraud run rampant – the main obstacle appears to be a lack of both cooperation and willpower. There’s no push to proactively register voters, and because there’s no centralized voter registration database, there’s limited communication between states.
The US is trying to roll out a centralized system, called Electronic Registration Information Center or ERIC, to inform states if a voter moves or dies, so that the names can be removed from the voter rolls. But to gain access, states must pledge to proactively register new voters who move to their state.
At its peak, ERIC had 33 states enrolled, but since the 2020 election, it has become the target of misinformation campaigns. Seven GOP-led states have pulled out of the interstate database over concerns about voter privacy and to protest the proactive registration requirement.
Ohio vote reflects abortion’s mobilizing power
Voters in the Buckeye State on Tuesday, with 57% of the vote, struck down Issue 1, a Republican-backed proposal aimed at making it harder to change the state’s constitution. If it had passed, a constitutional amendment on abortion rights planned for this November would’ve required a 60% supermajority to pass.
Proponents advertised it as a safeguard against mob rule and wealthy out-of-state interests, but opponents saw it as a thinly veiled attack on abortion rights. Blatant admissions from Republicans and a flood of money from pro-life groups backing Issue 1 reinforced those concerns.
The result reflects how powerful abortion is as a mobilizing force for Democrats. Ohio’s voter turnout more than doubled from recent state elections, driven largely by Democratic and Independent voters who wouldn’t have normally tuned into a summer election but got involved because abortion rights were on the line.
The big turnout echoed the 2022 Midterms, where abortion-protecting initiatives won in every state where they were on the ballot. The issue boosted Democratic turnout overall, enabling them to maintain control of the Senate and gain governorships in a year when election trends predicted GOP gains.
It also showed that Republicans pushing for abortion restrictions are out of step with the wider electorate. According to a New York Times/Siena College poll last month, a majority of voters across every region of the country believe that abortion should be all or mostly legal. Most 2024 Republican presidential hopefuls have sidestepped the issue – even Donald Trump, who appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, has avoided endorsing any kind of restrictions.
Protecting abortion has become a priority for a large portion of voters, especially in swing states like Florida, Ohio, Michigan, and Arizona, where Republican legislatures quickly moved to restrict abortion access after the Dobbs decision. Ahead of the 2024 election, where polling shows lukewarm Democratic support for Biden, abortion could become an invaluable tactic to boost turnout in key battleground states.