In the long-ago of 2005, just days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans, a young Kanye West blurted out on live television during a fundraising drive with comedian Mike Meyers that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

It was perhaps an early sign of West’s mental instability, but at the time it ended up defining the media narrative about Katrina and Bush, who was lambasted by the media for being indifferent to the fate of New Orleans because it was mostly poor black people who had been killed or displaced by the storm. 

It didn’t matter that the main cause of the problems in New Orleans during and immediately after Katrina — lack of evacuation, widespread looting, poor emergency response and coordination — was corruption at the local and state level, not incompetence at FEMA. (New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin would later be indicted and convicted in federal court on multiple corruption charges.)

But in the moment that didn’t matter. The national news media unfairly blamed President Bush. Every major media outlet ran a now-infamous photo of him looking down on hurricane-ravaged New Orleans from the window of Air Force One, cementing the narrative that the president was detached and indifferent to events on the ground. 

It would come to be known as Bush’s “Katrina moment,” and it heralded the effective end of his administration. Democrats sailed to a massive victory in the 2006 midterms, campaigning on Bush’s allegedly flat-footed Katrina response and the unpopular war in Iraq, rendering the president impotent

Arizona election officials privately worried that having nearly 100,000 voters on the wrong voter list would “validate” concerns about the integrity of the state’s elections.

Arizona requires voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship in order to vote in statewide elections. Voters who do not provide such proof are registered as “federal-only” voters, meaning they can only cast a ballot in federal races. Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer recently discovered what Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs described as an “erroneous voter registration record.”

The record was that of a noncitizen who was on the voter roll as a full-ballot voter, according to VoteBeat. While this noncitizen had a green card, all noncitizens are legally prohibited from voting in federal elections. Upon further inquiry, the state claims to have found approximately 97,000 voters who are listed as full-ballot voters despite having never provided the documentary proof of citizenship required to vote in statewide elections.

The Washington Post obtained audio from a 40-minute Sept. 10 phone call between Hobbs, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, and Attorney General Kris Mayes. During the call, Hobbs reportedly warned that the situation was “dire” and “urgent” while Fontes worried they would be “beat” up “no matter what the hell we do.”

“When this goes public, it is going to have all of the conspiracy theorists in the globe — in the world — coming back to re-litigate the past three elections, at least in Arizona,” Hobbs reportedly said. “And it’s going to validate all of

Nevada has used the “Effective Absentee System for Elections” (EASE) system to allow military and overseas voters to vote electronically for roughly the past decade. Since the 2020 election, the state has opened the EASE system to voters who are disabled or live on an Indian reservation, allowing them to vote online. But when asked how officials ensure the system is only used by eligible voters, the office of Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar could only point to each voter’s word.

Nevada’s EASE system is “an online application that seamlessly integrates voter registration and electronic ballot delivery and marking.” EASE is described as “the first entirely online application, from registration to requesting a ballot to ballot delivery to a ballot marking system using a digital/electronic signature,” according to the secretary of state’s website.

Voters who are registered with EASE can use an electronic image that is already on file with the county or state to “mark a digital image of their ballot and return their ballot submission electronically, negating the requirement of printing and signing the ballot before returning it,” according to the secretary of state’s website. Gabriel Di Chiara, the secretary of state’s chief deputy, said the program “is entirely secure,” according to Nevada Current.

But it appears the system has no safeguards in place — aside from an honor system — to ensure that EASE users are actually eligible for the system. So how does the state ensure that only eligible voters can use a system