Republican Glenn Cook seems like a fairly conventional candidate for Georgia’s legislature: A former naval aviator, pilot for Delta Airlines, Rotary member, VFW officer, elected member of a soil and water conservation district.

But examine his website and something may seem unusual about his campaign, the Georgia Recorder reports.

“A recent post advocates for community-based policing. It’s short on specifics to the coastal Georgia district he wants to represent but long on broad platitudes and noncontroversial solutions … Looking closer at some of the images within the posts reveals more oddities, including police officers with badges containing words in unknown concocted languages,” the Recorder writes.

Turns out much of what is on Cook’s site, including his frequent blog posts and even the candidate’s voice on a podcast, is created by AI.

                                                                                                                                                               This is a real image from Glenn Cook’s website. But the highlighted items demonstrate that this is definitely not a real police officer. (glen4georgia.com)

But don’t be alarmed – everything that goes out is vetted by humans, including the candidate himself, who is very much a real person, says Robert Lee, founder of Lesix Media and adviser to Cook’s campaign.

“We have an editorial and a content creation process, where we provide parameters to our AI platform, which is called Content at Scale, and we put those parameters in, and it produces the content, it essentially drafts the content for us,” he said. “And then we have an editorial process internally with my staff, and then ultimately with Glenn as our client and the candidate, to review that content, make changes, make sure our voice is added to it.”

Cook is among a handful of early adopters of the technology in political campaigns, but campaign consultants say this sort of thing will inevitably become more common.

“When you’re talking about a campaign that has three or four staffers on a local level, the option is not, like, staffer or AI, it’s like, AI or don’t have a digital plan,” said Betsy Hoover, founder and managing partner at California-based Higher Ground Labs, at an election conference in Atlanta this month. “Like, don’t have a digital program or have a very, very scaled-back digital program.”

The technology has “unbelievable potential” to help reach voters and empower candidates with limited means or expertise, said Arun Rai, a professor at Georgia State University, expert on generative AI and member of Georgia’s AI Advisory Council.

But the technology is also limited in some important ways, he said. AI has been shown to “hallucinate,” meaning to confidently assert facts or create images that are completely false. AI systems are sometimes cavalier in protecting private data, which would be a problem for a website that asks volunteers or donors to submit personal or financial information.

“And therefore, all of this is leading to one key point: it’s important that humans don’t fall asleep at the wheel,” Rai said.

                                                                     RockAthena Brittain, who is challenging U.S. Rep. Susie Lee, performs at a Las Vegas venue. (Photo courtesy RockAthena Brittain)

A Nevada candidate is trying something new: to become Nevada’s first openly transgender member of Congress. Singer-songwriter RockAthena Brittain has jumped into the Democratic primary, challenging three-term Rep. Susie Lee, reports the Nevada Current.

Lee is “boilerplate Democratic party,” Brittain said. “She votes along with the party on many things. It’s not that she’s not doing some good work. It’s that she’s neglecting quite a bit of it. The Democratic Party should be sounding an alarm to everybody.”

Knowing the challenges to LGBTQ+ rights first-hand, Brittain felt compelled to run in the face of a wave of anti-trans legislation and the threat of a national erosion of freedoms should former President Donald Trump win a second term. Lee, she said, is simply not displaying the passion to fight this threat.

“She’s not even waking people up to even vote Democrat,” she said of Lee. “She’s priding herself on being the most bipartisan member of Congress when there is no bipartisanship. If you feel satisfied with the establishment corporate candidate, then she’s a very good representative. But if you feel there are things that are not being addressed, it’s an issue.”

Brittain knows her candidacy is a long-shot. Not only is Lee well funded (and personally well-off), but she enjoys the endorsement from the Human Rights Campaign, an influential LGBTQ+ advocacy group.

Still, Brittain is no stranger to longshots. In 2010, before her transition, she successfully sued Clark County for denying a business permit to “Sextacy,” a proposed adult-themed club that would have been located in a district that was already home to several adult-oriented businesses. Although the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with her, the business never got off the ground for a lack of funds.

Even if her candidacy fails, she said, she hopes for a moral victory if she can get Lee to more forcefully address the threats posed by Trump and conservative Republicans.

“In my heart I did not want to run against a Democratic incumbent. I want democracy to win. I want Democrats to win,” says Brittain.                        It’s perfectly simple, your honor: If the president wants to do something bad, it’s A-OK. (Jane Norman/States Newsroom)

But enough of talking about future elections. Let’s talk (yet again) about the past one.

In Washington today, the Supreme Court heard arguments about Trump’s sweeping claim that former presidents enjoy immunity from prosecution for pretty much anything they did while in office, our D.C. Bureau reports.

Trump’s lawyer D. John Sauer argued that a president could not be prosecuted for any “official act” unless he had first been impeached and removed from office by Congress. And the test for what counts as an “official act” is expansive, broad enough to include Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

If that’s true, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Sauer, would the president, for example, be able to order the assassination of a political rival with impunity?

“That could well be an official act,” Sauer answered.

Even ordering a military coup might be just fine, he told Justice Elena Kagan.

“It would depend on the circumstances,” he observed.

Michael R. Dreeben, representing the U.S. Department of Justice, pointed out the obvious absurdity of this sweeping immunity for a president.

“His novel theory would immunize former presidents for criminal liability for bribery, treason, sedition, murder, and here, conspiring to use fraud to overturn the results of an election and perpetuate himself in power,” Dreeben said.

While conservative justices didn’t seem entirely to buy Trump’s “anything goes” outlook on presidential action, they did seem sympathetic to the notion that there might be some limits on what a former president could be charged with.

Justice Samuel Alito suggested that a president, tasked with making tough decisions in a hurry, might be in a “special, peculiarly precarious position.” The threat of later prosecution could cause him to hesitate.

Dreeben responded that honest mistakes rarely lead to criminal prosecutions, and anyway, what Trump has been accused of in a federal indictment, including inciting the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and pressuring state and federal officials to ignore election results, go well beyond anything anyone could interpret as an “official act” necessary to his performance of his duties.

In the end, it appeared that the court’s conservative majority was inclined to return the matter to a lower court, which had rejected Trump’s immunity claim, for further debate on what, exactly, the limits should be on prosecuting a president.

If the court does so, that appears to doom any chance that Trump’s trial on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election could take place before the 2024 election, the D.C. Bureau writes.

                                                                               Smile everyone. Prosecutors will be very interested in this photo of us signing fake elector certificates. (Screenshot via AZGOP) 

Meanwhile, Arizona became the latest state to indict participants in a sprawling scheme to submit fake slates of electors to the Electoral College in 2020, hoping to keep Trump in office despite the fact that he was, to put it bluntly, the big loser.

In all, a grand jury in Phoenix indicted 18 people, though only 11 were named, the Arizona Mirror reports. The remaining names will be revealed after the people are properly served with the indictment paperwork, prosecutors say.

Named so far are all 11 people who signed on as fake electors, including former state GOP chair Kelli Ward and two sitting state senators, Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern.

“The identities of some of the redacted defendants were obvious, including Rudy Giuliani, who was described as an attorney for Trump who was often referred to as ‘the mayor,’ former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Mike Roman, the director of Election Day operations for the Trump campaign,” the Mirror writes.

Prominently not indicted was former President Trump himself. He is referred to only as “unindicted conspirator 1,” but nobody was fooled because he is described as a former president who made false claims about the election.

The defendants are accused of forging election certificates, attempting to deprive Arizonans of the right to have their votes counted, and pressuring state and local officials to change election results.

Most have been mum about the charges. Sen. Hoffman was the only one to issue an immediate statement.

“Let me be unequivocal, I am innocent of any crime, I will vigorously defend myself, and I look forward to the day when I am vindicated of this disgusting political persecution by the judicial process,” Hoffman wrote. “(Attorney General) Kris Mayes & the Democrats’ naked corruption and weaponization of government will long be a stain on the history of our great state and nation.”

                                                                            Former Derby mayoral candidate Gino DiGiovanni Jr. is sorry. Like, really, really sorry. (Eddy Martinez/Connecticut Public Radio)

Finally, a former Connecticut mayoral candidate has been sentenced to 10 days in prison for his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, the CT Mirror reports.

“Gino DiGiovanni Jr., a former alderman who lost a mayoral race in Derby in November, was sentenced Wednesday for entering the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021, as riots broke out to stop certification of the 2020 presidential election,” the Mirror writes.

DiGiovanni’s attorney Martin Minnella had asked the judge for leniency, sparing his client any jail time.

“He didn’t destroy anything. He didn’t break anything. He went out on his own,” Minnella said, with his client sitting next to him. “He’s learned his lesson, believe me. He understands what he did was wrong.”