Move over, Barbie: Universal developing ‘Monster High’ film based on Mattel dolls

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By Christi Carras, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — Fresh off the resounding success of “Barbie,” Mattel is partnering with Universal Pictures to develop another live-action film based on its top-selling dolls.

The El Segundo-based toy company and the studio giant announced Wednesday that they are joining forces for “Monster High,” a big-screen feature inspired by the fashionable, plastic descendants of classic creatures.

Universal and Mattel have tapped Akiva Goldsman — an Oscar winning screenwriter known for “A Beautiful Mind” and “Cinderella Man” — to produce the picture under his banner, Weed Road. Goldsman said in a statement that he has been “fascinated” by the Monster High dolls since his daughters were “obsessed” with them as kids.

“Monster High” is one of many film projects in the Mattel pipeline derived from popular playthings, including American Girl dolls, Hot Wheels, the Magic 8 Ball, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots and Polly Pocket. (MGM is developing the latter with “Girls” creator Lena Dunham and “Emily in Paris” star Lily Collins attached.)

The toy factory is hoping to repeat the commercial and critical triumph that was Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” which grossed $1.4 billion at the global box office last year and landed eight Oscar nominations.

And Mattel isn’t the only one looking to score its next toy blockbuster.

Margot Robbie, who produced and starred in “Barbie,” is working on film adaptations of the Sims video game and the Monopoly board game through her production company, LuckyChap Entertainment.

May the best “Barbie” alum win.

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Election monitors nervously practice for the ‘big dance in November’

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By Matt Vasilogambros, Stateline.org

MARIETTA, Ga. — Just after 3 p.m. on the third Tuesday of May, Lamont Hart began his shift outside a suburban precinct as a scorching Georgia sun reflected heat off the white-bricked Worship with Wonders Church.

Tall, thin, wearing a backward flat cap and holding a notebook, Hart introduced himself to exiting voters and asked whether they’d had any issues casting their ballots.

“Went smooth,” he heard. “All good.” “Easy-peasy.”

Not everything would go perfectly, though, during Hart’s four-hour stint volunteering with the New Georgia Project. His job was to circulate among a handful of precincts, some 20 miles outside Atlanta, to check on voter access. Did folks understand their ballots? Could they even get to the right place to vote?

Georgia is one of the battleground states that will determine who is elected president in November. Since losing the 2020 election, Republican former President Donald Trump has made false claims of widespread voter fraud, and he has been charged in Georgia with felony conspiracy for urging state leaders to “find” the nearly 12,000 votes he needed to overtake Democrat Joe Biden in the state.

New voting ID laws, mail disruptions that could delay absentee ballots, confusion about redistricting — any one of them could sway a close election. Voter access groups around the country are working to ensure that on Nov. 5, every person who wants to have a say will be able to.

If the upcoming presidential election is like the championship game, consider last month’s primary in Georgia the scrimmage.

‘Our trial run’

Early on Tuesday morning, May 21, on the first floor of an Atlanta office building surrounded by highway overpasses, activists with the New Georgia Project buzzed in and out of a conference room stocked with a breakfast platter of pastries, fruit and coffee, and a cooler full of enough Cokes and peach iced teas to caffeinate the civic engagement group for the next 10 hours.

Georgians were making choices in a general primary with few contested races, so not many people were expected to turn out. It was relatively calm out there, a perfect day to test the system.

At 9 a.m., two hours after polls opened, CEO Kendra Davenport Cotton rallied nine of her cohort in the conference room and 30 others across the state on a Zoom call displayed on a large screen.

Their mission, Cotton told everyone, was to monitor the election statewide.

Stephanie Jackson Ali, policy director for the New Georgia Project, handles one of several issues that arose while managing their voter protection operation. (Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline/TNS)

They would field calls from confused voters, arrange rides to get older folks to the polls and observe voting locations for any disruptions. Earlier that morning, Cotton had been to a polling place in Cobb County, just northwest of Atlanta, to see whether a gas leak near a church had been fixed.

“We consider the May primary to be our trial run for the big dance in November,” Cotton told her statewide squad, standing at the head of the conference table.

Along with other groups, the New Georgia Project has been trying to engage communities of color and LGBTQ+, rural and young voters through door-to-door and issue-based organizing. Since 2020, the group has registered more than 150,000 new voters, many of whom are Black and under the age of 25.

Stateline shadowed local political parties and activist organizations in the final days of the primary last month, watching them as they trained poll watchers, scoured precincts and eyed ballot counting.

“We’re training staff to go through the motions, so they’re ready for the next election,” said Cecilia Ugarte Baldwin, the voter protection director for the Georgia Democratic Party, three days before the primary.

On Friday, the final day of early voting, she and her team of volunteer election lawyers fielded hotline calls from voters and poll watchers. With every conversation, they updated an internal spreadsheet tracking the concerns, from confusion about polling place changes to questions on how the ballot scanners worked.

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“If it went through the scanner, it’s been counted,” one lawyer was saying into his phone. A poll monitor at Buckhead Library in Atlanta was on the other end, questioning the process for feeding a two-sided ballot into the machine.

The lawyer was reassuring. “It’s not unusual to have the ballot run through twice.”

By November, Democrats may have as many as 2,000 voter protection volunteers in the Peach State — potentially the largest voter protection operation in the country, they say.

“It’s a lot of collaboration,” Ugarte Baldwin said. “If there’s a sticky situation, we talk it through.”

The same goes for conservative groups such as Voters Organized for Trusted Election Results in Georgia, commonly called VoterGA. The group has questioned the legitimacy of Biden’s win in 2020 and over the past three years has challenged the registrations of thousands of voters.

Co-founder Garland Favorito, who regularly speaks about “election integrity” to conservative organizations, declined an interview with Stateline. But in an emailed statement he said his organization had conducted poll worker and poll watcher training ahead of May’s primary to “ensure safe, secure and honest elections.”

‘On Election Day, this is unacceptable’

Back at the New Georgia Project, the morning Primary Day pep talk had yet to wrap up before the team started troubleshooting the day’s first test: While arranging rides for two Atlanta-area voters, staff discovered that their voter registrations were being challenged.

Since Georgia Republicans enacted a 2021 law that allowed residents to make unlimited challenges to voter registrations, right-wing activists, often using limited evidence or outdated voter lists, have questioned the eligibility of thousands of Georgians.

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp last month signed into law an update to the policy, making the challenge process even easier — to the chagrin both of voting rights groups and of many county officials who say they are bogged down by frivolous objections.

In the end, the two people were able to vote without issue. Under state law, the challenges had come too recently to stick. Volunteers called election board members in each voter’s county — DeKalb and Fulton — to alert them to the cases.

“This is going to be a really good example for us to use,” said Stephanie Jackson Ali, the New Georgia Project’s policy director and conductor of the day’s operation. “They’re good test cases to see what happens.”

Three rooms down, Miko Dougherty held her cellphone in one hand and typed with the other, talking to voters who needed to schedule free Lyft rides to the polls.

Miko Dougherty, center top, examines the registration status of a voter that requested a ride to the polls during last month’s primary. (Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline/TNS)

Some needed Lyft because their absentee ballots had arrived too late for them to mail back, and they didn’t have a way to get to their polling place. Nationwide, restructuring at the U.S. Postal Service has led to massive mail delays in recent months. In Georgia, ballots must arrive by 7 p.m. on the night of the election to be counted.

It was 1:15 p.m., and Dougherty was talking with a voter when Georgia’s My Voter Page website crashed, showing only an error page. Dougherty suddenly couldn’t match the voter to their polling place.

She hustled over to Ali.

“On Election Day, this is unacceptable,” Ali responded, rubbing her forehead. She dialed another voting rights group to see whether someone could find the location on their downloaded voter registration list.

“We can’t leave these folks hanging while they get this fixed,” Ali said.

After nearly an hour, the site was back up. Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for the Georgia secretary of state, held a news conference and told reporters that the downed site was “a hiccup.”

More people were using it than the state anticipated, Sterling said. “It’s a good lesson learned for the future when we have a big election in November.”

Ali agreed.

“You need to set aside $250 to buy the voter file for November,” she said to a staffer, watching Sterling’s press conference on her laptop and opening her second can of lime-flavored CBD soda of the day. “Let’s put it on the list.”

Watching the vote

As Hart, the polling place volunteer, arrived at Trinity Fellowship Church for his next precinct visit of the day, he recognized two voters who had been at a previous voting place. The couple had gone to their normal polling place, they told him, but found out it was no longer their precinct.

Georgia has shuffled its districts twice in the past four years. Last-minute court challenges changed congressional, county and state district boundaries and the polling places for some voters, too.

Hart went inside to the church’s gymnasium and asked poll manager LeDeadra Long whether there had been any other issues. A voter whose native language was Mandarin and who had limited English comprehension had a difficult time understanding the ballot, Long said. The voter had left without casting her ballot.

“We may need to print our ballots out to have an extra option for those who don’t speak English,” Long told Hart.

He ducked out of the church gym, sat on carpeted steps outside the sanctuary and typed a note on his phone for the voter protection team in Atlanta.

Later, driving past strip malls and woods on the way to the Cobb County Senior Wellness Center, his third precinct of the day, Hart described this work as “a duty.”

In his last conversation with his mother before she passed away in 2020, she gave him her absentee ballot and asked him to return it for her. She died 15 minutes after he left the hospital.

“I think this is what she would have wanted me to do,” Hart said, his voice shaking. “Her and my grandparents, they’d kill me if I didn’t vote. And I pass that onto my children too.”

As the air cooled in the waning day, Hart stood near the senior center’s exit and asked voter Paula Evwaraye whether she’d had any issues. She was concerned about the lack of signage outside the polling place, covered by trees along a busy thoroughfare.

“Driving by you wouldn’t know it’s a voting location,” she told him. “They definitely need to fix that before November.”

Hart took pictures on his phone of the “Vote Here” signs that were obscured by trees. They would go into his report.

“It’s going pretty good,” he said. “I expected a lot more issues. November is the one you really have to be ready for. This is just the warm-up act.”

Four miles down the road at the Cobb County elections office in Marietta, workers prepared to count the ballots as polls closed at 7 p.m. Three Republican Party poll monitors stood outside the counting room. One GOP watcher snagged a chair and brought a book, ready for a long night.

A Republican monitor overlooks the opening of absentee ballot envelopes at the Cobb County elections office in Marietta, Georgia, on the Monday before the May primary. (Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline/TNS)

Andy Kingery, another watcher, from Kennesaw, is one of the 100,000 poll watchers Trump wants to recruit ahead of November. They can’t be in the tabulation room, but they can look at it through glass and watch the vote count on a TV that mirrors the staff’s computer screen.

“I feel a burning need for election integrity,” Kingery said. “Sitting on my couch in 2020, I said, ‘What can I do?’ It was important for me to do something.”

He said there were too many questions that he couldn’t answer during the last presidential election; he figured that if he wanted to see whether there were shenanigans, he should go watch for himself.

Along with watching the count, Kingery also had been a county-certified Republican poll watcher at three voting locations. He didn’t have to report any issues, he said. It was a smooth day.

Before heading home that evening, Kingery added that it was good to get an election under his belt, getting familiar with the processes before he comes back in November. But, he said, “Boy, we could use more people to volunteer with us.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.

©2024 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Alito’s flag controversy foreshadows contentious Supreme Court rulings

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By Greg Stohr, Bloomberg News

Justice Samuel Alito’s flag-flying controversy has reignited the political firestorm over the Supreme Court, just as it prepares to issue a blizzard of high-stakes rulings topped by a clash over Donald Trump’s bid for immunity from prosecution.

Alito left Democratic lawmakers stewing last week by rejecting calls to step away from Trump cases amid revelations that his wife flew flags at their homes that also were displayed by the former president’s supporters during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Chief Justice John Roberts backed Alito by telling lawmakers that recusal decisions are up to individual justices.

Amid that turmoil, the court will issue about 30 rulings by the end of June, including decisions that could stop abortion pills from being dispensed by mail, strike down gun restrictions and slash the power of regulatory agencies. The biggest will come on Trump’s bid to avoid criminal charges for trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat.

The case is “probably the most important presidential power case since the Nixon tape case or something close to it,” said Josh Blackman, who teaches constitutional law at South Texas College of Law, referring to the 1974 ruling that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

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Critics say the court has slow-walked the case to the point where a trial before the November election is now unlikely, no matter how the justices rule on Trump’s immunity claim. The court in December rejected Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request to expedite the case and then waited to hear it on the last argument day of the term.

Even if the justices fully reject immunity later this month, “they’ve given the gift to Trump of not having a trial before the election,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

The schedule stands in contrast to the timeline earlier this year when the court reviewed the Colorado Supreme Court decision barring Trump from the ballot for inciting the Jan. 6 riot. The U.S. Supreme Court resolved that case – from the filing of Trump’s appeal to the final ruling in his favor – in only 61 days.

The Alito flag issue comes after Justice Clarence Thomas had similarly declined to recuse even though his wife, conservative activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, supported the push to overturn the 2020 results.

The Trump prosecution could also be affected by a separate appeal pressed by a Capitol riot defendant. He is seeking to limit prosecutors’ use of a 2002 law that makes it a crime to obstruct an official proceeding. Trump has also been charged under the law, as have hundreds of other Capitol riot defendants.

Regulation battles

The rulings could put new strain on an institution whose public standing is already near a record low. A Marquette Law School poll last month found approval of the court at 39%, the lowest level since it hit 38% in July 2022 in the aftermath of a blockbuster abortion ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. Approval among Democrats in the latest poll was 23%. The poll had a margin of error of 4.3 percentage points.

Beyond Trump, the most sweeping legal changes might come from a group of federal regulation cases. Business groups and big-government foes have asked the court to toss out the so-called Chevron doctrine, which since 1984 has required judges to defer to regulators on the meaning of ambiguous federal statutes.

The court is also considering declaring that defendants in Securities and Exchange Commission cases have a constitutional right to make their case to a federal jury. The ruling could undercut the SEC’s ability to press cases before its in-house judges and affect the Federal Trade Commission, Agriculture Department and Environmental Protection Agency.

“There’s a lot there for administrative law that I think will tell us how aggressive the court’s going to be,” said Jonathan Adler, a Case Western Reserve School of Law professor whose specialties include administrative law.

Abortion and guns

The court is poised to decide its first two abortion cases since Alito wrote the 2022 opinion that overturned Roe. One fight will determine whether mifepristone, the drug used in more than half of U.S. abortions, remains fully available. A federal appeals court said the Food and Drug Administration during the Obama and Biden administrations gave short shrift to safety issues when it loosened restrictions on the drug.

The second abortion case will affect emergency rooms in states with the strictest bans. The justices are weighing whether a federal law designed to ensure hospitals don’t turn away patients who need emergency care means pregnant women can get an abortion when necessary to avoid a serious health risk.

In one of its two gun cases, the court will determine the constitutionality of a federal law that bars firearm possession by people under domestic-violence restraining orders. It’s the court’s first Second Amendment dispute since the conservative majority established a tough new test for gun restrictions in 2022.

The court will also decide the fate of a federal prohibition on bump stocks, attachments that let a semiautomatic rifle fire at speeds rivaling a machine gun. That case concerns the reach of the U.S. law banning machine guns rather than the Second Amendment.

This year may be a “mixed bag” for conservative causes, in contrast with 2022, when the abortion and gun rulings were among several conservative triumphs, Blackman said.

Most likely, “the court, or at least the court’s center, will be very happy to say, ‘Look, look, we’re not radicals. We’re going to scale back,’” he said.

Even so, recent comments by liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor may have been a hint that Alito and the other conservatives have more sweeping rulings on the way.

“There are days that I’ve come to my office after an announcement of a case and closed my door and cried,” Sotomayor said late last month at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. “There have been those days. And there are likely to be more.”

©2024 Bloomberg News. Visit at bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Election certification disputes in a handful of states spark concerns over 2024 presidential contest

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By Nicholas Riccardi and Joey Cappalletti, Associated Press

In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, two Republican members of a county canvassing board last month refused to sign off on the results of an election that led to the recall of three GOP members of the county commission. They did so only after state officials warned them it was their legal duty to record the final vote tally.

In Georgia’s Fulton County, which includes the Democratic-voting city of Atlanta, a group run by members of former President Donald Trump’s administration last week sued so a Republican member of the local elections board could refuse to certify the results of the primary election.

And in Arizona, GOP lawmakers sued to reverse the state’s top Democratic officials’ requirement that local boards automatically validate their election results.

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The past four years have been filled with battles over all sorts of election arcana, including one that had long been regarded as an administrative afterthought — little-known state and local boards certifying the results. With the presidential election looming in November, attorneys are gearing up for yet more fights over election certification, especially in the swing states where the victory margins are expected to be tight. Even if those efforts ultimately fail, election officials worry they’ll become a vehicle for promoting bogus election claims.

Trump and his allies have tried to use the tactic to stop election results from being made final if they lose. In 2020, two Republicans on Michigan’s state board of canvassers, which must certify ballot totals before state officials can declare a winner, briefly balked at signing off before one relented and became the decisive vote. Trump had cheered the delay as part of his push to overturn his loss that ultimately culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

During the 2022 midterms, some conservative, rural counties tried to hold up their state election results, citing the same debunked claims of voter fraud that Trump has made.

In New Mexico, rural county supervisors refused to certify the state’s primary vote until they were threatened with prosecution. In Cochise County in southeastern Arizona, two Republican supervisors who refused to certify the local vote totals said they had no doubt their own county’s tally was accurate but were protesting the counts in other counties that gave Democratic candidates for governor, attorney general and secretary of state their victories.

Responding to the certification controversies, Michigan’s Democratic legislature passed a law making clear that state and local canvassing boards must certify election totals. The two Arizona county supervisors are currently facing criminal charges filed by the state’s Democratic attorney general.

Democrats and nonpartisan groups say the thousands of local election oversight boards across the country aren’t the place to contest ballot counts, and that state laws make clear they have no leeway on whether to sign off on their staff’s final tallies.

“Election authorities don’t have the discretion to reject the results of an election because of their vibes,” said Jonathan Diaz of the Campaign Legal Center, adding that lawsuits and recounts are the proper recourse. “They’re there to perform a function. They’re there to certify.”

But some Republicans argue that’s going too far. Kory Langhofer, the attorney suing to overturn the election procedures manual’s directive in Arizona that was issued by the Democratic attorney general and secretary of state, said he didn’t support the effort to block certification in Cochise County in 2022. But, he argued, locally elected boards of supervisors have to have some discretion to police elections.

“It seems to me the system is stronger when you have multiple eyes on it,” Langhofer said. Of the efforts to block certification in 2020 and 2022, he added, “I hope that’s behind us.”

Democrats doubt that’s the case. They note that the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump organization run by former officials from his administration, filed the lawsuit in Georgia to let Fulton County Elections Board member Julie Adams vote against certifying elections. Adams’ four other board members voted to certify last month’s primary but Adams abstained last week, contending she couldn’t accept the results given prior election administration problems in the county.

“This action will re-establish the role of board members as the ultimate parties responsible for ensuring elections in Fulton County are free from fraud, deceit, and abuse,” the institute wrote in its release announcing the lawsuit. The group did not respond to a request for comment.

Fulton County is the heart of the Democratic vote in Georgia, and anything that holds up its totals in November could help make it look like Trump has a large lead in the state.

“Trump and MAGA Republicans have made it clear they are planning to try to block certification of November’s election when they are defeated again, and this is a transparent attempt to set the stage for that fight,” Georgia Democratic Party chair and Rep. Nikema Williams said in a statement.

In Michigan’s Delta County, clerk Nancy Przewrocki, a Republican, said the two GOP canvassers had requested a hand recount of the votes, which is beyond the scope of their position. The canvassers eventually voted to certify the May election after receiving a letter from the State Elections Director Jonathan Brater, which reminded them of their duties and warned them of the consequences of failing to certify.

Still, Przewrocki said she’s concerned about what could happen in November if a similar situation arises.

“I can see this escalating, unfortunately. I’m trying to keep our voters confident in our voting equipment, and this is completely undermining it when there’s really nothing there,” Przewrocki said.

Following the Delta County incident, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Attorney General Dana Nessel, both Democrats, issued a reminder to local canvassing boards throughout the state warning them of their legal obligation to certify election results based solely on vote returns. If they don’t, there will be “swift action to ensure the legal certification of election results,” along with “possible civil and criminal charges against those members for their actions,” Benson warned.

Michigan is an example of the futility of the tactic. The new state law makes it clear that canvassing boards can’t block certification, but Benson said in an interview that she still worries such an effort, even if legally doomed, would help spread false allegations about the November election.

“Misinformation and talking points emerge that enable others — particularly politicians — to continue to cast doubt on the accuracy of election results,” she said.

Riccardi reported from Denver and Cappelletti from Lansing, Michigan. Associated Press writers Jeff Amy in Atlanta and Morgan Lee in Santa Fe, New Mexico, contributed to this report.

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