Category Archives: Uncategorized

“LWV Files Federal Lawsuit Against AI-Generated Robocalls Sent on the Eve of the New Hampshire Presidential Primary”

Release:

Today, the League of Women Voters of New Hampshire, the League of Women Voters of the United States, and individual New Hampshire voters filed a federal lawsuit against Steve Kramer, Lingo Telecom, LLC, and Life Corporation for voter intimidation, coercion, and deception ahead of the 2024 New Hampshire presidential primary. The defendants used illegal AI-generated robocalls to discourage voters from participating in the primary. The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire, seeks to order the defendants to cease engaging in illegal, dishonest, and deceptive tactics nationwide.

Two days before the New Hampshire presidential primary, the defendants sent robocalls to New Hampshire voters with a “deepfake” simulated voice of President Joe Biden to discourage them from participating in that primary. The New Hampshire robocalls urged recipients not to vote in the primary and to “save” their vote for the November 2024 US Presidential Election.  

Read the complaint.

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“To boost Trump, GOP attorneys general charge into battle over state election rules”

Zachary Roth:


With less than six months before voting begins, the legal jousting over the rules for the 2024 election is already underway. And former President Donald Trump’s campaign is getting support from allies who have stayed mostly under the national radar: red-state attorneys general. 

In court filings made in recent months, these chief state legal officers have advanced a string of arguments — some strikingly far-reaching — that appear designed to lay the groundwork for Republican legal victories in the event of a contested presidential vote, or to otherwise boost Trump and the GOP. 

Often led by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, a loose coalition of Republican-led states has submitted briefs urging judges to:

  • Throw out certain mail ballots,
  • Weaken long-standing protections against racial discrimination in voting, 
  • Green-light gerrymandered district maps, 
  • And empower partisan state legislatures, rather than courts, to set election rules.

“These are all setting up an argument, potentially, to say that the 2024 election was flawed because of all these state practices that are questionable,” said Paul Nolette, a political science professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee who has written in depth on the role of state AGs. “The AGs just have been critical in pushing these arguments.”

Marshall’s office did not respond to a request to comment for this story. But last month Marshall also led a coalition of red states in submitting an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to pause Trump’s election subversion trial tied to the events of Jan. 6, 2021 — a stance that aligned the group perfectly with the interests of the Trump campaign. 

And in 2020, many of these same state AGs, including Marshall, sought to have the courts overturn Trump’s election loss.

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“Finding Condorcet”

I just posted this paper, written for the Washington & Lee Law Review’s symposium on voting rights in a politically polarized era. The paper uses a new dataset of about two hundred foreign instant-runoff voting (IRV) elections to assess the performance of IRV in practice. The abstract is below:

Instant-runoff voting (IRV) is having a moment. More than a dozen American localities have adopted it over the last few years. So have two states. Up to four more states may vote on switching to IRV in the 2024 election. In light of this momentum, it’s imperative to know how well IRV performs in practice. In particular, how often does IRV elect the candidate whom a majority of voters prefer over every other candidate in a head-to-head matchup, that is, the Condorcet winner? To answer this question, this article both surveys the existing literature on American IRV elections and analyzes a new dataset of almost two hundred foreign IRV races. Both approaches lead to the same conclusion: In actual elections—as opposed to in arithmetical examples or in simulated races—IRV almost always elects the Condorcet winner. What’s more, a Condorcet winner almost always exists. These findings help allay the concern that candidates lacking majority support frequently prevail under IRV. The results also reveal an electorate more rational than many might think: voters whose preferences among candidates are, at least, coherent in virtually all cases.

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“Trump says there will be ‘bloodbath’ if he loses 2024 election, ramps up anti-migrant rhetoric”

ABC News:

What was scheduled to be a guest appearance by former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally for Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno quickly turned into Trump saying there would be a “bloodbath” for the country if he doesn’t win the 2024 general election — while also railing against the electric vehicle industry manufacturing automobiles outside the U.S. and using disparaging language to describe immigrants who are in the country illegally.

“We’re gonna put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not gonna be able to sell those guys if I get elected,” Trump said at Saturday’s event while criticizing overseas manufacturing production.

“Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the whole … that’s gonna be the least of it, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the country, that’ll be the least of it.”

Trump’s campaign has pushed back on claims Trump was talking about violence throughout the country should he lose reelection in 2024, arguing he was talking about the destruction of the auto industry.

“Joe Biden’s Insane EV Mandate will slaughter the American auto industry,” senior Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller posted on X. “So many jobs killed! That’s why we have to elect President Trump.”

However, President Biden’s campaign seized on the comments, highlighting how Trump has often praised authoritarian leaders and starts many of his rallies saluting the American flag while “Justice for All” by the “J6 Prison Choir” plays.

“This is who Donald Trump is,” Biden-Harris spokesperson James Singer said in a statement Saturday night.

“He wants another January 6, but the American people are going to give him another electoral defeat this November because they continue to reject his extremism, his affection for violence, and his thirst for revenge.”

Later, as Trump was mounting the stakes of the November election, he argued, “I don’t think you’re going to have another election… in this country, if we don’t win this election … certainly not an election that’s meaningful.”

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“Judge Delays Trump’s Manhattan Trial Until at Least Mid-April”

NYT:

A New York judge on Friday delayed Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan until at least mid-April, postponing the only one of Mr. Trump’s four criminal cases that appeared set to begin.

The delay — lasting 30 days from the judge’s Friday decision — stems from the recent disclosure of more than 100,000 pages of records that may have some bearing on the case. Citing the records, Mr. Trump’s lawyers sought a 90-day delay of the trial, while the Manhattan prosecutors that brought the case proposed a postponement of up to 30 days.

The prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office, who accused the former president of covering up a sex scandal during and after his 2016 campaign, had said the extra time would allow Mr. Trump’s lawyers to review the records that recently emerged.

Mr. Trump, who recently clinched the Republican presidential nomination for the third time, was initially set to go on trial on March 25. Now, the judge in the case, Juan M. Merchan, will hold a hearing that day to determine whether the trial should be delayed further — and if so, for how long.

“There are significant questions of fact which this Court must resolve,” the judge wrote.

He also ordered both sides to produce a “detailed timeline of the events” leading up to the recent disclosure of the records.

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“Manhattan Prosecutors Seek 30-Day Delay of Trump Trial”

NYT:

Less than two weeks before Donald J. Trump is set to go on trial for criminal charges in Manhattan, the prosecutors who brought the case asked a judge on Thursday to delay it up to 30 days, a startling development in the first prosecution of a former American president.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which accused Mr. Trump of covering up a sex scandal during and after the 2016 presidential campaign, sought the delay so it could review a new batch of records. It only recently obtained the records from federal prosecutors, who years ago investigated the same hush-money payments at the center of the case.

The potential postponement of the trial, which is scheduled to start with jury selection on March 25, would represent the latest delay on Mr. Trump’s sprawling legal docket. The criminal case against him in Washington, where he is accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election results, was initially supposed to go to trial this month, but that is delayed while Mr. Trump appeals to the Supreme Court.

A delay in the Manhattan case would most likely delight the former president, whose central strategy for fighting all of his legal entanglements is to stall as much as possible. If he is elected to a second term in November, the criminal cases against him would grind to a halt until he is out of office.

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“Supreme Betrayal: A requiem for Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment”

Judge Luttig and Laurence Tribe in the Altantic:

The Supreme Court of the United States did a grave disservice to both the Constitution and the nation in Trump v. Anderson.

In a stunning disfigurement of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court impressed upon it an ahistorical misinterpretation that defies both its plain text and its original meaning. Despite disagreement within the Court that led to a 5–4 split among the justices over momentous but tangential issues that it had no need to reach in order to resolve the controversy before it, the Court was disappointingly unanimous in permitting oath-breaking insurrectionists, including former President Donald Trump, to return to power. In doing so, all nine justices denied “We the People” the very power that those who wrote and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment presciently secured to us to save the republic from future insurrectionists—reflecting a lesson hard-learned from the devastation wrought by the Civil War….

Far from preventing what it sought to depict as state usurpation of a federal responsibility, the Supreme Court itself usurped a congressional responsibility, and it did so in the name of protecting a congressional prerogative, that of enacting enforcement legislation under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Our highest court dramatically and dangerously betrayed its obligation to enforce what once was the Constitution’s safety net for America’s democracy. The Supreme Court has now rendered that safety net a dead letter, effectively rescinding it as if it had never been enacted.

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Can Congress Disqualify Trump After the Supreme Court’s Section 3 Ruling?

A Lawfare essay analyzing how best to read Trump v. Anderson for understanding its potential implications down the road. The piece delves deep into the details of both the per curiam and the separate opinion by the three liberals on the Court, but the unfortunate bottom line of uncertainty is reflected in the essay’s subtitle: “The dueling opinions for the 9-0 decision support two opposing interpretations on this crucial question.”

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Arizona’s Especially Worthwhile Electoral Reform Effort

A new Common Ground Democracy essay with this subtitle: “A local group is pursuing a proposal that deserves nationwide recognition as well as success at home.”

ELB readers should be especially interested in following the development of this important effort. Given Arizona’s status as one of the most hotly contested electoral battlegrounds–the only state with “toss-up” races in both its presidential and U.S. Senate elections, according to Cook Political Report (with Amy Walter)–the pursuit of this particular proposal, with its pragmatic flexibility, could serves as a model for how other states might tackle the increasing problem of partisan polarization.

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“Is the End of the Filibuster Near?”

Carl Hulse for the NYT:

“It is going to be challenged,” said Mr. Manchin, who sided with Mr. McConnell and Senate Republicans to block fellow Democrats from rewriting the Senate rule book.

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said as much recently when he suggested his party could try again to change the filibuster rules for voting rights legislation if Democrats wind up in control of the Senate, the House and the White House next year.

“When people attempt — courts or legislators — to take away voting rights, particularly of the most disenfranchised people, we have an obligation to do everything we can to restore those voting rights,” Mr. Schumer said after the decision by Ms. Sinema, now an independent, to relinquish her seat given her daunting re-election challenge.

Once rarely used, the filibuster has become a routine part of Senate life and has kept significant legislation bottled up. It was central to efforts to blockade civil rights legislation in the past but in recent years has ensnared gun control, health care and other social policy measures.

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“Democrats prepare to go to war against third-party candidates”

NBC News:

The Democratic National Committee is building its first team to counter third-party and independent presidential candidates, people involved told NBC News, as the party and its allies prepare for a potential all-out war on candidates they view as spoilers.

The DNC has hired veteran Democratic operative Lis Smith, best known for her work guiding the 2020 presidential campaign of Pete Buttigieg, to help oversee an aggressive communications component of its strategy, which also includes opposition research and legal challenges.

Underscoring how important Democrats view the effort, it is being overseen by Mary Beth Cahill and Ramsey Reid, two veteran DNC insiders, who have already started issuing rare public statements rebuking Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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“Republicans in a rural Georgia county ignore a judge’s order to qualify candidates”

AJC:

A political and legal standoff is underway in Catoosa County after the local GOP passed rules giving it the final say over who can qualify as a Republican and then this week refused to allow several contenders for the County Commission to run on the GOP ticket.

The party has repeatedly flouted Superior Court Judge Don Thompson’s order requiring it to allow four candidates — including three incumbent county commissioners — to run with an “R” by their name in the deep-red county.

The judge told deputies to record the candidates being rejected with their bodycams for court records, and then he threatened to slap a major fine on the Catoosa GOP if it doesn’t comply with his order.

On Friday, Thompson instructed the Catoosa Board of Elections — separate from the local GOP — to qualify the four candidates and indicated he could hold party officials in contempt if they don’t heed his warnings.

“This case is unprecedented given the intransigence of Respondents to the law and this Court’s repeated directives,” Thompson wrote in a Friday court order.

The party seems to be spoiling for a fight, arguing that the government can’t compel a political party to give up its rights to select candidates.

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