All posts by Rick Hasen

“Pa. election conspiracy activist appointed to election integrity role at Department of Homeland Security”

election subversion risk, fraudulent fraud squad

WITF:

A Pennsylvania-based activist tied to President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election is now overseeing election security matters for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. 

Heather Honey, of Lebanon County, is serving as the deputy assistant secretary for elections integrity, a political appointment in the department’s Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans, according to the department’s website. 

The office is responsible for leading, conducting and coordinating “Department-wide policy development and implementation and strategic planning,” according to its page. 

DHS did not answer questions about Honey’s responsibilities, or whether she will still be able to both work in government and hold positions in several advocacy groups that push conspiratorial election claims….

Votebeat had an earlier profile of Honey, This Pa. activist is the source of false and flawed election claims gaining traction across the country. MORE from Democracy Docket.

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“Judge rules Utah’s congressional map must be redrawn for the 2026 elections”

redistricting

AP:

The Utah Legislature will need to rapidly redraw the state’s congressional boundaries after a judge ruled Monday that the Republican-controlled body circumvented safeguards put in place by voters to ensure districts aren’t drawn to favor any party.

The current map, adopted in 2021, divides Salt Lake County — Utah’s population center and a Democratic stronghold — among the state’s four congressional districts, all of which have since elected Republicans by wide margins.

District Court Judge Dianna Gibson made few judgments on the content of the map but declared it unlawful because lawmakers had weakened and ignored an independent commission established by voters to prevent partisan gerrymandering.

“The nature of the violation lies in the Legislature’s refusal to respect the people’s exercise of their constitutional lawmaking power and to honor the people’s right to reform their government,” Gibson said in the ruling.

New maps will need to be drawn quickly, before candidates start filing in early January for the 2026 midterm elections. The ruling gives lawmakers a deadline of Sept. 24 and allows voting rights groups involved in the legal challenge to submit alternate proposals to the court.

But appeals expected from Republican officials could help them run out the clock to possibly delay adopting new maps until 2028.

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“How AOC built a Democratic fundraising juggernaut”

campaign finance, campaigns

CNN:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is building a fundraising juggernaut that is rivaling some of the Democratic Party’s core infrastructure, prompting questions about both her future and the party’s.

Small-dollar donations – contributions of less than $200 – are the lifeblood of campaigns and a key measure of voter enthusiasm. And on ActBlue, Democrats’ largest online fundraising platform, the New York congresswoman received the third-most small-dollar donations in the first half of the year.

That trailed only the Democratic National Committee and the party’s Senate campaign arm, key party infrastructure. Ocasio-Cortez beat the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the House campaign arm, and every other individual candidate.

Ocasio-Cortez raised nearly $15 million total in the first half of 2025 from 736,000 contributions, an average of $20 a donor. Notably, her fundraising spiked after the March announcement that she would join Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ national “Fighting Oligarchy” tour….

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Unanimous Third Circuit Panel Holds Unconstitutional Pennsylvania Requirement to Discard Timely Received Mail-in Ballots That Have Wrong or Missing Dates

election administration

It’s an interesting case that finds only a minimal burden under the Anderson-Burdick balancing test but still finds the state law unconstitutional. Here, the date requirement on timely received ballots was found to serve no government interest.

I expect the RNC will seek U.S. Supreme Court review.

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“In Private Deal, the D.N.C. Covered $20 Million in Harris Bills Post-Election”

campaign finance, campaigns

NYT:

Not long after Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election, her senior advisers and the Democratic National Committee struck a handshake deal.

Ms. Harris still had bills piling up, and campaign officials had counted on raising more money during a prolonged fight over tallying votes. Instead, the race was called early in the morning after Election Day.

The private agreement was this: The party would pick up the tab for any outstanding 2024 bills, allowing Ms. Harris to claim she did not end the race in debt. In turn, Ms. Harris would raise the money to cover all of those leftover costs, leaving the party whole financially as it sought to navigate the second Trump era.

Left in the dark were the small donors who received nearly 100 email solicitations sent from the Harris operation this year alone on behalf of the D.N.C. The emails did not disclose that funds raised from those emails were essentially earmarked for leftover bills. Convincing donors, both big and small, to pay for debts is typically a tough sell.

The arrangement was described by four people with knowledge of it and corroborated through Federal Election Commission disclosures. The people spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Though the deal was struck before the current party chairman, Ken Martin, was elected in February, it has continued during his tenure.

The total tally in post-election bills that the D.N.C. has covered so far is $20.5 million, federal records show. While significant, that sum amounted to less than 2 percent of the $1.5 billion that the presidential campaign spent in 15 weeks….

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California: “Republicans again ask Supreme Court to stop Democratic redistricting”

direct democracy, redistricting

At the Lectern:

California Republicans today filed a second writ petition — Sanchez v. Weber — in the Supreme Court seeking to prevent the electorate from voting in November to temporarily redraw the state’s congressional districts.

The court denied the first petition last week, two days after it was filed, but before enactment of the legislation necessary to put the redistricting proposal on the ballot. The petition had asked for immediate action to stop the Legislature from acting. The court declined to stop the Legislature from voting, but seemed to leave open today’s second petition, apparently saying the first petition was premature.

Today’s petition asks the Supreme Court to keep off the November ballot ACA 8, the Legislature’s proposed constitutional amendment for temporary redistricting. It requests a court decision — with or without a hearing — in two weeks, by September 8. I do not see in the petition why September 8 is a critical date. The only reference to that day on the California Secretary of State’s web page of key dates for the November special election is: “Translations of Ballot Label and Ballot Title and Summary Available for Public Display” “August 31–September 8, 2025.”

Today’s petition reprises the lone argument made in the first, that the Legislature acted too quickly on the redistricting bills, in violation of California Constitution article IV, section 8(a). But it also alleges ACA 8 violates other state constitutional provisions — the separate-vote requirement of article XVIII, section 1; and the Citizens Redistricting Commission provisions and the once-a-decade-redistricting limitations of article XXI. The petition doesn’t mention how these arguments might be affected by the ACA 8 provision that the changes it makes are “notwithstanding any other provision of [California’s] Constitution or existing law.”

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“How China Influences Elections in America’s Biggest City”

chicanery

NYT:

In New York City, social clubs backed by China undermined a congressional candidate who once challenged the regime on Chinese television.

They helped unseat a state senator for attending a banquet with the president of Taiwan.

And they condemned a City Council candidate on social media for supporting Hong Kong democracy.

In the past few years, these organizations have quietly foiled the careers of politicians who opposed China’s authoritarian government while backing others who supported policies of the country’s ruling Communist Party. The groups, many of them tax-exempt nonprofits, have allowed America’s most formidable adversary to influence elections in the country’s largest city, The New York Times found.

The groups are mostly “hometown associations” of people hailing from the same town or province in China. Some have been around for more than a century, while dozens of others have sprung up over the past decade. Like other heritage clubs in a city of immigrants, they welcome newcomers, organize parades and foster social connections.

But many hometown associations have become useful tools of China’s consulate in Midtown Manhattan, according to dozens of group members, politicians and former prosecutors. Some group leaders have family or business in China and fear the consequences of bucking its authority. Consulate officials have enlisted them to intimidate politicians who support Taiwan or cross Beijing’s other red lines. In one case, a Chinese intelligence agent and several hometown leaders targeted the same candidate.

This meddling may seem modest, involving politicians who are unlikely to affect international policy. But China is determined to quash dissent in its diaspora before it spreads back home, said Audrye Wong, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who studies Chinese influence.

Beijing is also making a longer bet, she said: “You never know which politician might eventually run for Congress at the national level, or become a presidential candidate.”…

China’s influence machine is one of the world’s most expansive and effective. Over decades, it has harassed exiles in France, bribed academics in Britain and targeted politicians in Canada. It has even built clandestine police stations in dozens of countries to threaten dissidents. Its efforts have been especially potent in New York City, home to 600,000 ethnic Chinese people.

In 2023, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested leaders of one group, the America Changle Association, for operating a police station in its clubhouse. Last year, a federal indictment accused a former aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul of conspiring with the heads of two Chinese associations, saying their political activities “were supervised, directed, and controlled” by Chinese officials. And this summer, F.B.I. agents interviewed group leaders in Chinatown about consulate pressure, two leaders said….

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“Plutocratic Democracy, Elon Musk, and the Limits of Campaign Finance Reform”

campaign finance, Plutocrats United

Guy Charles and Frances Peale have posted this draft on SSRN (forthcoming in  Campaign Finance and the First Amendment, Lee C. Bollinger & Geoffrey R. Stone, Eds., 2025). Here is the abstract:

Politicians appear to be increasingly dependent upon a group of ultra-wealthy elites who not only fund their campaigns but are critical for the functioning of public governance. These ultrawealthy individuals provide the indispensable infrastructure, expertise, and communication that are critical to modern electoral politics. These ultra-wealthy individuals want more than influence, seeking instead to govern even though the voters do not elect them. This chapter describes this process and argues that the campaign finance literature, which is mired in a debate about corruption and equality, is not well-positioned to address this contemporary challenge to representative democracy. The piece refers to this challenge as “plutocratic democracy,” and uses Elon Musk as a case study.

This is an important piece, and is very much in line with my own draft, Faux Campaign Finance Regulation and the Pathway to American Oligarchy (conference paper dated Apr. 24, 2025, draft available, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5229707).

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“District Populations and Partisan Bias”

redistricting

Barry Burden and Veronica Judson have written this article for Legislative Studies Quarterly. Here is the abstract:

We investigate whether the differing population sizes of legislative districts affect the ability to engage in partisan gerrymandering. We conjecture that larger populations facilitate partisan gerrymandering by providing mapmakers with more “raw material” to manipulate, and this might make such districts less compact. Evidence based on measures of partisan bias, district population, and compactness suggests that more populous districts encourage partisan distortion and do so partly through violations of compactness. Regression analysis of lower and upper chamber state legislative maps shows that more populous districts lead to more partisan bias in maps even after accounting for other aspects of districts and Voting Rights Act requirements that affect how states draw district lines.

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“How the Electoral College Could Tilt Further From Democrats”

electoral college

NYT:

The year is 2032. Studying the Electoral College map, a Democratic presidential candidate can no longer plan to sweep New Hampshire, Minnesota and the “blue wall” battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and win the White House. A victory in the swing state of Nevada would not help, either.

That is the nightmare scenario many Democratic Party insiders see playing out if current U.S. population projections hold. After every decennial census, like the one coming up in 2030, congressional seats are reallocated among the states based on population shifts. Those seats in turn affect how big a prize each state is within the Electoral College — or how a candidate actually wins the presidency.

In the next decade, the Electoral College will tilt significantly away from Democrats….

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“How California bluffed its way into a redistricting war with Trump”

redistricting

Politico:

When word got out that Texas might undertake an extraordinary mid-decade redistricting at Donald Trump’s behest, a handful of top California Democratic operatives floated an idea to Rep. Zoe Lofgren: Could California respond in kind?

Lofgren, the chair of California’s 43-member Democratic delegation, consulted in June with a trusted data expert who dismissed it as absurd — a foolhardy end-run around the state’s popular redistricting panel with no guarantee of yielding enough blue seats to fully offset Texas. Deterred by those misgivings, California Democrats instead spent weeks putting up a front, dangling the threat of a countermove without making any real plans to do so.

“It seemed to me worth a bluff,” Lofgren said. “If the Texans and Trump thought they’d go through all of this and they’d end up not gaining anything, maybe they would stop.”

“But they didn’t stop,” she added. “They just doubled down.”

So did California Democrats, especially Gov. Gavin Newsom. In a matter of weeks, they bluffed themselves into the marquee political contest of Trump’s second term, a high-voltage fight to shape the outcome of the 2026 midterms and the remaining years of his presidency.

“It got very real, very fast,” recounted Newsom, whose provocative podcast appearances and social media posturing lit the fuse for this slapdash effort — and positioned him as a de facto leader of the opposition party in advance of his likely 2028 White House run.

Texas Republicans approved a gerrymandered map early Saturday morning.

POLITICO spoke with nearly 50 people involved with the California effort, including lawmakers, political operatives, staffers and redistricting wonks. Many were granted anonymity to share details of private deliberations of the tightly-guarded process, which spanned multiple states and levels of government. Together, they paint a picture of a showdown propelled not by painstaking deliberations but by its own self-generating momentum and the opportunity for a rudderless Democratic party to remake itself as a political street brawler….

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