The Senator’s WaPo oped: The warning lights are flashing red. America’s elections are under attack.This week, I reviewed classified materials in the Senate’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility and received a similarly classified briefing on malign foreign threats to U.S. elections. … Continue reading
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Norm oped in USA Today: The vote totals counted and announced on Nov. 3 may be very different from the final tallies. We may see state legislatures or even governors contesting these results, and possibly putting up alternative slates of electors to cast … Continue reading
AJC reports. … Continue reading
NYT: The United States government on Thursday became, for a brief moment, one of the biggest and perhaps most annoying telemarketers in Russia.Seeking to publicize new rewards of up to $10 million for information about people trying to attack American … Continue reading
Good news: Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) has introduced a bill to extend the federal safe harbor period for states to determine electors from December 8, 2020 to January 1, 2021 for this year’s presidential election. He explains his position in this … Continue reading
The Washington Post has published this piece of mine. An excerpt: The main fight over “vote by mail” is over. President Trump ended it, even if he doesn’t realize that. In the past few weeks, the president has repeatedly and … Continue reading
New report from CAP and Democratic Secretaries of State Assn. … Continue reading
WaPo reports. … Continue reading
CNN reports. … Continue reading
Molly Ball analysis for TIME. … Continue reading
WRAL editorial. … Continue reading
WSJ reports. … Continue reading
At the Nevada Independent. … Continue reading
Detroit Free Press: More than 2 million Michiganders mailed in ballots or voted in person for the primary election Tuesday, requiring many clerks to scramble for staff during a pandemic and spend late-night hours tallying a record number of absentee ballot. Overall, … Continue reading
NPR reports. … Continue reading
The RAND Corporation is out with analyses in this series: REPORTAn Assessment of State Voting Processes: Preparing for Elections During a PandemicTo conduct elections safely this fall, states need registration and voting options that can happen remotely or can enable … Continue reading
Axios canvasses the landscape. … Continue reading
NBC News: On June 23, Suraj Patel challenged incumbent Rep. Carolyn Maloney in New York’s Democratic primary. Six weeks after Election Day, Patel is still a candidate — because there are so many absentee ballots uncounted that officials have yet to declare … Continue reading
The Hill: President Trump on Tuesday elaborated on his sudden support for mail-in voting in the state of Florida by noting the state is run by a Republican governor.The president earlier in the day offered a qualifier to his weeks of sustained attacks … Continue reading
Ben Jacobs: Lane Ruhland, the Wisconsin lawyer who dropped off Kanye West's presidential filing at the Wisconsin Board of Elections represented Donald Trump's presidential campaign exactly one week before in federal court pic.twitter.com/RHajkRDiMO— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) August 5, 2020 Daniel … Continue reading
Editorial: It would help lower the temperature if a highly visible, authoritative commission were ready to observe and evaluate alleged irregularities — to clarify that voting officials in Georgia are counting votes, not stuffing ballot boxes, or that postal workers … Continue reading
The Star Tribune reports. … Continue reading
Jacob Sullum for Reason. … Continue reading
Washington Post: Mail problems marred the delivery of absentee ballots in Michigan in the run-up to Tuesday’s primary in the state, testing election administrators and ramping up fears of political pressure on the U.S. Postal Service just three months before … Continue reading
Politico: Donald Trump’s all-out war on mail voting is backfiring in battleground states.New private polling shared first with POLITICO showed that Republicans have become overwhelmingly concerned about mail balloting, which Trump has claimed without evidence, will lead to widespread voter … Continue reading
Axios reports. … Continue reading
Here: Recent Top Papers (60 days) As of: 04 Jun 2020 – 03 Aug 2020 RankPaperDownloads1.Do Shifts in Late-Counted Votes Signal Fraud? Evidence From BoliviaNicolás Idrobo, Dorothy Kronick and Francisco RodríguezUniversity of Pennsylvania, School of Arts & Sciences, Department of Political Science, Students, University … Continue reading
Seems an application of the Democracy Canon. … Continue reading
West Academic Published has announced that the 2020 Supplement to The Law of Democracy: Legal Regulation of the Political Process is now available at this link. The Supplement contains a free-standing 15-page section on issues concerning the fall election, including … Continue reading
CNN: Video of then-businessman Donald Trump struggling to vote in-person before declaring he would fill out an absentee ballot in 2004 has resurfaced this week amid a new round of unfounded attacks on mail-in voting from the President. The “Access Hollywood” segment, filmed … Continue reading
WaPo: Outside the Las Vegas Convention Center, Kayleigh McEnany raised a microphone to a mega-fan and asked what it felt like to be acknowledged by President Trump at his February rally in Sin City.At the time a spokeswoman for Trump’s … Continue reading
CNN reports. … Continue reading
Ben Smith NYT media column: Picture this Thanksgiving: turkey, football (maybe), tenser-than-usual interactions with relatives. And perhaps a new tradition: finding out who actually won the presidential election.The coronavirus crisis means that states like Pennsylvania may be counting mail-in ballots … Continue reading
I appreciated a respite from the daily posting routine. Going to only get busier up in the lead-up to November. … Continue reading
This title might be a bit misleading, since the text of the story refers to lack of resources or knowledge. Still, raises important issues: As the coronavirus pandemic has upended normal balloting, more than half of voters under the age … Continue reading
From the Washington Post: When Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan announced an all-of-the-above strategy to conduct “a normal” election in November, he cast it as a decision to maximize voter access during the coronavirus pandemic. A massive backlash ensued. Over the … Continue reading
Sen. Coons op-ed in WP: It is now well understood that states across the country do not have adequate resources to conduct an election during the novel coronavirus pandemic, largely because Congress and the states have provided only a small … Continue reading
Op-ed in the Anchorage Daily News from Jacob Begich, after his father, Sen. Mark Begich, wrote a WSJ op-ed opposing RCV. … Continue reading
From AP News, in the Bellefontaine Examiner: Fears that the coronavirus pandemic will worsen, Victor Gibson said he’s not planning to take advantage of Michigan’s expanded vote-by-mail system when he casts his ballot in November. The retired teacher from Detroit … Continue reading
From Bob Barnes at the WP: But the court’s customary summer lull? It never arrived. Instead, responding to emergency pleas for intervention, the justices allowed federal executions to resume for the first time in 17 years. They threw up a … Continue reading
From CCN: US intelligence officials on Friday discounted the possibility of foreign countries mass producing fake ballots to interfere in the November elections, contradicting President Donald Trump’s continued insistence that mail-in voting poses a significant threat to election security. The … Continue reading
In the NY Daily News: The elections will remain scheduled for Nov. 3. The question will be whether procedures to be used will be sufficient to permit every eligible voter wishing to participate to have an adequate opportunity to cast … Continue reading
This story from Yahoo News is titled “GOP intransigence in Michigan could lead to a chaotic presidential election.” The story identifies an issue that I have been hammering away at since way back in March. There are going to be … Continue reading
From David Wasserman at The Cook Political Report: The real danger is a perfect catastrophe of administrative overload, postal delays and voter error that could lead to millions of absentee ballots not counting. And this year, unlike the past, those ballots are … Continue reading
TN law permits absentee voting only for one of 12 specified reasons. A lower court held, as a matter of state constitutional law, that no-excuse absentee voting was required, given Covid-19. The case was argued yesterday before the TN Supreme … Continue reading
From NBC news: A dozen doctors delivered speeches in front of the U.S. Capitol on Monday to a small crowd, claiming without evidence that the coronavirus could be cured and that widely accepted efforts to slow its spread were unnecessary … Continue reading
The Washington Post’s Michelle Lee and Jacob Bogage write: The U.S. Postal Service is experiencing days-long backlogs of mail across the country after a top Trump donor running the agency put in place new procedures described as cost-cutting efforts, alarming … Continue reading
For those of us who believe strong political parties, at both the national and state level, are important for a strong democratic system of politics and governance, this story from Politico identifies a noteworthy development: Once ignored, underfunded and often … Continue reading
From about 1/2 hour ago, the same position I flagged earlier: Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump 33m Glad I was able to get the very dishonest LameStream Media to finally start talking about the RISKS to our Democracy from dangerous Universal … Continue reading
That appears to be the conclusion of this new paper by Ed Stiglitz and Aviv Caspi entitled “Observability and Reasoned Discourse: Evidence from the U.S. Senate”. Here’s the abstract: Many private and public institutions depend on reasoned discourse to reach … Continue reading