In the first one to two minutes of this clip, Republican Rep. Donalds lambasts PA for not permitting officials to start processing absentee ballots before Election Day. He notes that his state of Florida, along with Georgia and many others, permit this, which is why they can get to a more complete count more quickly than PA. Rep. Donalds is right about this( the way @atrupar excerpts the dialogue does not capture this part of the conversation) .

The Republican controlled Senate has refused to permit this unless the Democrats, including the Governor, agree to accept a voter ID law. This same partisan gamesmanship is why PA failed to permit pre-processing last time around, which is part of the reason PA’s vote count could not get closer to completion earlier in 2020 — with all the consequences that followed.

The Election Law at Ohio State program is hosting a webinar on the multiple efforts around the country this year to reform the structure of elections (including the effort in Alaska to repeal that state’s previous reform). Date & Time: Sep 17, 2024 02:00 PM Eastern.

To register for the webinar, click this link.

The webinar will include:

1. A preview of electoral reforms on the ballot across the nation in November.
2. A review and analysis of the jurisdictions that have already adopted ranked-choice voting, open primaries, or other systemic reforms.
3. A discussion of voter perceptions and changing views of electoral reforms.
4. An exploration of the interplay between nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting.
5. A history of first-past-the-post electoral systems and partisan primaries.
6. On-the-ground reports from Alaska and Arizona, two of the leading battlegrounds in the debate over election system reform.

The panel will offer valuable insights into these issues, providing a 360-degree perspective on electoral reform across the country. Don’t miss this opportunity to engage in a robust discussion of current and future possibilities for election systems in the United States.

Panelists:

Edward Foley, Ebersold Chair in Constitutional Law at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, where he directs the Election Law Program.

Beth Hladick, Director of Research & Outreach at Unite America.

Deb Otis, Director of Research and Policy at FairVote.

Iris Samuels, Reporter for the Anchorage Daily News.

Pat DeConcini, Make Elections Fair Arizona.

Moderator:

Tony Gaughan, visiting professor of law at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.

Very important topic and great lineup for this conference at Hofstra’s Freedman Institute for the Study of Legal ethics.

E.J. Dionne and Miles Rapoport in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Sasha Issenberg for Smithsonian Magazine.

Looking forward to participating in this conversation at the Humphrey School (free registration required):

Description

Can the United States continue to conduct free and fair elections? Richard Hasen, the Gary T. Schwartz Endowed Chair in Law and Director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law and Jennifer Morrell, partner at the Elections Group, will consider risks to the fair counting of ballots and the prospect that some voters and candidates may not accept election results as legitimate

Ned Foley, Ruth Greenwood, David Niven, Dan Tokaji, and I filed this amicus brief today, exclusively in our personal capacities, arguing that the Ohio Ballot Board’s summary of Ohio’s anti-gerrymandering initiative is deeply misleading. While the initiative would be one of the country’s most potent safeguards against gerrymandering, the Board’s summary says that it would require the proposed commission to gerrymander. Here are some excerpts from the brief’s introduction:

Orwell himself would have trouble topping the efforts of the Ohio Ballot Board. Legally obligated to draft ballot language that “fairly and accurately” summarizes Issue 1—a proposed constitutional amendment that would curb partisan gerrymandering in Ohio—the Board instead adopted text telling voters that Issue 1 would itself constitute gerrymandering. According to the Board’s up-is-down summary, the amendment supposedly “[r]epeal[s] constitutional protections against gerrymandering.” Relators_034 (emphasis added). In fact, Issue 1 dramatically strengthens these safeguards. The Board’s summary also falsely accuses the amendment of “requir[ing]” the proposed commission “to gerrymander the boundaries of . . . districts to favor either of the two largest political parties.” Id. (emphasis added). The whole point of Issue 1 is actually to prevent gerrymandering by stopping self-interested politicians from drawing district lines and subjecting district maps to a partisan fairness requirement.

. . . First, while conceptions of gerrymandering abound, no common notion of this activity equates it with ensuring that parties’ legislative representation is congruent to their popular support. On some accounts, this kind of congruence is the antithesis of gerrymandering. At worst, from other perspectives, such congruence is orthogonal to the injury inflicted by gerrymandering.

Second, Ohio’s distinctive history establishes that, in this State, partisan gerrymandering can’t possibly mean correspondence between parties’ statewide seat shares and vote shares (“seat-vote correspondence”). This is because Ohio already has a state constitutional requirement that “[t]he statewide proportion of districts . . . favor[ing] each political party shall correspond closely to the statewide preferences of the voters.” Ohio Const. art. XI, § 6(B). This Court is intimately familiar with this requirement, having decided a series of cases about it just two years ago. In these cases, all of the Court’s members—both in the majority and dissenting—agreed that the requirement aims to thwart gerrymandering. No one voiced the Board’s preposterous position that the requirement compels gerrymandering.

Third, because the U.S. Supreme Court has commented extensively on the relationship between partisan gerrymandering and proportional representation, it’s important to set the record straight about what that Court has said. When a plurality of the Court recognized that gerrymandering could be unconstitutional, these justices held that a party’s disproportionally low representation is an element of the offense—just not enough, alone, to prove liability. Over the years, several justices stated that a district plan’s achievement of proportional representation is a valid defense to a charge that the plan is an unlawful gerrymander. And more recently, when the Court deemed partisan gerrymandering nonjusticiable, the majority asserted that plaintiffs challenging gerrymandering necessarily seek proportional representation. Proportional representation must be distinct from gerrymandering, then, since it would be nonsensical for gerrymandering’s foes to ask for a remedy of more gerrymandering.

AP:

A judge agreed Friday to postpone Donald Trump’s sentencing in his hush money case until after the November election, granting him a hard-won reprieve as he navigates the aftermath of his criminal conviction and the homestretch of his presidential campaign.

Manhattan Judge Juan M. Merchan, who is also weighing a defense request to overturn the verdict on immunity grounds, delayed Trump’s sentencing until Nov. 26, several weeks after the final votes are cast in the presidential election.

It had been scheduled for Sept. 18, about seven weeks before Election Day.

From the court’s letter:

Unfortunately, we are now at a place rn time that is fraught with complexities rendering the requirements of a sentencing hearing, should one be necessary, difficult to execute. Thus, in accordance with certain of the grounds submitted by Defendant and the reasons for adjournment provided by the People coupled with the unique time frame this matter currently finds itself in, the decision on the CPL s 330.30 motion and the imposition of sentence will be adjourned to avoid any appearance-however unwarranted-that the proceeding has been affected by or seeks to affect the approaching Presidential election in which the Defendant is a candidate. The Court is a fair, impartial, and apolitical institution. Adjourning decision on the motion and sentencing, if such is required, should dispel any suggestion that the Court will have issued any decision or imposed sentence either to give an advantage to, or to create a disadvantage for, any political party and/or any candidate for any office. …

Michigan

North Carolina

There may be further appeals.

CNN:

Judge Tanya Chutkan has set a schedule in the federal election subversion case against former President Donald Trump that will allow prosecutors to release never-before-seen evidence, such as grand jury transcripts, ahead of the presidential election.

The deadline for the filing from prosecutors is September 26, according to the latest order from the judge, which largely sides with special counsel Jack Smith’s proposed schedule discussed at Thursday’s hearing. Trump’s defense team had sought to delay the public release of evidence in the case until after the November election.

The evidence the prosecutors reveal in late September may not be immediately public, and Chutkan will be able to control its release. It is likely it would become available, though, with potentially some redactions.

AP:

A court decided Thursday that voters in the presidential battleground of Pennsylvania can cast provisional ballots in place of mail-in ballots that are rejected for a garden-variety mistake they made when they returned it.

Democrats typically outvote Republicans by mail by about 3-to-1 in Pennsylvania, and the decision by a state Commonwealth Court panel could mean that hundreds or thousands more votes are counted in November’s election, when the state is expected to play an outsized role in picking the next president.

The three-member panel ruled that nothing in state law prevented Republican-controlled Butler County from counting two voters’ provisional ballots in the April 23 primary election, even if state law is ambiguous.

A provisional ballot is typically cast at a polling place on Election Day and is separated from regular ballots in cases when elections workers need more time to determine a voter’s eligibility to vote.

John M. Carey et al new paper in Political Behavior. Abstract:

Fact-checks have been shown to be effective in correcting specific false beliefs, but do they also cause people to update their broader views about the phenomenon in question? We consider this question in the context of the 2022 Arizona governor’s race, testing the effect of debunking false claims of fraud on specific beliefs about that election as well as general confidence in the 2022 and 2020 U.S. elections and beliefs about the prevalence of fraud. Our results indicate that fact-checks reduce false beliefs about the election in Arizona, but we find no evidence that participants extrapolate these findings to their general beliefs about fraud or their confidence in the 2022 or 2020 elections. These results suggest that methods of combating misinformation that rely on case-by-case corrections of specific falsehoods may not be effective in changing broader false beliefs.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Nearly a decade ago, Wisconsin traded its designation as one of the easiest places to cast ballots for stricter voting rules that set off a still-ongoing debate over voter access.

The implementation of a state law that requires voters to show photo identification increased ballot security, Republican authors argue, but the side effects have disproportionately hit Black voters in Milwaukee who are more likely not to have a photo ID and less inclined to seek one than their white peers, experts and advocates say.

“You don’t realize the effect it has on you until it happens to you,” Anita Johnson, who has spent the last eight years helping Milwaukee voters navigate the state’s voter ID law, said in an interview. “And then you’re like, ‘Do I want to go through this? I mean, is this really worth it?’ It really stops people from voting.”

Steven Rosenfeld reports.