Category Archives: chicanery

“Supreme Court Unanimously Overturns ‘Bridgegate’ Convictions”

May 7, 2020, 8:32 amchicanery, Supreme CourtRick Hasen

NYT: The Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously overturned the convictions of two defendants in the “Bridgegate” scandal.The case resulted from a decision in 2013 by associates of Chris Christie, then the governor of New Jersey, to close… Continue reading

“Colorado GOP Chair Ken Buck pressured local official to submit incorrect election results; Fellow Republican says congressman tried to bully him into committing a crime”

May 6, 2020, 8:41 pmchicanery, political partiesRick Hasen

Quite a story in the Denver Post.

“New Details Hint at Risk of Russian Misinformation in Dossier”

April 15, 2020, 8:03 pmchicaneryRick Hasen

NYT: The Trump administration has declassified several footnotes from a report about the F.B.I.’s Trump-Russia investigation, providing details hinting anew at the possibility that Russia may have sown disinformation in a dossier used to investigate a former Trump… Continue reading

“How absentee ballots and voter fraud stopped Texans from voting by mail”

April 14, 2020, 8:30 amabsentee ballots, chicaneryRick Hasen

Important article in the Dallas Morning News.

Expanded Zuberi Allegations Show Problem of Foreign Influence in US Elections

March 21, 2020, 1:01 pmcampaign finance, chicaneryRick Hasen

Mother Jones: Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles this week described a dizzying array of secret foreign lobbying by a major donor to both political parties—a new twist in a case that could reveal whether there were foreign efforts to funnel… Continue reading

“Biden ad manipulates video to slam Trump”

March 13, 2020, 8:10 amcampaigns, chicaneryRick Hasen

WaPo: An onslaught of political advertising is par for the course in any election year. The 2020 presidential contest proves to be no exception.So, on first glance, nothing was unusual when former vice president Joe Biden, who appears to… Continue reading

“Meet the Trump Fan Accused of Registering Democrats as Republicans”

March 12, 2020, 8:03 amchicaneryRick Hasen

NYT: Something was indeed amiss: Ms. Hall, a 63-year-old and very ardent Republican whose ranch house in Clermont sports life-size cutouts of Donald and Melania Trump and a MAGA poster in the window, was charged last week with 10… Continue reading

“Wisconsin voter purge case appealed to state Supreme Court”

March 12, 2020, 7:47 amchicaneryRick Hasen

AP: A conservative law firm asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday to quickly overturn an appeals court ruling that stopped the purging of more than 200,000 people from the state’s voter rolls, a move that Democrats argued was… Continue reading

“The Technology 202: Twitter’s first ‘manipulated media’ flag on Trump aide ignites fact-checking debate”

March 9, 2020, 7:47 amcampaigns, chicaneryRick Hasen

WaPo: Social media sites are once again at the center of a debate over online speech after Twitter applied its new “manipulated media” label for the first time yesterday to a deceptively edited video of former vice president Joe… Continue reading

NYT: Erik Prince, Brother of Cabinet Secretary Working with Project Veritas to Spy on Teachers Union, Congressional Campaign

March 7, 2020, 11:56 amchicaneryRick Hasen

In normal times this would be a multi-day major story: Erik Prince, the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating… Continue reading

New in APSR: “One Person, One Vote: Estimating the Prevalence of Double Voting in U.S. Presidential Elections”

March 6, 2020, 10:46 amchicanery, election administrationRick Hasen

Sharad Goel, Marc Meredith, Michael Morse, David Rothschild, and Houshmand Shirani-Mehr have written this article for the American Political Science Review. Here is the abstract: Beliefs about the incidence of voter fraud inform how people view the trade-off between electoral… Continue reading

“Facebook Removes Misleading Trump Census Ads”

March 5, 2020, 7:41 pmcampaigns, census litigation, chicaneryRick Hasen

NYT: Facebook said on Thursday that it had removed misleading ads run by President Trump’s re-election campaign about the 2020 census, in a stand against disinformation ahead of the decennial population count that begins next week.Earlier this week, Trump Make… Continue reading

“Report: Russian social accounts sow election discord – again”

March 5, 2020, 9:28 amcampaigns, chicaneryRick Hasen

AP: Four years after Russia-linked groups stoked divisions in the U.S. presidential election on social media platforms, a new report shows that Moscow’s campaign hasn’t let up and has become harder to detect.The report from University of Wisconsin-Madison professor… Continue reading

“Sick: Trolls Exploit Coronavirus Fears for Election Fun”

March 4, 2020, 12:16 pmchicaneryRick Hasen

Daily Beast: Accounts from self-identified supporters of Bernie Sanders’ candidacy also joked that Biden voters, who tend to be older and presumably more at risk of serious illness from coronavirus, should stay away from polling places. In tweets now deleted… Continue reading