Could this dispute make it all the way to the Supreme Court? Yes, yes it could.

This is a chilling, and sober and not hyperbolic, analysis:

It is hard to fault those who have taken Trump to court. He certainly committed at least one of the crimes he is charged with; we don’t need a trial to tell us he tried to overturn the 2020 election. Nor can you blame those who have hoped thereby to obstruct his path back to the Oval Office. When a marauder is crashing through your house, you throw everything you can at him — pots, pans, candlesticks — in the hope of slowing him down and tripping him up. But that doesn’t mean it works.

Trump will not be contained by the courts or the rule of law. On the contrary, he is going to use the trials to display his power. That’s why he wants them televised. Trump’s power comes from his following, not from the institutions of American government, and his devoted voters love him precisely because he crosses lines and ignores the old boundaries. They feel empowered by it, and that in turn empowers him. Even before the trials begin, he is toying with the judges, forcing them to try to muzzle him, defying their orders. He is a bit like King Kong testing the chains on his arms, sensing that he can break free whenever he chooses.

And just wait until the votes start pouring in. Will the judges throw a presumptive Republican nominee in jail for contempt of court? Once it becomes clear that they will not, then the power balance within the courtroom, and in the country at large, will shift again to Trump. The likeliest outcome of the trials will be to demonstrate our judicial system’s inability to contain someone like Trump and, incidentally, to reveal its impotence as a check should he become president. Indicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective. Like Caesar, Trump wields a clout that transcends the laws and institutions of government, based on the unswerving personal loyalty of his army of followers…..

t is worth getting inside Trump’s head a bit and imagining his mood following an election victory. He will have spent the previous year, and more, fighting to stay out of jail, plagued by myriad persecutors and helpless to do what he likes to do best: exact revenge. Think of the fury that will have built up inside him, a fury that, from his point of view, he has worked hard to contain. As he once put it, “I think I’ve been toned down, if you want to know the truth. I could really tone it up.” Indeed he could — and will. We caught a glimpse of his deep thirst for vengeance in his Veterans Day promise to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.” Note the equation of himself with “America and the American Dream.” It is he they are trying to destroy, he believes, and as president, he will return the favor.

What will that look like? Trump has already named some of those he intends to go after once he is elected: senior officials from his first term such as retired Gen. John F. Kelly, Gen. Mark A. Milley, former attorney general William P. Barr and others who spoke against him after the 2020 election; officials in the FBI and the CIA who investigated him in the Russia probe; Justice Department officials who refused his demands to overturn the 2020 election; members of the Jan. 6 committee; Democratic opponents including Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.); and Republicans who voted for or publicly supported his impeachment and conviction.

But that’s just the start. After all, Trump will not be the only person seeking revenge. His administration will be filled with people with enemies’ lists of their own, a determined cadre of “vetted” officials who will see it as their sole, presidentially authorized mission to “root out” those in the government who cannot be trusted. Many will simply be fired, but others will be subject to career-destroying investigations. The Trump administration will be filled with people who will not need explicit instruction from Trump, any more than Hitler’s local gauleiters needed instruction. In such circumstances, people “work toward the Führer,” which is to say, they anticipate his desires and seek favor through acts they think will make him happy, thereby enhancing their own influence and power in the process.

Nor will it be difficult to find things to charge opponents with. Our history is unfortunately filled with instances of unfairly targeted officials singled out for being on the wrong side of a particular issue at the wrong time — the State Department’s “China Hands” of the late 1940s, for instance, whose careers were destroyed because they happened to be in positions of influence when the Chinese Communist Revolution occurred. Today, there is the whiff of a new McCarthyism in the air. MAGA Republicans insist that Biden himself is a “communist,” that his election was a “communist takeover” and that his administration is a “communist regime.”…

Another exhibit in the decline of SOS LaRose:

 Secretary of State Frank LaRose offered an unusually blunt assessment while defending the ballot language he helped write for state Issue 1, the abortion-rights ballot measure that voters approved earlier this month, to a conservative critic at a local Republican Party event.

In doing so, LaRose confirmed something that abortion-rights supporters have suspected all along: Abortion opponents helped him craft the ballot language in a way meant to benefit their campaign to defeat the measure….

In response to a question about specifics in the amendment language, LaRose said his office consulted with three prominent anti-abortion groups that led the anti-Issue 1 campaign – Susan B. Anthony Pro Life America, the Center for Christian Virtue and Ohio Right to Life – as it crafted the ballot language. All three groups played central roles in leading and funding Protect Women Ohio, the main anti-Issue 1 campaign group….

The audience member’s question was about including the term “woman” in the ballot language, a decision that upset abortion-rights supporters backing the amendment. The word didn’t appear in the amendment’s text. But the audience member suggested that LaRose actually helped the measure pass by diffusing opponents’ arguments that Issue 1′s sweeping language affected issues unrelated to abortion.

Part of the feedback LaRose said his office received from anti-abortion groups was to include the word “woman” in place of “pregnant patient,” the gender-neutral term that appeared in the amendment language. LaRose said this was meant to convey his view that only women can get pregnant.

But, LaRose said the anti-Issue 1 groups pushed for the language to benefit their campaign while still also remaining accurate enough to withstand an inevitable court challenge.

“That [writing ‘woman’] was something that the pro-life community felt very strongly should be included in that,” LaRose said. “And they liked that as well, because the name of the ‘no’ campaign was Protect Women Ohio, and the yard signs said: ‘Protect women.’”

“So they wanted that, they thought that was reasonable and would be helpful to them. And they thought it would be honest.”

I’m honored to have been invited to deliver this lecture in the spring. The day before the lecture, there will be panel discussions on election integrity, election litigation, and gerrymandering.

Some of the previous Dunwody lecturers include Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, @CassSunstein, and Akhil Amar, among many others.

Troubling developments, from Washington Post, in response to lower-court decision and other factors:

The U.S. federal government has stopped warning some social networks about foreign disinformation campaigns on their platforms, reversing a years-long approach to preventing Russia and other actors from interfering in American politics less than a year before the U.S. presidential elections, according to company officials.

Meta no longer receives notifications of global influence campaigns from the Biden administration, halting a prolonged partnership between the federal government and the world’s largest social media company, senior security officials said Wednesday. Federal agencies have also stopped communicating about political disinformation with Pinterest, according to the company.

The developments underscore the far-reaching impact of a conservative legal campaign against initiatives established to avoid a repeat of the 2016 election, when Russia manipulated social media in an attempt to sow chaos and swing the vote for Donald Trump.

For months, researchers in government and academia have warned that a barrage of lawsuits, congressional demands and online attacks are having a chilling effect on programs intended to combat health and election misinformation. But the shift in communications about foreign meddling signals how ongoing litigation and Republican probes in Congress are unwinding efforts once viewed as critical to protecting U.S. national security interests.

Analysis from Cato’s Walter Olson of an emerging set of issues:

The controversy involves two different information formats often confused with each other that should be kept straight. Cast vote records are electronic summaries of individual ballots and the choices made on each, which may also carry additional information such as a timestamp of when the vote was received. These records can be of considerable interest to politics buffs. For example, they can reveal how persons who voted for a given candidate voted on other races—something you couldn’t necessarily deduce from conventional aggregated election results.

Ballot images go further: they are literal pictures of filled‐​out ballots, which means they also record stray marks and cross‐​outs, write‐​ins, coffee stains, and anything else that may have found its way onto the paper (you’re not supposed to write in the margins on your ballot, but some voters do, and even sign their names.)…

A new law enacted by the Minnesota legislature as part of wide‐​ranging election reform takes a middle course. It classifies ballot images themselves as sensitive individual data not to be released, but it directs that cast vote record (CVR) data be made public unless it falls into certain categories “likely to facilitate associating votes with particular voters, such as showing the order in which the votes were cast,” to quote one report.

One reason the landscape is changing quickly is that election administrators have scrambled to respond to a wave of public records requests for cast votes; election conspiracy buff Mike Lindell has urged his followers to file such requests. Some offices calculate that pre‐​emptively releasing the records to everyone would be easier than coping with the request barrage.

From Axios:

No Labels — the bipartisan group plotting a third-party presidential bid — is pulling the plug on its Dallas convention next spring and will instead conduct its “selection process virtually,” Axios has learned.

Why it matters: The group hasn’t made a final decision on whether or not to launch a third-party challenge, which Democratic critics argue could throw the election to former President Trump.

• Canceling its Dallas convention will give No Labels more flexibility — and more time — to make that determination.
• It will also allow more candidates to potentially emerge and challenge the status quo.

From ABC News:

One of former president Donald Trump’s current attorneys told special counsel Jack Smith’s team that, within days of the Justice Department issuing a subpoena last year for all classified documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, she “very clearly” warned Trump that if he failed to fully comply — but then swore he did — “it’s going to be a crime,” according to sources familiar with the matter.

Sources said the lawyer, Jennifer Little, told investigators Trump “absolutely” understood the warning, which came during a pivotal meeting at Mar-a-Lago with Trump and another attorney, Evan Corcoran, who had recently joined Trump’s legal team.

Politico:

At 11:08 p.m. on Dec. 30, 2020, days before Donald Trump prepared to install Jeff Clark atop the Justice Department amid his frenzied push to remain in power, Clark got a text from one key ally, Rep. Scott Perry.

“POTUS seems very happy with your response. I read it just as you dictated,” Perry (R-Pa.) texted the senior Justice Department official….

Many of the documents connected to the case had been kept under seal. But on Wednesday, the D.C. Circuit unsealed them — including a lower court’s opinion that described and quoted from a large volume of the very text messages that Smith has been seeking. By Wednesday evening, the unsealed opinion appeared to have been removed from the court’s public docket, suggesting it may have been posted inadvertently….

The newly disclosed documents reveal an extraordinary web of communications between Perry, who is now the chair of the House Freedom Caucus, and key figures in Trump’s orbit. They include:

• A Dec. 12, 2020, text exchange with Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel discussing efforts to challenge Joe Biden’s victory in the election.
• A series of exchanges between Perry and a former DOJ colleague, Robert Gasaway, between Dec. 30, 2020, and Jan. 5, 2021, in which Perry embraced a plan to have then-Vice President Mike Pence “admit testimony” prior to the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021. Perry agreed to “sell[] the idea” with a call to Trump, Pence and Trump adviser John Eastman, but Perry later alerted Gasaway that Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, “will not allow access.”
• A description of numerous exchanges between Perry and top Trump administration officials, including Clark, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, senior adviser Eric Herschmann and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, a former House colleague of Perry.
• A Nov, 12, 2020 text to Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon advising the campaign on challenges to the election results in Pennsylvania, as well as numerous other contacts with Trump-affiliated lawyers Jenna Ellis, Boris Epshteyn and Justin Clark.
• An exchange with Simone Gold, a doctor known for opposing the Covid vaccine who would later plead guilty to misdemeanors for her role in the breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6.
• Exchanges with numerous Pennsylvania state legislators, including Doug Mastriano, strategizing ways to challenge the state’s election results.
• Texts with “cybersecurity individuals” working with attorney Sidney Powell to challenge the election results, including Phil Waldron. In one exchange, Perry emailed former Trump National Security Council staffer Rich Higgins to relay an “incredibly spooky” allegation that the U.S. Army had confiscated election servers in Germany to help cover up fraud.

From NYT:

Two Republican county supervisors in Arizona were indicted Wednesday on felony charges related to their attempts to delay the certification of 2022 election results.

Kris Mayes, the state attorney general, announced in a statement that Peggy Judd and Tom Crosby, two of the three supervisors in Cochise County, face charges of interference with an election officer and conspiracy, criticizing what she described as their “repeated attempts to undermine our democracy.”

Neither Ms. Judd nor Mr. Crosby could be reached for comment Wednesday.

Last year, Ms. Judd and Mr. Crosby sought to order a hand count of the ballots that had been cast in Cochise, a heavily Republican rural county, citing conspiracy theories that had been raised by local right-wing activists. When a judge ruled against them, they voted to delay certification of the election before eventually relenting under pressure of a court order.

The episode was closely watched by democracy advocates and election law experts, who saw in the supervisors’ machinations a worrying precedent.

Appears from this story that the lower courts held that this was a partisan gerrymander, but that it was not an “egregious” partisan gerrymander, and therefore it did not violate the state constitution. But can’t tell anything from the Supreme Court opinion, which is just a brief affirmance. If others are more familiar with the details, get in touch.