Robert Brigham, a retired math professor at the University of Central Florida, has difficulty waiting in line to vote, because of his concern about the lack of access to a clean restroom after his treatment for colorectal cancer. But he prefers to drop off his ballot in person because he had a couple of bill payments get lost in the mail.
“I have a medical condition that literally makes me scared to be far from a bathroom,” Brigham said. “When there are more boxes available, I have more ability of where to go to drop off my ballot. I like short distances.”
Brigham was one of 1.5 million Floridians who dropped off their absentee ballots in 2020 and he would like to again this year. Florida adopted restrictions for drop boxes in 2021 to strengthen election security, even though studies found the boxes secure and trustworthy.
Monthly Archives: July 2024
“12 states have new voter ID laws. Ohio’s strict rules blocked 8,000 from voting”
Lynn Brown is an 80-year-old Democrat from Cleveland who’s been voting since she was 18. But when she tried to do so in March, she had a problem she’d never experienced.
Brown, who typically votes absentee, was unable to get a mail ballot. So she went in person to her local polling place, the first time she’s done so since Ohio passed one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country.
She’s still not quite sure what the issue was, but records called the issue “non-matching” identification. She filled out a paper ballot, known as a provisional ballot, and waited for elections officials to decide whether it should be counted. It wasn’t.
“How the Current Supreme Court Would Look Under Biden’s Term-Limit Plan”
NYT:
President Biden proposed major changes to the Supreme Court on Monday, including 18-year term limits for justices and a binding code of conduct.
The Supreme Court now includes six conservative justices and three liberal ones. Three justices, all conservatives, have served longer than 18 years: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas.
Under Mr. Biden’s plan, presidents would appoint a new Supreme Court justice every two years. His statement announcing the proposal did not address how and when current justices’ terms would end if his proposal were to be adopted.
If the rule had already been in effect and term limits had allowed the president to choose a justice every two years during the past two decades, the court’s ideological split would be flipped. Assuming each justice had served the full 18-year term, six justices would have been appointed by Democratic presidents, and three by Republicans.
“Brief – Election Integrity Recommendations for Generative AI Developers”
New report from Tim Harper at CDT:
With over 80 countries and more than half of the world’s population going to the polls this year, 2024 represents the largest single year of global elections since the advent of the internet. It has also been dubbed the ‘First AI Election’, in light of the boom in widely accessible generative AI tools that have the potential to accelerate cybersecurity and information integrity challenges to global elections this year. . . .
Although we are halfway through this election year, it remains imperative for AI developers to quickly develop election integrity programs employing a variety of levers including policy, product, and enforcement to protect democratic elections this year and beyond.
“How to harden our defenses against an authoritarian president”
Barton Gellman in The Washington Post:
It is late afternoon on Inauguration Day 2025. Protesters fill the downtowns of American cities, enraging the newly sworn president. Send in the military, he demands. Invoke the Insurrection Act. Federalize the National Guard in all 50 states. Tell the troops to use all the force they need to clear the streets.
So began one of five tabletop exercises I co-led in May and June, along with former Defense Department official Rosa Brooks and historian Nils Gilman. We based the starting scenarios on the election of former president Donald Trump to a second term, and we asked participants playing the president, all of them Republicans or former Republicans, to base their gameplay on Trump’s publicly stated promises.
As a nonpartisan think tank, my employer, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, takes no position on how Americans should cast their votes. Nor do we predict who will win in November. Some of my colleagues are doing scenario planning for a Democratic victory, too.
The role-playing exercises were designed to test how well checks and balances, broadly understood, might restrain a president from abusing his power. The results were not encouraging: The games demonstrated repeatedly that an authoritarian in control of the executive branch, with little concern for legal limits, holds a structural advantage over any lawful effort to restrain him.
“New ballot-box obstacles: Mapping the states with recent laws that make it harder to vote”
In the wake of former President Donald Trump’s lies about a stolen election in 2020, many state legislatures implemented new laws restricting voter accessibility in key parts of the voting process.
Passed in more than half of U.S. states, the laws are often part of sweeping bills that targeted multiple parts of the process, including absentee voting, early voting, and Election Day voting. They mostly come from Republican-led legislatures.
Supporters of the laws say they help improve the integrity of elections, sometimes by standardizing elections and often using a common tagline, “hard to cheat.” Opponents have accused lawmakers all over the country of disenfranchising voters − especially Democratic-leaning groups such as voters of color and low-income voters − and they often sue to try to block new laws from going into effect, with mixed success.
“ACLU and LWV sue over partisan gerrymandering of South Carolina congressional districts”
SOUTH CAROLINA (WSAV) – The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), ACLU of South Carolina, and Duffy & Young LLC filed a lawsuit today challenging partisan gerrymandering of South Carolina’s congressional districts.
The lawsuit comes after redistricting following the 2020 census, a tradition at the beginning of each decade involving redrawing the lines of congressional districts to meet population requirements. In this case, the suit alleges that the boundaries of the state’s First Congressional District (which includes Charleston, Beaufort and Bluffton) were drawn with a Republican advantage; a manner, they say, that violates the South Carolina Constitution.
“How Ideological Diversity Moderates Republican Support for Voter Suppression Measures: The Cases of Georgia and Alabama”
Abstract below of new scholarship from Jesse H. Rhodes and Adam Eichen:
Why do Republicans sometimes decline to enact voter suppression measures, even when contextual conditions (unified control of state government, electoral threats from Democrats, and racial threats from African American and Latinx voters) suggest that they should? We argue that ideological diversity within state Republican parties plays an important role in moderating Republican efforts to adopt policies that substantially increase the cost of voting. When a state Republican Party is more ideologically diverse, members may differ significantly on the preferred severity of voting restrictions and the priority of ballot restrictions relative to other issues. Thus, more heterogeneous Republican Parties may be less willing and able to institute voter suppression measures. In contrast, more ideologically unified Republican Parties face fewer barriers to collective action in advancing ballot restrictions, facilitating their adoption of voter suppression measures. We illustrate our arguments with case studies from Georgia and Alabama.
“Electoral Innovation and the Alaska System: Partisanship and Populism Are Associated With Support for Top-4/Ranked-Choice Voting Rules”
Abstract below of new scholarship from Christian Robert Grose, Andrew Sinclair, Betsy Sinclair, and Mike Alvarez
In 2020, Alaskans voted to adopt a nonpartisan top-4 primary followed by a ranked-choice general election. Proposals for “final four” and “final five” election systems are being considered in other states, as well as ranked-choice voting. The initial use of Alaska’s procedure in 2022 serves as a test case for examining whether such reforms may help moderate candidates avoid being “primaried.” In 2022, incumbent Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski held her seat against a Trump-endorsed Republican, Kelly Tshibaka. We use data from the 2022 election in Alaska, along with a mixed-mode survey of Alaskan voters before the general election, to test hypotheses about how voters behave in these kinds of elections, finding: (1) the moderate Republican candidate, Murkowski, likely would have lost a closed partisan primary; (2) some Democrats and independents favored the moderate Republican over the candidate of their own party, and the new rules allowed them to support her at all stages of the election, along with others who voted for her to stop the more conservative Republican candidate; and (3) that Alaskan voters are largely favorable toward the new rules, but that certain kinds of populist voters are likely to both support Trump and oppose the rules.
“Russia is relying on unwitting Americans to spread election disinformation, US officials say”
AP:
The Kremlin is turning to unwitting Americans and commercial public relations firms in Russia to spread disinformation about the U.S. presidential race, top intelligence officials said Monday, detailing the latest efforts by America’s adversaries to shape public opinion ahead of the 2024 election.
The warning comes after a tumultuous few weeks in U.S. politics that have forced Russia, Iran and China to revise some of the details of their propaganda playbook. What hasn’t changed, intelligence officials said, is the determination of these nations to seed the internet with false and incendiary claims about American democracy to undermine faith in the election.
“A half-million records and one app: The group behind a massive effort to ‘clean’ voter rolls”
CNN:
Police officers in Texas, senior citizens at a nursing home in Pennsylvania and people who had registered to vote at a Marine base in California.
They are among the thousands of voters whose right to cast a ballot has been needlessly challenged ahead of this November’s election by activists — many of whom have been inspired by conspiracy theories — seeking to prevent voter fraud. . . .
Election officials across the country have been inundated with dubious complaints about inaccurate voter rolls, which have wasted government resources and sapped taxpayer money spent reviewing lists of registered voters that officials say are already carefully maintained, a CNN investigation has found.
One of the main drivers of the fruitless challenges is a conservative Texas-based nonprofit group called True the Vote, an election-monitoring organization that has long peddled debunked voter-fraud theories. The group’s founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, has called on followers to help clean voter rolls by using an app called IV3 that enables users to research voter data and submit voter-eligibility challenges to local election offices.
“Can Harris Use Biden’s Campaign Money?”
But more than $90 million was held by Biden’s principal campaign committee — the official vehicle for the Biden-Harris reelection campaign. FEC filings suggest that those funds will now be used by the Harris campaign. Is that legal?
Most campaign finance experts think it is. The rationale here is straightforward. FEC regulations provide that “any campaign depository designated by the principal campaign committee of a political party’s candidate for President shall be the campaign depository for that political party’s candidate for the office of Vice President.” Therefore, Biden’s committee, which was also his principal campaign committee in 2020, has jointly listed Harris in its FEC filings ever since she first became his running mate. Once Biden withdrew from the race this year, the committee simply updated its FEC registration to replace Biden with Harris at the top of the ticket.
It is true that FEC regulations and federal statutory law do not address this exact situation . . . But the commission has never suggested that an incumbent vice president must at any point establish her own campaign committee, let alone provided specific guidance for when doing so might be necessary. All incumbent presidential and vice-presidential candidates in recent memory have run for reelection together as a single ticket, sharing one committee before and after formal renomination.
“Echoes of Roe v. Wade in Decision Granting Immunity to Trump”
“The judicial method employed by Trump v. United States resembles Roe v. Wade in the ways that matter,” Richard D. Bernstein, who filed a supporting brief in the case on behalf of conservative critics of Mr. Trump’s legal positions, wrote in a blog post a week after the decision. . . .
The Dobbs decision criticized Roe for usurping the authority of legislators. Mr. Bernstein, who was a law clerk for Justice Scalia, said in an interview that the immunity decision was vulnerable to the same charge.
“The Trump decision cuts voters and their elected representatives out of the picture much more completely than Roe did,” he said. “Going forward, Congress could not enact even a narrow, specific statute providing that a president lacks any federal criminal immunity for even the most egregious official act — such as using the military domestically to arrest and detain political opponents.”
“Biden Calls for Changes to Supreme Court”
NYT:
President Biden said on Monday he was pushing for legislation that would bring major changes to the Supreme Court, including imposing term limits and creating an enforceable code of ethics on the justices.
In an opinion essay in The Washington Post, Mr. Biden also said that the court’s decision to grant broad immunity to presidents for crimes they commit in office was an example of “dangerous and extreme” decision-making that had put the American people at risk. He added that a number ethical concerns posed a threat to the integrity of the court.