Monthly Archives: May 2025

“Noem urges Poles to elect Trump ally as CPAC holds its first meeting in Poland”

Uncategorized

I somehow missed this AP report from Tuesday, about the current U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security (with a cameo by John Eastman) expressly campaigning in Poland for a particular candidate in tomorrow’s Polish presidential election.

(While OLC has interpreted the Hatch Act to exempt foreign elections, it still strikes me as significant to have U.S. cabinet officials actively campaigning abroad. If this is a more frequent thing by gov’t officials other than stray statements from POTUS and VPOTUS, I’d welcome the correction.)

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“Judicial Candidates Try TikTok and Tinder in Mexico’s Sprawling Elections”

campaign finance, campaigns, cheap speech, judicial elections

I mentioned Mexico’s historic upcoming judicial elections a few days ago, but hadn’t then focused on the campaign finance regime.  Now the NYT digs a little deeper:

They weren’t allowed to buy ads on television, radio, billboards or online. Mexico barred them from public funding or receiving campaign contributions. National debates were difficult, if not impossible, to mount.

So people running to be judges across Mexico were largely left with social media.

In one widely seen video, one Supreme Court candidate argued that he was as well seasoned as the fried pork sold on the streets. Another Supreme Court candidate styled herself Dora the Transformer, a spin on the cartoon character Dora the Explorer. Another Supreme Court candidate used dating apps so that, in his words, prospective voters could match with justice and then chat about the issues.

The strict campaign limits, in contrast to traditional rules for presidential or congressional elections, are part of Mexico’s sprawling, first-ever elections on Sunday. Voters will choose nearly 2,700 federal and state judicial positions at every level of the courts, with federal seats, like those on the Supreme Court, chosen at the national level and a host of officials elected locally.

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“Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare Speaks on Redistricting Effort, Partisanship Claims”

election law and constitutional law, political parties, redistricting,

A coming vote on new mid-decade maps for Tarrant County, Texas (where Ft. Worth is the county seat) has been quite controversial, with charges of racial and partisan impropriety, and likely litigation on the horizon.

County Judge Tim O’Hare has initiated the redistricting process.  (In Texas counties with fewer than 225,000 people, the “county judge” is a judicial official, but in counties like Ft. Worth, the “county judge” is both a member of the legislature and the chief executive; the policymaking body consists of four commissioners elected from precincts and the county judge elected at-large.)

And Judge O’Hare has been in the news quite a bit this week based on the rationale for the new maps.  Per The Texan: “The only reason O’Hare said he is looking for three Republican precincts in the county is because he can’t figure out a way to have four.”   And CBS recounts: “O’Hare said, ‘This is about partisan politics. You can legally in this country, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, draw maps for partisan purposes. So for me, it’s 100% about partisan politics.’”

O’Hare’s dead wrong about that latter point, but his confusion is understandable, and that’s absolutely the Supreme Court’s fault.  In Rucho v. Common Cause, citing dicta from racial gerrymandering cases and improperly conflating “partisan” and “political,” the Supreme Court did say that securing partisan advantage to some degree is constitutionally permissible.  (I still think that was both unnecessary and wrong, but I’m not the one in the robes.) 

But – and this is a critical point that some legislators of both parties have willfully misunderstood — the Court did NOT say that excessive partisan gerrymandering was legal.  Quite the opposite: the Court recognized as “fact” that “excessive partisanship in districting” is “incompatible with democratic principles.”  Rucho held only that the federal courts were unavailable to hear claims of excessive partisanship. 

That’s a big difference.  Or, at least, it should be to anyone who takes an oath to uphold the Constitution.  If local law enforcement won’t arrest or prosecute you for shoplifting, that forbearance doesn’t make shoplifting legal.  (See, e.g., federal appropriations riders preventing federal prosecution of some marijuana-related crimes; federal executive orders temporarily declining to enforce a very clear statutory social media ban) 

So while O’Hare’s correct that blatant use of government power to punish opposing partisans represents a weird lacuna in the redistricting context for federal court enforcement, it’s not true that 100% partisanship in the drawing of district lines is “legal.”

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“Why On-And-Off Voters Who Backed Trump May Be GOP’s Midterm Silver Bullet”

election administration, The Voting Wars

The Daily Caller calls out low-propensity Republican voters. 

Given that restrictions on access to the ballot generally hit low-propensity voters harder, I’ve been wondering for a while whether the political incentives on election administration issues might be changing.  (And that’s probably a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction question.)

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“School Choice and Household Participation in School District Politics”

voting,

A fascinating new Annenberg Institute paper from three MSU researchers on the connection between school choice and voter turnout in local bond elections.  Theoretically, I can understand why sending your kid to a different school might change incentives to vote for or against a local bond, but it’s a more interesting question why it might change the incentive to vote at all.

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Quote of the Day

authoritarian threats in US

“They don’t want someone who’s just going to be like, ‘We’re going to follow the law and do the originalistic thing, and whatever the result is, so may be it,’” said the consultant. “They want someone [who] can figure out how to get the result that they want.”

–Unnamed “conservative consultant,” quoted in Politico article on the split between MAGA and the Federalist Society, who added that MAGA world wants more people like Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and fewer people like Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

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“US government is investigating messages impersonating Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles”

Uncategorized

This AP story is presented as a cybersecurity issue.  And it is.

But one of the dangers of running government without any regard for standard administrative process is that it makes fraud so much easier to perpetrate.  If government action is based on a phone call or a text with a request or a threat or a purported order, it’s much easier to fake the initial outreach.  It’s harder to fake a notice in the Federal Register.

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“Oklahoma parents fight new curriculum on 2020 election ‘discrepancies’”

election subversion risk,

The WaPo subhead: “A lawsuit alleges that state superintendent Ryan Walters added a provision on election questions without notifying some board members before they voted.”

A further excerpt from the article:

The draft shown to the public only mandated that high-schoolers “examine issues related to the election of 2020,” according to the lawsuit.

The version that was approved says students will “identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results” and will be instructed to analyze information including “the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.”

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“Cuomo Loses Another $675,000 Over Suspected Super PAC Coordination”

campaign finance

The NYT reports on the NYC campaign finance board’s decision, which turns on “redboxing” – the practice of campaigns issuing public documents that sure look like very-thinly-veiled instructions to SuperPAC allies, in an attempt to skirt local prohibitions on coordination.

Here’s the page the NYT identifies as the culprit.  You be the judge.

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