…ion County. Of course, there are some Republicans who’ve thought that it’s good politics to make voting more difficult. The leading example is Kris Kobach, who staked his career on stoking fears of voting fraud and pressing for ever-more stringent voting restrictions. His fate in this year’s election – losing the Governor’s race in deep-red Kansas – should be a lesson for any Republican who thinks that vote suppression is smart politics. Making it…
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Matt Ford for TNR: What was your signature like at eighteen? Is it still the same? In the wake of the 2018 midterms, the American electoral system is under scrutiny again—as, in fact, it seems to be almost every two years now. This year, razor-thin margins in Florida and Georgia are drawing fresh attention to allegations of voter suppression and incidents of electoral mismanagement. And now, the recount in Florida has given absentee voters until…
Continue reading…identification laws that disenfranchised minority and other voters for no good reason. Voters who surmounted these many obstacles often had to endure long waits and broken machines simply to exercise their constitutional right to vote. When the polls closed, election officials—who themselves were sometimes even on the ballot—often engaged in blatant partisan efforts to manipulate the outcome. Fixing this long list of stains on our democracy shoul…
Continue reading…w-tailoring (i.e., how much analysis must a legislature do to show it had “good reasons” to believe its use of race was necessary). The conservative wing of the Court may see this case as a good vehicle to emphasize just how reticent courts should be to step in and police these boundaries generally. (Though, as in Cooper, Thomas’s view may diverge from the conservatives on this issue.) (2) Revisiting Predominance: The “holistic” analysis that Appe…
Continue reading…o state Whoops! Brenda Snipes’ office mixed bad provisional ballots with good ones And this. Judge’s ruling that ballots were illegally destroyed continues Broward election woes And summed up recently here: Behind the curtain of the most controversial elections department in South Florida With South Florida again in the national eye on races too close to call and troubles in counting and re-counting votes, so, too is the supervisor of elections….
Continue reading…nsation of inspectors, clerks, and deputy sheriffs. 102.031 Maintenance of good order at polls; authorities; persons allowed in polling rooms and early voting areas; unlawful solicitation of voters. 102.071 Tabulation of votes and proclamation of results. 102.091 Duty of sheriff to watch for violations; appointment of special officers. 102.101 Sheriff and other officers not allowed in polling place. 102.111 Elections Canvassing Commission. 102.112…
Continue reading…cting commission responsible for drawing the lines. The odds are therefore good that gerrymandering in the next decade will not be as prevalent, or as one-sided, as it was in this cycle. On the other hand, barring judicial intervention, we’re still likely to see some extreme gerrymanders. Democrats will probably have unified control in major states such as Illinois, Massachusetts (since they can override a gubernatorial veto), and New York (where…
Continue readingNed Foley and Steve Huefner at Slate: This year, in particular, the temptation may be especially strong to distort the vote-counting process to achieve a victory for one side or the other. Given the refrain that the current elections are uniquely important to the fate of the nation, it may be easy to convince oneself that “the ends justify the means” and that the count must be conducted to maximize the prospect that the preferred party prevails,…
Continue reading…ing credible claims of potential disenfranchisement: Your arguments may be good on the merits, but it’s too late. These courts, which were examining onerous voting rules in North Dakota and Kansas, took their cues from the U.S. Supreme Court, which has embraced an unfortunate rule that even serious voting problems cannot be remedied in the period before Election Day…. Both of these cases relied heavily upon what I’ve termed the “Purcell Principle,…
Continue readingClark.com: Much has been made recently about the good deed being offered by two of America’s most popular ridesharing services. Uber and Lyft have both announced that they are going to give voters in the midterm elections rides to the polls on Tuesday, November 6. But what Uber and Lyft aren’t saying, at least not as loud, is that those free rides to the polling stations are one way. In other words, once you take one of these companies up on thei…
Continue reading…ne-in-ten (89%) have confidence in poll workers in their community to do a good job, and majorities say the same about local and state election officials. Yet the public expresses less confidence that elections across the United States will be handled as well as local ones. And Americans are deeply concerned about whether the midterms will be secure from foreign hacking. Two years after Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election, 67% of…
Continue reading…ttack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh which has left 11 people dead. These people were praying and celebrating a recent birth with a bris. The killer apparently yelled “All Jews must die” as he opened fire. This comes just a few days after two African-American patrons of a Kroger store were senselessly killed in Louisville Kentucky in another racist domestic terrorist incident after the shooter could not get into a predominantly Africa…
Continue reading…ces needed for a countywide stream remediation plan, it must appeal to the good graces of four different Assembly members and a state senator. Or consider the plight of the ironically named town of Neversink, already drowned once to create a water reservoir for New York City and now the only town from Sullivan County to be politically isolated into the 101st. Also problematic is the village of Ellenville with a large bilingual and minority populat…
Continue reading…ough the ERIC database to avoid duplicate voter registrations. That is all good news, and it is often ignored in the fight over voter fraud and voter suppression. Such actions deserve praise and support as election officials and legislatures do their jobs to ensure that all eligible voters can easily cast a ballot that will be fairly counted. But there’s the other part of America too. There’s North Dakota, which changed its voter identification la…
Continue readingThis looks like something good for a journalist to follow up on. A reader writes: “Texas apparently no longer interested in making voter ID available.I’ve been looking at Texas’s voter ID page (http://www.votetexas.gov/mobile/eic/index.htm) and noticed that, as of today, two weeks before the election, they’ve only had one mobile ID event, and the information about Saturday hours for EICs still discusses availability for March 2018. It seems Texas…
Continue readingNate Silver: The fundraising numbers are so good for Democrats — and so bad for Republicans — that it’s a little bit hard to know quite what to make of them. From a modelling standpoint, we’re extrapolating from years in which fundraising was relatively even, or from when one party had a modest edge, into an environment where Democrats suddenly have a 2-1 advantage in fundraising in competitive races. Moreover, this edge comes despite the fact th…
Continue readingGood news: Florida eased restrictions Thursday on vote-by-mail ballots in eight counties ravaged last week by Hurricane Michael, while also giving elections supervisors more time to conduct early voting. Secretary of State Ken Detzner, the state’s top election official, said the changes included in an executive order by Gov. Rick Scott were requested by local supervisors and are intended to help displaced voters in Bay, Calhoun, Franklin, Gadsden…
Continue reading…d or abrogated, thus signaling to bench and bar alike that it is no longer good law. Relatedly, Westlaw’s description of Shelby County’s holding stated that those four decisions had been abrogated. But after a recent back-and-forth between Westlaw representatives and me, Westlaw has revised its description of Shelby County’s holding to delete any reference to abrogated decisions and to remove any corresponding red flags. So why did Westlaw change…
Continue reading…hat protects immigrants brought to the United States as children. There is good reason to think that a Justice Kavanaugh, or any other justice appointed by Mr. Trump, might vote differently from Justice Kennedy on all three issues. “We are headed for a whole new world,” Irv Gornstein, the executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University, said at a recent news briefing. “The only real questions are how far are we going to…
Continue reading…h was rejected by his board, as he took a leave of absence). But there are good reasons to believe Whelan is far from contrite, still involved in influencing public opinion on the Kavanaugh confirmation process, and planning a comeback. To begin with, it turns out that Whelan’s libelous and bad faith theory that Dr. Ford had another attacker was hatched at a PR firm, CRC. The firm does work for the Federalist Society and the Judicial Confirmation…
Continue readingKate Ackley for Roll Call: It’s been a good week for advocates of faster, and more, political money disclosure. With President Donald Trump’s signature Friday, it’s official: Senate candidates now must file their campaign finance reports electronically with the Federal Election Commission, making it easier for reporters, voters and opponents alike to sift through donor and spending disclosures. The change was tucked into a $147.5 billion governme…
Continue reading…group would spend heavily to support his bid to unseat Sen. Jon Tester, Rosendale told attendees at a July event in Washington. PAY DIRT exclusively obtained audio of Rosendale’s remarks, which good-government groups say raise serious questions of potentially illicit coordination between Rosendale and an independent political group supporting his campaign….
Continue reading….” Namely, that assertion comes without supporting legal authority and for good reason. Neither the law nor empirical fact supports the idea that stockholders are associated citizens, much less with any common political or social viewpoint. Part V then notes the stark difference in the Supreme Court’s approach when dealing with the free speech of labor unions. In the union context, the Supreme Court’s principal concern has been ensuring that no un…
Continue reading…ent of the district court is affirmed based on the district court’s well-reasoned opinion.”). The numerical signature requirement here, in combination with the signature collection window and filing deadline, is a severe burden on independent candidates and those who wish to vote for them. That would be good news for supporters of easier ballot access laws. (Via BAN.)…
Continue reading…https://twitter.com/gercohen/status/1037774708454907904 This is the right call, and shows some good faith on the part of prosecutors. Even if there is a legitimate reason to investigate voter fraud issues in North Carolina (there could be), it should not be done to interfere with the busiest time in gearing up for elections….
Continue reading…tory intent or discriminatory effects.” Thus, so long as Section 2 remains good law, a voting rights plaintiff can prevail if they show that a state law has a disproportionate effect on voters of color, even if that plaintiff cannot prove that lawmakers acted with racist intent when they voted for the law. This disparate effects test is especially important after the Supreme Court’s decision last June in Abbott v. Perez , which made it nearly impo…
Continue reading…ty of California, Irvine School of Law, said in an email that “it would be good practice even if not required by state law for an election official to recuse from any recount or legal proceedings surrounding his or her own election efforts. A longstanding English and American tradition is that ‘no man should be a judge of his own case.’ That should apply here.” Hasen added that the issue “only arises because we have partisan election officials run…
Continue readingTPM: A Virginia judge appointed a special prosecutor Tuesday to look into a case of potential forgery and other election law violations after multiple suspicious signatures were found on a petition to get an independent congressional candidate on the ballot, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. But there’s a big twist: The signatures for that independent candidate, Shaun Brown, were collected by paid campaign staffers for the incumbent Republica…
Continue reading…nd doing my part to promote the work of #electiongeeks across America. The good news is that little of that is going to change; however, in a couple of weeks I’ll be starting a new chapter of my career. On August 20, I will be joining Fors Marsh Group in Northern Virginia as their Director of Election Research. FMG is home to some of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and they’re already doing incredible work in the election space with clients lik…
Continue reading…andard set forth by our precedents over the course of 85 years”). And, for good measure, the dissent accuses the majority of altering these longstanding standards. But if the standard set forth in Laing and Pontiac Sch Dist and the Court of Appeals decisions in Citizens and Protect Our Jobs was so clear and longstanding on this point, one wonders why this Court refused to adopt it in 2008 in Citizens, instead issuing a highly unusual order leaving…
Continue readingAdam Bonica NYT oped: Once again, the nation is on the cusp of a generational revolution. As a group, millennials favor Democrats by nearly a 2 to 1 margin. Millennials are unlikely to trend Republican as they age so long as the current hyper-polarized political environment persists. However, they will become more likely to vote. (A general rule of thumb is that turnout increases by about one percentage point with each year of age.) This makes it…
Continue reading…to spend $765,000 at West Virginia’s Greenbrier Sporting Club and $361,000 at Ritz-Carlton hotels. The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has long prohibited politicians from spending official campaign funds on personal expenditures – and for good reason. Campaign donations present a much greater risk of corruption if they are funding the politician’s next round of golf, country club membership, clothing purchase, or trip to Disney World. But that…
Continue reading…-vote litigation under the Constitution. I wanted to call attention to two good academic articles that have appeared recently on this increasingly central issue. Both synthesize the existing caselaw, then provide analysis on how they believe courts ought to handle the issue. Ellen Katz address the issue in the context of VRA Section 2 litigation in Section 2 After Section 5: Voting Rights and the Race to the Bottom. Derek Muller address the issue…
Continue reading…ency gap promoted by the plaintiffs in Gill, and in the press lately, as a good measure of partisan gerrymandering? Bruce Cain. (Photo: Stanford University) The reality is, people [academics] come up with these measures, and then they fall in love with them, and then they don’t openly tell you guys in the press what the disadvantages of these measures are. But the rest of us in the redistricting community have discussed it in private, and we know…
Continue reading…o’s majority opinion, the court emphasized that courts must “presume” the “good faith” of the legislatures in determining whether a state was engaged in racial discrimination. Further, because race and party overlap so much in places like Texas, what looks like racial motivation may be partisan motivation. The upshot of this analysis is that it is going to be well near impossible for plaintiffs to prove that states have engaged in intentional raci…
Continue readingThis event at Cato on June 28 should be good: Featuring Bradley Smith, Chairman and Founder, Institute for Free Speech and Josiah H. Blackmore II/Shirley M. Nault Professor of Law at Capital University Law School, Capital University; Lawrence Noble, former General Counsel, Federal Election Commission; moderated by John Samples, Vice President, Cato Institute. Sixty years ago, the United States Supreme Court decided the landmark case of NAACP v. A…
Continue reading…Oh my. Not good. UPDATE: See the follow up post, Lee Goodman: “I did not approve or authorize the envelope or its identification of me as [FEC] ‘Chairman.’”…
Continue reading…nion if he is in the majority. That means it is likely, but not certain, that Justices Alito or Thomas have the Texas redistricting cases if there is a majority opinion. That would likely not be good news for voting rights plaintiffs. But this term has been a strange one full of punts and unusual configurations of Justices. So we will have to wait and see….
Continue reading…: I forgot to mention in the original piece that Jessie Amunson also has a good student Note on the same subject]. So far, the elections clause has not been the focus of sustained attention in any of the Supreme Court’s partisan-gerrymandering decisions. But that is about to change. The three-judge federal court that struck down North Carolina’s 2016 congressional districting plan held that partisan gerrymanders of Congress do indeed violate the e…
Continue reading…ably meets the requirements of OPOV as applied to registered voting data, but badly fails if total population is employed. Thus, it would make a good test case to resolve some of the open questions in Evenwel….
Continue reading…r to the question of whether such a constitutional claim can proceed or is dead is “maybe.” The Court could continue to hold partisan gerrymandering claims nonnonjusticiable, if it wishes, right up until the 2020 Census, a state of affairs that would be unlikely to strike too much fear into the hearts of increasingly confident partisan gerrymanderers, with their increasingly impressive data and software. But, maybe just a little teensy bit of fear…
Continue reading…ltaneously sent letters to the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Election Commission asking those agencies to investigate the alleged violations of federal tax laws and campaign finance laws, respectively. And, for good measure, on the letter to the F.E.C., she copied two top officials from the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, which is charged with investigating and prosecuting criminal violations of election laws….
Continue reading…very broad ban on wearing political apparel in polling places is a pretty good one. Although the court struck down a law I thought it should have upheld, the opinion shows a more realistic and functional understanding of the political process than the court has shown in campaign finance cases. It gives states ample room to assure that people can vote at polling places free of political pressure and intimidation…. First, the court made it clear th…
Continue reading…clared.”…. The court is right that ordinarily a declaratory judgment is as good as an injunction. It is implicitly coercive, and can be followed up by an injunction if necessary (note the “at this time” language in the court opinion). It is a “myth” that declaratory judgments are milder, as Sam Bray argues. And it made sense here for the court to piggy-back off that myth. And yet, Donald Trump is a known norm breaker who has attacked the courts wh…
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