North Carolina: “Surprise GOP campaign finance law proposal prompts walkout by Democratic senators”

campaign finance, chicanery

NC Newsline:

in a surprise move that caught most Legislative Building watchers off-guard, Republican lawmakers unveiled legislation on Thursday that would make significant changes to state campaign finance law. The sudden move prompted all 20 Senate Democrats to walk out of the chamber in protest when the bill was quickly brought to a vote. It was approved 28-0 by the Republicans who remained on the Senate floor. The House is expected to take up the measure next week.

The proposed law changes, which were appended to a conference committee report on a controversial and much-debated bill dealing with punishment for unlawful protests and the wearing of masks (see the box below), would make it easier for big dollar donors to funnel large sums of cash in relative anonymity to support North Carolina political candidates.

Republicans said the proposal was merely designed to “level the playing field” with Democrats in response to a 2020 advisory opinion from the State Board of Elections that they said benefited the Democratic Governors Association, but Democratic legislators and good government groups decried both the substance of the proposal and the process used to bring it forward.

Complex but important changes

According to veteran campaign finance watchdog Bob Hall, the former longtime executive director of the group Democracy North Carolina, the changes are complex, but their impact will likely be significant.

Hall told NC Newsline that the proposed changes would provide wealthy individuals with new ways to give tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars to support a North Carolina candidate without their name being identified with the donation. The change would allow them to contribute to a national “527 committee” like the Republican Governors Association or Democratic Governors Association, which could then donate the money in its name to a party committee or “affiliated party committee” controlled by a state candidate without disclosing its true source.

Hall said that the change will incentivize politicians of both parties to create more front groups that launder large donations to a committee the politician controls. Meanwhile, Hall noted, the real source of the money will be buried in hundreds of pages of a PDF report and not filed with the North Carolina State Board of Elections until “weeks and weeks after the fact.”…

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Chilling WaPo with a Weird Euphemism in Title: “Trump loyalist pushes ‘post-constitutional’ vision for second term”

authoritarian threats in US

Beth Reinhard for WaPo:

A battle-tested D.C. bureaucrat and self-described Christian nationalist is drawing up detailed plans for a sweeping expansion of presidential power in a second Trump administration. Russ Vought, who served as the former president’s budget chief, calls his political strategy for razing long-standing guardrails “radical constitutionalism.”

He has helped craft proposals for Donald Trump to deploy the military to quash civil unrest, seize more control over the Justice Department and assert the power to withhold congressional appropriations — and that’s just on Trump’s first day back in office….

Vought, 48, is poised to steer this agenda from an influential perch in the White House, potentially as Trump’s chief of staff, according to some people involved in discussions about a second term who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations….

Some of Vought’srecommendations, such as bucking the Justice Department’s tradition of political independence, have long percolated in the conservative movement. But he is taking a harder line — and seeking to empower a presidential nominee who has openly vowed “retribution,”alarming some fellow conservatives who recall fighting against big government alongside Vought long before Trump’s election.

“I am concerned that he is willing to embrace an ends-justify-the-means mentality,” said Marc Short, formerly chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, who has said he won’t endorse Trump. Vought, Short added, is embracing “tactics of growing government and using the levers of power in the federal bureaucracy to fight our political opponents.”

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Someone Needs to Take Away Steven Calabresi’s Keys to the Volokh Conspiracy Blog

election law biz

Something like this in coming out as an election denier is just embarrassing. And it is part of a recent pattern of poorly reasoned and odd postings that make me worried for his mental acuity. And it’s relatively new and contrary to how he had approached these issues in the past.

Unfortunately, he’s not the only emeritus law professor who could use some advice about no longer posting to social media and blogs.

UPDATE: It appears that Calabresi is not emeritus. I regret the error.

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“Operatives with GOP ties are helping Cornel West get on the ballot in a key state”

ballot access

NBC News:

Cornel West’s independent presidential campaign is broke. His former campaign manager says he knows nothing about ballot access. And he spent more on graphic design than petition-gathering in his most recent campaign finance report.

But tens of thousands of signatures have been gathered on behalf of the famed left-wing academic in key states thanks to self-organized grassroots volunteers — and some help from outside operatives tied to a Republican consulting firm.

Democrats fear West’s potential to siphon votes from President Joe Biden in places where he is on the ballot in a close election, and some Republicans are publicly discussing ways to boost West and other minor candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Green Party’s Jill Stein in the hopes of splitting the anti-Donald Trump coalition. 

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“Misunderstanding the harms of online misinformation”

cheap speech, political polarization

Ceren Budak, Brendan Nyhan, David M. Rothschild, Emily Thorson & Duncan J. Watts in Nature:

The controversy over online misinformation and social media has opened a gap between public discourse and scientific research. Public intellectuals and journalists frequently make sweeping claims about the effects of exposure to false content online that are inconsistent with much of the current empirical evidence. Here we identify three common misperceptions: that average exposure to problematic content is high, that algorithms are largely responsible for this exposure and that social media is a primary cause of broader social problems such as polarization. In our review of behavioural science research on online misinformation, we document a pattern of low exposure to false and inflammatory content that is concentrated among a narrow fringe with strong motivations to seek out such information. In response, we recommend holding platforms accountable for facilitating exposure to false and extreme content in the tails of the distribution, where consumption is highest and the risk of real-world harm is greatest. We also call for increased platform transparency, including collaborations with outside researchers, to better evaluate the effects of online misinformation and the most effective responses to it. Taking these steps is especially important outside the USA and Western Europe, where research and data are scant and harms may be more severe.

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“Google and Microsoft’s AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election”

cheap speech

Wired:

When asked “Who won the 2020 US presidential election?” Microsoft’s chatbot Copilot, which is based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model, responds by saying: “Looks like I can’t respond to this topic.” It then tells users to search on Bing instead.

When the same question is asked of Google’s Gemini chatbot, which is based on Google’s own large language model, also called Gemini, it responds: “I’m still learning how to answer this question.”

Changing the question to “Did Joe Biden win the 2020 US presidential election?” didn’t make a difference, either: Both chatbots would not answer.

The chatbots would not share the results of any election held around the world. They also refused to give the results of any historical US elections, including a question about the winner of the first US presidential election.

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Combating Misinformation and Building Trust in Elections: Assessing Election Official Communications During the 2022 Election Cycle

cheap speech, election administration
New report from Thessalia Merivaki and Mara Suttmann-Lea. Abstract: In this project, we identify the dominant trust-building campaigns used by state and local election officials, with an emphasis on combating misinformation, during the 2022 election cycle. In partnership with the… Continue reading