Reminder: Wednesday webinar on electoral reform

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I won’t repeat all of the previous ELB post announcing this webinar on alternative electoral reforms to improve American democracy, especially in light of increasing partisan polarization. I will simply note that the French legislative elections, the first round of which is this coming Sunday, is a stark reminder of the stakes involved in the choice of an electoral system. The U.S. is hardly alone in facing the dangers of hyper-polarization. France, like the U.S., has tried since the late eighteenth century to make democracy work. Both countries have had their share of difficulties in this regard: France with its Reign of Terror when its revolution spun out of control, the U.S. with its Civil War and failed Reconstruction. The question for both countries now is whether they can draw upon their common heritage of political science about the design of republican government, a heritage stemming from the Enlightenment, to develop and implement to procedures for self-government in order to avoid its demise.

The webinar is on Wednesday at 3pm ET. Here, again, is the registration link.

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“GOP colleagues sneer at Rep. Good’s election complaints”

fraudulent fraud squad

Axios:

Rep. Bob Good‘s (R-Va.) efforts to sow doubts about the results of his too-close-to-call GOP primary are being met with eye rolls from many of his House Republican colleagues.

Why it matters: The House Freedom Caucus chair is tapping into a strain of election denialism common in Donald Trump’s Republican Party – but without the widespread GOP support Trump enjoyed.

  • “No one is buying it, but all understand this is one of the several stages of electoral grief,” said one House Republican, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
  • The GOP lawmaker added that Good’s assertion of election irregularities is “the reflexive thing people who can’t accept loss say these days.”…
  • Former Rep. Denver Riggleman, a Republican-turned-independent who lost to Good in 2020, noted that McGuire and Good have both echoed Trump’s claims about the 2020 election.
  • “I don’t find it surprising that an election between an election denier and an election denier would end with one of them denying the election was fair based on conspiracy theories,” he said.
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“Tax documents detail how election deniers profit from group founded by conspiracy theorists Patrick Byrne and Michael Flynn”

chicanery

Issue One:

A new tax filing reviewed by Issue One shows that several prominent election deniers have been profiting from The America Project, a nonprofit founded in 2021 by former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne and President Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who each have spent the past several years peddling falsehoods about the 2020 election.

In July 2022, Byrne told the bipartisan congressional select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection that he wasn’t receiving a salary from The America Project, but by the end of the year, he had, in fact, collected a salary of $95,000, and The America Project paid a real estate company linked to him — known as Black Manatee Investment LLC — another $192,000. That money came on top of the $65,000 salary Byrne collected from The America Project in 2021.

Byrne isn’t the only one who has been reaping financial benefits from The America Project….

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5th Circuit, Evenly Split, Will Not Consider for Now En Banc Louisiana’s Argument that Private Plaintiffs Cannot Sue Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act

Voting Rights Act

Democracy Docket:

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a request today for a hearing with the full court on the issue of whether individuals and groups can sue under Section 2 of the federal Voting Rights Act.

Monday’s decision means the entire 5th Circuit — the nation’s most conservative federal appeals court which covers Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas — won’t consider whether a group of Black voters and civil rights groups lacked the standing to sue Louisiana in 2022 over the state’s electoral districts, which were struck down by a federal district court in February. The state is appealing this decision, so the matter is not yet resolved.

The vote on the 5th Circuit was close, with eight judges voting in favor of hearing the case en banc, and eight others declining the hearing.

Attorneys for the state indicated in a June 7 status report that officials were waiting for the 5th Circuit’s ruling on whether it would hold an en banc hearing on the private-right-of-action issue before Louisiana began the process of redrawing the state’s legislative maps.

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Assuming the Gary T. Schwartz Endowed Chair in Law on July 1

election law biz

On July 1, I will officially be the Gary T. Schwarz Endowed Chair in Law at UCLA (along with a Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) and the Director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project).

Alhthough it is of course an honor to be awarded any academic chair, this chair is really special to me. Gary was a professor of mine and on my doctoral dissertation committee when I was at UCLA. He was brilliant and quirky, a voracious reader and a keen legal mind. He was intellectually curious and prolific. He profoundly shaped tort doctrine through his scholarship and through his work as a Reporter on the first part of the mammoth Restatement (Third) of Torts for the American Law Institute. He could translate complex doctrine into understandable prose and test the latest academic theory against real evidence.

Most importantly for me as a student, Gary was an relentless cheerleader when I sought work as an academic, getting on the phone to his many contacts across the country, and an unremitting coach to push me to do better on my scholarship. You couldn’t slip any sloppy reasoning or half-formed thought by Gary. When he offered praise, it really meant that I had accomplished something.

It’s not lost on me as I approach 60 that Gary died early and surprisingly of a malignant brain tumor when he was 61. It was a loss for all of us. I want to think that some of my work (with Doug Laycock) on one of the last parts of the Third Restatement of Torts will be a fitting tribute to his legacy.

I take over the chair from Eugene Volokh, who takes emeritus status and moves onto Stanford’s Hoover Institution July 1. Eugene was a year behind me at UCLA Law School, and we began our spirited but always cordial debates over the nature of law in Dan Lowenstein’s 1990 Election Law course. Dan, another of my exemplary mentors, wrote to me: “I cannot imagine a better chair to hold than one named after Gary Schwartz.” Indeed.

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“Supreme Court won’t take up Georgia dispute over ‘at-large’ elections and minority vote dilution”

Supreme Court, Voting Rights Act

CNN:

The Supreme Court won’t take up a case challenging Georgia’s system for electing its public utility board in a defeat for Black voters who argued the so-called “at-large” electoral system diluted their votes.

The justices’ refusal to get involved will potentially make it much harder for challenges to such at-large systems of voting – that challengers call a “relic of Jim Crow” – to move forward in three states in the South.

The five members of Georgia’s Public Service Commission are each elected in staggered, statewide votes – a system that a federal judge said violated the Voting Rights Act. That ruling was then reversed by the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals, prompting the Black voters’ appeal to the Supreme Court.

In declining to take up the case Monday, the Supreme Court did not say anything on the merits of the arguments. However, the move leaves standing an 11th Circuit precedent that could affect other Voting Rights Act lawsuits brought in Florida, Georgia and Alabama, the three states the circuit covers.

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