California: “Many O.C. residents skeptical of election results, potentially swaying key races, poll finds”

election administration

LAT:

Alex Lopez doesn’t contest that Joe Biden was elected president in 2020.

His concern lies with how those results came to be.

“By the numbers? He absolutely won it. Ethically? Probably not,” said the 38-year-old Anaheim resident, who works as a logistics coordinator.

Questions about the integrity of the election process have been stoked nationally for years, in large part because of former President Trump’s claims that victory was stolen from him.

The same goes for Orange County, where 26% of adults surveyed in a UC Irvine poll released this month said they did not believe Biden legitimately won the presidency in 2020, with another 17% unsure about the question.

In a purple county with several key races that could help determine the balance of power in Congress, these doubts could cause voters to stay home in November — particularly conservative voters.

A majority of the O.C. Republicans surveyed for the poll — 55% — thought Biden had not won fairly, while most Democrats — 88% — believed the election results.

A majority of people surveyed who aren’t members of either party said Biden won legitimately. However, 23% said he didn’t, and the same percentage didn’t know.

“Distrust in the election system may very well convince some people not to participate, and what we’re seeing is that people who distrust it more tend to skew to the right, and so that would hurt Republicans,” said Jon Gould, dean of the UCI School of Social Ecology, who spearheaded the poll….

Orange County Registrar of Voters Bob Page started conducting open tours of the ballot counting operation in Santa Ana during the 2022 midterms in an effort to show people the process and alleviate concerns.

But election skepticism and allegations of a “rigged” voting system have persisted.

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Will Anti-Abortion Presidential Candidate Randall Terry, on the Constitution Party’s Ballot Line in at Least 12 States, Be a Factor in 2024?

ballot access, third parties

With so much attention focused on RFK Jr., Cornell West, etc., don’t sleep on this news, via Ballot Access news.

If ever there was an election year to move to ranked choice voting for President so that third party candidates don’t affect the outcome between the top two contenders, this would be it.

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“Georgia’s election integrity laws could create ‘hovering threat’ for poll workers in 2024”

election administration, The Voting Wars

USA Today:

In Georgia, in particular, a series of election rules passed over the last three years threaten to overburden election officials and, in some cases, issue criminal penalties against them. New election measures passed by the Republican-led state legislature in late-March that are awaiting a signature from Gov. Brian Kemp could further hamper the way elections offices operate if enacted, experts say.

Liz Avore, lead author of the Voting Rights Lab report, argued that these laws take “steps toward almost treating election officials like they are suspects in a crime” and “treating election offices like they’re crime scenes.” 

For the election workers that USA TODAY spoke with, however, the main concern is that the heightened regulations may hinder the recruitment of poll workers for the 2024 election who play a vital role in elections administration.

Republican leaders in the state, including Kemp and current Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger have defended the new laws, arguing that they bring enhanced security and provide clarity around laws for election officials.

Raffensperger said he didn’t see an issue with poll worker recruitment in 2022 after some of the initial election laws were passed, and doesn’t expect to see any in 2024. He also lauded Republican officials’ work in recent elections.

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Limits on Potential Criminal Prosecutions of Ex-Presidents, According to the Special Counsel

Uncategorized

During last week’s arguments on this issue, the Special Counsel took the position that there are a significant number of limitations on potential criminal prosecutions of ex-Presidents. These limitations would provide ex-Presidents with functional immunity, when they apply. They are not technically immunity from suit, which has its own distinct procedural aspects; when immunity applies in the technical sense, for example, the ex-President can raise this before trial and take an immediate (interlocutory) appeal if the argument is rejected. But these limitations would mean an ex-President could not be criminally convicted when they apply. Here’s a list of circumstances, according to the SC, in which an ex-President is functionally immune:

  1. If the Attorney General gives the President advice that an action is legal, that provides an absolute defense. The SC, when asked this, responded very clearly that yes, it would be a “root violation of due process” to prosecute for that. At another point, the SC qualified this a bit by saying this would violate due process, “absent the kind of collusion or conspiracy that itself represented a criminal violation…”
  2. The SC argued that Congress cannot criminalize presidential conduct in areas where doing so would interfere with an exclusive presidential power under Art. II or “that would prevent the president from accomplishing his constitutionally assigned functions.” As examples, he noted that pardon power; the veto power; the appointments power; the recognition of foreign governments; a small area of the commander-in-chief power, such as decisions about direction troops on the battlefield.
  3. The SC’s position is that official acts can only be prosecuted when they are undertaken for “private gain.” This is a significant point which is easily missed. It means that disputes over whether a President acted lawfully in his official capacity cannot be turned into criminal prosecutions unless, in addition to the liability elements of the criminal statute, the President was also acting for private gain. To give a concrete example, US law makes it a domestic crime to commit certain “war crimes.” But even if some use of force by a President were to be considered a war crime by some international law standard, he could not be criminally prosecuted domestically, under the SC’s view, unless that use of force is found to have been undertaken for “private gain.” Abuse of office, under this view, means more than acting unlawfully; it means doing so for “private gain.”
  4. The SC also argued all criminal law statutes should be understood to exclude from liability any action for which there is a “public authority” defense. This defense justifies conduct that is authorized by laws defining the duties or functions of (in this case) the President. The SC’s position, I think (less certain here) is that this defense does not turn on the subjective motives for which the P. acted. It turns on an objective characterization about the nature of his/her acts.
  5. The SC acknowledged that criminal statutes applied to ex-Presidents must be construed so as to avoid serious constitutional questions about whether if applied they would interfere with a President’s ability to carry out his constitutionally assigned functions. This is different, and much narrower, than a principle that criminal statutes cannot be applied to an ex-President unless they specifically mention the presidency. But it is still a limitation on potential criminal liability for an ex-President; as Justice Sotomayor put it, this (and these other points) reflect “narrowing principles to the concept that the P. is subject to all criminal laws in all situations.”
  6. The SC also stated that a politically driven prosecution of an ex-President would be selective prosecution and unconstitutional under Wayte v. United States.

Some of these limitations on presidential criminal accountability might overlap. And I’m not entirely clear about the SC’s position on some of them. At times, for example, he seems to suggest there can never be criminal liability for the P’s exercise of an Art. II power like the pardon power. At other times, he seems to suggest the P could be prosecuted for taking a bribe in return for granting a pardon (though the pardon would still stand).

There are two ways of looking at all these limitations. On the one hand, the SC is telling the Court there’s no need to adopt a sweeping immunity for all official acts, given that all these other limitations exist. From another perspective, these are acknowledgements that a President (or an ex-President) does have functional immunity from a significant range of potential criminal prosecutions.

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