“Libertarians Skip Over Trump and R.F.K. Jr. for Chase Oliver”

ballot access, third parties

NYT:

The Libertarian Party chose one of its own as its presidential nominee on Sunday night, capping a grueling day of elimination voting and a boisterous four-day event, where both Donald J. Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unsuccessfully sought to court the group’s backing.

The nominee, Chase Oliver — an openly gay former Democrat who in 2022 forced a runoff in a race for a U.S. Senate seat in Georgia — beat out nine other candidates at the party’s national convention in Washington, including Mr. Kennedy.

Mr. Kennedy, who was a late addition to the official list of potential nominees on Sunday morning, was eliminated in the first round of voting Sunday afternoon, with 19 votes — just 2 percent of the total. Mr. Trump, who was not an official candidate, received six write-in votes in the first round.

The Libertarian Party is among the better-established minor parties, with name recognition and placement on the majority of state ballots in November. The Libertarian nominee is guaranteed to be on the November ballot in at least 37 states, a number that party leaders say they expect to grow in the coming months….

A theme of the party’s convention, displayed proudly on badges and signs at the convention, was: “Become Ungovernable.”

On Sunday, it almost was. The party took more than seven hours, and seven rounds of elimination voting, to get a presidential nominee — and even then the party nearly ended up without any candidate at all, as more than a third of the final voters cast ballots for “none of the above.”

Had the party failed to nominate a candidate, it would have likely lost ballot access in many states.

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Meet the Press Dedicated Entire Episode to the Threat of Democracy in the U.S. [Corrected link]

election subversion risk

I wish this episode was not relegated to a holiday weekend when few are watching. Description:

Secretaries of State Brad Raffensperger (R-Ga.), Jocelyn Benson (D-Mich.), Al Schmidt (R-Penn.) and Adrian Fontes (D-Ariz.) join a special edition of Meet the Press on threats to democracy ahead of November’s elections. Anne Applebaum, author of, “Autocracy Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World,” and Renee DiResta, author of, “Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality,” describe the international threats from disinformation and authoritarianism abroad. Peter Baker, Evelyn Farkas, Ben Ginsberg and Amna Nawaz weigh in with the presidential race.

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“Debunking misinformation failed. Welcome to ‘pre-bunking’; Election officials around the world are adopting ‘prebunking’ campaigns, as AI and other threats jeopardize voting.”

campaigns, cheap speech

WaPo:

Election officials and researchers from Arizona to Taiwan are adopting a radical playbook to stop falsehoods about voting before they spread online, amid fears that traditional strategies to battle misinformation are insufficient in a perilous year for democracies around the world.

Modeled after vaccines, these campaigns — dubbed “prebunking” — expose people to weakened doses of misinformation paired with explanations and are aimed at helping the public develop “mental antibodies” to recognize and fend off hoaxes in a heated election year.

In the run-up to next month’s European Union election, for example, Google and partner organizations are blanketing millions of voters with colorful cartoon ads on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram that teach common tactics used to propagate lies and rumors on social media or in email.

One 50-second animation features a fake news campaign in which “visiting tourists” are blamed for a “litter crisis.” The example is meant to educate voters about “scapegoating,” a disinformation technique that places unwarranted blame for a problem on a single person or group.

Google has no plans to launch such a campaign in the United States, where former president Donald Trump and his allies are spreading falsehoods about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, laying the groundwork to cast doubt on the results of Trump’s rematch with President Biden in November.

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“New Hampshire Senate passes bill to eliminate all exceptions to voter ID law”

Uncategorized

WMUR:

New Hampshire Republicans advanced legislation Friday that would eliminate all exceptions to the state’s voter ID law.

Gov. Chris Sununu could soon be facing a decision on whether to make a big change to voting procedures in a presidential election year.

House Bill 1569 would require anyone who shows up to register to vote on Election Day to provide proof of citizenship through documents such as a birth certificate or a passport.

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“Judge rules Menendez’s prosecutors can’t show ‘critical’ evidence”

bribery, Speech or Debate Clause

Politico:

Jurors in Sen. Bob Menendez’s corruption case cannot see evidence prosecutors have called “critical” to part of their case, a federal judge ruled Friday.

The decision puts a hole in prosecutors’ ability to prove their central claim: that the New Jersey Democrat took bribes to help send billions of dollars of American military aid to Egypt.

U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein said prosecutors could not use evidence they hoped would show Egyptian officials were “frantic about not getting their money’s worth,” despite bribes Menendez allegedly took to help the country access billions of dollars of American military aid and arms.

Stein found the Constitution’s “speech or debate” clause does not allow prosecutors to show jurors the evidence. The clause grants members of Congress a form of immunity that is mostly impenetrable in investigations relating to the official duties of lawmakers, their aides or other congressional officials.

Coincidentally, Stein based his order on a 1979 Supreme Court case about another New Jersey Democrat accused of corruption. In that case, the high court ruled the speech or debate clause barred prosecutors from introducing certain evidence against Rep. Henry Helstoski, who had been accused of accepting bribes.

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Brandon Johnson: “There’s ‘Clear Error’ in the Supreme Court’s New Racial Gerrymandering Decision

Supreme Court

The following is a guest post from Brandon Johnson:

The Supreme Court has made a habit of applying general rules of law in exceptional ways when deciding election law cases. The Court has, for example, elevated the holding in Purcell to a quasi-abstention-level “principle” to limit federal courts’ abilities to review election regulations; it has changed the rules for reviewing state court interpretations of state law if the law at issue governs federal elections; and it has significantly expanded the reach of the political question doctrine to prevent judicial review of redistricting.  I will be addressing this trend in full-length article treatment in the coming year, but it is worth noting the continuation of this practice with the Court’s decision in Alexander v. South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP in which it has introduced exceptional rules for reviewing a lower court’s factual finding in racial gerrymandering cases.

Before walking through the exceptional nature of this opinion, a brief sketch of the case will provide some necessary context. In 2018, South Carolina congressional district 1—a previously reliably Republican district—elected a democratic candidate to Congress. After the 2020 census, District 1 and District 6—the state’s only reliably Democratic district—needed to be adjusted due to population disparities.

The resulting new map was subject to a lawsuit alleging that the new District 1 was an unconstitutional gerrymander. South Carolina categorically denied considering racial data at all in crafting the new district maps. At trial, South Carolina asserted, for the first time, that the new District 1 was drawn to serve partisan goals of ensuring that the district would once again be a safe Republican seat. After a lengthy litigation process, a three-judge district court found in favor of the plaintiffs and held that District 1 was, in fact, created in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The district court made several factual findings supporting this conclusion including crediting the plaintiff’s expert testimony and discrediting the State defendant’s denials that they used racial data in crafting the new maps.

The State sought and received review in the Supreme Court. In a 6-3 opinion authored by Justice Alito, the Court reversed the district court’s decision, allowing the new map to go into effect.

Because the district court’s decision rested in large part on factual findings, it would in the ordinary course be subject to clear error review on appeal. It is at this point that the exceptional nature of the Supreme Court’s majority opinion, authored by Justice Alito, starts to emerge.

From the opinion’s first discussion of the clear error standard, it is apparent that this will not be “clear error” as usual. Less than two pages after explicitly stating that the Court will “dispose of the case on clear error grounds,” the opinion backs away from the traditional formulation of the clear error standard, asserting that the three-judge court’s “mistaken impression of legal principles” means that the Court here “is not bound by the clearly erroneous standard.”’

Continue reading Brandon Johnson: “There’s ‘Clear Error’ in the Supreme Court’s New Racial Gerrymandering Decision →
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