You can listen here.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose can legally require counties to offer multiple drop boxes per county for completed absentee ballots, a panel of state appeals judges ruled on Friday.
The trio of judges on the Ohio 10th District Court of Appeals disagreed somewhat on the particulars — but a majority said it was within LaRose’s discretion to allow multiple drop boxes, while overturning a lower court decision from a Franklin County judge that said LaRose was legally required to do so.
Officials in large counties had asked LaRose to allow multiple drop boxes throughout the county to accommodate expected record levels of completed absentee ballots. LaRose, a Republican, had said it was a gray area, and decided to order county elections boards to only offer one drop box outside their office, even though he said he would support a law change allowing multiple drop boxes.
There’s a separate federal case where LaRose might be required to allow counties to use additional drop boxes. Stay tuned.
A federal judge has ordered that the 2020 Census count continue until Oct. 31, blocking for now the government’s efforts to complete the survey in time to deliver apportionment data to the president by the end of the year.
The ruling late Thursday night by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh of the Northern District of California follows a tense week in which the government appeared to try to circumvent a preliminary injunction against ending the count early.
After a surprise announcement Monday that the bureau was moving the end date by just five days, from Sept. 30 to Oct. 5, plaintiffs in the case asked Koh to provide clarification of her earlier order and other sanctions.
Rejecting the government’s argument that the request was “an attempt to radically modify the preliminary injunction,” Koh’s new ruling clarified that the end date for collection must revert to Oct. 31, as the bureau had originally planned.
It also ordered that on Friday, the government must send text messages to all Census Bureau employees notifying them of the Oct. 31 end date, and that Director Steven Dillingham must file a declaration by Monday that “unequivocally confirms Defendants’ ongoing compliance with the Injunction Order and details the steps Defendants have taken to prevent future violations of the Injunction Order.”
ORDER: Having received a petition for reconsideration filed by the State Legislature, the court has decided that it would be appropriate to certify a question of state law to the Supreme Court of Wisconsin under Wis. Stat. §821.01 and Seventh Circuit Rule 52. The court respectfully requests the Supreme Court of Wisconsin to decide whether, under Wis. Stat. §803.09(2m), the State Legislature has the authority to represent the State of Wisconsin’s interest in the validity of state laws. The court will transmit to the Supreme Court of Wisconsin a copy of the opinion filed on September 29, 2020, which shows how the answer to this question may affect the outcome of the State Legislature’s motion for reconsideration and a stay. Because time is pressing, we anticipate that the litigants will provide the state court with any other necessary documents (beyond those it already has in connection with the State Legislature’s request for an original writ). This court will keep the petition for reconsideration under advisement in the interim, but no later than next Wednesday (October 7). The State Legislature’s request for an administrative stay of the district court’s decision is denied. None of the district court’s orders requires substantive action before October 15, and a final decision in this court will be made at least a week before then.
You can find a majority, concurring, and dissenting opinion here. The judges broke along the party lines of the president that appointed them.
WaPo:
Bracing for possible civil unrest on Election Day, the Justice Department is planning to station officials in a command center at FBI headquarters to coordinate the federal response to any disturbances or other problems with voting that may arise across the country, officials familiar with the matter said.
Though the Justice Department monitors elections every year to ensure voters can cast their ballots, officials’ concerns are more acute this year that toxic politics, combined with the potential uncertainty surrounding vote tallies, could lead to violent demonstrations or clashes between opposing factions, those familiar with the matter said.
Preparations have been underway in recent weeks to deal with a wide range of possible problems, the officials said. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
President Trump has declined to say that he will accept the election results, while making exaggerated claims about voter fraud and urging his supporters to “go into the polls and watch very carefully.” The summer was marked by sometimes violent unrest — with people at protests for racial justice periodically clashing with far-right groups — and officials fear the election could spark new rounds of demonstrations.
“The Department of Justice takes election security and integrity seriously, and this year is no exception,” said Kerri Kupec, a Justice Department spokeswoman.
In a string of unsigned, unexplained orders this summer, the Supreme Court has repeatedly shown that it will not protect the right to vote during an election year. The court has considered emergency motions in cases challenging voting or ballot access restrictions in Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Oregon, and Texas. In each case, the court sided with the state, prompting Justice Sonia Sotomayor to take the court to task for its pattern of repeatedly “condoning disenfranchisement” and “forbid[ding] courts [from] mak[ing] voting safer during a pandemic.” The exception that proves the rule was a case from Rhode Island in which the court refused to disturb a settlement in which the state agreed not to enforce the restriction in question. The upshot is that Purcell has become an inflexible rule that sanctions voter suppression and prevents courts from playing their historic role in protecting constitutional rights.
Tens of thousands of emails sent on Thursday that asked recipients to volunteer for the Democratic Party ahead of the November U.S. election actually came from email scammers and carry malicious software, according to researchers at cybersecurity firm Proofpoint.
The emails borrow language from the website of the Democratic National Committee and seek to leverage interest in the U.S. presidential election following the first televised debate Tuesday between Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic contender Joe Biden, said Sherrod DeGrippo, senior director of threat research at Proofpoint.
The Word document attached to the spam contains miniature programs known as macros that, if enabled by the recipient, install a password-stealing program known as Emotet, DeGrippo said.
Looking forward to reading this new book from David Primo and Jeff Milyo.
USA Today oped.
I have written this piece for Slate. It begins:
President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump have the coronavirus and the White House reported on Friday that the president is suffering from mild symptoms. With the president having just attended the debate earlier this week with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, there could be concerns about Biden’s health as well. While Biden tested negative for COVID-19 on Friday, the lengthy incubation period means he’s still at risk.
Beyond wishing the president, first lady, and everyone who has contracted this terrible disease a full and speedy recovery, we need to ask as a matter of national importance what would happen if one of the presidential candidates died or became incapacitated before election day. Unfortunately, thanks once again to our Rube Goldberg machine for choosing the president, the answer to this question is somewhat murky and differs from state to state.
It concludes:
In a Friday update to his story, Pildes offered the following additional wrinkle: “If the RNC were deeply divided, and Republican electors then did not coalesce around a single replacement candidate, there might not be a majority winner in the electoral college. In that case, the House would choose the president from among the top three vote getters in the electoral college. In that process, each state delegation gets one vote.” In that case, one or two faithless electors deciding to support, say, Sen. Mitt Romney and allowing him to enter the top-three could potentially give us a candidate the people didn’t even see on the ballot. And because it could come down to the votes of House delegations, with each state getting one vote, we are going to see even more jockeying in places like Florida to see if Democrats can take over a majority of more House delegations.
In short, there would be a ton of uncertainty if we faced such a tragedy as a presidential candidate dying or becoming incapacitated during this period.
On June 29, 2020, Defendant Governor Greg Abbott argued in federal court that“precipitous changes to the [election] rules can cause ‘confusion’ and even undermine public confidence in the outcome of the election itself.” Three months later, with voting underway in Texas, Governor Abbott made exactly the type of “precipitous change” that he had cautioned against. On October 1, 2020, Governor Abbott issued an order forcing county election officials to offer their absentee voters no more than one physical drop-off location at which to return their ballot. In the State’s largest counties, including Harris and Travis counties, the October 1 order meant that the number of drop off location would respectively be reduced from 11 and 4 locations.
WHYY:
A contractor’s laptop and several encrypted USB devices were stolen from Philadelphia’s election warehouse in the East Falls neighborhood sometime this week, the Inquirer reported Wednesday. Police are investigating, and election officials assure voters that voting integrity is in no way compromised by the theft. New machines implemented earlier this year all include a paper trail as an added security measure.
But a Thursday morning visit to the warehouse where the machines are stored revealed lax security measures.
This reporter was able to walk into the building and roam around unattended for several minutes before being asked to leave. He strolled past hundreds of voting machines, various boxes, and other unidentified equipment without seeing other people.
WRAL:
A federal judge on Wednesday warned the State Board of Elections that recent changes to requirements for absentee mail-in voting in North Carolina do not have his approval.
Those changes, outlined in a Sept. 22 memo from the state board to county elections directors and confirmed again Monday in an email from the state board’s attorney to county boards, were represented as being responsive to changes required by U.S. District Judge William Osteen’s ruling in a lawsuit brought by Democracy North Carolina.
Osteen pushed back on that representation Wednesday, however, taking sharp exception to the board’s changes on witness requirements for absentee ballots.
A witness must certify that a specific voter completed an absentee ballot. When the witness information is missing from the ballot envelope, local election officials usually try to contact the voter so he or she can cast a new ballot that meets the requirement. If the problem can’t be rectified, the ballot isn’t counted.
But the state board told county officials voters could simply sign an affidavit attesting that they had mailed the ballot, forgoing the witness requirement altogether.ADVERTISING
“Nothing about this court’s preliminary injunction order can or should be construed as finding that the failure of a witness to sign the application and certificate as a witness is a deficiency which may be cured with a certification after the ballot has been returned,” Osteen wrote in his order Wednesday.
The judge said he wants to meet with state elections officials about his “concern that alleged compliance with this court’s order is resulting in elimination of a duly-enacted statute requiring a witness to an absentee ballot.”
And now Republican legislative leaders have moved to block the settlement.
Joan Walsh in The Nation.
New article in Valley Lawyer by Brad Hertz (starts on p. 28).
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is charging two well-known election provocateurs with felonies related to a racist robocall in metro Detroit that spread false information about the upcoming general election.
Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman are accused of orchestrating calls that went to thousands of voters in Detroit and other cities. The calls reportedly targeted Black voters and spread misinformation about voting by mail.
“Any effort to interfere with, intimidate or intentionally mislead Michigan voters will be met with swift and severe consequences,” Nessel said in a news release….
The call falsely claimed that voters who apply for and use absentee ballots are providing personal information that may be used by police to carry out warrants, by credit card companies to attempt to collect debts and the CDC to “track people for mandatory vaccines.”
None of this is true.
“Don’t be (inaudible) into giving your private information to the man. Stay safe, and beware of vote by mail,” the robocall states, according to a copy of the recording previously provided by the Office of Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.
News from today’s order list is no surprise. Here’s what I wrote back in January: “I strongly suspect that the Supreme Court will take this case, which reversed a lower court and a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel. A finding of intentional discrimination is especially important because it provides a basis for someone to ask Arizona to face preclearance for voting changes under the bail-in provisions of Section 3 of the Voting Rights Act.”
The Ninth Circuit had stayed its own order, so this changes nothing on the ground for this election. The Supreme Court will likely hear argument in this case early next year, with a decision expected by June.
I have published a new piece on this question with the Washington Post, which updates the two–part series I did in August on these issues. Here is a brief excerpt:
We do not know at this moment whether President Trump will have a mild or more serious case of covid-19. But without being alarmist, there is a public need to know what the procedures would be were the president to become incapacitated in two situations: before the election or if he wins and becomes incapacitated before Inauguration Day.
The national organization for the Republican Party is known as the Republican National Committee (RNC). In the first scenario, the RNC would have the power to replace the party’s nominee for president.
The RNC has 168 members — three from each state, plus three from six territories. The RNC’s rules provide that the three members from each state cast the same number of votes that their state or territory is entitled to at the party’s nominating convention.
In some sense, that’s the easy part, given how late in the election process we are now. If there were enough time, the party would seek to put the name of its new candidate on the ballot in each state. There almost certainly would not be time to do this, particularly if the issue only arises two to three weeks from now. The states have various deadlines for when the parties must certify their candidates for the ballot. Those dates have passed. In theory, the RNC could go to court to seek an order permitting it to change the name of its candidate. But there simply would not be enough time to reprint ballots at that point. President Trump will almost certainly remain on the ballot, no matter what happens.
That makes the second scenario the more critical one. Suppose Trump wins the election, even if incapacitated, or becomes incapacitated after the election but before Inauguration Day. This situation is more complex. . . .
The bottom line is that the RNC would determine who the replacement candidate would be, should it come to that unfortunate situation. And Republican slates of electors in states the president won, because he remains on the ballot, would very likely follow the RNC’s recommendation.
But one last possibility to ponder: If the RNC were deeply divided, and Republican electors then did not coalesce around a single replacement candidate, there might not be a majority winner in the electoral college. In that case, the House would choose the president from among the top three vote getters in the electoral college. In that process, each state delegation gets one vote.
These scenarios remain highly remote possibilities at this point, of course. But these and related questions may dominate public discussion for some time.
The President and First Lady reportedly tested positive for the coronavirus. As the New York Times notes, “Mr. Trump’s positive test result could pose immediate difficulties for the future of his campaign against former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., his Democratic challenger, with just 33 days before the election on Nov. 3. Even if Mr. Trump, 74, remains asymptomatic, he will have to withdraw from the campaign trail and stay isolated in the White House for an unknown period of time. If he becomes sick, it could raise questions about whether he should remain on the ballot at all.”
And of course with the President having just attended the debate earlier this week with Joe Biden, there could be concerns about Biden’s health as well.
I wish everyone who has contracted this terrible disease a full and speedy recovery.
But as a matter of national importance we need to ask what would happen if one of the presidential candidates died or became incapacitated before election day. Rick Pildes and Joshua Tucker did a two part series on the different permutations of what could happen, but this seems to fall within the cracks. Here’s the most relevant part of that discussion:
Joshua Tucker: What happens if the party’s nominee dies or withdraws after having been officially nominated but before the November election?
Richard Pildes: This puts the ball in the hands of the “national political parties,” which for this purpose means the legal entities known as the Democratic and Republican national committees.
The Democratic National Committee has a clear rule for this situation. The 447 members of the Democratic National Committee, the entity that formally hosts the convention, would choose the new nominee. The DNC chair, currently Tom Perez, is required to consult with the Democratic leadership in Congress and with the Democratic Governors Association. After the consultation, the chair provides a report to the DNC members, who then make the choice.
The Republican National Committee’s rules are similar. The RNC has 168 members — three from each state, plus three from six territories. The RNC’s rules provide that the three members from each state cast the same number of votes that their state or territory is entitled to at the convention. So Alaska’s three members get to cast a total of 28 votes, for example. If those three members disagree, they each get to cast one-third of those votes.
Second, the parties would now have to replace the name of their dead candidate on each state’s ballot with that of the new candidate. Depending on when this happens, that might not be simple. Different states have different deadlines for when the parties must certify their candidates for the ballot. In 2016, most were in August and September. If states do not have laws that permit changing the candidate’s name after that date, courts would probably have to be brought in. It’s hard to imagine courts refusing to permit one of the two major parties to replace a deceased candidate’s name with that of a validly chosen replacement.
The problem here is that ballots are already out and millions of people have already voted. At this point it seems impossible for candidates to come up with a new name to replace a name on the ballot without starting the whole election process over, which is not possible in the 30+ days before election day. Congress could pass a bill delaying the election but I find it hard to believe it would do so.
While things are not certain, what’s most likely that the election would take place on time with the deceased or incapacitated candidate’s name on the ballot, and then there would be a question if legislatures would allow presidential electors of each state to vote for someone other than the deceased candidate. Only some state laws provide for this eventuality. (Update: Some states provide that the votes for a named replacement are counted.) Or perhaps the legislatures would seek to appoint electors directly. This could lead to a whole lot of mischief if, say, the Pennsylvania Republican legislature tried, over the Democratic governor’s objection, to appoint electors to vote for Pence (if it were Trump who could no longer be a candidate) despite a vote for the people of Pennsylania for Biden over Trump.
See this exchange between Tucker and Pildes on a closely analogous issue:
J.T.: What if the winner of the November election dies or withdraws before the electoral college meets in December?
R.P.: This is the messiest situation and could unleash a lot of different maneuvers and disputes.
The issue is how an elector should or can cast their vote if the candidate their state has voted for dies after the election.
The initial questions are both constitutional and state-law based. Indeed, in cases argued on Wednesday, May 13, before the Supreme Court, Chiafalo v. Washington and Colorado Department of State v. Baca, the court will decide whether it is constitutional for states to “bind” their electors to vote for the candidate who won the popular vote in that state.
If the court holds that states can constitutionally bind their electors, then in a state that has done so, those laws do not specify whether an elector must still vote for a now-dead candidate and, if not, who they must or can vote for instead. When these laws were written, state legislatures were not thinking about this remote possibility. This is a glitch: States that bind electors should amend these laws to specify what an elector can or must do in this circumstance.
As a practical matter, if the parties have been vigilant, the electors should be extremely loyal to their political party. Even if the electors are formally bound by state law to vote for the dead candidate, I would expect them to cast their presidential vote for the vice-presidential nominee of that party.
But I can conjure up more complex scenarios. Remember, Congress ultimately “counts” the electors’ votes. Say Candidate A wins in State X, and then dies — but State X’s legislature strongly opposes Candidate A’s vice-presidential choice. One could imagine that state legislature appointing a new slate of electors committed to voting for a different candidate for president. It is unclear if states can constitutionally do this. We also don’t know if courts would get involved to decide that issue. Moreover, since Congress ultimately decides which electors’ votes to count, Congress might become a central player and decide what counts as a valid electoral vote in the various circumstances this scenario might unleash.
Since Pildes made these remarks, the Supreme Court decided Chaifalo (holding that states could bind electors to vote the way that the popular vote of the state goes), and Justice Kagan’s majority opinion actually discussed the issue in a footnote:
8 The Electors contend that elector discretion is needed to deal with the
possibility that a future presidential candidate will die between Election
Day and the Electoral College vote. See Reply Brief 20–22. We do not
dismiss how much turmoil such an event could cause. In recognition of
that fact, some States have drafted their pledge laws to give electors voting discretion when their candidate has died. See, e.g., Cal. Elec. Code
Ann. §6906; Ind. Code §3–10–4–1.7. And we suspect that in such a case,
States without a specific provision would also release electors from their
pledge. Still, we note that because the situation is not before us, nothing
in this opinion should be taken to permit the States to bind electors to a
deceased candidate.
In short, there would be a ton of uncertainty if we faced such a tragedy as a presidential candidate dying during this period. As if 2020 could not get more complicated and crazy…
The much-anticipated debut of early voting got off to a rocky start in Philadelphia on Tuesday, as technical issues left voters frustrated and confused while they waited in line, unable to cast their ballots.
Philadelphia opened the first seven of 15 satellite elections offices, where voters can request, receive, fill out, and submit a mail ballot in one stop….
Nick Custodio, a deputy commissioner under Deeley, said the delay was caused by the state’s voter database going down, which meant workers were unable to look up voters, process and approve mail ballot applications, and print ballot materials….
County elections officials across Pennsylvania said the state’s voter database, known as SURE, was down throughout the morning. They regularly complain that the system, put in place in the early 2000s and run by the Pennsylvania Department of State, often goes offline or slows down, especially under heavy traffic.
Ciara Torres-Spelliscy for The Hill.
In the last few weeks, Joe Biden has led President Donald Trump by a fairly consistent 8-point average in national polls and has maintained leads in more than enough battleground states to win the Electoral College, including Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all states Trump won in 2016.
But there are signs Trump’s ground operation is paying off when it comes to registering new voters in key states, an advantage that could become important if the race tightens before Nov. 3.
The Trump campaign has boasted that it knocks on more than a million doors a week, a claim that’s impossible to independently verify. In sharp contrast, the Biden campaign had ditched a ground game for virtual outreach, citing Covid-19 concerns — even though academic research has routinely concluded door-to-door canvassing is the “most consistently effective and efficient method of voter mobilization.” Only just now has the Biden campaign decided to restart its in-person voter contacts in some battleground states.
As deadlines approach, new data from the past few months shows Republicans have swamped Democrats in adding new voters to the rolls, a dramatic GOP improvement over 2016, even if new registrations have lagged 2016 rates across the board. It’s a sign that in a pandemic, Democrats are struggling to seize traditional opportunities to pad their margins, such as the return of students to college campuses.
Of the six states Trump won by less than 5 points in 2016, four — Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania — permit voters to register by party. In all four states, voter registration trends are more robust for the GOP than four years ago.
In Florida, Republicans added a net 195,652 registered voters between this March’s presidential primary and the end of August, while Democrats added 98,362 and other voters increased 69,848. During the same period in 2016, Republicans added a net 182,983 registrants, Democrats 163,571 and others 71,982. In 2016, Trump prevailed in Florida by just 112,911 votes.
With just a month to go before the November 3rd election, a group of 40 experts on elections and democracy are imploring Congress to support a bill that would give states more time to tally election results.
A letter the group sent to Senate and House members expresses concern that delays due to close races, legal disputes, and the unprecedented number of mail-in ballots expected during the Covid-19 pandemic could prevent states from being able to fully and accurately count votes by current deadlines, resulting in a constitutional crisis.
“In the event of one or more protracted disputes at the state level, the addition of 24 days to the deadline for determining electors could spare the country a debilitating national political crisis,” the letter notes. “Otherwise, it may fall to the new Congress (on January 6) to determine the winner of the electoral votes of one or more states, under the troublingly ambiguous provisions of the Electoral Count Act of 1887. This could produce a grave national controversy just two weeks before the inauguration.”
The group, which includes research, legal, and policy expertise on election administration across a wide range of institutional affiliations, is specifically asking Congress to back a bill Senator Marco Rubio introduced on August 6th, which would extend the federal safe harbor deadline from December 8, 2020 to January 1, 2021, and the Electoral College vote from December 14 to January 2.
The experts hope their letter can help generate newfound bipartisan support for the measure, noting, “the extension of these deadlines would not favor or prejudice either political party,” and that “as experts who study the election process, the resolution of disputed elections, and similar matters, we believe Senator Rubio’s bill is good insurance for the integrity of the election and ought to be adopted.”
If the letter is successful in spurring enactment of the measure, states would gain valuable time to resolve any election disputes prior to Inauguration Day.
The full letter is attached below.
I broke my usual rule not to sign mass letters for this one. It’s that important.
The following is a guest post from Charlotte Blatt and Kate Hamilton, J.D. candidates at Yale Law School:
Young voters get a bad rap. In 2018, voters ages 18-29 made up just 13% of the electorate despite comprising 22% of the voting-age population – a poor turnout but an improvement upon prior elections. Yet young people are excited to participate this November. An August NextGen America/Global Strategy Group poll found that 77% of 18 to 35-year-olds from battleground states “definitely will vote” in the election, up from 70% just a month earlier. However, among other challenges sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic, barriers to young voter participation have reached new heights, particularly regarding the increasing reliance on vote-by-mail.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, civic participation groups have urged widespread expansion of vote-by-mail, and many states have heeded the call. While vote-by-mail is certainly attractive from a public health perspective, it is no panacea for democracy. Indeed, civil rights groups have warned that overreliance on vote-by-mail could have the effect of “inadvertently disenfranchis[ing]” Black, disabled, elderly and Native American voters. In addition to these recognized possibilities, the unprecedented use of mail ballots also runs the risk of further disenfranchising youth voters by multiplying the impediments young people must overcome to cast a ballot, increasing their chances of casting a “lost” or uncounted ballot.
Youth voters face significant barriers to voting by mail. Recent polling found that “more than half of voters under the age of 35 say they don’t have the resources or knowledge they need to vote by mail in November,” and there is reason to believe that this resource deficit is unevenly distributed across race, educational attainment, and income. In 2016, young people without college experience were least likely to vote-by-mail, and youth of color without college experience were even less likely to vote-by-mail than their white counterparts. These historical disparities suggest that heavy reliance on mail voting this November will require addressing the hurdles facing young people, particularly young people of color.
Continue readingThe aftermath of the first presidential debate between President Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden triggered a reckoning among Republicans on Wednesday about the incumbent’s incendiary remarks on white supremacy and his baseless claims of electoral fraud, with GOP officials privately expressing alarm about the fallout with key voters as the president’s allies argued that he electrified his core supporters.
Biden, who launched a train tour through the battlegrounds of Ohio and Pennsylvania, continued to pitch himself as a champion of working-class voters and saw Democrats rally around what they view as Trump’s threat to American democracy.
But few Republicans voiced outrage in the wake of Trump’s norm-shattering spectacle in Cleveland on Tuesday, including his statement that the extremist Proud Boys, a male-only far-right group known for street violence, should “stand back and stand by.” Responses ranged from silence to muted criticism, reflecting how the GOP remains convinced that an alliance with Trump and his voters is crucial for its survival.
But hewing too close to him is also seen as a mistake by some Republicans, particularly for those who wish to court moderates and independent voters.
A federal judge in Montana rejected the Trump campaign’s effort to stop an expansion of mail-in voting in the state.
The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee filed the lawsuit earlier this month after Democratic Montana Gov. Steve Bullock issued a directive allowing all counties in the state to switch to an essentially all-mail system for the 2020 election. But District Judge Dana Christensen ruled against Trump’s campaign on Wednesday and rejected its request to block the new voting rules.
In his ruling, the judge blasted the Trump-backed “fiction” that there is widespread voter fraud in US elections.
Brendan in WaPo:
The question now is whether the media will learn anything from the debate experience. Will they accurately describe Trump’s attacks on the election as dangerous and anti-democratic? Or will they run faux-neutral headlines like “Pure chaos on election night” if he says the vote is being stolen and tries to declare victory before all the votes are counted? The stakes could not be higher.
I talked to Warren Olney for KCRW’s “To the Point.”
When the district court issued its order I was quite surprised there was no focus on trying to implement this so close to the election. As the appeals court wrote: “Finally, given that thousands of ballots without straight-ticket voting have already been mailed in accordance with a law that was passed three years ago and the immense difficulty described by the Secretary of managing an election with different sets of ballots for in-person and mail-in voting, the public interest weighs heavily in favor of issuing the stay.”
President Trump’s proclamations at Tuesday’s debate that there was no way the presidential election could be conducted without fraud, as well as frequent tweets along those lines, aren’t helping.
“I have never been so upset about a sitting president attempting to undermine our elections in this way,” said Denise Merrill, the Connecticut secretary of state and a Democrat, who spent Wednesday morning replaying Mr. Trump’s remarks from the debate stage out of disbelief. “What he’s really doing is impugning the work of thousands of elections officials across the country — all those people in the towns and counties busy trying to maintain faith in the elections process.”
In search of solidarity, some secretaries of state, across party lines, have joined a group text where they share tips to help one another overcome election kinks.
“There are a lot of OMGs,” Ms. Merrill said.
None of the officials want to be known as the 2020 version of Katherine Harris, who as Florida’s Republican secretary of state unexpectedly gained the attention of an anxious nation awaiting a winner in the 2000 election and became the butt of “Saturday Night Live” jokes.
In the current climate, many officials are reaching for Boy Scout-like earnestness.
With just over a month to go before Americans head en masse to the polls in an extraordinarily contentious election, Facebook is expanding restrictions on political advertising, including new bans on messages claiming widespread voter fraud.
New prohibitions laid out in a blog post come days after President Donald Trump raised the prospect of mass fraud in the vote-by-mail process during a debate with Democratic rival Joe Biden.
Banned ads “would include calling a method of voting inherently fraudulent or corrupt, or using isolated incidents of voter fraud to delegitimize the result of an election,” Rob Leathern, Facebook’s director of product management, tweeted. The changes apply to Facebook and Instagram and are effective immediately, he said.
The ban includes ads that call an election into question because the result isn’t determined on the final day of voting. There is a good chance U.S. election results will require additional time this year because of expanded mail-in ballots due to the pandemic.
Also banned are advertisements portraying voting or census participation as meaningless and advising people not to take part.
The Arizona Court of Appeals has reinstated a 2017 law that opens the door to “dark money” contributions to political races.
The judges said Tuesday that the Republican-controlled Legislature was within its rights to decide that any group the Internal Revenue Service classified as nonprofit does not have to disclose its donors, even if it uses the money to finance independent expenditures to elect or defeat candidates.
That legislative change overturned the ability of the voter-created Citizens Clean Elections Commission to determine whether the group was really a charity or only a thinly disguised political action committee. PACs have to disclose donors.
Tuesday’s unanimous ruling also allows political parties to spend unlimited dollars on behalf of their candidates without disclosure.
The brief relies heavily on the Purcell Principle.
AP:
They’ve been fighting in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania over the cutoff date for counting mailed ballots, and in North Carolina over witness requirements. Ohio is grappling with drop boxes for ballots as Texas faces a court challenge over extra days of early voting.
Measuring the anxiety over the November election is as simple as tallying the hundreds of voting-related lawsuits filed across the country in recent months. The cases concern the fundamentals of the American voting process, including how ballots are cast and counted, during an election made unique by the coronavirus pandemic and by a president who refuses to commit to accepting the results.
The Russian group accused of meddling in the 2016 U.S. election has posed as an independent news outlet to target right-wing social media users ahead of this year’s vote, two people familiar with an FBI probe into the activity told Reuters.
The latest operation centred around a pseudo media organisation called the Newsroom for American and European Based Citizens (NAEBC), which was run by people associated with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, the sources said.
U.S. prosecutors say the agency played a key role in Russian efforts to sway the 2016 election in favour of President Donald Trump, and Facebook and Twitter exposed a fake left-wing media outlet in September which they said was run by people connected to the organisation.
NAEBC and its activity, which have not been previously reported, now show that Russian attempts to influence U.S. voters ahead of the 2020 election have targeted both sides of the political divide.
The website predominantly focused on U.S. politics and current events, republishing articles from conservative media and paying real Americans to write about politically-sensitive issues. A network of accounts posing as editors and journalists then promoted the articles on social media sites favoured by right-wing users.
I spoke with Madeline Brand on KCRW’s Press Play.
Announcement:
In the lead-up to the 2020 election, Uncivil War, a new documentary from the Bertelsmann Foundation, explores three factors eroding the US electoral system: gerrymandering, voter suppression, and disinformation. The film unravels a web of threats to American elections, separates truth from fiction, and exposes a hidden war against democracy itself.
The US Premiere of Uncivil War will be free and online, October 8, 6:30-9:15pm ET. You can register here.
NYT:
The group of Trump campaign officials came carrying cellphone cameras and a determination to help the president’s re-election efforts in Philadelphia. But they were asked to leave the city’s newly opened satellite election offices on Tuesday after being told local election laws did not permit them to monitor voters coming to request and complete absentee ballots.
On social media, right-wing news sites and in the presidential debate on Tuesday night, President Trump and his campaign quickly suggested nefarious intent in the actions of local election officials, with the president claiming during the debate that “bad things happen in Philadelphia” and urging his supporters everywhere to “go into the polls and watch very carefully.”
The dark and baseless descriptions of the voting process in Philadelphia were the latest broad-brush attempt by the Trump campaign to undermine confidence in this year’s election, a message delivered with an ominous edge at the debate when he advised an extremist group, the Proud Boys, to “stand back and stand by” in his remarks about the election.
The sinister insinuations and calls for his followers to monitor voting activity are clear. What’s less apparent is how the Trump campaign wants this to play out….
The Republican establishment has ample reason to want to avoid accusations of voter intimidation. In the early 1980s, after the party sent hired workers sporting armbands reading “National Ballot Security Task Force” into Black and Latino precincts in New Jersey to challenge voters’ eligibility, it operated under an increasingly strict federal consent decree that eventually barred it from conducting or advising on any sort of “ballot security” activities — even by unpaid volunteers.
Richard L. Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California, Irvine, said that because of the president’s influence, the Republican National Committee was at risk of being associated with the same kind of behavior that led to the consent decree. He noted that the 2017 federal court ruling lifting the consent decree stated in a footnote that Mr. Trump had clearly encouraged voter suppression during the 2016 presidential campaign, but that his behavior could not be tied to the national party.
Now, however, he effectively controls the party.
“While I was worried about Trump norm-breaking in 2016, it is far worse for a sitting president to be undermining the integrity of the election,” Dr. Hasen said. “Whether Trump means the things he says or not, he’s convincing his most ardent supporters that the only way he loses is if the Democrats cheat.”
He added, “That’s profoundly destabilizing and scary.”
A laptop and several memory sticks used to program Philadelphia’s voting machines were stolen from a city warehouse in East Falls, officials confirmed Wednesday, setting off a scramble to investigate and to ensure the machines had not been compromised.
Though it remains unclear when exactly equipment was stolen, sources briefed on the investigation said it vanished this week. The laptop and USB drives — the only items believed to have been taken — belonged to an on-site employee for the company that supplies the machines.
City officials vowed Wednesday that the theft would not disrupt voting on Nov. 3.
“We are confident,” said Nick Custodio, a deputy to Lisa Deeley, chair of the city commissioners, who oversee elections, “that this incident will not in any way compromise the integrity of the election.”
But behind the scenes, they fretted about how President Donald Trump and his allies might use the news to cast doubt on the integrity of the city’s elections in light of false claims and conspiracy theories he cited during Tuesday’s presidential debate.
The commissioners initially refused to confirm the theft or that an investigation had been opened. They only did so after The Inquirer informed them it would be reporting the incident based on sources who were not authorized to publicly discuss it.
The bad news is that Republican officials in three swing states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, are blocking legislation that could allow for the early processing of absentee ballots—purposefully making it take longer to get the election results. In other words, they are engineering the absentee vote counting delays that Trump is already planning to complain about and sue over.
In each of these states, current law allows absentee vote processing to begin either on or after Election Day. Over the last several months, county clerks and advocates have pushed for that period to be extended, all to enable elections officials to begin processing the votes more quickly, so there is less of a delay in announcing the outcome to the public. But in each of those states, such bills have been blocked by Republican leadership in the state houses. All of those states have a Democratic governor and a Democratic secretary of state pushing for such bills, but Republicans control the legislatures. In Pennsylvania, legislation was introduced in June to begin processing and counting ballots early, but it went nowhere. In Wisconsin, Democrats introduced a bill in May to begin processing ballots early, but not tabulate them until after the polls closed. That, too, faced GOP resistance.
In Michigan, there has been slightly more progress. After months of advocacy by county clerks, including Republicans, to give elections officials the ability to get a head start on processing absentee ballots, the Michigan state house passed a bill last week after sitting on it for months to extend early absentee vote processing—by just one day. That’s better than nothing, but it’s hardly enough time to meet the needs of elections officials.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told me it only gives elections officials 10 hours to start processing ballots on Election Day, which includes additional administrative work. Some clerks have estimated that they would only net three hours that day for processing ballots.
A federal appeals court on Wednesday rebuffed Wisconsin Republicans who had asked the court to temporarily halt a ruling that pushed back the battleground state’s mail-vote due date, possibly teeing up a GOP bid for review by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The U.S. Supreme Court put a clash over undocumented immigrants and the census on a fast track, granting a request by President Donald Trump’s administration to expedite handling of his appeal.
Trump is trying to exclude undocumented immigrants from the 2020 census count, which will determine the allocation of congressional seats and federal dollars. A three-judge federal panel ruled on Sept. 10 that Congress didn’t give the president authority to do that.
The Supreme Court ordered opponents of Trump’s plan to file a brief by Oct. 7. That would let the justices determine in October whether they will hear arguments. Trump is seeking an argument session in late November or early December.
On September 25, 2020, a Montana court permanently struck down a state law that severely restricted the right to vote for indigenous people living on rural reservations.
Western Native Voice v. Stapleton, filed in March of this year by Native American Rights Fund , the American Civil Liberties Union, and ACLU of Montana, challenged the so-called Montana Ballot Interference Prevention Act (BIPA), a law that imposed severe restrictions on ballot collection efforts that are critical to Native American voters living on rural reservations.
The law set an arbitrary limit on the number of ballots an individual could collect and also restricted the categories of individuals who were permitted to collect ballots. These limitations were intended to suppress turnout on rural reservations, where geographic and socioeconomic barriers to voting make ballot collection even more critical.
New Brennan Center report.