Proposition 50: “California voters pass anti-Trump, pro-Democrat ballot measure”

direct democracy, redistricting

LA Times:

California Democrats’ effort to block President Trump’s agenda by increasing their party’s numbers in Congress was overwhelmingly approved by voters on Tuesday.

The Associated Press called the victory moments after the polls closed Tuesday night.

The statewide ballot measure will reconfigure California’s congressional districts to favor more Democratic candidates. The Democratic-led California Legislature placed the measure on the Nov. 4 ballot, at Gov. Gavin Newsom’s behest, after Trump urged Texas and other GOP-led states to modify their congressional maps to favor their party members, a move designed to keep the U.S. House of Representatives in Republican control during his final two years in office.

Proposition 50 was the sole item on the statewide, special-election ballot Tuesday. Supporters hope the ballot measure has become a referendum about Trump, who remains extremely unpopular in California, while opponents call Prop. 50 an underhanded power grab by Democrats….

Share this:

“All three Pa. Supreme Court justices are retained following a historically expensive race”

judicial elections

Philly Inquirer:

All three Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices on Tuesday’s ballot for retention will remain on the bench, following an unprecedented and closely watched retention election that eclipsed previous spending records as Democrats sought to protect the liberal judges.

Pennsylvania’s highest court will maintain its liberal majority for at least the next two years, retaining JusticesChristine Donohue, Kevin Dougherty, and David Wecht through the 2026 midterms and ahead of the 2028 presidential election. During that time, the court will hear cases that impact the daily lives of Pennsylvania residents, such as abortion access, voter access, mail voting law, and more. The Associated Press called the race at 9:53 p.m. Tuesday, less than two hours after polls closed.

The stakes of Tuesday’s judicial retention election were set up a decade ago by a perfect storm of factors.The three justices up for retention — Donohue, Dougherty, Wecht — were each elected as Democrats in 2015 during a rare and transitional period for the court when Democrats took a majority. The 2015 election was the first time three seats were open at one time, in part due to resignations of disgraced former justices. Since then, Donohue, Dougherty, and Wecht have played decisive roles on the 5-2 liberal majority of Pennsylvania’s highest court.

This year’s retention race — usually a sleepy, off-year affair — topped $16 million in ad buys and mailers, mostly from Democrats or aligned groups, to try to draw voters out to the polls to protect the liberal majority they view as the last backstop to protect Pennsylvanians’ rights during an overreaching Trump administration. Republicans, meanwhile, saw the high-stakes race as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to oust three liberal state Supreme Court justices in one election….

Share this:

“Mainers reject voter ID, absentee ballot restrictions as Question 1 fails”

absentee ballots, direct democracy, voter id

Maine Public:

Maine voters rejected a referendum on Tuesday that would have required a photo ID to cast a ballot and that proposed multiple changes to Maine’s increasingly popular absentee voting process.

The Associated Press called the race at 9:54 p.m. as initial returns showed strong opposition to Question 1 in more left-leaning coastal Maine but also in some areas of rural western and central Maine. Question 1 was failing 39% to 61% with more than half of the statewide votes counted, according to the AP.

The lopsided outcome represents the latest political defeat for conservatives on an issue that they have been pursuing in Maine for more than a decade. Conservative activists collected more than 170,000 petition signatures to place the issue on the statewide ballot this year after repeatedly failing to get voter ID bills through the Maine Legislature.

But the “overwhelming grassroots support” that campaign organizers said they witnessed during the petition drive failed to carry through to Election Day. Instead, the campaign struggled to compete against better-funded opponents who seized on the proposed changes to absentee balloting as they portrayed Question 1 as an underhanded attempt to disenfranchise voters and making voting more difficult.

Share this:

“Republicans Reprise Unfounded Claims of Widespread Election Interference”

fraudulent fraud squad

NYT with the subhed: “Prominent conservatives, including the president, sounded familiar alarms about voter suppression and other efforts to manipulate the vote on Election Day, without presenting evidence.”

From the body:

The reflex to declare interference shows how much the conduct of elections continues to animate Republican politics — at least in races where the party’s candidates could be headed to defeat.

Before the polls even opened on Tuesday, Mr. Trump called a vote in California to redraw congressional districts ahead of next year’s midterm elections, as Texas and other Republican-controlled states have done, “a GIANT SCAM.”

“The entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED,” Mr. Trump declared without citing anything to support the claim. He suggested that Republicans were somehow “shut out” of mail-in voting, warning that a “serious legal and criminal review” was on the way. Mr. Trump has long railed against mail-in voting, but it was not clear what he meant by a review.

There is little evidence that significant voter fraud is, or has been, a problem in California. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization, lists only a single case in 2024 in its “election fraud map” and only 69 cases since 1982.

he White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters on Tuesday that the state’s practice of allowing everyone to vote by mail was “ripe for fraud.”

Asked at the White House for evidence, she cited, “fraudulent ballots that are being mailed in in the names of other people and the names of illegal aliens who shouldn’t be voting in American elections.” A White House official, when asked by email for examples, repeated many of the claims about potential, though not real, fraud, and cited a Department of Justice lawsuit against the state saying it reported finding more than two million duplicate registrations, while seven counties did not report duplicates. The lawsuit does not claim any of the duplicates resulted in duplicate votes.

Ms. Leavitt said preparations for an executive order on elections were underway but did not detail what review Mr. Trump referred to. The Justice Department sent election observers to five counties in California, but by midday there were no immediate reports of problems with voting. Polls have suggested that the redistricting measure, called Proposition 50, is likely to pass.…

Share this:

“America’s Recount Addiction”

recounts

I’m honored to participate in the NYU Democracy Project, and offer this entry, “America’s Recount Addiction.” It begins:

America has a recount problem. State recount laws too often invite costly, unnecessary delays that undermine confidence in elections without changing outcomes. Losing candidates prolong the contest and sell false hope in fundraising pleas. States should amend their laws to significantly narrow the circumstances in which recounts take place.

Read the whole thing here.

Share this: