[EL] ELB News and Commentary 6/26/17

Sun Jun 25 21:03:11 PDT 2017

“Political Road Map: California’s big change in voting rules is off to a rocky start for 2018”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=93367>
Posted on June 25, 2017 8:54 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=93367> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
John Myers column for the LAT.<http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-road-map-vote-centers-counties-20170625-story.html>
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Posted in election administration<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>

“White House Says Its Election Commission Will Examine Hacking. That’s News To The Commissioners.”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=93365>
Posted on June 25, 2017 8:45 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=93365> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
HuffPo:<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/white-house-russia-hacking_us_594e7ba2e4b05c37bb76a963?section=us_politics>
But if understanding hacking is going to be a commission priority, it would appear to be news to at least some of the commissioners, who said this week they have no idea when the commission will meet or what it is actually going to examine.
Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, pointed to the presidential commission on electoral integrity, created by Trump in May, when he was asked Friday whether Trump was concerned about hacking.
“He instituted an election commission that is making sure that we look at all of how we’re voting, and to make sure that we maintain integrity in all of our voting process to make sure that we have faith in it,” Spicer said Friday. “And that includes cyber, it includes voter I.D., it includes all sort of systems.  I expect that commission to have several announcements in probably the next two weeks, and potentially some hearings in July.”…
Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap (D) told HuffPost he had no contact with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), the vice chairman of the panel, since being named to the commission in May. While he hoped the commission would investigate Russian hacking, he didn’t know if it would. There’s been an urgent focus on the need to address election security after leaked National Security Agency documents<https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05/top-secret-nsa-report-details-russian-hacking-effort-days-before-2016-election/> showed Russia successfully breached election systems last year. Bloomberg reported there was a breach in 39 states<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-13/russian-breach-of-39-states-threatens-future-u-s-elections>, but Trump has downplayed Russia’s responsibility.
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Posted in Uncategorized<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>

CA Republican Legislator Patricia Bates Claims Vote Centers in Orange County Could Lead to Increased Voter Fraud<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=93363>
Posted on June 25, 2017 8:41 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=93363> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
I don’t see the evidence supporting these claims.<http://www.ocregister.com/2017/06/25/too-soon-for-county-vote-centers/>
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Posted in Uncategorized<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>

“Analysis indicates partisan gerrymandering has benefited GOP”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=93361>
Posted on June 25, 2017 3:43 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=93361> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
Extensive AP analysis using the efficiency gap:<https://apnews.com/fa6478e10cda4e9cbd75380e705bd380/Analysis-indicates-partisan-gerrymandering-has-benefited-GOP>
The AP scrutinized the outcomes of all 435 U.S. House races and about 4,700 state House and Assembly seats up for election last year using a new statistical method of calculating partisan advantage. It’s designed to detect cases in which one party may have won, widened or retained its grip on power through political gerrymandering.
The analysis found four times as many states with Republican-skewed state House or Assembly districts than Democratic ones. Among the two dozen most populated states that determine the vast majority of Congress, there were nearly three times as many with Republican-tilted U.S. House districts.
Traditional battlegrounds such as Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and Virginia were among those with significant Republican advantages in their U.S. or state House races. All had districts drawn by Republicans after the last Census in 2010.
The AP analysis also found that Republicans won as many as 22 additional U.S. House seats over what would have been expected based on the average vote share in congressional districts across the country. That helped provide the GOP with a comfortable majority over Democrats instead of a narrow one.
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Posted in redistricting<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=6>

“How Democrats Gerrymandered Their Way to Victory in Maryland”<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=93359>
Posted on June 25, 2017 3:26 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=93359> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
Dave Daley <https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/how-deep-blue-maryland-shows-redistricting-is-broken/531492/> in The Atlantic:
New court depositions and previously unseen emails uncover just how determined Maryland Democrats were to take a seat from the Republicans and knock 10-term veteran Roscoe Bartlett—an idiosyncratic conservative who after losing his seat retired off the grid in the mountains of West Virginia, issuing dire warnings about the vulnerability of our power grid—out of office. They also reveal the partisanship with which Democrats approached redistricting in Maryland: As former governor and 2016 Democratic presidential primary candidate Martin O’Malley explains, he and other Democrats wanted to use their party’s control of the governor’s office to secure a  7-1 majority.
“Yes,” said O’Malley, in a deposition. “Part of my intent was to create a map that, all things being legal and equal, would, nonetheless, be more likely to elect more Democrats rather than less.”
Nationally, Republicans not only dominated the decennial redistricting that followed the 2010 census, but reinvented the partisan gerrymander. The GOP executed a strategy called REDMAP, short for Redistricting Majority Project. They successfully targeted control of state legislative chambers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin and many other states, earning total control of the new lines even in bluish swing states. The GOP emerged from 2010 with unilateral power to draw 193 U.S. House seats while the Democrats fully controlled merely 44. REDMAP cost just $30 million and went a long way to ensuring GOP control of the House and state legislatures nationwide. In 2012 when Democratic congressional candidates received 1.4 million more votes but Republicans maintained a 33-seat majority. It was the biggest bargain—and perhaps the most audacious heist—in modern politics.
Nevertheless, the untold story of Maryland’s sixth congressional district—unfolding now in documents before a U.S. District Court in the Benisek v Lamone partisan gerrymandering case—illustrate just how fiercely Democrats, as well, have fought to rig the system in their direction when presented with the opportunity. Republicans controlled redistricting in many more states in 2010. But these court records show that Democrats were also eager to maximize a fundamentally broken redistricting process to their advantage, and to the detriment of democracy.
Listen also to this On the Media segment.<http://www.wnyc.org/story/all-about-gerrymandering/>
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Posted in redistricting<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=6>

News Analysis Cannot Replicate PILF “Alien Invasion” Study Finding “Massive” Noncitizen Voting in VA<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=93357>
Posted on June 24, 2017 9:09 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=93357> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
Capital News Service:<http://www.tidewaternews.com/2017/06/24/illegal-voting-in-virginia-yes-massive-doubtful/>
Last fall, a pair of groups supported by conservatives released a report with the sensational title “Alien Invasion in Virginia: The discovery and coverup of noncitizen registration and voting.” It said illegal voting is a “massive problem”:…
In recent weeks, Capital News Service attempted to replicate the study’s methods and found that some noncitizens have indeed voted in Virginia, though not on a massive scale. Using the Freedom of Information Act, voter registration records and voter history data, CNS found that:

  *   About 240 people who weren’t citizens had been registered to vote in 10 localities, mostly in Northern Virginia and the Richmond area.
  *   28 of these noncitizens actually voted in an election before they were removed from the voter registration rolls.
  *   They cast a total of more than 100 ballots.
CNS did not find evidence that noncitizens voted in massive numbers or tipped an election, as some Republicans have alleged. Indeed, half of the noncitizens who voted in a party primary voted in a Republican primary. However, the records seem to contradict Democrats’ assertion that voter fraud is nonexistent.
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Posted in fraudulent fraud squad<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=8>, The Voting Wars<http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60>

ELB Podcast Episode 17. Josh Chafetz: Congress’s Power Before, During, and After Trump<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=93351>
Posted on June 23, 2017 4:59 pm<http://electionlawblog.org/?p=93351> by Rick Hasen<http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
In this era of polarization in politics, how much power does Congress have compared to the President and the courts? Is the Republican Congress a meaningful check on President Trump? How well does Congress do at policing ethical lapses of its own members?
On Episode 17 of the ELB Podcast, we talk with Josh Chafetz, Cornell Law School professor and author of the new book, Congress’s Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers.<https://www.amazon.com/Congresss-Constitution-Legislative-Authority-Separation/dp/0300197101>
You can listen to the ELB Podcast Episode 17 on Soundcloud<https://soundcloud.com/rick-hasen/elb-podcast-episode-17> or subscribe at iTunes.<https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/elb-podcast/id1029317166?mt=2>

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--
Rick Hasen
Chancellor's Professor of Law and Political Science
UC Irvine School of Law
401 E. Peltason Dr., Suite 1000
Irvine, CA 92697-8000
949.824.3072 - office
949.824.0495 - fax
rhasen at law.uci.edu<mailto:rhasen at law.uci.edu>
http://www.law.uci.edu/faculty/full-time/hasen/
http://electionlawblog.org<http://electionlawblog.org/>
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